McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 (2 page)

 
          
 
Boog warned me about
Washington
, but until I saw the rich lady set her pugs
on the dinner table, I didn't take him seriously. A staple of my relationship
with Boog is that he warns and I ignore.

 
          
 
“It’s because you're self-made that you're so
reckless," he said. "I wisht I was self-made."

 
          
 
Actually, to look at Boog, you would hardly
think he was made at all, not so much because he's fat and ugly as because of
his shiny suits and slicked-down hair. His ties always have silver in them,
augmented by colors like yellow, or puke green, a style acquired during the
twenty years he spent being a Congressional aide to a cheap politician from
East Houston
.

 
          
 
It was during those years that he learned his
way around
Washington
well enough to be able to warn me about it,
though probably he would have warned me even if he hadn't known what he was
talking about. Boog freely admits that it's easier to give advice than it is to
lead an interesting life.

 
          
 
"D.C.'s diffrunt from Waxahachie,"
he maintained. "It's filt up with them stump-suckin' women."

 
          
 
One of Boog's problems is that he insists on
speaking in terms that can be understood by the common citizens of
Winkler County
,
Texas
, the county his family happened to own. His brothers and sisters had
all finally killed themselves off in adulteries and small-plane crashes and
other popular forms of risk-taking, leaving him sole heir to

 
          
 
Winkler
County
and the fifteen million
barrels of oil that were said to flow beneath it.
He's not reluctant to spend his money,
either. The day I met him I sold him a narwhal tusk for $3,000 and I’ve been
selling to him regularly ever since.

 
          
 
What I am is a scout. My trade name—Cadillac
Jack— derives from the fact that nowadays I do the bulk of my traveling in a
pearl-colored Cadillac with peach velour interior, a comfortable vehicle in
which to roam America.

 
          
 
I roam it a lot, too, continually crossing and
recrossing the continent in pursuit of objects of every description. I've sold
Italian lace and Lalique glass, French snuffboxes and pre-World War II Coke
bottles, English silver and Chinese porcelain, Purdey shotguns and Colt
revolvers, Apache basketry and Turkish ceramics, Greek cheese-boards, Coptic
pottery, Depression glass, Peruvian mummy-wrappings, kilims, Aubussons, icons,
Tibetan textiles, camel-pads, netsuke, scarabs, jewels, rare tools, early
cameras and typewriters, barometers, Sevres, miniatures, lacquer, screens,
tapestries, classic cars, railroadiana, Disneyana, Eskimo carvings, Belgian
firearms, musical instruments, autographs, Swiss music boxes, Maori war clubs,
and so on.

 
          
 
If you happen to want a World War I
parachute—and a lot of people seem to—or a fly-catching machine—never patented
but produced in some quantity by a German immigrant in Flatonia, Texas, in the
1890s—I'll try to come up with one. Those fly-catching machines are really
wonderful: The flies stick themselves to a little honey-covered roller and are
then scraped off" into a pan to be fed to the chickens, sort of like
crackerjacks.

 
          
 
Most scouts specialize, but not me. I'm too
curious, too restless, too much in love with the treasure hunt. I keep on the
move constantly, covering as much as I can of the vast grid of dealers,
collectors, accumulators, pack rats, antique shops, thrift shops, junk shops,
estate sales, country auctions, bankruptcy sales, antique shows, flea markets,
and garage sales that covers
America
like a screen. Nobody can check every
square on the grid—I once spent a profitable three weeks hitting nothing but
garage sales in the Chicago area alone—but I pride myself on covering more of
it regularly than any other scout. I buy and sell as I go, seldom keeping
anything more than a week or two. My kind of buying is like my kind of falling
in love: a matter of immediate eye appeal. I fall in love with objects, each in
its turn, my only problem being that as I get older I also get pickier.
First-rate objects don't excite me anymore: I want exceptional objects, and
those can take a lot of looking for.

