The Fiction of Owen Thomas

Precipitation Likely, Chance of Sun
(“The Might and the Will”)

A Novella

Excerpt D

The Qwicky Pawn on North Front Street was the original Qwicky Pawn that had, over the past thirty years, bloomed into a mini-empire of six Qwicky Pawn storefronts scattered throughout the county. The Qwicky Pawn king was Lonnie Mopes, a one-armed veteran generally known as Mr. Itch or King Itch or simply Itch, all nominally for the thing he could no longer scratch, but the moniker could just as easily have represented his professional devotion to impulse. The pawn business had been successful enough for Mr. Itch to retire from the nine-to-five grind and to help finance the ventures of his friends, such as Blue Reels Video and a strip club on Springfield Road called Shocks & Struts. Itch eventually purchased controlling interests in both businesses and devoted his time counting his money, making spot inspections and sampling the goods.

Quinn’s job at the North Front Street Qwicky Pawn was as part of a three-man crew that, in shifts of two, made sales, kept rigorous track of inventory, discounted sentimental value, and loaned money on the back of heartache. The store manager was Itch’s cousin Mel, a mephitic fat man with a high voice, a quick temper and a deviated septum that kept his mouth dangling open on its hinge when he was not actually thinking about it. Which was almost always. The North Front Street Qwicky Pawn training program was for Mel to yell at you and hit you on the arm until you got it right. The health plan consisted of a promise to fire you if you ever called in sick.

Mel was not without a sense of humor. Particularly when he and Roddy P got to going. Quinn never did know what the P stood for, or even whether P was Roddy’s last initial or middle initial or just part of a nickname. All he knew was that Roddy P had been working at the Qwicky Pawn even longer than Mel and that he was dumber than a bag of rocks. He wore a mustache that looked like something with a hundred legs had crawled up under the shade of his nose to get out of the sun and died there, sprawling out over the top of his upper lip. Roddy P liked to stroke the dead thing with his lower lip whenever he needed the concentration required of deep thought. He had thin brown hair and two plaid shirts to his name that he alternated every two or three days, one red on black and the other black on red. Quinn and Roddy P worked adjoining shifts, but Roddy P always liked to hang around chewing the fat with Mel while Quinn tried to busy himself with whatever needed to be done.

“Hey, Roddy P,” Mel would say with mocking concern from across the store, sitting down on his stool behind the counter like a glacial slab calving into a fiord, “You seen that Rolex we got yesterday?”

“Not since Junior had it I ain’t,” Roddy P would reply, referring to Quinn by their affectionate name for him. “You thinking Junior pocketed that watch, boss?”

“Pocketed? Junior steal from me? Better not. He dumb but not that dumb.”

“King Itch gonna get that boy, Boss.”

“Roddy P, I’m thinking Junior’s got that Rolex puppy wrapped around his little dingly-dang.”

“Bet he checks the time every two minutes or so, don’cha think, Boss?”

“Bet so, Roddy P. Bet he’s th’only one give that little pecker of his the time a day.”

They’d laugh across the store at each other, sometimes pulling the customers in on the joke if there were any around. If he was in striking distance, Mel would give Quinn a punch in the arm, ostensibly to show that it was all in good fun and to take away any basis for objection Quinn might otherwise have had.

But Quinn did not usually object. He took it. He put his head to his work or helped the next customer and let it pass, seizing upon the next comment from either of them that was about business or the weather or at least not intended to get a rise out of him. It was a paycheck. It was a place to go. Although Mel and Roddy P quickly put Edna at the Pay-n-Go Grocery Stop in a whole new light.

Not that he would have ever taken back the iceberg lettuce exit. But still.