Craphound by Cory Doctorow (best free novels .txt) 📖
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had a skinny, rawboned look to her. "That's my
Billy's things, Billy the Kid we called him. He was dotty for cowboys when he
was a boy. Couldn't get him to take off that fool outfit -- nearly got him
thrown out of school. He's a lawyer now, in Toronto, got a fancy office on Bay
Street. I called him to ask if he minded my putting his cowboy things in the
sale, and you know what? He didn't know what I was talking about! Doesn't that
beat everything? He was dotty for cowboys when he was a boy."
It's another of my rituals to smile and nod and be as polite as possible to the
erstwhile owners of crap that I'm trying to buy, so I smiled and nodded and
examined the 78 player she had produced. In lariat script, on the top, it said,
"Official Bob Wills Little Record Player," and had a crude watercolour of Bob
Wills and His Texas Playboys grinning on the front. It was the kind of record
player that folded up like a suitcase when you weren't using it. I'd had one as
a kid, with Yogi Bear silkscreened on the front.
Billy's mom plugged the yellowed cord into a wall jack and took the 78 from me,
touched the stylus to the record. A tinny ukelele played, accompanied by
horse-clops, and then a narrator with a deep, whisky voice said, "Howdy,
Pardners! I was just settin' down by the ole campfire. Why don't you stay an'
have some beans, an' I'll tell y'all the story of how Hopalong Cassidy beat the
Duke Gang when they come to rob the Santa Fe."
In my head, I was already breaking down the cowboy trunk and its contents,
thinking about the minimum bid I'd place on each item at Sotheby's. Sold
individually, I figured I could get over two grand for the contents. Then I
thought about putting ads in some of the Japanese collectors' magazines, just
for a lark, before I sent the lot to the auction house. You never can tell. A
buddy I knew had sold a complete packaged set of Welcome Back, Kotter action
figures for nearly eight grand that way. Maybe I could buy a new truck. . .
"This is wonderful," Craphound said, interrupting my reverie. "How much would
you like for the collection?"
I felt a knife in my guts. Craphound had found the cowboy trunk, so that meant
it was his. But he usually let me take the stuff with street-value -- he was
interested in _everything_, so it hardly mattered if I picked up a few scraps
with which to eke out a living.
Billy's mom looked over the stuff. "I was hoping to get twenty dollars for the
lot, but if that's too much, I'm willing to come down."
"I'll give you thirty," my mouth said, without intervention from my brain.
They both turned and stared at me. Craphound was unreadable behind his goggles.
Billy's mom broke the silence. "Oh, my! Thirty dollars for this old mess?"
"I will pay fifty," Craphound said.
"Seventy-five," I said.
"Oh, my," Billy's mom said.
"Five hundred," Craphound said.
I opened my mouth, and shut it. Craphound had built his stake on Earth by
selling a complicated biochemical process for non-chlorophyll photosynthesis to
a Saudi banker. I wouldn't ever beat him in a bidding war. "A thousand dollars,"
my mouth said.
"Ten thousand," Craphound said, and extruded a roll of hundreds from somewhere
in his exoskeleton.
"My Lord!" Billy's mom said. "Ten thousand dollars!"
The other pickers, the firemen, the blue haired ladies all looked up at that and
stared at us, their mouths open.
"It is for a good cause." Craphound said.
"Ten thousand dollars!" Billy's mom said again.
Craphound's digits ruffled through the roll as fast as a croupier's counter,
separated off a large chunk of the brown bills, and handed them to Billy's mom.
One of the firemen, a middle-aged paunchy man with a comb-over appeared at
Billy's mom's shoulder.
"What's going on, Eva?" he said.
"This. . .gentleman is going to pay ten thousand dollars for Billy's old cowboy
things, Tom."
