McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 (15 page)

 
          
 
"But they can't sell the stuff that's on
view in the Smithsonian," I said. "Those are famous pieces. People
would miss them."

 
          
 
Boog was silent, but he grinned at me in a way
that suggested Waxahachie was my destiny.

 
          
 
"What if they
was
replaced by first-rate repros?" he said, finally. "How long do you
reckon it'd take the public to notice?"

 
          
 
I was speechless. The notion that all the
superb objects in seventeen museums were being quietly replaced with high-class
forgeries was ... well, mind-boggling. It meant that somewhere in
America
an army of forgers was working away, making
museum-quality forgeries of an almost infinite variety of objects.

 
          
 
"Hodges," Boog said, when I looked
at him in bewilderment. "
Hodges
,
South Carolina
. That's where they're making the repros."

 
          
 
That made sense. The
Carolinas
are full of furniture factories, some of
which turn out nothing but reproduction furniture. And, of course, forgery
itself was hardly a new thing.

 
          
 
"But who gets the real pieces?" I
asked. "They're world famous. If they start turning up in museums in
Zaire
or
Bangladesh
someone's gonna notice."

 
          
 
Boog dismissed this notion.

 
          
 
"The world ain't really filt with art
historians," he said. "Most people ain't scouts. Half the people in
museums all over the world are in a bad humor because they've been made to go
against their wills. They ain't gonna give a shit if some statue that used to
be in the National Gallery turns up in
Islamabad
."

 
          
 
"What does Mrs. Lump have to do with
it?" I asked. "Is she a spy?"

 
          
 
"Ain't we all spies?" he asked,
turning suddenly metaphysical. "The way I figger it, to spy is
human."

 
          
 
Then he began to talk about Spinoza and
Descartes and was still talking about them when I delivered him back to his
muddy
Lincoln
, in front of the Bubble Bath.

 
          
 
"Spinoza was a great man," he said.
"Greater than Sam Raybum or Fehx Frankfurter either."

 
          
 
Then he got in his
Lincoln
and roared oflf toward
Washington
.

 
          
 
I sat in my car for a few minutes, staring at
the flaking purple front of the Bubble Bath and wondering what Spinoza would
have thought about a Double Bubble Brunch.

 
          
 
Suddenly I felt
very
pressured, not from anything people were doing to me, but from things I was
doing to myself.

 
          
 
To put it simply, I was in a phase of wanting
too much. I wanted Cindy, but I also wanted Jean, I wanted Boss Miller, and I
certainly would not have spurned Lolly and Janie Lee, whose very cheerfulness
made them attractive. Of course I still wanted Coffee and Kate and Tanya Todd,
and I had a strong fondness for Beth Gibbon—the flea-marketer's daughter, only
a scant two hours away, in
Augusta
,
West Virginia
.

 
          
 
My capacity for wanting, which had always been
great, seemed to have expanded dangerously since I arrived in
Washington
. I not only wanted several women now, I
also wanted a great many things, and I wanted both the women and the things
keenly. My ongoing fantasies about Boss Miller were as dark, intense, and
adulterous as ever, but at the moment they were overlaid with half-innocent
fantasies about Jean, and light cheerful fantasies about Lolly and Janie Lee,
and somehow all these fantasies arrived at a time when, thanks to Cindy, I
should have been feeling sexually content.

 
          
 
In short, I was just a stew of wants, none of
them really significant, but none of them easily dismissible, either.

 
          
 
In such moods, I usually hit the road. If I'm
in Maine I head for Oregon, if in Chicago or Detroit for Miami or New Orleans,
trusting that the long roads and blue skies of America will restore me to
lucidity and a simple sense of purpose: to find the best things to be found
along the roads and beneath the skies.

 
          
 
And the last resort, always, when the buzz of
wants becomes intolerable, is to head for
Harbor City
,
California
, and its great flea market, stuck there between
L.A.
and the ocean, the souk of souks, the
ultimate American marketplace.

 
          
 
A trip to Harbor City, from anywhere in the
eastern half of America, offered the best of both worlds: the ascetic
loneliness of the long drive across gray plains and beige deserts, and then
millions of goods one could fling oneself into in pure debauch, like Scrooge
McDuck into his money bin.

 
          
 
It's not that I ever find much in
Harbor
City
, perhaps the most intelligently scouted
flea market in the world, with hustlers of every variety circling like pariah
dogs, waiting for someone to give up and drop a price significantly.

