McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 (51 page)

 
          
 
From then on, whenever I was in the vicinity
of
Baltimore
, I made a point of stopping by, so Benny
could lecture me about his antiques for a few hours. Usually I sold him
something good, at a reasonable price. He always paid in cash, and pretty soon
he began to expect my visits. I came to realize that Benny was a kind of
frustrated professor* He should have opened an
Academy
of
Antiques
somewhere and shared his knowledge with
eager students. With the knowledge he carried in his head he could have trained
an army of scouts and sent them to pick
America
even cleaner than it has been picked
already.

 
          
 
There was no need to call ahead when visiting
Benny at night: He was always there, and always up.

 
          
 
I knew Benny looked terrible, but when I rang
and he worked his way down to the door, through the maze of his shelving, it
was always a shock to see how terrible. The circles under his eyes might have
been painted with charcoal. He had only a few teeth left, most of them in his
upper jaw. He rarely shaved but his salt-and-pepper stubble wasn't long enough
to be thought of as a beard.

 
          
 
"Hi, Benny," I said, when he peeped
suspiciously out of his peephole. "I was in
Washington
and happened to have something I thought
you might want."

 
          
 
It was an American Indian carving of a bear—I had
bought it in
Chicago
. I knew Benny loved Indian woodcraft, and had bought it with him in
mind. It was a peculiar piece, almost abstract, and very beautiful.

 
          
 
"Oh yes, Pequot," Benny said,
glancing at it. "I have several in this style but I don't think I have a
bear. We better go see, though. I might have a bear. The others are on the top
floor."

 
          
 
All five flights of stairs were piled with
things that wouldn't fit in the shelves. One landing held a brass diving helmet
and some weighted brass shoes.

 
          
 
We found the Pequot carvings way at the back,
on a high shelf.

 
          
 
"I was right," Benny said. "I
don't have a bear."

 
          
 
I agreed to let him have it for $800 and while
he was going to get the cash I poked around a little. While I was wandering
along a long section of shelving containing lighting devices, lamps mostly, I
noticed a door I hadn't seen before.

 
          
 
When Benny came back with the cash I nodded
toward the door.

 
          
 
"What's in there?" I asked.

 
          
 
"Oh, I keep my unicums in there," he
said. "I have forty-seven now."

 
          
 
A unicum, of course, is a unique thing: not a
freak, but the only surviving example of its class.

 
          
 
Assiduous collectors—usually the dominant
collectors in their fields—will occasionally secure a unicum. A collector of
American prints, if he's lucky enough, might get a unique example of a print by
some obscure artist. Most unicums, in fact, are paper items: stamps or
broadsides that exist but in a single copy.

 
          
 
"I didn't know you have a unicum
collection, Benny," I said.

 
          
 
Benny looked modest. "It's just some
unicums I picked up," he said. "Someday I'll show them to you."

 
          
 
While we were looking at the Pequot carvings
the doorbell rang. I think I was more surprised than Benny. It had never rung
before during my visits, and I had taken to making the lax assumption that I
was the only person admitted to Benny's house.

 
          
 
"That must be August," Benny said.

 
          
 
We worked our way laboriously downstairs. The
thing that worried me most about Benny's collection was that he might get
trapped in it. It is not unheard of for elderly collectors to fall victim to
their own collections. A magazine collector I knew slightly had met his death
that way. He had a largish house in
St. Louis
, but it was filled with magazines, heaped
in towering stacks in every room, with only a narrow path between the stacks,
like the paths between Bryan Ponder's bird nests. One day the old man had
dislodged a
stack, that
stack had struck another
stack, and he had been buried beneath an avalanche of magazines. Since, like
many collectors, he was a recluse, he was not found for nearly a month.

 
          
 
Indeed, I knew many stories of collections
turning on their collectors. A man in
Fort Smith
,
Arkansas
, who collected tractors, was killed when his latest acquisition reared
up and fell on him.

 
          
 
Something like that could happen to Benny.
There was only one exit to his house: the front door. All the windows had long
since been covered with shelving. The front door itself was getting harder to
open, as Benny carelessly piled more and more things in the front hall until he
could get time to sort them. Eventually, if he wasn't careful, he was going to
wall himself in. If there was a fire, or if he simply pulled some shelving over
on himself, he would be in big trouble. Nobody would be likely to miss him,
since nobody ever saw him anyway.

 
          
 
The doorbell rang steadily, as we worked our
way downstairs.

