Cadillac Jack

by Larry McMurtry

  Big John Flint is a phenomenal trader whose antique bam just outside Zanesville, Ohio—where I had just fallaciously located Beth Gibbon, the flea-marketer's daughter—was a mecca for scouts of all descriptions. Since the business that had brought me to Cindy was antiques, I assumed she would assume I meant Big John Flint when I uttered the phrase "Big John."

  The fact that she thought I meant Big John Connolly was probably what prompted her to ask me to the dinner party.

  Cindy owned three trend-setting businesses, two downstairs and one upstairs in the large building on O Street.

  One of them was an antique shop called Schlock, my reason for being in D.C. in the first place. Next door was her dress shop, Fancy Folk, and upstairs, over both shops, was her very avant-garde gallery, which was called Sensibility.

  At the time of my arrival Sensibility was filled with the bread sculpture of an emigre Latvian peasant woman. Many of the sculptures evidently represented the eternal feminine, being a mixture of lumps and indentations. "Women are the bread of life, in Latvian folklore," Cindy explained.

  Before I went to see Cindy for the first time, Boog advised me to dress as vulgarly as possible, reasoning that what had worked for him might work for me.

  "A tasteful Texan ain't gonna play," he said. "It'll just confuse the natives, what few they is."

  I decided to ignore this advice. I put on a beautiful white doeskin jacket I had bought from a Blood Indian in Montana, and got my Stetson out of its hatbox in the rear of the Cadillac. The Stetson was a brown 100-X beaver, with a hatband made from the skin of an albino diamondback. It had been the Sunday hat of a famous Texas Ranger captain and had probably not been out of its box six times when I bought it from a spur-scout in the Rio Grande valley.

  I put on my yellow armadillo boots and a thin silver concho belt that had belonged to a Zicarilla medicine man.

  After some thought, I decided to put my Valentino hubcaps on the Cadillac.

  Valentino hubcaps were in the form of silver cobras, very graceful. Anyone who flea-markets much will have seen one or two such hubcaps, all of them purporting to be off Valentino's own cars.

  In fact, almost all the hubcaps now being traded are the work of a well-known hubcap forger from Torrance, California. He was finally exposed in the sixties, but not before he had salted the market with several hundred cobra hubcaps. The one detail he neglected, or was too cheap, to duplicate, was the eyes. Valentino's cobras had real rubies for eyes. And of the many cars he owned, only four—all Hispano-Suizas—were equipped with the silver-plated, ruby-eyed cobra hubcaps.

  I had one of the four true sets, bought from Valentino's secretary, an aged, contentious, dipsomaniacal woman named Beulah Mahony, who ended her days in a dingy apartment on De Longpre Street, in West Hollywood.

  I almost didn't buy the hubcaps from her, not because I doubted their authenticity but because I hated to think of Beaulah without them, knowing, as I did, that they were her last link with youth and glory.

  Also, the hubcaps were her last means of securing herself a little company.

  Many aged, lonely people own a treasure or two and quickly learn to use them as a tease. By letting it be known that they might—just might—sell the treasure, they can entice collectors and scouts to visit them again and again, if only for long enough to share a cup of coffee or watch a soap opera with them. If the object in question is desirable enough, the old person can sometimes scratch out a marginal social life on the strength of it.

  The true test of the honor and discipline of a scout lies in his treatment of the old man or old woman with only one treasure left. When they finally give in and sell it, it means they're done: tired of the small indignities of the tease.

  When they sell it, people stop coming to see them and they die.

  My claims to virtue are modest, but at least I never went to L.A. without checking on Beulah Mahony—not that she was invariably grateful for my loyalty.

  Beulah was a querulous old orange-haired woman, frenzied one day and apathetic the next. She was so incurably addicted to holding garage sales that the last time I saw her she had even sold her cheap formica table and had made a crude replacement out of forty or fifty phone books she had managed to gather up around her apartment building. She just piled them up in a block and ate off them. For drinks she mixed gin and Kool-Aid, probably because Kool-Aid was the only mixer she could afford.

