McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 (32 page)

 
          
 
In the morning I felt peculiar, unlike Cindy,
who bounced out of bed, all worries forgotten, and went off to swim three
miles. I hate to swim, and the fact that I was sleeping with a woman who swam
three miles every other day made me feel even more peculiar.

 
          
 
I dressed and drove up to the Millers’, hoping
Boog would be gone so I could sit around in peace with Boss for a while.
Naturally, Boog was still there, sitting at the breakfast table in a vivid
yellow suit, a quart full of red liquid in front of him. Boss, as usual, was
engrossed in The Wall Street Journal and hardly looked up when I came in.

 
          
 
"You’re just in time for a red draw,”
Boog said, hefting the big glass at me.

 
          
 
A red draw was a mixture of beer and tomato
juice—a popular drink in
West Texas
.

 
          
 
"Fm disserpointed in
you.
Jack,” he said. "You never bring me
no
worthwhile antiques no more. All you do is
hang
around
hopin’ to fuck my wife."

 
          
 
Boss got up and took some biscuits out of the
oven. She hadn't said a word to me. I mixed myself a red draw, just to be
companionable.

 
          
 
"Sell me that icon,” Boog said. "Or
ain’t you give it to the woman you wanted to fuck yet?*'

 
          
 
"She wouldn't take it,” I said.

 
          
 
"Anyway, sell me somethang,” Boog said.
"I ain’t bought nothin’ in days.
That makes me restless
as all get out.”

 
          
 
"What do you
want.
Jack?” Boss asked.

 
          
 
"He wants to fuck you, like the rest of
mankind,” Boog said.

 
          
 
"I’m gonna sock you, Boog," Boss
said. "I wasn't asking you."

 
          
 
"If he's so nice he ought to sell me
somethang," Boog countered. "What's the use of a scout if he don't
bring you
nothing
?"

 
          
 
He had a point. I had not exactly been piling
up treasures, during the last few days. The icon and Jean's dower chest were my
only purchases. I had begun to drift, slightly. Partly it was Cindy's fault,
since she didn't recognize my profession and didn't care whether I was drifting
or not. I hadn't hit a flea market in a week, which was most unusual for me.

 
          
 
While I ate some biscuits.
Boss watched me closely. I didn't meet her eye, but I knew she was watching me.
The fact that I interested her that much was faintly reassuring.

 
          
 
Then I remembered that I had an appointment to
meet Mr. Cawdrey, the man who was presumably selling the Smithsonian baskets.
Buying 190,000 baskets would certainly pull me out of my slump.

 
          
 
"I'm looking at the baskets today,"
I said to Boog.

 
          
 
He looked blank.

 
          
 
"The Smithsonian baskets," I said.

 
          
 
"Oh, them," Boog said. "I thank
them's already sold. That's what I hear."

 
          
 
"I just talked to the man
yesterday," I said. "How can they have been sold?"

 
          
 
Of course I knew my question was stupid. The
first law of life is that anything can be sold at any time.

 
          
 
I suddenly felt very unconfident. A scout's
confidence is like an athlete's confidence, essentially irrational. The old,
beautiful conviction, which was that I could persuade anyone to sell me
anything, was slipping away.

 
          
 
"You sat on your ass where them baskets
was concerned," Boog said. "There
was
probably a lot of them baskets that I could have used. What's the matter with
you?"

 
          
 
"Cindy is the matter with him," Boss
said.

 
          
 
"I wisht she was the matter with
me," Boog said, "But I never was lucky."

 
          
 
He belched a deep belch and stood up.
"Gotter go," he said. "Gotter see a man."

 
          
 
"That's odd," Boss said.

 
          
 
"Whut is?"

 
          
 
"You seeing a man," she said.
"I thought you usually saw a couple of little fat hookers this time of
day."

 
          
 
"I wouldn't know where to find one if I
was to want to," Boog said, straightening the knot on his bright blue tie.