 
          
 
"August must think I'm deaf," Benny
observed mildly.

 
          
 
When he opened the door August still had his
finger on the doorbell. He was a short man, as broad as he was tall, dressed in
old overalls and a grimy red baseball cap. He was about Benny's age, but so
thick that he could have made three of Benny. One unusual aspect of his
appearance was that his white chest hair extended upward to his jaw line. It
was thick, white, and curly. August looked like a primate, but not exactly like
a man. More disconcerting than the chest hair was the fact that his eyes were
not in synch. One looked straight at us—the other pointed off toward the left.

 
          
 
"Hello, August," Benny said.

 
          
 
"Got a nice gong," August said.

 
          
 
"Oh well," Benny said. "I've
got quite a few gongs.
About forty.
What kind of gong
is it?"

 
          
 
"Dinner gong," August said.
"Got a turtle shell with a picture on it."

 
          
 
"What?" Benny asked, perking up a
little.

 
          
 
"Big turtle shell," August said.
"Picture ain't too good though."

 
          
 
Through the door I could see an old black
pickup parked at the curb. It had wooden sideboards, but whatever it may once
have boasted in the way of springs had long since had the spring crushed out of
them. The pickup sagged far to one side with the weight of goods piled in it.

 
          
 
On the sidewalk near the pickup were two thin
men dressed as August was. They were watching a dusty-looking mongrel relieve
itself against the rear tire of the pickup.

 
          
 
"I better take a look at that
shell," Benny said.

 
          
 
August took no interest in me at all. He led
us out to the pickup, lowered the much-dented tailgate, and began to dig
objects out of the clutter of goods the rear end contained. To my surprise, the
objects were good. The dinner gong was silver, with a nice little felt mallet.
The two thin men and the dusty mongrel came over and stood silently as we
inspected it.

 
          
 
"Hello, Sept," Benny said.
"Hello, Octo."

 
          
 
The two men nodded shyly, but didn't speak.

 
          
 
"How's your dog?" Benny asked. The
dog was scratching at a tick. The two thin men looked down at it, embarrassed
by Benny's politeness.

 
          
 
Nice as the gong was, it was a trifle compared
to the turtle shell with the picture in it. The shell was the size of a
washbasin, the shell of a sea turtle, obviously. The picture, on the inside of
the shell, was a primitive showing two little black children with flowers in
their hair. It was painted on the scraped surface of the sea turtle's shell. I
had never seen such a painting, never heard of such a technique. It was a
wonderful thing, but I carefully muted my interest. After all, it was Benny's
buy, and the qualities of the painting were not lost on him either.

 
          
 
"My goodness," he said.
"My goodness.
Where'd you find this, August?"

 
          
 
"Down
Carolina
," August said.

 
          
 
"Well my goodness," Benny said.
"Did they have any more?"

 
          
 
"Only one," August said.

 
          
 
"What would a man have to give for a
thing like that?" Benny wondered.

 
          
 
August looked unhappy. Having to think up
prices for oddities like a turtle shell with a picture on it was wearisome
work. He fixed his one good eye on the-two thin men, but they were carefully
noncommittal. They kept their eyes on the dog.

 
          
 
"Only one they had," August said.
"Would you pay seventy-five?"

 
          
 
Benny didn't have to think that one over long.

 
          
 
"I'll go get the money," he said.
"I don't really need the gong. I have quite a few nice gongs as it
is."

 
          
 
He went in the house to get the money and
silence fell. The three men were not very talkative. The dog, more animated
than the rest of us, jumped up in the back of the pickup and crawled over the
miscellaneous heap of goods to where it had a bed.

 
          
 
I was wondering if I ought to buy the gong,
simply as a means of breaking the ice. It was obvious that I had stumbled on a
little family of American traders, men who got around. The pickup had an
Ohio
license plate.

 
          
 
"My name's Jack," I said. "How
much do you want for the gong?"

 
          
 
August looked unhappy. Some people are as shy
about selling as others are about sex. Although he probably spent his whole
life buying and selling, the making of prices did not come easy, particularly
if the customer was a stranger.

 
          
 
"Silver gong," he said finally.

 
          
 
Then I noticed the end of a trunk, wedged
beneath a pile of quilts. I could barely see it, but it looked like an
interesting trunk. It looked very old, and it didn't look American.

 
          
 
"Hey," I said. "Can I see that
trunk? I need a trunk."