Before They Were Giants

by James L. Sutter

  “Second floor, in the toy section.”

  “There wasn’t anything else like it, was there?”

  “‘Fraid not,” I said, and the cashier picked it up and started wrapping it in newspaper.

  “Ah,” he said, and he looked like a little kid who’d just been told that he couldn’t have a puppy. “I don’t suppose you’d want to sell it, would you?”

  I held up a hand and waited while the cashier bagged it with the rest of my stuff, a few old clothbound novels I thought I could sell at a used book-store, and a Grease belt-buckle with Olivia Newton John on it. I led him out the door by the elbow of his expensive suit.

  “How much?” I had paid a dollar.

  “Ten bucks?”

  I nearly said, “Sold!” but I caught myself. “Twenty.”

  “Twenty dollars?”

  “That’s what they’d charge at a boutique on Queen Street.”

  He took out a slim leather wallet and produced a twenty. I handed him the uke. His face lit up like a lightbulb.

  ~ * ~

  It’s not that my adulthood is particularly unhappy. Likewise, it’s not that my childhood was particularly happy.

  There are memories I have, though, that are like a cool drink of water. My grandfather’s place near Milton, an old Victorian farmhouse, where the cat drank out of a milk-glass bowl; and where we sat around a rough pine table as big as my whole apartment; and where my playroom was the draughty barn with hay-filled lofts bulging with farm junk and Tarzan-ropes.

  There was Grampa’s friend Fyodor, and we spent every evening at his wrecking-yard, he and Grampa talking and smoking while I scampered in the twilight, scaling mountains of auto-junk. The glove-boxes yielded treasures: crumpled photos of college boys mugging in front of signs, roadmaps of far-away places. I found a guidebook from the 1964 New York World’s Fair once, and a lipstick like a chrome bullet, and a pair of white leather ladies’ gloves.

  Fyodor dealt in scrap, too, and once, he had half of a carny carousel, a few horses and part of the canopy, paint flaking and sharp torn edges protruding; next to it, a Korean-war tank minus its turret and treads, and inside the tank were peeling old pinup girls and a rotation schedule and a crude Kilroy. The control-room in the middle of the carousel had a stack of paperback sci-fi novels, Ace Doubles that had two books bound back-to-back, and when you finished the first, you turned it over and read the other. Fyodor let me keep them, and there was a pawn-ticket in one from Macon, Georgia, for a transistor radio.

  My parents started leaving me alone when I was fourteen and I couldn’t keep from sneaking into their room and snooping. Mom’s jewelry box had books of matches from their honeymoon in Acapulco, printed with bad palm-trees. My Dad kept an old photo in his sock drawer, of himself on muscle-beach, shirtless, flexing his biceps.

  My grandmother saved every scrap of my mother’s life in her basement, in dusty Army trunks. I entertained myself by pulling it out and taking it in: her Mouse Ears from the big family train-trip to Disneyland in ‘57, and her records, and the glittery pasteboard sign from her sweet sixteen. There were well-chewed stuffed animals, and school exercise books in which she’d practiced variations on her signature for page after page.

  It all told a story. The penciled Kilroy in the tank made me see one of those Canadian soldiers in Korea, unshaven and crew-cut like an extra on M*A*S*H, sitting for bored hour after hour, staring at the pinup girls, fiddling with a crossword, finally laying it down and sketching his Kilroy quickly, before anyone saw.

  The photo of my Dad posing sent me whirling through time to Toronto’s Muscle Beach in the east end, and hearing the tinny AM radios playing weird psychedelic rock while teenagers lounged on their Mustangs and the girls sunbathed in bikinis that made their tits into torpedoes.

  It all made poems. The old pulp novels and the pawn ticket, when I spread them out in front of the TV, and arranged them just so, they made up a poem that took my breath away.

  ~ * ~

  After the cowboy trunk episode, I didn’t run into Craphound again until the annual Rotary Club charity rummage sale at the Upper Canada Brewing Company. He was wearing the cowboy hat, sixguns and the silver star from the cowboy trunk. It should have looked ridiculous, but the net effect was naive and somehow charming, like he was a little boy whose hair you wanted to muss.

  I found a box of nice old melamine dishes, in various shades of green -- four square plates, bowls, salad-plates, and a serving tray. I threw them in the duffel-bag I’d brought and kept browsing, ignoring Craphound as he charmed a salty old Rotarian while fondling a box of leather-bound books.

  I browsed a stack of old Ministry of Labour licenses -- barber, chiropodist, bartender, watchmaker. They all had pretty seals and were framed in stark green institutional metal. They all had different names, but all from one family, and I made up a little story to entertain myself, about the proud mother saving her sons’ accreditations and framing hanging them in the spare room with their diplomas. “Oh, George Junior’s just opened his own barbershop, and little Jimmy’s still fixing watches. . .”

  I bought them.

  In a box of crappy plastic Little Ponies and Barbies and Care Bears, I found a leather Indian headdress, a wooden bow-and-arrow set, and a fringed buckskin vest. Craphound was still buttering up the leather books’ owner. I bought them quick, for five bucks.