 
          
 
Just as Boog went out the door Micah Leviticus
walked into the room, looking bleary. He hadn't shaved. Somehow stubble looked
worse on such a small face. His whiskers were larger than his features. As
usual, he had a small television set in his hand. He got a spoon from a drawer
and came over to the table, where he began to eat jam right out of the jar.

 
          
 
Boss sat with a cheerful look on her face,
watching him eat jam. It was a good thing I had already taken all I wanted,
because Micah polished off the jar. It was excellent strawberry jam.

 
          
 
"Micah's writing an epic poem," Boss
said.

 
          
 
"What's it called?" I asked
,
to be polite.

 
          
 
"It's called Soap Opera," Micah
said. "Only it may not be an epic. It may be a verse drama."

 
          
 
"Boog's gonna get it put on TV,"
Boss said. "He knows a lot of TV people."

 
          
 
"If we can get the right actors,"
Micah said. "I think I'll wash my hair."

 
          
 
This he proceeded to do, at the kitchen sink,
using Ivory liquid and the dishwashing nozzle. Boss went over and gave him a
scalp massage while streams of white suds ran down his face.

 
          
 
I decided to leave. Watching Boss give Micah a
scalp massage was not exactly what I had had in mind for the morning, though
what that was might not have been easy to say.

 
          
 
When I started out Boss gave Micah a dish
towel to dry his hair with and walked out with me. "You're always in a
hurry," she said, linking her arm in mine.

 
          
 
"I don't understand what you see in
Micah," I said.

 
          
 
"Well, he's never in a hurry, like
you," she said. "Give him a TV set and a jar of strawberry jam and
he's happy. I like happy fellows.
Can't stand men that get
down in the mouth.

 
          
 
"Most men don't have the energy to be
happy," she said. "That's what I like about ol' Boog. He's got the
energy."

 
          
 
Then she tickled my ear a little, looking
happy. It was a windy fall day. Leaves were rustling over the concrete of the
Millers' driveway.

 
          
 
"Do you think I was wrong to leave
Coffee?" I asked Boss. I don't think I really needed an answer. I just
wanted to stand around with Boss and mooch off her spirit for a little while.

 
          
 
"I got no opinion," Boss said, with
a grin. She was well aware that 1 was mooching off her spirit. She gave me a
little sock on the shoulder and then went back up the driveway through the
swirling leaves.

 
          
 
I Still had a lot of time to kill before my
meeting with Mr. Hobart Cawdrey—a pointless meeting anyway, if the basketry had
already been sold—so I drove down and wandered into Brisling Bowker's auction,
where it was setting-up day.

 
          
 
The pace of setting-up day was in marked
contrast to the frenzy of auction day. A gangly black youth was pushing a big
broom up the floor, so slowly it was hard to detect his movement. A couple of
minions were pulleying a big dusty Oriental rug up on one wall. The rug had
several holes in it, a matter of no moment whatever to the minions. Near the
back of the room, other minions were unloading lawn mowers and bags of
fertilizer. Probably some lawn-supply store had gone broke, and Brisling was getting
ready to auction what assets it had left.

 
          
 
Tuck was standing near the front of the room,
receiving a shipment of tweedy-looking chairs. The chairs were all fat, and all
the color of George Psalmanazar's tweed suit. A big moving van parked in the
street was smack full of them. A couple of movers were shooting the chairs down
a little ramp straight to Tuck, who was functioning like a post in a pinball
machine. He scarcely seemed to touch the chairs with his hands.
When one shot down he would give it a little bump with his hip,
sending it straight over to the wall, where it would pop in line next to the
one that had preceded it.

 
          
 
I didn't bother him. The chairs were coming
along at the rate of one every twenty seconds, so he needed his concentration.
A number of boxes of bric-a-brac had been dumped helter-skelter along the wall,
and I began to pick through them, though I knew at once that they just
contained junk glassware. Still, going through bric-a-brac was a kind of
warming-up exercise. It was relaxing. At least I was back in a place where
things were bought and sold. I poked through the residue of a lot of
lower-middle-class dining rooms, lulled by the slide of tweed chairs across the
floor, or the thump of falling bags of fertilizer.