  Beulah's attitude was not unlike Momma Cullen's. Any form of charity, even a buddy check, was an insult, but somehow she had figured out that I really liked her, an affection she rightly judged to be a weakness on my part. Consequently—in common with all the other women in my life—she saw no reason to refrain from harsh judgment.

  We sat at the phone book table, drinking the revolting drink from two pink glasses Beulah had managed to withhold from her last garage sale. Outside the window, a ditch-digging machine was eating its way down De Longpre Street, belching and roaring as it crunched through the asphalt.

  "Jack, I don't know what to do about you," Beulah said, occasionally pulling out a sprig of her orange hair and tossing it on the phone books.

  "It's a selfish life, driving around buying things," she added. Being Valentino's secretary had not blurred her sense of values, those having been inculcated long ago in her hometown, Topeka, Kansas.

  "A man your age needs responsibilities," she said. "Kids, in other words."

  It was a common theme. Both of my ex-wives had hinted darkly that our marriage would probably have worked out if we'd only had children, though, so far as I could see, they were both as frightened of the prospect as I was.

  "If you don't want none of your own you could always marry a divorcee," Beulah suggested. "Plenty of them around, and most of them got kids they don't know what to do with."

  "I don't think I'd know what to do with them, either," I said, honestly.

  Beulah snorted. "Raise 'em to be solid citizens," she said. "Decent citizens."

  She had a profound belief in the decency of American citizens in general, though the mostly seedy citizens of her own decrepit neighborhood had often let her down.

  "You want to know something, Jack?" she said. "I stole them hubcaps. The one criminal thing I done in my life, besides taking off my income tax, once in a while."

  "My goodness," I said. "Why?"

  "Justice," she said. "I figured they was my due. I worked for the man eleven years. Some queer would have got them if I hadn't, so I stole 'em in the confusion. And you finally bought 'em off me, after all this time. Life's funny."

  And she laughed at it cheerfully, the laugh of a decent old lady from Topeka who had managed to go only slightly batty.

  "It's a good thing L.A. is a big town, with fat phone books," she said. "Otherwise I'd be eatin' off the floor."

  Six months later, when I checked in again, Beulah was dead, buried, and forgotten, except by me. A family of nine Vietnamese lived in her apartment. They hadn't met Beulah, but they remembered her final table.

  "Many phone books," the father said, and the whole small, neat family smiled.

  Chapter VII

  What I supposed, when I finally set off for Georgetown, was that even a lady who owned three trendy stores might derive a faint buzz from the combination of doeskin jacket, yellow boots, albino-diamondback hatband, and Valentino hubcaps, not to mention six feet five of me.

  In the event, Cindy hardly gave the combination a glance.

  "It was a little over-studied," she said later, with characteristic candor.

  When I wheeled the pearly Cadillac into a parking place right in front of Schlock, Cindy was standing on the sidewalk, studying her window display, and Harris was standing in her doorway, looking this way and that.

  What really impressed Cindy was that I drove straight to the parking place as if I’d known it would be there waiting for me, although it was Saturday afternoon and the rest of Georgetown was a maelstrom of frustrated parking-place seekers.

  "We must be m
eant for one another or you wouldn't have got that parking place," she said, without irony, when I introduced myself.

  The fact that someone meant for her had driven up in a Cadillac filled with steer horns, antelope skulls, Hopi basketry, and Mexican spurs didn't seem to surprise her.

  "What's your sign, Tex?" she asked. Then she stepped right over and linked her arm in mine, studying our reflections in the window of her antique shop. It was as if she had decided to try out the concept—or at least the image—of us as a couple, right off the bat.

  Then she led me into her store, right past Harris, who, I now realize, was engrossed in his own dilemma. An hour later, when she had dragged me off to buy a dinner jacket from a grumpy old Russian tailor, she casually informed me that the man in the doorway was her fiance.

  Cindy was one of those near-perfect physical specimens that sprout, unblemished as tulips, in certain California suburbs—Montecito, in her case. Words like "gorgeous" and "knockout" applied to her precisely. I was unprepared for such looks in an antique dealer—I guess I had expected to find one of the humorless, overeducated young ladies who populate the antiquities departments of museums and major auction houses. Antiquities seldom attract your giggling ninnies.