 
          
 
What's important is that
Harbor
City
is always there, a river of trash and
treasure flowing unwearied through its stalls. If you want to buy a vintage
Wurlitzer jukebox or sell a complete set of Little Orphan Annie Radio Club
decoders —six in all—you can, almost any time you arrive.

 
          
 
To simple people, content with themselves, the
need for such a place must seem degraded. But I love it, and anyway have never
been content with myself.

 
          
 
I guess I buy and sell in hope of style—or
maybe as a style of hope, and Harbor City is kind of the capital of my nation,
where there are always others as restless as myself, who constantly buy and
sell, too, for their own reasons.

 
          
 
I actually sat in front of the Bubble Bath for
about ten minutes, in a fretful mood, trying to convince myself to be sensible
and stop wanting so many women and so many things.

 
          
 
Wanting even one woman intensely was dangerous
enough: Wanting several at the same time meant erecting a structure of need and
desire which would eventually collapse like a South American bleacher, burying
me in angry women.

 
          
 
But after ten minutes I hit the Capital
Beltway, in a mood to ply the wistful Jean Arber with icons, or trunks, or
whatever it might take.

 
          
 
Main drag
Wheaton
is so seedy it almost makes
Arlington
look classy.

 
          
 
Jean's shop was in a little decayed shopping
center that looked like it had been built in
Cleveland
and then rolled end over end from there to
Wheaton
.

 
          
 
Put another way, it looked like it had been
set down whole by some huge crane capable of lowering whole cinderblock
shopping centers into place: only in the case of this shopping center the crane
operator had nodded for a moment and dropped it into place from a height of
about ten feet.

 
          
 
All the buildings in the shopping center were
slightly cracked, and the asphalt parking lot had begun to roil and bubble. In
fact the parking area looked a little like the surface of the moon, in which
big chunks of dusty asphalt were interspersed with sizable craters.

 
          
 
I worked my way through the craters and parked
right in front of Jean's shop, which was between an adult bookstore and a pet
shop. The door of the adult bookstore was framed with multicolored lightbulbs,
which when flashing might have been expected to attract adults, or at least
teenagers.

 
          
 
The pet shop was even more depressing. Its
window contained nothing but comatose hamsters and a cage full of hyperactive
gerbils.

 
          
 
The cracks in the several buildings were large
enough that small shrubs or spreading vines could have been planted in them,
but instead of shrubs and vines most of them seemed to be full of empty
red-and-white boxes, of the sort Colonel Sanders' fried chicken comes in.

 
          
 
The sources of all the red-and-white boxes was
not far to seek. A fried chicken outlet was right across the street, sandwiched
between a Long John Silver's and a spanking new Taco Belle. Even as I watched,
a patron of Colonel Sanders casually tossed an empty fried chicken box out of
his rusty station wagon.

 
          
 
I got out and looked in the window of Jean
Arber's antique shop. The window had a modest wooden sign on it which said
"Jean's Antiques." Inside I could see a number of trunks and what
looked like some rather nice blue crockery, but I couldn't get in. The door was
locked and a note stuck to it which read:

 
          
 
Dear Jimmy:

 
          
 
Gone to the babysitters.
Back at
3:15
.
Did you really tell them you'd take them to
Baskin-Robbins?

 
          
 
XXX Jean

 
          
 
Although the note was short and not intended
for me, I was intrigued by it.

 
          
 
Particularly, I was intrigued by the three
X's, just above the signature. Tanya Todd was always writing me notes and
ending them with Xs and I could never quite puzzle out what the Xs were
supposed to tell me. Were the Xs meant as a warning, or did they conceal an
affection that the woman making the Xs didn't feel like being too specific
about?

 
          
 
Since Jean's letter was addressed to the
husband from whom she was not quite divorced, I suspected the latter. She might
not be quite sure that she still loved him, so she hit him with a few Xs, to
warn him to take things slow.

 
          
 
While I sat in the car, reflecting, one of the
oldest Volvos I had ever seen drove up and parked beside me. It had once been
dark blue but now it was just dark. I knew a good many Volvo collectors, mostly
in
California
—they tend to be a finicky lot, but any one
of them would have jumped at the chance to buy such an ancient specimen. It was
much smaller than the Volvos of our day—in
fact,
it
resembled those small vehicles, half pickup and half dogcart, that big city
milkmen used to deliver milk in.

 
          
 
Instead of containing milk bottles, this Volvo
contained a short energetic man in bib overalls. It didn't even contain him
long, because he immediately got out and headed for Jean's antique shop. He was
evidently so accustomed to marching right in that he didn't notice the note
until he crashed into the door.

