Bridge Job

Logan Forrest had been a veterinarian for film sets for eleven years, and in all that time he had never once wandered into Newman's Pawn & Repair, mostly because a man who spends his days tranquilizing trained horses and checking the ears of movie dogs does not generally need a secondhand blender or a pawned watch. He was thirty-four years old, his last real relationship had ended sometime around the second Obama administration, and lately his life had gone sort of soft and gray around the edges, a photograph left on a windowsill. The job in town was wrapping, some coastal drama with three goats and a retriever who could cry on cue, and the crew kept saying there was nothing to do in this town, and then one Tuesday afternoon Logan proved them right by walking up and down the main street twice and then drifting, mostly out of boredom, into the pawn shop with the hand-painted sign.

The bell over the door did that cheap clatter thing that bells do, and the place smelled like furniture polish and old strings, and behind a workbench in the back there was a guy with strong forearms and reading glasses pushed up into his hair, hunched over the neck of a guitar with a file in his hand. Logan stood there for a second feeling kind of dumb, because he knew that face. Not from town, not from a billboard, but from a set. He remembered the name eventually, Newman, Duane Newman, the luthier they'd flown in for that streaming show about a family of bluegrass musicians, the one that got cancelled three days into prep when the money dried up. Duane had spent the whole lost week restringing the hero banjo and telling stories that made the sound department cry laughing, and then everybody had scattered and it was finished.

"Well hey there," Duane said now, looking up and squinting, and then his face did a little rearrangement. "Hold on. You're the animal guy. The horse guy, from the, what was it, the bluegrass thing."

"Logan," Logan said, sticking out a hand across a display case full of cameras that probably did not work. "Logan Forrest. And I mostly do dogs, the horse thing was one job, but yeah, that's me. You're the banjo fixer."

"Duane." He shook the hand and wiped his palm on his apron like he'd just remembered he was holding a file a second ago. "Newman's the family name, it's on the sign, I don't actually own the pawning part, I just rent the corner back here where I fix instruments and try not to breathe the dust." He gestured at the workbench, at the necks of four guitars laid out like patients in triage. "You here to pawn something or to buy something or just to stand there looking handsome?"

"That last one, mostly," Logan said, and then heard himself say it, and decided not to walk it back, because honestly the day was so boring that flirting with a luthier seemed like a reasonable use of a Tuesday. Duane snorted and went back to the fretboard, but Logan noticed he didn't actually look away for a few seconds longer than a man strictly needed to, and Logan filed that away with a small warm feeling in his chest that he hadn't felt in a while.

The shop was in its last week, the register had a handwritten sign taped to it that said CLOSING and everything in the cases had orange stickers on it like it was all guilty. Out on the sidewalk there was a sandwich board, one of those A-frame chalkboard things, and on it in big wobbling letters somebody had written EVERYTHING MUST GO, EVEN THE GUITARS, and under that, in smaller letters, YES, THE BRIDGE TOO.

Logan was reading that second line when the idea walked into his head and sat down like it owned the place.

"Okay," he said, walking back to the bench, "explain the bridge thing. Is that a joke or a threat?"

"It's a joke," Duane said, sanding something small and humming to himself. "They're demolishing the old bridge Saturday morning. The whole town's coming out to watch, there's gonna be a news helicopter, it's basically the biggest thing that's happened here since the flood. I put it on the board because I figured if everything must go, the bridge might as well go too."

"Here's my question," Logan said, leaning his elbows on the case, and he could feel the grin starting on his own face, the same grin he got when he talked a location manager into letting the pig sleep in the trailer. "Has anybody ever put a pawn shop sign on a bridge before?"

Duane stopped sanding. "I'm gonna go out on a limb and say no."

"Because listen to this. My production, the one I'm working on? They're shooting B-roll of the demolition for the show, some drone stuff, establishing shots, whatever. I know the camera guys. And the news helicopters are gonna be circling, right, every station in the state." He picked an imaginary marker off the counter and started writing in the air. "So Saturday morning, before dawn, you and I carry that sandwich board out onto the pedestrian walkway, we set it up dead center, big as life. EVERYTHING MUST GO, YES, THE BRIDGE TOO. Every helicopter shot, every drone pass, every local news broadcast for the rest of recorded time, that sign is just there."

There was a pause, and then Duane laughed, and it was a good laugh, the kind that came up from somewhere real. "They'd cut it out."

"They never cut it out," Logan said. "News editors are lazy and the sign would be in the wide shots. It would be in the archive footage forever. Twenty years from now somebody does a documentary about the bridge and there's your chalkboard, sitting on the railing, selling guitars."

"You're a bad man," Duane said, and he was smiling while he said it, pushing his glasses back down onto his nose like he needed them to properly evaluate the level of badness. "You're a veterinarian. You're supposed to be gentle."

"I'm bored," Logan told him, and it came out more honest than he'd planned, so he kept going with it. "I've been in this town six weeks, I drag three goats around a field for a living right now, and I have not done one single memorable thing since I got here. You close Saturday, the bridge goes down Saturday, this is a closing window. I'm not saying it's a good idea. I'm saying it's an idea, and it's the only one I've had in months that made me feel anything."

Duane looked at him over the top of the glasses for a second, and then he set down the file and came around the end of the workbench, wiping his hands on a rag, and up close Logan could see he was maybe a year older than Logan, thirty-five or so, with sawdust in his dark hair and a little scar through one eyebrow, and Logan thought, well, huh, and didn't examine the thought too hard just then.

