he said aloud, as though to excuse the pain. He began rolling up the sleeves of his shirt for the first time that summer, disturbed at this first concession to the heat.
Jesus Ortiz came downstairs with a pair of suits on hangers. All morning he had sorted and stacked and labeled. He had looked at the clothing stacked in dusty hundreds to the ceiling of the stifling loft and each suit had seemed a building block for some odd edifice he was erecting without conscious design. Now he had reached a point where he was obsessed with perfection, and two ordinary suits had seemed to mar the aesthetic daze he worked in.
“These here suits, Sol,” he began, and then stared in puzzlement at the crudely tattooed numbers on his employer’s thick, hairless arm. “Hey, what kind of tattoo you call that?” he asked.
“It’s a secret society I belong to,” Sol answered, with a scythelike curve to his mouth. “You could never belong. You have to be able to walk on the water.”
“Okay, okay, mind my own business, hah,” Ortiz said, his eyes still on the strange, codelike markings. How many secrets the big, pallid Jew had! “I mean, like these here suits is like brand new,” he went on in an absent voice, no longer concerned with his mission. “They worth thirty-five, forty bucks easy. Got Hickey-Freeman labels inside.”
“I leave it to you, Ortiz. Be creative, use your own initiative,” the Pawnbroker said sardonically.
Ortiz just looked steadily at him for a minute before turning away with an equally secluded expression. He had secrets, too; secrets gave you a look of vast dignity, a feeling of power.
Just before twelve, as was his habit, Ortiz went out. He ate his own lunch in the cafeteria diagonally across the street and then bought Sol’s never-varying cheese sandwich and coffee, and brought them back to the store. He handled the traffic alone for some fifteen minutes while Sol sat in the little windowed office eating and staring out sightiessly through the glass like some exhibited creature from another clime. And while Ortiz worked, treating the predominantly Negro customers with a show of better-humored hardness than his employer’s, he was constantly aware of the odd, blind gaze on his back. He felt tense with a mysterious excitement, for the sense of his apprenticeship assumed an unfathomable importance then, seemed to possess the key to Sol’s buried treasure.
At least half the clocks hovered near one when three men came in pushing a motorized lawn mower. Sol stared at it for a moment, reminded of how incredible and silly his atmosphere was. Then he nodded in mild disgust, as though bowing to some nasty omnipotence. “Oh yes, here’s an item, fine, fine.”
He had seen two of the men around the neighborhood; the gaudy little Tangee in a wide-shouldered, checked suit, and Buck White, with his majestic tribesman face of almost pure black, who appeared elemental in his dignity until you noticed the foolish, childish dreaminess of his eyes. But it was the third man who took Sol’s attention. He was an oddly plain-clothed Negro in a shapeless, ash-gray suit and with a battered, styleless hat square on his head. With his clean white shirt and drab brown tie, he might have been some poor but discreet civil servant of decent education who was determined to avoid the Negro cliché in dress. Until you looked at his face, which was bony and gaunt and dominated by blue eyes filled with restless, darting menace. And in the presence of that face, the ridiculous transaction suddenly became oppressive out of all proportion.
“What’s this here worth, Uncle?” Tangee asked with a smile that was all flash. “Brand new, never been use. S’pose to have a real strong engine. I mean what do they get for these?” As he talked, his eyes, like those of his companions, roved over the vast assortment of merchandise with an insolent and covetous look.
“Where’d you get it?” Sol asked, rubbing his cheek.
“What kind of question is that? Why, it was a gift, man, a gift! I woulda return it to the store my friend bought it, on’y I was embarrass to ask him where. Didn’t want to let on I had no use for it, hurt his feelin’s and all. Can’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” Tangee’s tiny mustache twitched over the ivory display of smile. “Yeah, this here friend give it to me for housewarmin’ present like.”
“Amazing how stupid some people can be, isn’t it?” Sol said. “I mean that he shouldn’t have noticed that there wasn’t a blade of grass within two miles of your house. Your friend, that is.”
“Oh well, yeah,” Tangee agreed, beginning to tire of the badinage, his eyes licking more hungrily at the great collection around him, darting occasionally toward his companions as though for some agreement. “You know how it is.”
“Yes, I know very well,” Sol said flatly. “Where did you get it?”
“Hey, man, I don’t see where you come off askin’ like that. I got it, that’s all. I mean that there my business, ain’t it?”
“Look, my friend, the police have lists of stolen merchandise. I am obligated to list all the items taken for pawn. For myself, I don’t give a care if you stole it from Macy’s window. All I am concerned with is that I would be out my money if they appropriated it.”
Three other customers came in while he struggled with Tangee and his silent companions. He pressed the little signal button that called Ortiz down from the second floor.
“I ain’t stole it, man; you don’t have to worry. Some guy give it to me, figure I make some use out of it.”
“A lawn mower?” The Pawnbroker’s sarcasm was a bland poison that acted only on himself. He had a faint sensation of suffocation as he watched the loose rubbery lips of Tangee and the nightmarishly blue eyes of the Negro in the ash-gray suit.
“Sure, a lawn mower! I hock the friggen thing and get money. That useful enough, ain’t it?” Tangee said with a roving, marble-eyed study of the Pawnbroker’s face, an expression of cold appraisal, as though he were figuring how to go about taking Sol’s face apart.
Buck White stared at Sol’s tattooed arm, and the blue-eyed Negro kept his gaze on the rear of the store, his face like a burned bone. There was, in their idle patience, the murderous quality of hunting dogs so sure of their prey that they rest, panting, in a confident circle around it. Sol held himself motionless, trying to be as patient and cool as they. Across the store, Ortiz was crowded with customers, moving busily, waiting on two or three at once, disposing of them quickly and efficiently. And he stood there before the three strange men, imprisoned in their mood of menace, the silly lawn mower in the middle of the floor like some grotesque totem they were urging on him.
“Even if it isn’t stolen . . . a lawn mower! No one comes in here for a lawn mower. Even at auction . . .”
“Take it, Pawnbroker, take the goddam thing,” the blue-eyed Negro said suddenly, his voice amazingly low, subterranean even, like an echo from a distant depth.
Sol looked at him bleakly for a moment, went on to the inhuman ox-glance of Buck White, the insolent appraisal of Tangee. Suddenly he just wanted them out of there; they were like bands around his chest. He nodded.
“I’ll give you seven dollars,” he mumbled. “Take it or leave it.”
“Why sure, man, sold! See, I ain’t no trouble . . . pleasure to do business with, ain’t I?” Tangee turned to his two companions like a performer. Buck White grinned, a shy expression forming as he shifted his huge, powerful body. The blue-eyed man just bent his mouth and took his eyes reluctantly from whatever they had been fixed on at the rear of the store.
Tangee took the money and then, his