 
          
 
Then I went back to the farthest reaches of
the room, where the true junk was sold—broken washing machines, treadless snow
tires, similar flotsam and jetsam. The best thing I saw was an ancient
snowmobile, so old that it looked like it might have been the patent model. I
studied it for a bit, since I knew a rich lady in
Chicago
who collected patent models. Her name was
Sally Reed, and her life consisted of a search for patent models interspersed
with drinking.

 
          
 
Unfortunately, the snowmobile wasn't a patent
model. It was just old and worn out. When I finished inspecting it I looked up
to see Brisling Bowker, standing in his own service elevator. Brisling had a
habit of simply materializing, mysteriously. He reminded me of a Cape buffalo.

 
          
 
Then I spotted an old tricycle, wedged in with
a litter of household goods. It is unusual to find a tricycle earlier than the
forties, and this one was definitely earlier than that. I knew plenty of
tricycle collectors, including a man in
Oregon
who had over five hundred.

 
          
 
"Too rusty," Brisling said, while I
was looking at the tricycle. As usual, he was right.

 
          
 
"Want to buy a Henry?" he asked,
staring at me impassively.

 
          
 
"Do you mean a Henry rifle, or a person
named Henry?" I asked.

 
          
 
Brisling was not a man who appreciated witticisms.
He nodded and I got on the service elevator with him. We went slowly upward,
through the several floors of his empire, most of them crammed with
consignments waiting to be auctioned. The floor we got off* on was almost pitch
dark, though I could see huge shapes looming in the darkness.

 
          
 
When Brisling turned the lights on I saw that
the dark shapes were furniture, of a very ponderous sort. We were on the heavy
furniture floor. Most of the pieces were Victorian or Edwardian and not much
smaller than the average log cabin. There was an oak pantry against one wall so
commodious that a small family could have probably lived in it.

 
          
 
A long object was lying on one of the side
tables, wrapped in an old army blanket. Brisling handed it to me. Sure enough,
it was a Henry rifle, in a saddle scabbard so beautifully worn that it looked
like mahogany. I had never sold or owned a Henry—in good condition one could be
worth upwards of $15,000.

 
          
 
They were heavy guns. I eased this one out of
the scabbard and hefted it. It's strange how good objects immediately
communicate a certain authority when you hold them. Of course the Henry was a
weapon—authority was its business. It was meant to knock down buffalo, or
anything else you pointed it at. When I put the gun to my shoulder and sighted
it at the pantry I saw a herd of buffalo in my mind's eye, standing in a
valley
of
Montana
or
Wyoming
. It was happening more and more—objects
functioning like time machines, effortlessly removing me from my time and
inserting me briefly in theirs. The longer I looked at the Sung vase the more I
had imagined
China
. Little eighteenth-century porcelain snuffboxes invariably made me
think
of Voltaire, although I knew practically nothing about
him. And Elizabethan wine bottles, of which I've owned only three or four, made
me think of Sir Walter Raleigh, sitting in the tower waiting to get his head
chopped off".

 
          
 
Brisling Bowker was not disposed to grant me
my vision of buffaloes for very long. Scouts were nothing new to Brisling. He
had seen the great ones of the profession come and go. I knew he harbored a
sneaking affection for Zack Jenks, but I wasn't so sure that it extended to me.

 
          
 
"Buy it," he said, meaning the
Henry. *'If I put it on sale somebody'll break it."

 
          
 
He was probably right. The public that flocks
to auctions can't resist guns. They love to work levers, snap triggers, and
pull back hammers. Pretty soon they've messed up the gun.

 
          
 
"What do you know about the warehouse
full of baskets?" I asked, out of curiosity. "I was thinking about
buying it, if it isn't already sold."

