Cory Doctorow - Craphound
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Cory Doctorow >> Craphound
"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.
#
The following Thursday, I went to the little crap-auction house on King Street.
I'd put my finds from the weekend in the sale: lower minimum bid, and they took
a smaller commission than Sotheby's. Fine for moving the small stuff.
Craphound was there, of course. I knew he'd be. It was where we met, when he bid
on a case of Lincoln Logs I'd found at a fire-sale.
I'd known him for a kindred spirit when he bought them, and we'd talked
afterwards, at his place, a sprawling, two-storey warehouse amid a cluster of
auto-wrecking yards where the junkyard dogs barked, barked, barked.
Inside was paradise. His taste ran to shrines -- a collection of fifties bar
kitsch that was a shrine to liquor; a circular waterbed on a raised podium that
was nearly buried under seventies bachelor pad-inalia; a kitchen that was nearly
unusable, so packed it was with old barn-board furniture and rural memorabilia;
a leather-appointed library straight out of a Victorian gentlemen's club; a
solarium dressed in wicker and bamboo and tiki-idols. It was a hell of a place.
Craphound had known all about the Goodwills and the Sally Anns, and the auction
houses, and the kitsch boutiques on Queen Street, but he still hadn't figured
out where it all came from.
"Yard sales, rummage sales, garage sales," I said, reclining in a vibrating
naughahyde easy-chair, drinking a glass of his pricey single-malt that he'd
bought for the beautiful bottle it came in.
"But where are these? Who is allowed to make them?" Craphound hunched opposite
me, his exoskeleton locked into a coiled, semi-seated position.
"Who? Well, anyone. You just one day decide that you need to clean out the
basement, you put an ad in the _Star_, tape up a few signs, and voila, yard
sale. Sometimes, a school or a church will get donations of old junk and sell it
all at one time, as a fundraiser."
"And how do you locate these?" he asked, bobbing up and down slightly with
excitement.
"Well, there're amateurs who just read the ads in the weekend papers, or just
pick a neighbourhood and wander around, but that's no way to go about it. What I
do is, I get in a truck, and I sniff the air, catch the scent of crap and
_vroom!_, I'm off like a bloodhound on a trail. You learn things over time: like
stay away from Yuppie yard sales, they never have anything worth buying, just
the same crap you can buy in any mall."
"Do you think I might accompany you some day?"
"Hell, sure. Next Saturday? We'll head over to Cabbagetown -- those old coach
houses, you'd be amazed what people get rid of. It's practically criminal."
"I would like to go with you on next Saturday very much Mr Jerry Abington." He
used to talk like that, without commas or question marks. Later, he got better,
but then, it was all one big sentence.
"Call me Jerry. It's a date, then. Tell you what, though: there's a Code you got
to learn before we go out. The Craphound's Code."
"What is a craphound?"
"You're lookin' at one. You're one, too, unless I miss my guess. You'll get to
know some of the local craphounds, you hang around with me long enough. They're
the competition, but they're also your buddies, and there're certain rules we
have."
And then I explained to him all about how you never bid against a craphound at a
yard-sale, how you get to know the other fellows' tastes, and when you see
something they might like, you haul it out for them, and they'll do the same for
you, and how you never buy something that another craphound might be looking
for, if all you're buying it for is to sell it back to him. Just good form and
common sense, really, but you'd be surprised how many amateurs just fail to make
the jump to pro because they can't grasp it.
#
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.
#
I met Scott/Billy three times more at the Secret Boutique that week.
He was a lawyer, who specialised in alien-technology patents. He had a practice
on Bay Street, with two partners, and despite his youth, he was the senior man.
I didn't let on that I knew about Billy the Kid and his mother in the East
Muskoka Volunteer Fire Department Ladies' Auxiliary. But I felt a bond with him,
as though we shared an unspoken secret. I pulled any cowboy finds for him, and
he developed a pretty good eye for what I was after and returned the favour.