  “Those are beautiful,” a voice said at my elbow. I turned around and smiled at the snappy dresser who’d bought the uke at the Secret Boutique. He’d gone casual for the weekend, in an expensive, L.L. Bean button-down way.

  “Aren’t they, though.”

  “You sell them on Queen Street? Your finds, I mean?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes at auction. How’s the uke?”

  “Oh, I got it all tuned up,” he said, and smiled the same smile he’d given me when he’d taken hold of it at Goodwill. “I can play ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ on it.” He looked at his feet. “Silly, huh?”

  “Not at all. You’re into cowboy things, huh?” As I said it, I was overcome with the knowledge that this was “Billy the Kid,” the original owner of the cowboy trunk. I don’t know why I felt that way, but I did, with utter certainty.

  “Just trying to re-live a piece of my childhood, I guess. I’m Scott,” he said, extending his hand.

  Scott? I thought wildly. Maybe it’s his middle name? “I’m Jerry.”

  The Upper Canada Brewery sale has many things going for it, including a beer garden where you can sample their wares and get a good BBQ burger. We gently gravitated to it, looking over the tables as we went.

  “You’re a pro, right?” he asked after we had plastic cups of beer.

  “You could say that.”

  “I’m an amateur. A rank amateur. Any words of wisdom?”

  I laughed and drank some beer, lit a cigarette. “There’s no secret to it, I think. Just diligence: you’ve got to go out every chance you get, or you’ll miss the big score.”

  He chuckled. “I hear that. Sometimes, I’ll be sitting in my office, and I’ll just know that they’re putting out a piece of pure gold at the Goodwill and that someone else will get to it before my lunch. I get so wound up, I’m no good until I go down there and hunt for it. I guess I’m hooked, eh?”

  “Cheaper than some other kinds of addictions.”

  “I guess so. About that Indian stuff -- what do you figure you’d get for it at a Queen Street boutique?”

  I looked him in the eye. He may have been something high-powered and cool and collected in his natural environment, but just then, he was as eager and nervous as a kitchen-table poker-player at a high-stakes game.

  “Maybe fifty bucks,” I said.

  “Fifty, huh?” he asked.

  “About that,” I said.

  “Once it sold,” he said.

  “There is that,” I said.

  “Might take a month, might take a year,” he said.

  “Might take a day,” I said.

  “It migh
t, it might.” He finished his beer. “I don’t suppose you’d take forty?”

  I’d paid five for it, not ten minutes before. It looked like it would fit Craphound, who, after all, was wearing Scott/Billy’s own boyhood treasures as we spoke. You don’t make a living by feeling guilty over eight hundred percent markups. Still, I’d angered the fates, and needed to redeem myself.

  “Make it five,” I said.

  He started to say something, then closed his mouth and gave me a look of thanks. He took a five out of his wallet and handed it to me. I pulled the vest and bow and headdress out my duffel.

  He walked back to a shiny black Jeep with gold detail work, parked next to Craphound’s van. Craphound was building onto the Lego body, and the hood had a miniature Lego town attached to it.

  Craphound looked around as he passed, and leaned forward with undisguised interest at the booty. I grimaced and finished my beer.

  ~ * ~

  I met Scott/Billy three times more at the Secret Boutique that week.

  He was a lawyer, who specialised in alien-technology patents. He had a practice on Bay Street, with two partners, and despite his youth, he was the senior man.

  I didn’t let on that I knew about Billy the Kid and his mother in the East Muskoka Volunteer Fire Department Ladies’ Auxiliary. But I felt a bond with him, as though we shared an unspoken secret. I pulled any cowboy finds for him, and he developed a pretty good eye for what I was after and returned the favour.

  The fates were with me again, and no two ways about it. I took home a ratty old Oriental rug that on closer inspection was a 19th century hand-knotted Persian; an upholstered Turkish footstool; a collection of hand-painted silk Hawaiiana pillows and a carved Meerschaum pipe. Scott/Billy found the last for me, and it cost me two dollars. I knew a collector who would pay thirty in an eye-blink, and from then on, as far as I was concerned, Scott/Billy was a fellow craphound.

  “You going to the auction tomorrow night?” I asked him at the checkout line.

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” he said. He’d barely been able to contain his excitement when I told him about the Thursday night auctions and the bargains to be had there. He sure had the bug.

  “Want to get together for dinner beforehand? The Rotterdam’s got a good patio.”

  He did, and we did, and I had a glass of framboise that packed a hell of a kick and tasted like fizzy raspberry lemonade; and doorstopper fries and a club sandwich.

  I had my nose in my glass when he kicked my ankle under the table. “Look at that!”

  It was Craphound in his van, cruising for a parking spot. The Lego village had been joined by a whole postmodern spaceport on the roof, with a red-and-blue castle, a football-sized flying saucer, and a clown’s head with blinking eyes.

