Craphound (4 page)

There was a bunch of other stuff at the auction, other craphounds' weekend

treasures. This was high season, when the sun comes out and people start to

clean out the cottage, the basement, the garage. There were some collectors in

the crowd, and a whole whack of antique and junk dealers, and a few pickers, and

me, and Craphound. I watched the bidding listlessly, waiting for my things to

come up and sneaking out for smokes between lots. Craphound never once looked at

me or acknowledged my presence, and I became perversely obsessed with catching

his eye, so I coughed and shifted and walked past him several times, until the

auctioneer glared at me, and one of the attendants asked if I needed a throat

lozenge.

My lot came up. The bowling glasses went for five bucks to one of the Queen

Street junk dealers; the elephant-foot fetched $350 after a spirited bidding war

between an antique dealer and a collector -- the collector won; the dealer took

the top-hat for $100. The rest of it came up and sold, or didn't, and at end of

the lot, I'd made over $800, which was rent for the month plus beer for the

weekend plus gas for the truck.

Craphound bid on and bought more cowboy things -- a box of super-eight cowboy

movies, the boxes mouldy, the stock itself running to slime; a Navajo blanket; a

plastic donkey that dispensed cigarettes out of its ass; a big neon armadillo

sign.

One of the other nice things about that place over Sotheby's, there was none of

this waiting thirty days to get a cheque. I queued up with the other pickers

after the bidding was through, collected a wad of bills, and headed for my

truck.

I spotted Craphound loading his haul into a minivan with handicapped plates. It

looked like some kind of fungus was growing over the hood and side-panels. On

closer inspection, I saw that the body had been covered in closely glued Lego.

Craphound popped the hatchback and threw his gear in, then opened the driver's

side door, and I saw that his van had been fitted out for a legless driver, with

brake and accelerator levers. A paraplegic I knew drove one just like it.

Craphound's exoskeleton levered him into the seat, and I watched the eerily

precise way it executed the macro that started the car, pulled the

shoulder-belt, put it into drive and switched on the stereo. I heard tape-hiss,

then, loud as a b-boy cruising Yonge Street, an old-timey cowboy voice: "Howdy

pardners! Saddle up, we're ridin'!" Then the van backed up and sped out of the

lot.

I get into the truck and drove home. Truth be told, I missed the little bastard.

Some people said that we should have run Craphound and his kin off the planet,

out of the Solar System. They said that it wasn't fair for the aliens to keep us

in the dark about their technologies. They say that we should have captured a

ship and reverse-engineered it, built our own and kicked ass.

Some people!

First of all, nobody with human DNA could survive a trip in one of those ships.

They're part of Craphound's people's bodies, as I understand it, and we just

don't have the right parts. Second of all, they
were
sharing their tech with

us -- they just weren't giving it away. Fair trades every time.

It's not as if space was off-limits to us. We can any one of us visit their

homeworld, just as soon as we figure out how. Only they wouldn't hold our hands

along the way.

I spent the week haunting the "Secret Boutique," AKA the Goodwill As-Is Centre

on Jarvis. It's all there is to do between yard sales, and sometimes it makes

for good finds. Part of my theory of yard-sale karma holds that if I miss one

day at the thrift shops, that'll be the day they put out the big score. So I hit

the stores diligently and came up with crapola. I had offended the fates, I

knew, and wouldn't make another score until I placated them. It was lonely work,

still and all, and I missed Craphound's good eye and obsessive delight.

I was at the cash-register with a few items at the Goodwill when a guy in a suit

behind me tapped me on the shoulder.

"Sorry to bother you," he said. His suit looked expensive, as did his manicure

and his haircut and his wire-rimmed glasses. "I was just wondering where you

found that." He gestured at a rhinestone-studded ukelele, with a cowboy hat

wood-burned into the body. I had picked it up with a guilty little thrill,

thinking that Craphound might buy it at the next auction.

"Second floor, in the toy section."

"There wasn't anything else like it, was there?"

"'Fraid not," I said, and the cashier picked it up and started wrapping it in

newspaper.