  My first thought, on seeing Cindy, was that she was probably into mountaineering—a deduction partly based on her glowing health and partly on the fact that she had several antique alpenstocks in her window.

  In fact, Cindy was into mountaineering, only the ascent she had in mind involved the sheer, ice-coated face of American society—a peak I had never so much as glimpsed, in all my driving.

  For the moment she was concentrating on ascending what might be called the East Face, but there was no doubt but that hers was the large view. There was an East Face and a West Face, a crumbling pinnacle or two in the South and a few rockspurs in the southwest, but it was essentially one mountain, broad at the bottom and narrow at the top.

  All this was fascinating to me: I had never met a beautiful girl social climber before. Cindy was not reticent about her ambition, either. Reticence was right up there with patience on the list of things she didn't have.

  Looking back, I can see that it was a measure of my naivete that I could suppose mention of Big John Flint, the trader from Ohio, would prompt a beautiful social climber to invite me to a Georgetown dinner party, even though he was, in my view, more remarkable by far than Big John Connolly, to whom I had sold a couple of Rainey oils. Among Big John Flint's many triumphs was the discovery, in a warehouse in Poughkeepsie, of more than 100,000 pre-1925 Boy Scout knives.

  I had only dropped his name because it was obvious at a glance that four-fifths of the antiques in Cindy's store came from him. She went in heavily for overpolished American furniture, nineteenth-century tin boxes, chums, weather vanes, early tools, duck decoys, salt-glazed crocks, dining car china, and inkwells, all items Big John dispensed by the thousands.

  I found out later that she bought most of her stuff from a scout in Pittsburgh, who obviously trucked it right in from Zanesville. She had never heard of Big John, and what's more, she wasn't particularly interested when I told her about him, the next morning in bed. Cindy was more interested in having her fill of salami and Brie.

  "Why are you telling me this?" she asked, whacking me on the sternum with the handle of the knife.

  "Because it could save you money," I said.

  She shrugged her beautiful, lightly freckled shoulders. If anything was wrong with Cindy's body, only X-rays could have discovered what. I even liked her feet, big though they were. They looked like feet that had trod a lot of beaches and worn out numerous pairs of tennis shoes.

  "How much did you pay for those duck decoys?" I asked.

  "Twenty-five apiece," she said, her boredom deepening.

  "Big John sells them for eight."

  Now that the point was made, Cindy ignored it.

  "If you're just out to get Harris, you better be careful," she said. "Pm very protective of Harris."

  This intermittent conversation forced me to acknowledge what I already knew, which is that relations with women are never simple.

  The reason the conversation was intermittent was because Cindy took time out to eat the lion's share of the salami and most of the Brie. The fact was she didn't feed me very much, and while I was lying there watching her eat the mental me reasserted itself over the physical me. I should have got up, scrambled myself some eggs, and met the day on the level of the basic appetites, as Cindy had.

  I do have the basic appetites, but unfortunately the mental me is the one with the real staying power. It will only stand aside for the basic appetites so long, and the minute it returns the trouble starts.

  Chapter VIII

  Cindy was a supremely beautiful woman, and she sat not three inches from me, having just reduced a large salami to a pile of scrapings.

  My heart should have soared at the mere sight of her, but instead my heart sank like a lead turtle. I felt like I had ingested the lead turtle while Cindy was ingesting salami.

  What did it was her indifference to Big John Flint. How could I be falling in love with an antique dealer who didn't want to hear the story about Big John? Most of the antique dealers in America sat in their stores all day, gasping like fish out of water for want of the latest news about Big John.

  In fact, I had the latest news, which was that he had bought a small town in north Georgia and was dismantling it house by house, mainly to get the antebellum fireplace moldings. His passion for duck decoys was as nothing to his passion for antebellum fireplaces. There had only been twenty-seven people left in the town and all of them were tired of it, so they sold it to Big John.