 
          
 
I wouldn't be driving the pearl-colored
Cadillac had it not been for an extraordinary Sung vase that happened to be in
Mom and Pop Cullen's junk barn in De Queen,
Arkansas
. It was priced at $20 and surrounded by
sets of reproduction fireplace equipment priced at $150 the set. The vase was
so obviously an exceptional thing that I had one of my rare attacks of
conscience.

 
          
 
"I don't know," I said. "That
vase looks to me like it could be worth two or three hundred dollars. I
wouldn't feel right paying you less than a hundred for it."

 
          
 
In saying as much I was breaking the first law
of scouting, which is that you never implant in the mind of an owner the notion
that something he or she has for sale might be worth more than its stated
price. It's not simply that the owners are then likely to raise the price: It's
that they may freeze altogether and decide not to sell the object until they
can figure out what it's really worth—something they usually never get around
to doing.

 
          
 
But I knew the Cullens—they just sold junk
because it was easier than farming, and they weren't obsessed with prices. I
had bought a good Parker shotgun and some nice
Tennessee
butter crocks from them on my last visit
and all I had in mind was to cheat them $80 less.

 
          
 
Momma Cullen was practically insulted, as I
had known she would be. She didn't suspect me of mere foolishness— she
suspected me of offering charity, since I had prospered sufficiently by that time
to be sporting a new Buick Estate Wagon while she and Old Man Cullen still had
the same worn-out Dodge pickup and the same dusty, run-down junk bam. Momma
Cullen was a large woman who seldom got up from the big Sears and Roebuck chair
she installed herself in every morning. The chair had once been covered in blue
imitation velvet, but had worn so white in places that it reminded me of the
whiskers on an old dog's muzzle.

 
          
 
"Aw, that thang," Momma Cullen said,
squinting at the vase through her bifocals. "Why that dem thang won't even
hold flowers. Where'd that thang come
from.
Poppa?"

 
          
 
Old Man Cullen looked at the vase for about
five minutes, scratching his leathery neck and trying to get his thoughts
together.

 
          
 
"Momma, I guess it come from that Yankee
schoolteacher," he said.
"That one that gassed
herself.
I don't know where else we would have got it."

 
          
 
I gave them the $20 and drank a Delaware Punch
with them, to help smooth over the insult. De Queen seemed to be the only place
left in America where Delaware Punches still came out of the pop machines, all
of which were so old themselves that I could have sold them for big money in
Houston or L.A.

 
          
 
"Now, Jack, don't you drive too
fast," Momma Cullen said, as I was leaving. "You ought to get married
and raise a family, but if you don't, look out for some of that Depression
glass. I'll pay for that stuff."

 
          
 
Old Man Cullen just stood and looked. I don't
think he had entirely satisfied himself about the origins of the vase, and was
still slowly working back in his memory, from one junk buy to the next, hoping
to come to the one that had contained the vase. Even unobsessed dealers like to
remember where their wares came from.

 
          
 
I wrapped the vase well and put it in a small,
brass-bound nineteenth-century traveling trunk I kept for just such a purpose.
Naturally I realized that I had just become rich— or at least rich enough to
buy the car of my dreams, which at that time belonged to a Cadillac collector
in Ypsilanti—but I didn't feel elated, or even happy. I knew perfectly well
that I had just shot up and over a peak, and could expect to work the down side
of the hill for several months or years. I might live to find objects as great
as the vase, but not for $20. The discrepancy between quality and price that
made the find almost miraculous was a once-or-twice-in-a-lifetime thing. I
could wander through thousands of flea markets and scale an Everest of junk
without a combination such as that one coming up again, and I knew it.

 
          
 
Five months later the vase auctioned at
Sotheby's for $106,000, to a discreet Swiss collector who had probably never
happened through De Queen.

 
          
 
Of course, Boog was right not to credit me with
much sophistication. In my rodeo days I had seen a lot of
America
, but mostly only its filling stations and
rodeo arenas. Once I became a scout I tended to spend a lot of time in the
parking lots of the same arenas, since that's where a lot of
America
's flea markets are held.

