McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 (14 page)

 
          
 
Though well aware that I was already in enough
woman trouble, I couldn't claim to feel 100 percent resistant, even with the
Smithsonian hanging in the balance.

 
          
 
"What's involved in a Double Bubble
Brunch?" I asked.

 
          
 
Lolly ticked off the essentials on her fat
little fingers.

 
          
 
"Well, the double part means me an' Janie
Lee," she said—"I mean both of us in the bath with you at the same
time. The bubble part is just a bubble bath, of course."

 
          
 
"He can get a color of his choice,"
Janie Lee reminded her. "We got purple an' all kinds of colors."

 
          
 
"Yeah, color of your choice," Lolly
said, ticking off a finger. "An' naturally it's a whirlpool bath and you
get a bottle of champagne and a massage first, if you want one, and it's only a
hundred dollars up to
eleven a.m.
"

 
          
 
"We used to run it till
noon
and it was real popular," Janie Lee
said. "The Congressmen used to just pour in here about eleven-fifteen,
hopin' to squeeze it all in between votin' or whatever they do."

 
          
 
"It got too popular," Lolly said.
"Nobody wanted to pay the afternoon rates, so now it's only good till
'leven."

 
          
 
The thought of lolling around drinking
champagne in a purple whirlpool bubble bath with two chubby girls was pretty
diverting, though it was the last thing I would have expected to find myself
doing when I left Cindy's apartment that morning.

 
          
 
I probably would have given Lolly and Janie
Lee the hundred bucks and had a nice bubbly time with them had we not happened
to meet Boog Miller just as he was coming out the door of their aptly named
establishment, the Bubble Bath.

 
          
 
"Aw, no," Boog said when he saw us.
"Comert again."

 
          
 
He had an orange tie in his hand and looked
content enough to have just completed a Double Bubble Brunch.

 
          
 
Full of fun though they were, the girls seemed
a little ticked at Boog. Lolly went over and tried to kick him in the shins,
while Janie Lee moved in from the other side.

 
          
 
Boog backed up against his
Lincoln
and made his tie into a garrote, daring the
girls to come and get
kim
, an invitation they
declined.

 
          
 
"It's just 'cause he spent the whole
morning with Ginger when he could have spent it with us," Lolly explained.
"Just 'cause she's from
Texas
don't mean she knows everything."

 
          
 
They looked at me significantly again, but the
spell of the totally unexpected had already been broken.

 
          
 
"I guess I'll have to miss the
special," I said. "I gotta see Boog for a minute."

 
          
 
"Well, there's six days in a week,"
Lolly said. "You just come anytime."

 
          
 
"Ain't they sweet?" Boog said, once
they had gone into the Bubble Bath. "I love 'em like daughters."

 
          
 
"Let me ask you something," I said.
"Is the Smithsonian for sale?"

 
          
 
"Yeah, they're tryin' to sell it, but the
deal ain't set," Boog said. "Let's go find a barbecue palace."

 
          
 
We got in my car and drove on out
Wilson Boulevard
, a street so seedy it gave me deja vu. I
kept thinking I was back on Little York Road, in
Houston
. It was at a flea market on Little York
Road that I first met Boog, seconds after I beat him to a narwhal tusk. Shortly
after that, I sold it to him and we became friends.

 
          
 
Boog tied his orange tie and put on some
wraparound sunglasses, which he immediately took off in order to examine the
fine Armenian icon propped in the back seat.

 
          
 
"I meant to buy that thang and hang it in
the
Winkler
County
courthouse," he said. "It'd give
some of them old dirt farmers a pretty good scare."

 
          
 
Then he took out a little inhaler and squirted
an antihistaminic substance up his nose, a noisy process that sounded like
somebody trying to start a worn-out car.

 
          
 
"If you
was
to
offer me a fair deal on that icon I'd tell you about the Smithsonian," he
said.

 
          
 
"I might," I said. "I'll let
you know in a day or two."

 
          
 
Boog looked at me closely. He was a hard man
to fool.

 
          
 
"There must be a new woman in the
picture," he said.
"One with the hots for icons.

 
          
 
"It's a hard life," he sighed.
"I was thanking your passion for Cindy would last till at least
nine-forty-five. If it had you wouldn't have got there in time to bid. You're a
fucking lost generation.
Can't even fuck till
nine-forty-five."

 
          
 
Soon we left
Arlington
behind and were in
Falls Church
, not that it was easy to tell them apart.
Falls Church
had fewer massage parlors and more TV
repair shops, but that was the only appreciable difference.

 
          
 
The barbecue palace Boog had in mind was
called The Cover-Up, and was about as covertly located as any barbecue palace
in the land. It was in a little warren of run-down shops behind a construction
site in a more than normally depressed part of
Falls Church
.

 
          
 
Nonetheless, it was packed with men, most of
them with their security clearances hanging around their necks or clipped to
their shirt pockets. A couple of sullen Pakistanis were slicing barbecue as
fast as they could slice, and a grinning Chinaman who was built not unlike Boog
slapped it onto plates, splashed a little sauce over it, and handed it to
whoever was at the head of the line.

 
          
 
"Wall-to-wall spooks," Boog said.
"Only place in town where it’s safe to talk. See that Chinaman? Best spy
in town."

 
          
 
"Who does he spy for?" I asked.

 
          
 
"The Israelis," Boog said. The line
was moving virtually at a trot.

 
          
 
"Hello, Freddy," Boog said, when we
got to the counter. "Hit us with a little of that goat."

 
          
 
"Booger-man," Freddy said, in an
accent that might have been Princetonian. His eyes scanned me from head to foot,
like a radar beam. Then he handed us our barbecue, which in fact was goat.

 
          
 
"Yeah, all these spooks eat goat,"
Boog said. "They get used to it while they're overseas in the
Third World
, performing covert acts."