  I went back to my drink and tried to get my appetite back.

  “Was that an extee driving?”

  “Yeah. Used to be a friend of mine.”

  “He’s a picker?”

  “Uh-huh.” I turned back to my fries and tried to kill the subject.

  “Do you know how he made his stake?”

  “The chlorophyll thing, in Saudi Arabia.”

  “Sweet!” he said. “Very sweet. I’ve got a client who’s got some secondary patents from that one. What’s he go after?”

  “Oh, pretty much everything,” I said, resigning myself to discussing the topic after all. “But lately, the same as you -- cowboys and Injuns.”

  He laughed and smacked his knee. “Well, what do you know? What could he possibly want with the stuff?”

  “What do they want with any of it? He got started one day when we were cruising the Muskokas,” I said carefully, watching his face. “Found a trunk of old cowboy things at a rummage sale. East Muskoka Volunteer Fire Department Ladies’ Auxiliary.” I waited for him to shout or startle. He didn’t.

  “Yeah? A good find, I guess. Wish I’d made it.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I took a bite of my sandwich.

  Scott continued. “I think about what they get out of it a lot. There’s nothing we have here that they couldn’t make for themselves. I mean, if they picked up and left today, we’d still be making sense of everything they gave us in a hundred years. You know, I just closed a deal for a biochemical computer that’s no-shit 10,000 times faster than anything we’ve built out of silicon. You know what the extee took in trade? Title to a defunct fairground outside of Calgary -- they shut it down ten years ago because the midway was too unsafe to ride. Doesn’t that beat all? This thing is worth a billion dollars right out of the gate, I mean, within twenty-four hours of the deal closing, the seller can turn it into the GDP of Bolivia. For a crummy real-estate dog that you couldn’t get five grand for!”

  It always shocked me when Billy/Scott talked about his job -- it was easy to forget that he was a high-powered lawyer when we were jawing and fooling around like old craphounds. I wondered if maybe he wasn’t Billy the Kid; I couldn’t think of any reason for him to be playing it all so close to his chest.

  “What the hell is some extee going to do with a fairground?”

  ~ * ~

  Craphound got a free Coke from Lisa at the check-in when he made his appearance. He bid high, but shrewdly, and never pulled ten-thousand-dollar stunts. The bidders were wandering the floor, previewing that week’s stock, and making notes to themselves.

  I rooted through a box-lot full of old tins, and found one with a buckaroo at the Calgary Stampede, riding a bucking bronc. I picked it up and stood to inspect it. Craphound was behind me.

  “Nice piece, huh?” I said to him.

  “I like it very much,” Craphound said, and I felt my cheeks flush.

  “You’re going to have some competition tonight, I think,” I said, and nodded at Scott/Billy. “I think he’s Billy; the one whose mother sold us -- you -- the cowboy trunk.”

  “Really?” Craphound said, and it felt like we were partners again, scoping out the competition. Suddenly I felt a knife of shame, like I was betraying Scott/Billy somehow. I took a step back.

  “Jerry, I am very sorry that we argued.”

  I sighed out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding in. “Me, too.”

  “They’re starting the bidding. May I sit with you?”

  And so the three of us sat together, and Craphound shook Scott/Billy’s hand and the auctioneer started into his harangue.

  It was a night for unusual occurrences. I bid on a piece, something I told myself I’d never do. It was a set of four matched Li’l Orphan Annie Ovaltine glasses, like Grandma’s had been, and seeing them in the auctioneer’s hand took me right back to her kitchen, and endless afternoons passed with my colouring books and weird old-lady hard candies and Liberace albums playing in the living room.

  “Ten,” I said, opening the bidding.

  “I got ten, ten, ten, I got ten, who’ll say twenty, who’ll say twenty, twenty for the four.”

  Craphound waved his bidding card, and I jumped as if I’d been stung.

  “I got twenty from the space cowboy, I got twenty, sir will you say thirty?”

  I waved my card.

  “That’s thirty to you sir.”

  “Forty,” Craphound said.

  “Fifty,” I said even before the auctioneer could point back to me. An old pro, he settled back and let us do the work.

  “One hundred,” Craphound said.

  “One fifty,” I said.

  The room was perfectly silent. I thought about my overextended MasterCard, and wondered if Scott/Billy would give me a loan.

  “Two hundred,” Craphound said.

  Fine, I thought. Pay two hundred for those. I can get a set on Queen Street for thirty bucks.

  The auctioneer turned to me. “The bidding stands at two. Will you say two-ten, sir?”

  I shook my head. The auctioneer paused a long moment, letting me sweat over the decision to bow out.

  “I have two -- do I have any other bids from the floor? Any other bids? Sold, $200
, to number 57.” An attendant brought Craphound the glasses. He took them and tucked them under his seat.

  ~ * ~

  I was fuming when we left. Craphound was at my elbow. I wanted to punch him -- I’d never punched anyone in my life, but I wanted to punch him.

  We entered the cool night air and I sucked in several lungfuls before lighting a cigarette.