 
          
 
Once that happened he was forced to take
cognizance of the note. He was rather likable looking, bushy-haired,
bushy-bearded, blue-eyed, and puzzled. He squinted at the note for a moment and
then went over and stood in front of the window of the pet shop, looking almost
as morose as the hamsters. In fact, he looked not unlike a human hamster,
except that his hair was longer.

 
          
 
I had a feeling he was Jimmy. So far he had
not noticed me at all, which in itself says something about the state he was
in. A pearl Cadillac can't be an everyday sight in such a shopping center.

 
          
 
I had been thinking of Jean's husband as a
potential rival, but the more I studied Jimmy the less like a rival I felt. Who
could take pride at beating a human hamster in a contest for the hamster's own
wife? Jimmy looked like all he wanted to do was find some nice litter and curl
up in it. He had little sprigs of straw in his hair, so perhaps he had already
curled up in some.

 
          
 
Before I could reflect further on Jimmy or the
Xs Jean's van drove up and parked on the other side of me. I looked around and
saw two wonderful little faces peering at me out of the right window of the
van. Those faces certainly didn't ignore white Cadillacs and cowboys. They were
the faces of little girls, maybe about three and five years old, respectively.
They looked as intelligent as racoons, and their faces were surrounded by great
puffs of fleecy curls, as if both of them were wearing Harpo Marx wigs.

 
          
 
I smiled at them, an unexpected development
that caused them to exchange quick glances. Like their mother, they wore puffy
coats, only theirs were red instead of blue.

 
          
 
After a moment of shy hesitation they decided
they were charmed by my smile and gave me two smiles in return.

 
          
 
In the few moments that it took me to
establish contact with the girls, a marital or perhaps post-marital storm
gathered and broke on the other side of Jean's van.

 
          
 
Jimmy stopped being a human hamster and became
an outraged ex-husband. He immediately rushed around to Jean's side of the van,
and as he did I rolled my window down a little, out of a shameless desire to
eavesdrop.

 
          
 
Eavesdropping was no problem, since Jimmy's
pent-up feelings burst out of him at the top of his voice. At the mere sound of
his voice both little girls gritted their teeth, made faces, and put their
fingers in their ears.

 
          
 
"Where did you go?" Jimmy yelled.

 
          
 
Whatever reply Jean made was totally
inaudible.

 
          
 
"But I drove all the way!" Jimmy yelled.
"I thought we were going to get burgers!"

 
          
 
At the mention of burgers the little girls
whipped around. They still had their fingers in their ears, or at least in
their curls, but the burger part got through. They immediately deserted me and
began to pat their mother's back. It was obvious even to me, a neophyte with
children, that so far as their father was concerned they were willing to let
bygones be bygones if he was in the mood to provide burgers.

 
          
 
I felt thoroughly awkward. My visit could not
have been more ill-timed. For half a day I had been building interesting
fantasies around Jean Arber, but none of my fantasies had located her in the
midst of such a charming family. The little girls were absolute darlings, and
even Jimmy was something of a darling. A
man
who wore
bib overalls, drove an incunabular Volvo, had straw in his hair, and wanted to
buy his ex-wife a cheeseburger couldn't be all bad, or even half bad.

 
          
 
It is hard to sustain adulterous fantasies
when faced with such a scene.

 
          
 
For a moment my impulse was to slip away. I
had come at the wrong time. Probably I should just go to
New Mexico
with Cindy. Now that I knew where Jean's
antique shop was I could always return.

 
          
 
But it's hard just to slip away when you drive
up in a car like mine, and before I could reach any decision the little girls
turned their attention back to me. They rapped on their window to get my
attention.

 
          
 
I smiled again.

 
          
 
Encouraged, they began to roll down their
window. This was not easy, but they persisted. The one who was doing most of
the rolling gritted her teeth, and made a face, to indicate how hard it was.

 
          
 
As soon as the window was down they both
popped their elbows out. Giggling at their own daring, they leaned way out and
looked at the ground. The window was full of red parkas and reddish-blond
curls. It seemed for a moment that they might both topple out into the crater
that separated the two cars, but of course they were relying on the marvelous
balance of children. They didn't topple out. When they'd seen enough of the
ground they easily righted themselves, looked at me, and settled down for some
frank conversation.

 
          
 
“I'm the oldest," the older said.

 
          
 
The younger girl ignored this flagrant claim.

 
          
 
"What's your name?" she asked.