The fireman took the money from Billy's mom and stared at it. He held up the top
note under the light and turned it this way and that, watching the holographic
stamp change from green to gold, then green again. He looked at the serial
number, then the serial number of the next bill. He licked his forefinger and
started counting off the bills in piles of ten. Once he had ten piles, he
counted them again. "That's ten thousand dollars, all right. Thank you very
much, mister. Can I give you a hand getting this to your car?"
Craphound, meanwhile, had re-packed the trunk and balanced the 78 player on top
of it. He looked at me, then at the fireman.
"I wonder if I could impose on you to take me to the nearest bus station. I
think I'm going to be making my own way home."
The fireman and Billy's mom both stared at me. My cheeks flushed. "Aw, c'mon," I
said. "I'll drive you home."
"I think I prefer the bus," Craphound said.
"It's no trouble at all to give you a lift, friend," the fireman said.
I called it quits for the day, and drove home alone with the truck only
half-filled. I pulled it into the coach-house and threw a tarp over the load and
went inside and cracked a beer and sat on the sofa, watching a nature show on a
desert reclamation project in Arizona, where the state legislature had traded a
derelict mega-mall and a custom-built habitat to an alien for a local-area
weather control machine.
#
The following Thursday, I went to the little crap-auction house on King Street.
I'd put my finds from the weekend in the sale: lower minimum bid, and they took
a smaller commission than Sotheby's. Fine for moving the small stuff.
Craphound was there, of course. I knew he'd be. It was where we met, when he bid
on a case of Lincoln Logs I'd found at a fire-sale.
I'd known him for a kindred spirit when he bought them, and we'd talked
afterwards, at his place, a sprawling, two-storey warehouse amid a cluster of
auto-wrecking yards where the junkyard dogs barked, barked, barked.
Inside was paradise. His taste ran to shrines -- a collection of fifties bar
kitsch that was a shrine to liquor; a circular waterbed on a raised podium that
was nearly buried under seventies bachelor pad-inalia; a kitchen that was nearly
unusable, so packed it was with old barn-board furniture and rural memorabilia;
a leather-appointed library straight out of a Victorian gentlemen's club; a
solarium dressed in wicker and bamboo and tiki-idols. It was a hell of a place.
Craphound had known all about the Goodwills and the Sally Anns, and the auction
houses, and the kitsch boutiques on Queen Street, but he still hadn't figured
out where it all came from.
"Yard sales, rummage sales, garage sales," I said, reclining in a vibrating
naughahyde easy-chair, drinking a glass of his pricey single-malt that he'd
bought for the beautiful bottle it came in.
"But where are these? Who is allowed to make them?" Craphound hunched opposite
me, his exoskeleton locked into a coiled, semi-seated position.
"Who? Well, anyone. You just one day decide that you need to clean out the
basement, you put an ad in the _Star_, tape up a few signs, and voila, yard
sale. Sometimes, a school or a church will get donations of old junk and sell it
all at one time, as a fundraiser."
"And how do you locate these?" he asked, bobbing up and down slightly with
excitement.
"Well, there're amateurs who just read the ads in the weekend papers, or just
pick a neighbourhood and wander around, but that's no way to go about it. What I
do is, I get in a truck, and I sniff the air, catch the scent of crap and
_vroom!_, I'm off like a bloodhound on a trail. You learn things over time: like
stay away from Yuppie yard sales, they never have anything worth buying, just
the same crap you can buy in any mall."
"Do you think I might accompany you some day?"
"Hell, sure. Next Saturday? We'll head over to Cabbagetown -- those old coach
houses, you'd be amazed what people get rid of. It's practically criminal."
"I would like to go with you on next Saturday very much Mr Jerry Abington." He
used to talk like that, without commas or question marks. Later, he got better,
but then, it was all one big sentence.
"Call me Jerry. It's a date, then. Tell you what, though: there's a Code you got
to learn before we go out. The Craphound's Code."
"What is a craphound?"
"You're lookin' at one. You're one, too, unless I miss my guess. You'll get to
know some of the local craphounds, you hang around with me long enough. They're
the competition, but they're also your buddies, and there're certain rules we
have."
