"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.
Chapter VII
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 abo
ut 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."
He paused. "Why I gave you a bargain," he said. "Bad luck to sell the same piece more than three times. You get my age, things start following you around. Pets, I call 'em. Take that thing to Texas and sell it. I got enough pets. Pretty soon I'll be like Bag Hopkirk."
Bag Hopkirk was an aged dealer in Cleveland who had made a fortune by outliving his customers, and their heirs, and their heirs' heirs. His shop was filled with objects he had owned several times. His sales were more like rentals. No one who knew him supposed he would ever die. He had sold things to customers forty years younger than himself and then outlived them.
The bankrupt lawn store had had a lot of leftover fertilizer. Even in bags it didn't smell too great. A huge pyramid of it had risen in the auction room, while Brisling and I were upstairs. The pyramid separated forty or fifty shiny new lawn mowers from about a hundred tweed chairs. Brisling regarded the arrangement gloomily. If some pesky customer punctured one of the sacks of fertilizer the auction room was going to be fragrant for a while. When I left. Tuck and one or two of the minions were erecting a sort of barrier of lawn mowers between the public and the fertilizer.
"Thanks for the gun," I said, but the gun was history, just a droplet in the river of objects whose flow had been Brisling's life. He was contemplating a huge stack of dusty Oriental rugs, and he didn't look up.
Chapter VIII
As I was cruising along in what I hoped was the general direction of the Department of Transportation, where I was to meet the mysterious Hobart Cawdrey, I suddenly found myself in front of a Wax Museum. The reason I noticed it was because I was behind a bus and the bus suddenly stopped and disgorged about a hundred high school kids with cameras. Other buses were disgorging elderly couples, also with cameras. I politely stopped and let a stream of young and old cross the street in front of me.
The old women had on print dresses and the old men had the collars of their shirts turned back over the collars of their sports coats. Some of the old men were holding hands with their wives. Most of them looked keen to see the Wax Museum, outside of which was a sign advertising WATERGATE FIGURES.
The kids seemed a good deal less eager. They looked like they had been up all night, smoking dope and trying to fuck one another. Several bedraggled teachers were grimly herding them along, watching to see that none of the kids made a break for freedom. Having bussed them to the capital from remote parts of the country they meant to make sure that they saw every damn thing they were supposed to see, including wax replicas of Watergate figures.
"I hope they've got Martha Mitchell," one old lady said. "I wanta see Martha."
A couple of blocks past the Wax Museum I bumped right into the Department of Transportation. It occupied a full city block, from comer to comer. It was 10:25 and I was supposed to meet Mr. Cawdrey at 10:30. I found a phone and dialed the Department. When the operator rang extension 1000 Mr. Cawdrey answered at once.
"Hobart Cawdrey,” he answered, in a very slow voice.
"Hi, Mr. Cawdrey,” I said. "I'm Jack McGriff."
He didn't say a word.
"I was going to meet you in regard to the basketry," I reminded him.
"Well. you're too late, much too late," Mr. Cawdrey said "The baskets are being moved today. Arrangements have been finalized. Fm surprised you called."
"We had an appointment." I said. "That's why I called."
"Wait a minute." he said sternly. "I better check my book."
"Oh lord." he said, a moment later, aghast at what he'd found in his book,
"What's the matter?" I asked.
"You're right," he said. "I'm wrong. I'm due to meet you in the cafeteria in to minutes. You'll look like a cowboy."
"That's right," I said.
"Oh dear," he said. "I've been guilt of miscalculation. I can't possibly get to the cafeteria in two minutes. I can seldom even get down in the elevator in two minutes. It often takes four. I'm very sorry about this. It's not like me at al
l. I forgot to look in my book. I suppose you'll want to reschedule the whole business."
"Oh no," I said. "I'm in no hurry. I've got plenty of time."
He was silent for a long time. The thought of a cowboy with lots of time seemed to strike him as curious.
"All right, could you just stand near the ice," he said. "I'll be there in four to six minutes."
Pretty soon I was following a stream of people which was pouring down into the basement of the building, toward the cafeteria. The stream was not exactly meandering aimlessly, either. I felt like I had wandered into an ant colony, or perhaps a beetle colony. The people around me had an insectlike quality, though it would have been hard to name the insect they suggested. Wood lice, probably. They moved along at a rapid clip and seemed to be responding to the directives of a collective brain. All of them seemed to be dressed not merely poorly, but terribly, in the cheapest available synthetic fabrics of the worst colors. None of them looked like they owned so much as a good pair of socks.
There was a lack of light in their eyes that would have won someone an Academy Award for great special effects if they had all been in a zombie movie.
By the time we actually got down to the cafeteria I had begun to feel odd. After all, I wasn't part of the colony. I felt like a wasp that had accidentally gone down an anthill.
Fortunately the ice-maker where I was supposed to meet Hobart Cawdrey was easy to spot. It was in the center of the room, near a counter that seemed to contain millions of Styrofoam cups. The workers—I guess they should be called bureaucrats—poured off the food line carrying hamburgers on Styrofoam plates. Then they grabbed a Styrofoam cup, scooped up a few ice cubes, and moved past a row of spigots that dispensed liquids on the order of iced tea and Pepsi-Cola.
I don't eat in cafeterias much—just being in the middle of such a vast one was a little daunting. The people shuffling along in the food line didn't have the anticipatory look people usually have when they're waiting to be fed. Most people assume that if they're going to be fed the food will probably taste good, but nowhere in the cafeteria did I see a face lit with the prospect of eating something that might taste good. Instead of looking like people who were about to eat they looked like people who had lined up to get polio shots, or something.