Before They Were Giants (11 page)

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Craphound

by Cory Doctorow

raphound had wicked yard-sale karma, for a rotten, filthy alien bastard. He was too good at panning out the single grain of gold in a raging river of uselessness for me not to like him -- respect him, anyway. But then he found the cowboy trunk. It was two months’ rent to me and nothing but some squirrelly alien kitsch-fetish to Craphound.

So I did the unthinkable. I violated the Code. I got into a bidding war with a buddy. Never let them tell you that women poison friendships: in my experience, wounds from women-fights heal quickly; fights over garbage leave nothing behind but scorched earth.

Craphound spotted the sign -- his karma, plus the goggles in his exoskeleton, gave him the advantage when we were doing 80 kmh on some stretch of back-highway in cottage country. He was riding shotgun while I drove, and we had the radio on to the CBC’s summer-Saturday programming: eight weekends with eight hours of old radio dramas: “The Shadow,” “Quiet Please,” “Tom Mix,” “The Crypt-Keeper” with Bela Lugosi. It was hour three, and Bogey was phoning in his performance on a radio adaptation of
The African Queen
. I had the windows of the old truck rolled down so that I could smoke without fouling Craphound’s breather. My arm was hanging out the window, the radio was booming, and Craphound said “Turn around! Turn around, now, Jerry, now, turn around!”

When Craphound gets that excited, it’s a sign that he’s spotted a rich vein. I checked the side-mirror quickly, pounded the brakes and spun around. The transmission creaked, the wheels squealed, and then we were creeping along the way we’d come.

“There,” Craphound said, gesturing with his long, skinny arm. I saw it. A wooden A-frame real-estate sign, a piece of hand-lettered cardboard stuck overtop of the realtor’s name:

EAST MUSKOKA VOLUNTEER FIRE-DEPT

LADIES AUXILIARY RUMMAGE SALE

SAT 25 JUNE

“Hoo-eee!” I hollered, and spun the truck onto the dirt road. I gunned the engine as we cruised along the tree-lined road, trusting Craphound to spot any deer, signs, or hikers in time to avert disaster. The sky was a perfect blue and the smells of summer were all around us. I snapped off the radio and listened to the wind rushing through the truck. Ontario is
beautiful
in the summer.

“There!” Craphound shouted. I hit the turn-off and down-shifted and then we were back on a paved road. Soon, we were rolling into a country fire-station, an ugly brick barn. The hall was lined with long, folding tables, stacked high. The mother lode!

Craphound beat me out the door, as usual. His exoskeleton is programmable, so he can record little scripts for it like: move left arm to door handle, pop it, swing legs out to running-board, jump to ground, close door, move forward. Meanwhile, I’m still making sure I’ve switched off the headlights and that I’ve got my wallet.

Two blue-haired grannies had a card-table set up out front of the hall, with a big tin pitcher of lemonade and three boxes of Tim Horton assorted donuts. That stopped us both, since we share the superstition that you
always
buy food from old ladies and little kids, as a sacrifice to the crap-gods. One of the old ladies poured out the lemonade while the other smiled and greeted us.

“Welcome, welcome! My, you’ve come a long way for us!”

“Just up from Toronto, ma’am,” I said. It’s an old joke, but it’s also part of the ritual, and it’s got to be done.

“I meant your friend, sir. This gentleman.”

Craphound smiled without baring his gums and sipped his lemonade. “Of course I came, dear lady. I wouldn’t miss it for the worlds!” His accent is pretty good, but when it comes to stock phrases like this, he’s got so much polish you’d think he was reading the news.

The biddie
blushed
and
giggled
, and I felt faintly sick. I walked off to the tables, trying not to hurry. I chose my first spot, about halfway down, where things wouldn’t be quite so picked-over. I grabbed an empty box from underneath and started putting stuff into it: four matched highball glasses with gold crossed bowling-pins and a line of black around the rim; an Expo ‘67 wall-hanging that wasn’t even a little faded; a shoebox full of late sixties O-Pee-Chee hockey cards; a worn, wooden-handled steel cleaver that you could butcher a steer with.

I picked up my box and moved on: a deck of playing cards copyrighted ‘57, with the logo for the Royal Canadian Dairy, Bala Ontario printed on the backs; a fireman’s cap with a brass badge so tarnished I couldn’t read it; a three-story wedding-cake trophy for the 1974 Eastern Region Curling Championships. The cash-register in my mind was ringing, ringing, ringing. God bless the East Muskoka Volunteer Fire Department Ladies’ Auxiliary.

I’d mined that table long enough. I moved to the other end of the hall. Time was, I’d start at the beginning and turn over each item, build one pile of maybes and another pile of definites, try to strategise. In time, I came to rely on instinct and on the fates, to whom I make my obeisances at every opportunity.

Let’s hear it for the fates: a genuine collapsible top-hat; a white-tipped evening cane; a hand-carved cherry-wood walking stick; a beautiful black lace parasol; a wrought-iron lightning rod with a rooster on top; all of it in an elephant-leg umbrella-stand. I filled the box, folded it over, and started on another.

I collided with Craphound. He grinned his natural grin, the one that showed row on row of wet, slimy gums, tipped with writhing, poisonous suckers. “Gold! Gold!” he said, and moved along. I turned my head after him, just as he bent over the cowboy trunk.

I sucked air between my teeth. It was magnificent: a leather-bound miniature steamer trunk, the leather worked with lariats, Stetson hats, war-bonnets and six-guns. I moved toward him, and he popped the latch. I caught my breath.