The fates were with me again, and no two ways about it. I took home a ratty old
Oriental rug that on closer inspection was a 19th century hand-knotted Persian;
an upholstered Turkish footstool; a collection of hand-painted silk Hawaiiana
pillows and a carved Meerschaum pipe. Scott/Billy found the last for me, and it
cost me two dollars. I knew a collector who would pay thirty in an eye-blink,
and from then on, as far as I was concerned, Scott/Billy was a fellow craphound.
"You going to the auction tomorrow night?" I asked him at the checkout line.
"Wouldn't miss it," he said. He'd barely been able to contain his excitement
when I told him about the Thursday night auctions and the bargains to be had
there. He sure had the bug.
"Want to get together for dinner beforehand? The Rotterdam's got a good patio."
He did, and we did, and I had a glass of framboise that packed a hell of a kick
and tasted like fizzy raspberry lemonade; and doorstopper fries and a club
sandwich.
I had my nose in my glass when he kicked my ankle under the table. "Look at
that!"
It was Craphound in his van, cruising for a parking spot. The Lego village had
been joined by a whole postmodern spaceport on the roof, with a red-and-blue
castle, a football-sized flying saucer, and a clown's head with blinking eyes.
I went back to my drink and tried to get my appetite back.
"Was that an extee driving?"
"Yeah. Used to be a friend of mine."
"He's a picker?"
"Uh-huh." I turned back to my fries and tried to kill the subject.
"Do you know how he made his stake?"
"The chlorophyll thing, in Saudi Arabia."
"Sweet!" he said. "Very sweet. I've got a client who's got some secondary
patents from that one. What's he go after?"
"Oh, pretty much everything," I said, resigning myself to discussing the topic
after all. "But lately, the same as you -- cowboys and Injuns."
He laughed and smacked his knee. "Well, what do you know? What could he possibly
want with the stuff?"
"What do they want with any of it? He got started one day when we were cruising
the Muskokas," I said carefully, watching his face. "Found a trunk of old cowboy
things at a rummage sale. East Muskoka Volunteer Fire Department Ladies'
Auxiliary." I waited for him to shout or startle. He didn't.
"Yeah? A good find, I guess. Wish I'd made it."
I didn't know what to say to that, so I took a bite of my sandwich.
Scott continued. "I think about what they get out of it a lot. There's nothing
we have here that they couldn't make for themselves. I mean, if they picked up
and left today, we'd still be making sense of everything they gave us in a
hundred years. You know, I just closed a deal for a biochemical computer that's
no-shit 10,000 times faster than anything we've built out of silicon. You know
what the extee took in trade? Title to a defunct fairground outside of Calgary
-- they shut it down ten years ago because the midway was too unsafe to ride.
Doesn't that beat all? This thing is worth a billion dollars right out of the
gate, I mean, within twenty-four hours of the deal closing, the seller can turn
it into the GDP of Bolivia. For a crummy real-estate dog that you couldn't get
five grand for!"
It always shocked me when Billy/Scott talked about his job -- it was easy to
forget that he was a high-powered lawyer when we were jawing and fooling around
like old craphounds. I wondered if maybe he _wasn't_ Billy the Kid; I couldn't
think of any reason for him to be playing it all so close to his chest.
"What the hell is some extee going to do with a fairground?"
#
Craphound got a free Coke from Lisa at the check-in when he made his appearance.
He bid high, but shrewdly, and never pulled ten-thousand-dollar stunts. The
bidders were wandering the floor, previewing that week's stock, and making notes
to themselves.
I rooted through a box-lot full of old tins, and found one with a buckaroo at
the Calgary Stampede, riding a bucking bronc. I picked it up and stood to
inspect it. Craphound was behind me.
"Nice piece, huh?" I said to him.
"I like it very much," Craphound said, and I felt my cheeks flush.
"You're going to have some competition tonight, I think," I said, and nodded at
Scott/Billy. "I think he's Billy; the one whose mother sold us -- you -- the
cowboy trunk."
"Really?" Craphound said, and it felt like we were partners again, scoping out
the competition. Suddenly I felt a knife of shame, like I was betraying
Scott/Billy somehow. I took a step back.