"Okay, here's my problems with it," Duane said, holding up fingers. "One, it's technically trespassing, the walkway's been closed since they started the demolition prep. Two, if we get caught, my last day of business ends with a fine, which is a hell of a souvenir. Three." He paused, and the third finger just hung there.

"Three?" Logan prompted.

"Three is I can't actually think of a problem with it that outweighs how funny it is," Duane admitted. "My last day is Friday. The shop closes for good, I hand back the keys, and then I'm a guy with a truck full of tools and nowhere to put them. If the last thing I ever do in this town is commit a light misdemeanor with a handsome animal doctor, that's honestly a better sendoff than the one my landlord planned."

"So that's a yes?"

"That's a maybe that's leaning so hard it's basically lying down," Duane said. "When do your camera people shoot?"

"Dawn-ish Saturday, they want the light. Which means we'd have to be on that bridge by five thirty in the morning, in the dark, carrying a chalkboard."

"My truck has a tailgate," Duane said. "It's carried worse."

Logan looked out the front window at the sandwich board standing there on the sidewalk, wobbling a little in the coastal wind like it already knew what was coming, and he felt something he hadn't felt in a long time, which was the specific interest of a person who has just agreed to do a thing. "Okay," he said. "It's a deal. But I'm staying till closing, I've got nowhere to be, and you have to tell me the story about the banjo player and the ferret, because I heard the first half of that on the bluegrass set and they cancelled before you got to the end, and I have thought about it for two years."

Duane laughed again, that real one. "The ferret story ends in a lawsuit threat," he said. "Pull up a stool."

The stool was behind the counter and it wobbled on one leg and Duane kicked it into shape with his heel without even looking, the way a man does when he has kicked that stool into shape four hundred times, and Logan sat down with his elbows on the glass case full of costume rings and watched Duane go back to the guitar neck he had been sanding when Logan came in.

"So the ferret," Logan said. "Start from the top. I only got the part where it got into the head writer's trailer."

"Yeah, so, they brought this animal trainer on who had, I swear, one ferret and a business card," Duane said, turning the neck in the light and squinting at the frets. "And the showrunner wanted a ferret because his nephew had a ferret, that was the entire reason, it was in the notes. Ferret per episode. So this trainer charges by the day, which is normal, but he also charged a contingency fee, which is not normal, and the ferret got loose in pre-dawn hours and ate through a bag of prop candy and took up residence inside the sofa in the trailer of the head writer, who was already furious because his trailer was next to the generator."

"That's where I tuned out," Logan said. "I was sedating a retriever."

"The lawsuit threat was from the production, against the ferret guy, except the ferret guy didn't have a company, he had a card and a ferret, so the lawyers spent a whole day trying to figure out who you even sue," Duane said. "And then Friday happened and the whole show died and the ferret went home and I flew back and that was it. Closest I ever got to network television."

"And now you're closing a pawn shop!"

"And now I'm closing a pawn shop," Duane agreed, and there was a pause where the sander ran and didn't need to run, and then he shut it off and turned around on his stool and looked at Logan properly, the way he hadn't yet, both eyes and the scar and everything.

"Okay," he said. "Your turn to be honest with a stranger."

"I'm an open book."

"You're not. You're a guy who walked in here to sell a story about a sandwich board and stayed two hours." Duane set the sander down and folded his arms. "You don't care about that sign. I could tell within ten minutes. You don't even know what model guitars are on it, I asked you twice."

"You didn't ask me twice."

"I asked you what was written on the bottom line and you said, and I quote, everything, probably." Duane's mouth was doing something at the corner that was trying very hard not to be a grin. "Nobody proposes a heist over a sign he can't read. So what's the actual deal, Logan. You got a bet going? You filming me? You one of those guys who collects stories about failing businesses?"

"God, no!"

"Then what? Because I'm gonna tell you what it looks like from over here. It looks like someone who's bored the way you said, actually bored, the real kind, and who found the one interesting thing in a six week radius and is squeezing it."

Logan opened his mouth to argue and then closed it, because the honest answer was sitting right there and it had been sitting there since about the second hour, when Duane had come out from the back wiping finish off his hands and said something dry about the weather and Logan had felt the day change shape.

"The actual deal," Logan said, "is that I stayed because of you."

Duane didn't say anything to that. He raised his eyebrows, which was enough.

"The board thing is real, I'll do it, it's funny, I want the helicopters," Logan went on, talking faster now, which he knew he did when he was caught out. "But if the bridge was coming down and the shop was closing and you were in, say, Phoenix, I'd have walked in here, bought a dollar keychain, and left. I stayed because two years ago I met a guy on a cancelled bluegrass show who was funny about ferrets and had sawdust in his hair, and I thought about him more than was strictly reasonable for a set acquaintance, and then today I walked into a pawn shop in a town I don't even like and there he was. That's the deal. That's the whole."

(He would think about that sentence later, the word he'd picked, strictly reasonable, like he was filing a report with somebody. He was thirty-four years old and he had not blushed in years and he blushed then.)

"Huh," Duane said.

"You can't just say huh."

"I can, it's my shop, it's technically still my shop for three more days." Duane unfolded his arms and put his hands flat on the counter between them, which put them maybe eight inches apart, and Logan looked at those hands