 
          
 
All in all, I had not exactly lived a
high-rent life, except for one week I spent in the Beverly Wilshire hotel in
Los Angeles
, as a guest of Universal Studios. The
reason I was their guest was because they were contemplating a film about my
career as a world champion bulldogger.

 
          
 
During my stay at the hotel I rode in the
elevator with Muhammad Ali and thought I saw Steve McQueen in the coffee shop.
But soon the week was up and nothing came of the movie.

 
          
 
I might have mastered the freeway system in
every major American city, but the truth was I spent most of my time with
people like Mom and Pop Cullen, who would have considered Waxahachie a
frightening metropolis. Stardom on the flea-market circuit, as Boog well knew,
does not necessarily equip one to dine with the power elite.

 
          
 
Which brings me to the
second part of Boog's admonition: the part about the stump-sucking women.

 
          
 
Some horses are called stump-suckers because
they have a penchant for chewing wood. Once they get the taste they'll gnaw on
stumps, fence posts, boards, and the comers of feed sheds. This neurotic habit
is more apt to manifest itself in highly strung, overbred animals than in your
common plugs.

 
          
 
Cowboys universally distrust the stump-sucking
horse as being a beast with a mental disorder that renders them unfit for the
long-term, trust-laden relationships they like to maintain with their mounts.

 
          
 
Boog seemed to hold the women of
Washington
in much the same distrust.

 
          
 
I have never learned to distrust women. For
some reason the notion involved is foreign to me. However, I am quick to notice
when I’ve wandered into a game whose rules are totally unfamiliar to me, as was
the case with my first
Georgetown
dinner party.

 
          
 
The party was at the home of a senator named
Penrose, and I was taken there by Cindy Sanders—a
California
princess I had met and become infatuated
with only a few hours earlier. Cindy would not have been loath to instruct me
in the niceties of social behavior, but unfortunately she was seated several
yards away, across a good seventeenth-century table covered with equally good
nineteenth-century damask. She had been placed there to entertain an aged
statesman named Dunscombe Cotswinkle, an old man with a jaw like a
Carolina
mule.

 
          
 
It was obvious even to someone as naive as
myself
that Cindy had been assigned Cotswinkle because she
was the most beautiful woman there, whereas he was the most important man.
Unfortunately, the appropriateness of the match-up was lost on Cotswinkle—his
mind was elsewhere, or at least I judged it to be, since he kept looking down the
table and shouting "Is that you, Winston?" at a nervous little French
journalist whose name was not Winston.

 
          
 
I was seated between two well-dressed ladies,
neither of whom gave the slightest indication that they knew I was there. They
were not young, but both were too modishly done up to be described as old.
Evidently they were somewhat testy about their placement at the table, and it
was hard to blame them, since each had an ugly congressman on the side not
occupied by me.

 
          
 
It was not lost on my dinner partners that the
younger and prettier women had been distributed among such senators and minor
press lords who happened to be there.

 
          
 
"Pencil will never learn," one
whispered to the other, across my coq au vin.

 
          
 
Pencil Penrose was our hostess, an ostensibly
giddy blonde whose real name was Penserilla.

 
          
 
"It doesn't matter," the other lady
said. "There's no one here anyway except Jake and Dunny, and I don't want
to talk to them. Dunny's deaf as a brass pig, and Jake wouldn't even talk to me
when I was married to him."

 
          
 
Dunny was obviously old Cotswinkle, whereas
Jake was the eminent columnist John C. V. Ponsonby, who was seated directly
across from me, so deeply bored by the deficiencies of the company that he had
lapsed into what appeared to be a coma. He ate no food, but retained enough
motor
reflex
to empty his wine glass into his mouth
from time to time.

