Craphound, Cory Doctorow [readict books .TXT] 📗

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