Craphound, Cory Doctorow [readict books .TXT] 📗

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.

"Jerry, I am very sorry that we argued."

I sighed out a breath I hadn't known I was holding in. "Me, too."

"They're starting the bidding. May I sit with you?"

And so the three of us sat together, and Craphound shook Scott/Billy's hand and
the auctioneer started into his harangue.

It was a night for unusual occurrences. I bid on a piece, something I told
myself I'd never do. It was a set of four matched Li'l Orphan Annie Ovaltine
glasses, like Grandma's had been, and seeing them in the auctioneer's hand took
me right back to her kitchen, and endless afternoons passed with my colouring
books and weird old-lady hard candies and Liberace albums playing in the living
room.

"Ten," I said, opening the bidding.

"I got ten, ten,ten, I got ten, who'll say twenty, who'll say twenty, twenty for
the four."

Craphound waved his bidding card, and I jumped as if I'd been stung.

"I got twenty from the space cowboy, I got twenty, sir will you say thirty?"

I waved my card.

"That's thirty to you sir."

"Forty," Craphound said.

"Fifty," I said even before the auctioneer could point back to me. An old pro,
he settled back and let us do the work.

"One hundred," Craphound said.

"One fifty," I said.

The room was perfectly silent. I thought about my overextended MasterCard, and
wondered if Scott/Billy would give me a loan.

"Two hundred," Craphound said.

Fine, I thought. Pay two hundred for those. I can get a set on Queen Street for
thirty bucks.

The auctioneer turned to me. "The bidding stands at two. Will you say two-ten,
sir?"

I shook my head. The auctioneer paused a long moment, letting me sweat over the
decision to bow out.

"I have two -- do I have any other bids from the floor? Any other bids? Sold,
$200, to number 57." An attendant brought Craphound the glasses. He took them
and tucked them under his seat.

#

I was fuming when we left. Craphound was at my elbow. I wanted to punch him --
I'd never punched anyone in my life, but I wanted to punch him.

We entered the cool night air and I sucked in several lungfuls before lighting a
cigarette.

"Jerry," Craphound said.

I stopped, but didn't look at him. I watched the taxis pull in and out of the
garage next door instead.

"Jerry, my friend," Craphound said.

"_What_?" I said, loud enough to startle myself. Scott, beside me, jerked as
well.

"We're going. I wanted to say goodbye, and to give you some things that I won't
be taking with me."

"What?" I said again, Scott just a beat behind me.

"My people -- we're going. It has been decided. We've gotten what we came for."

Without another word, he set off towards his van. We followed along behind,
shell-shocked.

Craphound's exoskeleton executed another macro and slid the panel-door aside,
revealing the cowboy trunk.

"I wanted to give you this. I will keep the glasses."

"I don't understand," I said.

"You're all leaving?" Scott asked, with a note of urgency.

"It has been decided. We'll go over the next twenty-four hours."

"But _why_?" Scott said, sounding almost petulant.

"It's not something that I can easily explain. As you must know, the things we
gave you were trinkets to us -- almost worthless. We traded them for something
that was almost worthless to you -- a fair trade, you'll agree -- but it's time
to move on."

Craphound handed me the cowboy trunk. Holding it, I smelled the lubricant from
his exoskeleton and the smell of the attic it had been mummified in before
making its way into his hands. I felt like I almost understood.

"This is for me," I said slowly, and Craphound nodded encouragingly. "This is
for me, and you're keeping the glasses. And I'll look at this and feel. . ."

"You understand," Craphound said, looking somehow relieved.

And I _did_. I understood that an alien wearing a cowboy hat and sixguns and
giving them away was a poem and a story, and a thirtyish bachelor trying to
spend half a month's rent on four glasses so that he could remember his
Grandma's kitchen was a story and a poem, and that the disused fairground
outside Calgary was a story and a poem, too.

"You're craphounds!" I said. "All of you!"

Craphound smiled so I could see his gums and I put down the cowboy trunk and
clapped my hands.

#

Scott recovered from his shock by spending the night at his office, crunching
numbers talking on the phone, and generally getting while the getting was good.
He had an edge -- no one else knew that they were going.

He went pro later that week, opened a chi-chi boutique on Queen Street, and
hired me on as chief picker and factum factotum.

Scott was not Billy the Kid. Just another Bay Street shyster with a cowboy
jones. From the way they come down and spend, there must be a million of them.

Our draw in the window is a beautiful mannequin I found, straight out of the
Fifties, a little boy we call The Beaver. He dresses in chaps and a Sheriff's
badge and sixguns and a miniature Stetson and cowboy boots with worn spurs, and
rests one foot on