 
          
 
Ponsonby, by no means unimportant, had his
hostess on his left and Lilah Landry on his right. Lilah was the beautiful if
somewhat gangly widow of a former Secretary of State. Her tumbling red hair,
dizzy smile, and trend-setting wardrobe could be seen daily on the local talk
show she hostessed.

 
          
 
Luckily, I had seen it that very morning,
while breakfasting at Boog's. The show was called Win a Country and matched a panel
of columnists, ex-Cabinet members, and socially prominent diplomats against a
computer called Big Hank. In order to win the country in question the panelists
had to make instant choices between bribery, trade benefits, military aid,
covert infiltration, saturation bombing and the like, though all Lilah had to
do was exhibit her hair, wardrobe, and cleavage, and occasionally employ her
abundant deep Georgia gift of gab to get some taciturn diplomat to talk.

 
          
 
If either of the ladies beside me had turned
and suddenly required speech of some kind, I guess I would have dropped Boog's
name, for despite his vulgar talk and silver ties Boog's was a name to conjure
with, in
Washington
. His big Victorian house in
Cleveland
Park
was constantly filled to the gills with
politicians, lobbyists, aides of all species, committee persons, agency
persons, journalists, and lawyers. Some of them were there because Boog had a
special faucet in his kitchen that ran Jack Daniel's, while others came because
they lusted after Boss, Boog's famous wife; but whatever their individual
compulsions, they all liked and respected Boog, the professional's professional
when it came to Hill politics.

 
          
 
Of course, the minute I had stepped into the
Penrose mansion that night I began to canvas the objets, a habit I can't
control. A scout scouts, even when purchase seems hopeless. It was hard to
concentrate on Pencil Penrose when she happened to be standing next to the
magnificent Belgian hall clock in her front foyer.

 
          
 
It's not that I dislike people, or that I'm
incurious about them, either. I want to look at the people, but their objects
keep jumping in front of them, demanding my attention. Sometimes I tell myself
that the best way to get to know people is to first study the objects among
which they place themselves, but for all I know that may be pure bullshit. It
may simply be that I've been subsumed by my vocation. Until I've sized up a
place and separated the good pieces from the fillers I just can't seem to concentrate
on the people.

 
          
 
Cindy Sanders was long of limb, but short of
patience. Her approach to life was emphatic, an approach she shared with my two
former wives.

 
          
 
After ten minutes of watching me eye the
ormolu, Cindy expressed herself by coming over and giving me an elbow in the
ribs that would have done credit to an NBA guard. In fact, she had once been
involved with an NBA guard.

 
          
 
"Stop looking at the furniture," she
said. "You'll never own any of it."

 
          
 
"That's okay," I said. "I don't
deal in French furniture much."

 
          
 
She gave me a smile that would have sold about
a million tubes of any toothpaste.

 
          
 
"Stop yukking around and talk to these
people," she said. "You said you knew Big John. They'd love some
fresh poop on Big John."

 
          
 
"Is that the only reason you brought
me?" I asked.
"Because I know Big John?"

 
          
 
The question seemed to interest her. She
tilted her head to one side for a moment, a gesture I took to be introspective.
A moment was enough. Her purse might be a jumble, but not her soul.

 
          
 
"Naw," she said. "It wasn't
decisive, which doesn't mean you can just stand around. I expect a little
social support when I ask a man out."

 
          
 
"I see," I said. "If I turn out
to be a dud people will think you're slipping, right?"

 
          
 
Cindy laughed, a loud
California
laugh that boomed right out into the room,
startling a number of pale people who were sipping drinks and having muted
conversations nearby. I loved it. It was such a healthy laugh that it even
affected my scrotum, which immediately tightened. Her laugh reminded me of the
absolutely confident way she had ripped a check out of her checkbook that
afternoon, when she paid me for
a
earful of cowboy
artifacts.

 
          
 
"I'm not slipping," she said,
faintly amused by the thought that anyone could suppose she might be.

 
          
 
Then she turned on her heel and marched off to
start a conversation with our hostess. Pencil Penrose.