  So far as I know, Big John Connolly has never done anything as interesting as buying a town in order to get fifty or sixty fireplace moldings.

  I don’t mean to suggest that the general public should be expected to judge the two men accurately. The general public knows nothing of Big John Flint, a quasi-mythical figure even in Zanesville.

  But Cindy wasn't the general public. She was an antique dealer, whose stock, though predictable, was far from hopeless. She had an ivory-tipped elephant goad, for example. I bought it instantly and sold it to Boog two days later.

  In certain moods Boog could be persuaded to buy almost anything. Objects and people constantly vie for space in his houses.

  "Hell, I got a daughter who's an elephant," he said, handing me $400 and waving the goad playfully in the direction of Linda Miller, a sweet teenager who happened to be going through a pudgy phase.

  "Get fucked, Daddy!" Linda said, whacking at him with a razor strop I had sold him a few days earlier. It had not yet made its way off the kitchen table.

  The Miller kids were scrappers. Linda's whack caused Boog to spill most of his breakfast toddy on a suit that was the color of fresh slime.

  Micah Leviticus was sitting next to Boss, eating a bowl of Cheerios and watching an early morning Mary Tyler Moore rerun on his tiny TV. I glanced at it just in time to watch Mary fling her cap up to be freeze-framed. The sight seemed to cheer Micah immensely. His tiny face lit up.

  "Look," he said. "It's Mary."

  We all looked. It was Mary, sure enough.

  "Don't you love her perky smile?" Micah said.

  Boss reached over and ruffled Micah's hair.

  "It's because of you I'm fat—it's your genes," Linda said, still whacking her father. "I wish I didn't love you!"

  Boss laughed, a loud immediate peal of delight that filled the kitchen. It startled Micah so much that he blinked and looked up from his milk-logged Cheerios, looking almost as out of it as had the congressman from Michigan, when Pencil Penrose's two black pugs trotted across the seventeenth-century table and began to eat his coq au vin.

  Chapter IX

  If Perkins, the Penroses' extraordinary manservant, had had his way, the congressman's coq au vin would not have been there for the pugs to eat.

  That goes without saying, of course. P
erkins was easily the most impressive person at the party, if not the most impressive person anywhere, now that Lord Mountbatten is dead. In fact, Perkins looked so much like Lord Mountbatten that I faltered badly when I first walked in with Cindy. Perkins is as tall as I am, and several times more dignified. I assumed he must be our host, at the very least, so I attempted to shake his hand.

  Perkins graciously ignored this gaucherie, but Cindy didn't.

  "If he wasn't the butler, he wouldn't be opening the door," she pointed out.

  Seconds later I was being introduced to Senator Penrose, our real host, a little fellow I might have missed entirely if left to my own devices. He had the constitution of a whippet and a complexion not unlike that of a rag that has hung in the sun for several weeks. Splotchy and bleached, in other words.

  At dinner I spent most of my time stealing glances at Perkins, trying to anticipate his next move. Seldom have I felt so intimidated by a man. Fortunately the two ladies bracketing me were experienced diners, who knew when to pick up a fork or surrender a plate—by watching them I got through the meal without serious embarrassment.

  The congressman from Michigan could have done the same, but he didn't. He didn't look dumb, just sort of weakly self-satisfied. He was also compulsively voluble on the subject of Michigan, perhaps the only subject he felt he had mastered.

  The person in the unfortunate position of having to listen to him was Cunard Cotswinkle, old Dunscombe's wife, a honey blonde about Boss's age who had managed to marry and outlive three of the world's ten richest men. Her nickname was Cunny and her charm was said to be fatal— evidently a hyperbole, since if it had been, the congressman from Michigan would have been dead before we reached the salad course.

  At any rate, the congressman made a simple mistake: He talked when he should have been eating. Consequently, while the rest of us were eating salad his coq au vin still sat in front of him, untouched.

  Across from me, John C. V. Ponsonby showed signs of being about to come to life. His chin, long since sunk on his bony chest, lifted a degree or two, and one hand began to fumble with his bow tie. The ladies beside me stared at him balefully: Clearly he was not a favorite of theirs.