And then I explained to him all about how you never bid against a craphound at a
yard-sale, how you get to know the other fellows' tastes, and when you see
something they might like, you haul it out for them, and they'll do the same for
you, and how you never buy something that another craphound might be looking
for, if all you're buying it for is to sell it back to him. Just good form and
common sense, really, but you'd be surprised how many amateurs just fail to make
the jump to pro because they can't grasp it.
#
There was a bunch of other stuff at the auction, other craphounds' weekend
treasures. This was high season, when the sun comes out and people start to
clean out the cottage, the basement, the garage. There were some collectors in
the crowd, and a whole whack of antique and junk dealers, and a few pickers, and
me, and Craphound. I watched the bidding listlessly, waiting for my things to
come up and sneaking out for smokes between lots. Craphound never once looked at
me or acknowledged my presence, and I became perversely obsessed with catching
his eye, so I coughed and shifted and walked past him several times, until the
auctioneer glared at me, and one of the attendants asked if I needed a throat
lozenge.
My lot came up. The bowling glasses went for five bucks to one of the Queen
Street junk dealers; the elephant-foot fetched $350 after a spirited bidding war
between an antique dealer and a collector -- the collector won; the dealer took
the top-hat for $100. The rest of it came up and sold, or didn't, and at end of
the lot, I'd made over $800, which was rent for the month plus beer for the
weekend plus gas for the truck.
Craphound bid on and bought more cowboy things -- a box of super-eight cowboy
movies, the boxes mouldy, the stock itself running to slime; a Navajo blanket; a
plastic donkey that dispensed cigarettes out of its ass; a big neon armadillo
sign.
One of the other nice things about that place over Sotheby's, there was none of
this waiting thirty days to get a cheque. I queued up with the other pickers
after the bidding was through, collected a wad of bills, and headed for my
truck.
I spotted Craphound loading his haul into a minivan with handicapped plates. It
looked like some kind of fungus was growing over
Billy's things, Billy the Kid we called him. He was dotty for cowboys when he
was a boy. Couldn't get him to take off that fool outfit -- nearly got him
thrown out of school. He's a lawyer now, in Toronto, got a fancy office on Bay
Street. I called him to ask if he minded my putting his cowboy things in the
sale, and you know what? He didn't know what I was talking about! Doesn't that
beat everything? He was dotty for cowboys when he was a boy."
It's another of my rituals to smile and nod and be as polite as possible to the
erstwhile owners of crap that I'm trying to buy, so I smiled and nodded and
examined the 78 player she had produced. In lariat script, on the top, it said,
"Official Bob Wills Little Record Player," and had a crude watercolour of Bob
Wills and His Texas Playboys grinning on the front. It was the kind of record
player that folded up like a suitcase when you weren't using it. I'd had one as
a kid, with Yogi Bear silkscreened on the front.
Billy's mom plugged the yellowed cord into a wall jack and took the 78 from me,
touched the stylus to the record. A tinny ukelele played, accompanied by
horse-clops, and then a narrator with a deep, whisky voice said, "Howdy,
Pardners! I was just settin' down by the ole campfire. Why don't you stay an'
have some beans, an' I'll tell y'all the story of how Hopalong Cassidy beat the
Duke Gang when they come to rob the Santa Fe."
In my head, I was already breaking down the cowboy trunk and its contents,
thinking about the minimum bid I'd place on each item at Sotheby's. Sold
individually, I figured I could get over two grand for the contents. Then I
thought about putting ads in some of the Japanese collectors' magazines, just
for a lark, before I sent the lot to the auction house. You never can tell. A
buddy I knew had sold a complete packaged set of Welcome Back, Kotter action
figures for nearly eight grand that way. Maybe I could buy a new truck. . .
"This is wonderful," Craphound said, interrupting my reverie. "How much would
you like for the collection?"