"Ah," he said, and he looked like a little kid who'd just been told that he

couldn't have a puppy. "I don't suppose you'd want to sell it, would you?"

I held up a hand and waited while the cashier bagged it with the rest of my

stuff, a few old clothbound novels I thought I could sell at a used book-store,

and a Grease belt-buckle with Olivia Newton John on it. I led him out the door

by the elbow of his expensive suit.

"How much?" I had paid a dollar.

"Ten bucks?"

I nearly said, "Sold!" but I caught myself. "Twenty."

"Twenty dollars?"

"That's what they'd charge at a boutique on Queen Street."

He took out a slim leather wallet and produced a twenty. I handed him the uke.

His face lit up like a lightbulb.

It's not that my adulthood is particularly unhappy. Likewise, it's not that my

childhood was particularly happy.

There are memories I have, though, that are like a cool drink of water. My

grandfather's place near Milton, an old Victorian farmhouse, where the cat drank

out of a milk-glass bowl; and where we sat around a rough pine table as big as

my whole apartment; and where my playroom was the draughty barn with hay-filled

lofts bulging with farm junk and Tarzan-ropes.

There was Grampa's friend Fyodor, and we spent every evening at his

wrecking-yard, he and Grampa talking and smoking while I scampered in the

twilight, scaling mountains of auto-junk. The glove-boxes yielded treasures:

crumpled photos of college boys mugging in front of signs, roadmaps of far-away

places. I found a guidebook from the 1964 New York World's Fair once, and a

lipstick like a chrome bullet, and a pair of white leather ladies' gloves.

Fyodor dealt in scrap, too, and once, he had half of a carny carousel, a few

horses and part of the canopy, paint flaking and sharp torn edges protruding;

next to it, a Korean-war tank minus its turret and treads, and inside the tank

were peeling old pinup girls and a rotation schedule and a crude Kilroy. The

control-room in the middle of the carousel had a stack of paperback sci-fi

novels, Ace Doubles that had two books bound back-to-back, and when you finished

the first, you turned it over and read the other. Fyodor let me keep them, and

there was a pawn-ticket in one from Macon, Georgia, for a transistor radio.

My parents started leaving me alone when I was fourteen and I couldn't keep from

sneaking into their room and snooping. Mom's jewelry box had books of matches

from their honeymoon in Acapulco, printed with bad palm-trees. My Dad kept an

old photo in his sock drawer, of himself on muscle-beach, shirtless, flexing his

biceps.

My grandmother saved every scrap of my mother's life in her basement, in dusty

Army trunks. I entertained myself by pulling it out and taking it in: her Mouse

Ears from the big family train-trip to Disneyland in '57, and her records, and

the glittery pasteboard sign from her sweet sixteen. There were well-chewed

stuffed animals, and school exercise books in which she'd practiced variations

on her signature for page after page.

It all told a story. The penciled Kilroy in the tank made me see one of those

Canadian soldiers in Korea, unshaven and crew-cut like an extra on M
A
S
H,

sitting for bored hour after hour, staring at the pinup girls, fiddling with a

crossword, finally laying it down and sketching his Kilroy quickly, before

anyone saw.

The photo of my Dad posing sent me whirling through time to Toronto's Muscle

Beach in the east end, and hearing the tinny AM radios playing weird psychedelic

rock while teenagers lounged on their Mustangs and the girls sunbathed in

bikinis that made their tits into torpedoes.

It all made poems. The old pulp novels and the pawn ticket, when I spread them

out in front of the TV, and arranged them just so, they made up a poem that took

my breath away.

After the cowboy trunk episode, I didn't run into Craphound again until the

annual Rotary Club charity rummage sale at the Upper Canada Brewing Company. He

was wearing the cowboy hat, sixguns and the silver star from the cowboy trunk.

It should have looked ridiculous, but the net effect was naive and somehow

charming, like he was a little boy whose hair you wanted to muss.