 
          
 
"What's Freddy's last name?"

 
          
 
"Fu," Boog said.

 
          
 
"There was a woman at the auction named
Mrs. Lump," I said. "Ever heard of her?"

 
          
 
"Bessie Lump," Boog said.
"Sure. Only she ain't the one you're saving that icon for.
Too old for you.

 
          
 
"These booths must have been meant for
midgets to fuck in," he commented, trying to arrange a napkin so as to
protect his orange tie. Then he nodded at the eagle-eyed Freddy Fu and a moment
later a Pakistani teenager appeared with two bottles of Tasmanian beer.

 
          
 
"I allus drink Tasmanian beer when I eat
goat," Boog explained.

 
          
 
"Bessie Lump is Cyrus Folmsbee's girl
friend," he added, swabbing up a puddle of sauce with a bit of goat.
"Cyrus happens to be the richest man between
Upperville
,
Virginia
, and
Riyadh
, Sau-ou-dee
Arabia
. His family started up the Smithsonian to
begin with. The Folmsbees own just about everythang in
America
that's worth havin' except
Winkler
County
."

 
          
 
"How can he own the Smithsonian?" I
asked.

 
          
 
"Well, he
don't
,
exactly," Boog said. "But ownership might just be a state of mind. I thank
it's safe to say Cyrus has the mind of an owner. I thank he thanks his family
just kind of lent it to the nation."

 
          
 
"What does Mrs. Lump have to do with
it?" I asked.

 
          
 
The second I said it Boog kicked me in the
shins. I looked up, he nodded at the carry-out line, and there was Bessie Lump
herself, quietly waiting to get some barbecued goat.

 
          
 
The sight of her almost caused me to drip
barbecue sauce on my doeskin jacket. She was just a dumpy little woman in an
old blue coat, but the fact that she had somehow turned up in a CL barbecue
joint in
Falls
Church
,
Virginia
, struck me as unnerving.

 
          
 
Boog immediately popped out of the booth and
went over to talk to her. Bessie Lump didn't greet him warmly, but on the other
hand she didn't seem to mind that he had come over to talk to her. She shuffled
up the line and received a modest brown bag, presumably full of barbecued goat.

 
          
 
To my surprise, Boog brought her over and
introduced us. "Isn't he tall?" she said, when I stood up. Her eyes
were disconcertingly colorless, like
Levis
that have been washed too many times.

 
          
 
"She followed me," I said, when she
was gone.

 
          
 
Boog just laughed. "She never follert
you," he said. "Old Cyrus used to run the CIA, back when it was a
respectable organization. He picked up a taste for goat, that's all."

 
          
 
"She doesn't seem very friendly," I
said, not reassured.

 
          
 
"Well, the Folmsbees ain't exactly just
folks," Boog said. "The Shiptons neither. Bessie's a Shipton."

 
          
 
"What's a Shipton?" I asked.

 
          
 
Boog looked amused. "Yore ignorance is so
appalling I can't thank where to start," he said, between munchings.
"Bessie married beneath her. Husband's name is Northrup

 
          
 
Lump. Of course, she would have had to marry
beneath her, if she married at all, since the Shiptons got here back in the
days of the primordial slime. The Shiptons even beat the Folmsbees, but the
Folmsbees hung onto their money and the Shiptons didn't. The Shiptons was
shabby genteel."

 
          
 
That I could follow. The shabby genteel are
familiar ground to me. I had bought many a second-rate heirloom from meek,
shabby genteel ladies in decorous apartments about the land. I could always get
the heirlooms for reasonable prices, since the meek ladies could seldom bring
themselves to discuss money at all. They would take whatever I offered, and in
turn give me tea. If they had lives, it was not apparent.

 
          
 
"Anyway," Boog went on, "having
married a Lump the only way Bessie could redeem herself was by shacking up with
a Folmsbee. It's been going on for forty years."

 
          
 
"What happened to Mr. Lump?" I
asked.

 
          
 
"Why nothin'," Boog said. "I
thank he spends his time playin' checkers with the butler."

 
          
 
"It's hard to believe the Smithsonian is
really for sale," I said.

 
          
 
"You got the Waxahachie outlook," Boog
said. "Thank of it. Seventeen museums in the Smithsonian, not to mention
all
them
warehouses they got strung around in places
like Anacostia and
Silver
Spring
. For fifty,
sixty years we been sucking stuff out of every country in the world and
cramming it into warehouses an' museums—seventy-eight million items, they say.

 
          
 
"Hail, we got more African masks than you
could find in
Africa
, and more Persian doodads than the pore old
Shah."

 
          
 
"But that stuff is worth billions and
billions," I said. "Who's gonna buy it?"

 
          
 
"That's the fun part," Boog said.
"Emergent nations is gonna buy it. What them pore bastards in the
Third World
don't realize yet is that we bought up most
of their heritage years ago, before they even started thanking about emerging.
We got it right here. Now, what's the first thang an emergent nation needs when
it emerges?"

 
          
 
"Schools and
hospitals?"
I ventured.
"Tractors.
Freeways."

 
          
 
Boog shook his head. "What they need is
fancy new museums, filt with the native crafts that are their heritage,"
he said.
"Something to remind them of how it was before
they shook off their colonial shackles."

 
          
 
"Oh," I said.

 
          
 
Boog grinned. "Cy's got a little brother
named Peck, short for Peckham.
The Folmsbees kind of look
down on Peck because he actually went in business.
What he does is build
museums. Right this minute he's off building national museums in twenty or
thirty little new countries. Naturally the countries ain't got nothing to put
in the new museums, since we carted off all their goodies long ago."

 
          
 
"So we'll sell it all back to them,"
I said.

 
          
 
"Bingo," Boog said, with a grin.