I felt a knife in my guts. Craphound had found the cowboy trunk, so that meant
it was his. But he usually let me take the stuff with street-value -- he was
interested in _everything_, so it hardly mattered if I picked up a few scraps
with which to eke out a living.
Billy's mom looked over the stuff. "I was hoping to get twenty dollars for the
lot, but if that's too much, I'm willing to come down."
"I'll give you thirty," my mouth said, without intervention from my brain.
They both turned and stared at me. Craphound was unreadable behind his goggles.
Billy's mom broke the silence. "Oh, my! Thirty dollars for this old mess?"
"I will pay fifty," Craphound said.
"Seventy-five," I said.
"Oh, my," Billy's mom said.
"Five hundred," Craphound said.
I opened my mouth, and shut it. Craphound had built his stake on Earth by
selling a complicated biochemical process for non-chlorophyll photosynthesis to
a Saudi banker. I wouldn't ever beat him in a bidding war. "A thousand dollars,"
my mouth said.
"Ten thousand," Craphound said, and extruded a roll of hundreds from somewhere
in his exoskeleton.
"My Lord!" Billy's mom said. "Ten thousand dollars!"
The other pickers, the firemen, the blue haired ladies all looked up at that and
stared at us, their mouths open.
"It is for a good cause." Craphound said.
"Ten thousand dollars!" Billy's mom said again.
Craphound's digits ruffled through the roll as fast as a croupier's counter,
separated off a large chunk of the brown bills, and handed them to Billy's mom.
One of the firemen, a middle-aged paunchy man with a comb-over appeared at
Billy's mom's shoulder.
"What's going on, Eva?" he said.
"This. . .gentleman is going to pay ten thousand dollars for Billy's old cowboy
things, Tom."
The fireman took the money from Billy's mom and stared at it. He held up the top
note under the light and turned it this way and that, watching the holographic
stamp change from green to gold, then green again. He looked at the serial
number, then the serial number of the next bill. He licked his forefinger and
started counting off the bills in piles of ten. Once he had ten piles, he
counted them again. "That's ten thousand dollars, all right. Thank you very
much, mister. Can I give you a hand getting this to your car?"
Craphound, meanwhile, had re-packed the trunk and balanced the 78 player on top
of it. He looked at me, then at the fireman.
"I wonder if I could impose on you to take me to the nearest bus station. I
think I'm going to be making my own way home."
The fireman and Billy's mom both stared at me. My cheeks flushed. "Aw, c'mon," I
said. "I'll drive you home."
"I think I prefer the bus," Craphound said.
"It's no trouble at all to give you a lift, friend," the fireman said.
I called it quits for the day, and drove home alone with the truck only
half-filled. I pulled it into the coach-house and threw a tarp over the load and
went inside and cracked a beer and sat on the sofa, watching a nature show on a
desert reclamation project in Arizona, where the state legislature had traded a
derelict mega-mall and a custom-built habitat to an alien for a local-area
weather control machine.
#
The following Thursday, I went to the little crap-auction house on King Street.
I'd put my finds from the weekend in the sale: lower minimum bid, and they took
a smaller commission than Sotheby's. Fine for moving the small stuff.
Craphound was there, of course. I knew he'd be. It was where we met, when he bid
on a case of Lincoln Logs I'd found at a fire-sale.
I'd known him for a kindred spirit when he bought them, and we'd talked
afterwards, at his place, a sprawling, two-storey warehouse amid a cluster of
auto-wrecking yards where the junkyard dogs barked, barked, barked.
Inside was paradise. His taste ran to shrines -- a collection of fifties bar
kitsch that was a shrine to liquor; a circular waterbed on a raised podium that
was nearly buried under seventies bachelor pad-inalia; a kitchen that was nearly
unusable, so packed it was with old barn-board furniture and rural memorabilia;
a leather-appointed library straight out of a Victorian gentlemen's club; a
solarium dressed in wicker and bamboo and tiki-idols. It was a hell of a place.