 
          
 
Brisling sighed. I looked up and found him
looking at me almost fondly.

 
          
 
"You don't want to buy no warehouse full
of baskets," he said. "You just want to see it. You don't want to buy
no warehouse full of nothin'. You do an' you'll end up like me."

 
          
 
He nodded at the vast room, which must have
contained about ninety tons of obsolete and mostly graceless furniture.

 
          
 
I was startled. A personal comment from
Brisling was an unheard-of thing.

 
          
 
"I was like you, once," he said.
"On the road all the time, making a score in every town.
Now lookit.
Five floors of this junk I'm responsible
for.
Selling fertilizer.
Lawn
mowers."

 
          
 
He stared at the huge Victorian pantry as if
he would like to take an axe and chop it to kindling.

 
          
 
"Look at that," he said. "It'd
take a damn crane to move it, and who's going to buy it?"

 
          
 
His point was not lost on me. If you open a
store you have to stay and run the store. And then, instead of buying things
you really love, you start buying what people bring you, in order to fill the
store and have something to sell. If the store is successful, pretty soon you
get a warehouse, and then more warehouses, and the next thing you know you're
Brisling Bowker, commander of an empire in which there might not have been ten
objects he really liked.

 
          
 
I had not even known he had been a scout.

 
          
 
He took the Henry from me, hefted it just as I
had, sighted down the long barrel. Perhaps he too was taking the time machine,
back to the time of buffalo.

 
          
 
"I wasn't born nailed down," he
said, slipping the gun back in the scabbard. He handled it with a light touch.

 
          
 
"I went everywhere," he said. "
California
,
New England
.
Canada
.
Europe
. You
know what did me in?"

 
          
 
He did not look done in, but I knew better
than to argue with a man in a nostalgic mood.

 
          
 
"Bargains," he said. "You guys
doing it today,
you ain't seen nothin'
.
Bargains everywhere.
In the thirties this gun would have
cost me two bucks.
Maybe five at the outside.
That
icon you bought, I would have got that for a quarter, back in the
thirties."

 
          
 
It was the song of the Old Scout. I had heard
it from many of them: tales of days when a fine Sung vase would have cost 50
cents instead of $20. No doubt they were right
There
must have been unbelievable bargains lying around
America
in the days before swap-meets had been
thought of. There still are unbelievable bargains lying around
America
, though nowadays every third person is some
kind of scout

 
          
 
"I found a Rubens in
Idaho
, once," Brisling said.
"Gives you an idea.
Idaho
.
In the only antique
store in the whole state.
Gave the old lady $200 for it and she thought
she was robbing me. Then I went and robbed myself.
Sold the
fucking thing for seventy-five thousand dollars.
Be worth three million
today."

 
          
 
"So what?"
I said. "You got your profit."

 
          
 
Brisling nodded. "Always," he said.
"I had one of those big Pierce-Arrow roadsters. It would hold a lot of
stuff, but not enough. I bought a truck, and made it follow me around. Then
when the truck got full I rented a warehouse."

 
          
 
He stopped. The rest of the story was obvious.
Dealers become slaves to their objects, just as farmers are slaves to their
land. Being enslaved to beautiful objects is one thing, but being enslaved to
ordinary or even ugly objects is something else.

 
          
 
Brisling had paid me the great compliment of
perceiving me as I was: a scout, such as he had been, such as he might have
remained. Offering me the Henry was not only a warning, it was almost a
paternal act.

 
          
 
"How much for the
gun?"
I asked.

 
          
 
"Twelve thousand," he said.

 
          
 
That was fine. He had carefully left me a 20
percent profit, if I was good enough to get it. I wrote him a check for $
12,000 and he stuffed it in his shirt pocket without looking at it

 
          
 
"I sold this gun three times," he
said, as we were riding down. "It came in during the war and I didn't do
nothing
about it till '46. Brought $400,
The
guy that bought it brought it back in '56 and it brought $1,250. The guy that
bought it in '56 died last year."