I found a box of nice old melamine dishes, in various shades of green -- four

square plates, bowls, salad-plates, and a serving tray. I threw them in the

duffel-bag I'd brought and kept browsing, ignoring Craphound as he charmed a

salty old Rotarian while fondling a box of leather-bound books.

I browsed a stack of old Ministry of Labour licenses -- barber, chiropodist,

bartender, watchmaker. They all had pretty seals and were framed in stark green

institutional metal. They all had different names, but all from one family, and

I made up a little story to entertain myself, about the proud mother saving her

sons' accreditations and framing hanging them in the spare room with their

diplomas. "Oh, George Junior's just opened his own barbershop, and little

Jimmy's still fixing watches. . ."

I bought them.

In a box of crappy plastic Little Ponies and Barbies and Care Bears, I found a

leather Indian headdress, a wooden bow-and-arrow set, and a fringed buckskin

vest. Craphound was still buttering up the leather books' owner. I bought them

quick, for five bucks.

"Those are beautiful," a voice said at my elbow. I turned around and smiled at

the snappy dresser who'd bought the uke at the Secret Boutique. He'd gone casual

for the weekend, in an expensive, L.L. Bean button-down way.

"Aren't they, though."

"You sell them on Queen Street? Your finds, I mean?"

"Sometimes. Sometimes at auction. How's the uke?"

"Oh, I got it all tuned up," he said, and smiled the same smile he'd given me

when he'd taken hold of it at Goodwill. "I can play 'Don't Fence Me In' on it."

He looked at his feet. "Silly, huh?"

"Not at all. You're into cowboy things, huh?" As I said it, I was overcome with

the knowledge that this was "Billy the Kid," the original owner of the cowboy

trunk. I don't know why I felt that way, but I did, with utter certainty.

"Just trying to re-live a piece of my childhood, I guess. I'm Scott," he said,

extending his hand.

Scott?
I thought wildly.
Maybe it's his middle name?
"I'm Jerry."

The Upper Canada Brewery sale has many things going for it, including a beer

garden where you can sample their wares and get a good BBQ burger. We gently

gravitated to it, looking over the tables as we went.

"You're a pro, right?" he asked after we had plastic cups of beer.

"You could say that."

"I'm an amateur. A rank amateur. Any words of wisdom?"

I laughed and drank some beer, lit a cigarette. "There's no secret to it, I

think. Just diligence: you've got to go out every chance you get, or you'll miss

the big score."

He chuckled. "I hear that. Sometimes, I'll be sitting in my office, and I'll

just
know
that they're putting out a piece of pure gold at the Goodwill and

that someone else will get to it before my lunch. I get so wound up, I'm no good

until I go down there and hunt for it. I guess I'm hooked, eh?"

"Cheaper than some other kinds of addictions."

"I guess so. About that Indian stuff -- what do you figure you'd get for it at a

Queen Street boutique?"

I looked him in the eye. He may have been something high-powered and cool and

collected in his natural environment, but just then, he was as eager and nervous

as a kitchen-table poker-player at a high-stakes game.

"Maybe fifty bucks," I said.

"Fifty, huh?" he asked.

"About that," I said.

"Once it sold," he said.

"There is that," I said.

"Might take a month, might take a year," he said.

"Might take a day," I said.

"It might, it might." He finished his beer. "I don't suppose you'd take forty?"

I'd paid five for it, not ten minutes before. It looked like it would fit

Craphound, who, after all, was wearing Scott/Billy's own boyhood treasures as we

spoke. You don't make a living by feeling guilty over eight hundred percent

markups. Still, I'd angered the fates, and needed to redeem myself.

"Make it five," I said.

He started to say something, then closed his mouth and gave me a look of thanks.

He took a five out of his wallet and handed it to me. I pulled the vest and bow

and headdress out my duffel.

He walked back to a shiny black Jeep with gold detail work, parked next to

Craphound's van. Craphound was building onto the Lego body, and the hood had a

miniature Lego town attached to it.

Craphound looked around as he passed, and leaned forward with undisguised

interest at the booty. I grimaced and finished my beer.