Craphound had known all about the Goodwills and the Sally Anns, and the auction
houses, and the kitsch boutiques on Queen Street, but he still hadn't figured
out where it all came from.
"Yard sales, rummage sales, garage sales," I said, reclining in a vibrating
naughahyde easy-chair, drinking a glass of his pricey single-malt that he'd
bought for the beautiful bottle it came in.
"But where are these? Who is allowed to make them?" Craphound hunched opposite
me, his exoskeleton locked into a coiled, semi-seated position.
"Who? Well, anyone. You just one day decide that you need to clean out the
basement, you put an ad in the _Star_, tape up a few signs, and voila, yard
sale. Sometimes, a school or a church will get donations of old junk and sell it
all at one time, as a fundraiser."
"And how do you locate these?" he asked, bobbing up and down slightly with
excitement.
"Well, there're amateurs who just read the ads in the weekend papers, or just
pick a neighbourhood and wander around, but that's no way to go about it. What I
do is, I get in a truck, and I sniff the air, catch the scent of crap and
_vroom!_, I'm off like a bloodhound on a trail. You learn things over time: like
stay away from Yuppie yard sales, they never have anything worth buying, just
the same crap you can buy in any mall."
"Do you think I might accompany you some day?"
"Hell, sure. Next Saturday? We'll head over to Cabbagetown -- those old coach
houses, you'd be amazed what people get rid of. It's practically criminal."
"I would like to go with you on next Saturday very much Mr Jerry Abington." He
used to talk like that, without commas or question marks. Later, he got better,
but then, it was all one big sentence.
"Call me Jerry. It's a date, then. Tell you what, though: there's a Code you got
to learn before we go out. The Craphound's Code."
"What is a craphound?"
"You're lookin' at one. You're one, too, unless I miss my guess. You'll get to
know some of the local craphounds, you hang around with me long enough. They're
the competition, but they're also your buddies, and there're certain rules we
have."
And then I explained to him all about how you never bid against a craphound at a
yard-sale, how you get to know the other fellows' tastes, and when you see
something they might like, you haul it out for them, and they'll do the same for
you, and how you never buy something that another craphound might be looking
for, if all you're buying it for is to sell it back to him. Just good form and
common sense, really, but you'd be surprised how many amateurs just fail to make
the jump to pro because they can't grasp it.
#
There was a bunch of other stuff at the auction, other craphounds' weekend
treasures. This was high season, when the sun comes out and people start to
clean out the cottage, the basement, the garage. There were some collectors in
the crowd, and a whole whack of antique and junk dealers, and a few pickers, and
me, and Craphound. I watched the bidding listlessly, waiting for my things to
come up and sneaking out for smokes between lots. Craphound never once looked at
me or acknowledged my presence, and I became perversely obsessed with catching
his eye, so I coughed and shifted and walked past him several times, until the
auctioneer glared at me, and one of the attendants asked if I needed a throat
lozenge.
My lot came up. The bowling glasses went for five bucks to one of the Queen
Street junk dealers; the elephant-foot fetched $350 after a spirited bidding war
between an antique dealer and a collector -- the collector won; the dealer took
the top-hat for $100. The rest of it came up and sold, or didn't, and at end of
the lot, I'd made over $800, which was rent for the month plus beer for the
weekend plus gas for the truck.
Craphound bid on and bought more cowboy things -- a box of super-eight cowboy
movies, the boxes mouldy, the stock itself running to slime; a Navajo blanket; a
plastic donkey that dispensed cigarettes out of its ass; a big neon armadillo
sign.
One of the other nice things about that place over Sotheby's, there was none of
this waiting thirty days to get a cheque. I queued up with the other pickers
after the bidding was through, collected a wad of bills, and headed for my
truck.
I spotted Craphound loading his haul into a minivan with handicapped plates. It
looked like some kind of fungus was growing over
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