On top, there was a kid’s cowboy costume: miniature leather chaps, a tiny Stetson, a pair of scuffed white-leather cowboy boots with long, worn spurs affixed to the heels. Craphound moved it reverently to the table and continued to pull more magic from the trunk’s depths: a stack of cardboard-bound Hopalong Cassidy 78s; a pair of tin six-guns with gunbelt and holsters; a silver star that said Sheriff; a bundle of Roy Rogers comics tied with twine, in mint condition; and a leather satchel filled with plastic cowboys and Indians, enough to re-enact the Alamo.

“Oh, my God,” I breathed, as he spread the loot out on the table.

“What are these, Jerry?” Craphound asked, holding up the 78s.

“Old records, like LPs, but you need a special record player to listen to them.” I took one out of its sleeve. It gleamed, scratch-free, in the overhead fluorescents.

“I got a 78 player here,” said a member of the East Muskoka Volunteer Fire Department Ladies’ Auxiliary. She was short enough to look Craphound in the eye, a hair under five feet, and had a skinny, rawboned look to her. “That’s my Billy’s things, Billy the Kid we called him. He was dotty for cowboys when he was a boy. Couldn’t get him to take off that fool outfit -- nearly got him thrown out of school. He’s a lawyer now, in Toronto, got a fancy office on Bay Street. I called him to ask if he minded my putting his cowboy things in the sale, and you know what? He didn’t know what I was talking about! Doesn’t that beat everything? He was dotty for cowboys when he was a boy.”

It’s another of my rituals to smile and nod and be as polite as possible to the erstwhile owners of crap that I’m trying to buy, so I smiled and nodded and examined the 78 player she had produced. In lariat script, on the top, it said, “Official Bob Wills Little Record Player,” and had a crude watercolour of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys grinning on the front. It was the kind of record player that folded up like a suitcase when you weren’t using it. I’d had one as a kid, with Yogi Bear silkscreened on the front.

Billy’s mom plugged the yellowed cord into a wall jack and took the 78 from me, touched the stylus to the record. A tinny ukelele played, accompanied by horse-clops, and then a narrator with a deep, whisky voice said, “Howdy, Pardners! I was just settin’ down by the ole campfire. Why don’t you stay an’ have some beans, an’ I’ll tell y’all the story of how Hopalong Cassidy beat the Duke Gang when they come to rob the Santa Fe.”

In my head, I was already breaking down the cowboy trunk and its contents, thinking about the minimum bid I’d place on each item at Sotheby’s. Sold individually, I figured I could get over two grand for the contents. Then I thought about putting ads in some of the Japanese collectors’ magazines, just for a lark, before I sent the lot to the auction house. You never can tell. A buddy I knew had sold a complete packaged set of Welcome Back, Kotter action figures for nearly eight grand that way. Maybe I could buy a new truck. . .

“This is wonderful,” Craphound said, interrupting my reverie. “How much would you like for the collection?”

I felt a knife in my guts. Craphound had found the cowboy trunk, so that meant it was his. But he usually let me take the stuff with street-value -- he was interested in
everything
, so it hardly mattered if I picked up a few scraps with which to eke out a living.

Billy’s mom looked over the stuff. “I was hoping to get twenty dollars for the lot, but if that’s too much, I’m willing to come down.”

“I’ll give you thirty,” my mouth said, without intervention from my brain.

They both turned and stared at me. Craphound was unreadable behind his goggles.

Billy’s mom broke the silence. “Oh, my! Thirty dollars for this old mess?”

“I will pay fifty,” Craphound said.

“Seventy-five,” I said.

“Oh, my,” Billy’s mom said.

“Five hundred,” Craphound said.

I opened my mouth, and shut it. Craphound had built his stake on Earth by selling a complicated biochemical process for non-chlorophyll photosynthesis to a Saudi banker. I wouldn’t ever beat him in a bidding war. “A thousand dollars,” my mouth said.

“Ten thousand,” Craphound said, and extruded a roll of hundreds from somewhere in his exoskeleton.

“My Lord!” Billy’s mom said. “Ten thousand dollars!”

The other pickers, the firemen, the blue haired ladies all looked up at that and stared at us, their mouths open.

“It is for a good cause.” Craphound said.

“Ten thousand dollars!” Billy’s mom said again.

Craphound’s digits ruffled through the roll as fast as a croupier’s counter, separated off a large chunk of the brown bills, and handed them to Billy’s mom.

One of the firemen, a middle-aged paunchy man with a comb-over appeared at Billy’s mom’s shoulder.

“What’s going on, Eva?” he said.

“This. . .gentleman is going to pay ten thousand dollars for Billy’s old cowboy things, Tom.”

The fireman took the money from Billy’s mom and stared at it. He held up the top note under the light and turned it this way and that, watching the holographic stamp change from green to gold, then green again. He looked at the serial number, then the serial number of the next bill. He licked his forefinger and started counting off the bills in piles of ten. Once he had ten piles, he counted them again. “That’s ten thousand dollars, all right. Thank you very much, mister. Can I give you a hand getting this to your car?”

Craphound, meanwhile, had re-packed the trunk and balanced the 78 player on top of it. He looked at me, then at the fireman.

“I wonder if I could impose on you to take me to the nearest bus station. I think I’m going to be making my own way home.”

The fireman and Billy’s mom both stared at me. My cheeks flushed. “Aw, c’mon,” I said. “I’ll drive you home.”

“I think I prefer the bus,” Craphound said.

“It’s no trouble at all to give you a lift, friend,” the fireman said.

I called it quits for the day, and drove home alone with the truck only half-filled. I pulled it into the coach-house and threw a tarp over the load and went inside and cracked a beer and sat on the sofa, watching a nature show on a desert reclamation project in Arizona, where the state legislature had traded a derelict mega-mall and a custom-built habitat to an alien for a local-area weather control machine.