Craphound Read Online Free PDF Page B

to make
    the jump to pro because they can't grasp it.
There was a bunch of other stuff at the auction, other craphounds' weekend
    treasures. This was high season, when the sun comes out and people start to
    clean out the cottage, the basement, the garage. There were some collectors in
    the crowd, and a whole whack of antique and junk dealers, and a few pickers, and
    me, and Craphound. I watched the bidding listlessly, waiting for my things to
    come up and sneaking out for smokes between lots. Craphound never once looked at
    me or acknowledged my presence, and I became perversely obsessed with catching
    his eye, so I coughed and shifted and walked past him several times, until the
    auctioneer glared at me, and one of the attendants asked if I needed a throat
    lozenge.
    My lot came up. The bowling glasses went for five bucks to one of the Queen
    Street junk dealers; the elephant-foot fetched $350 after a spirited bidding war
    between an antique dealer and a collector -- the collector won; the dealer took
    the top-hat for $100. The rest of it came up and sold, or didn't, and at end of
    the lot, I'd made over $800, which was rent for the month plus beer for the
    weekend plus gas for the truck.
    Craphound bid on and bought more cowboy things -- a box of super-eight cowboy
    movies, the boxes mouldy, the stock itself running to slime; a Navajo blanket; a
    plastic donkey that dispensed cigarettes out of its ass; a big neon armadillo
    sign.
    One of the other nice things about that place over Sotheby's, there was none of
    this waiting thirty days to get a cheque. I queued up with the other pickers
    after the bidding was through, collected a wad of bills, and headed for my
    truck.
    I spotted Craphound loading his haul into a minivan with handicapped plates. It
    looked like some kind of fungus was growing over the hood and side-panels. On
    closer inspection, I saw that the body had been covered in closely glued Lego.
    Craphound popped the hatchback and threw his gear in, then opened the driver's
    side door, and I saw that his van had been fitted out for a legless driver, with
    brake and accelerator levers. A paraplegic I knew drove one just like it.
    Craphound's exoskeleton levered him into the seat, and I watched the eerily
    precise way it executed the macro that started the car, pulled the
    shoulder-belt, put it into drive and switched on the stereo. I heard tape-hiss,
    then, loud as a b-boy cruising Yonge Street, an old-timey cowboy voice: "Howdy
    pardners! Saddle up, we're ridin'!" Then the van backed up and sped out of the
    lot.
    I get into the truck and drove home. Truth be told, I missed the little bastard.
Some people said that we should have run Craphound and his kin off the planet,
    out of the Solar System. They said that it wasn't fair for the aliens to keep us
    in the dark about their technologies. They say that we should have captured a
    ship and reverse-engineered it, built our own and kicked ass.
    Some people!
    First of all, nobody with human DNA could survive a trip in one of those ships.
    They're part of Craphound's people's bodies, as I understand it, and we just
    don't have the right parts. Second of all, they
were
sharing their tech with
    us -- they just weren't giving it away. Fair trades every time.
    It's not as if space was off-limits to us. We can any one of us visit their
    homeworld, just as soon as we figure out how. Only they wouldn't hold our hands
    along the way.
I spent the week haunting the "Secret Boutique," AKA the Goodwill As-Is Centre
    on Jarvis. It's all there is to do between yard sales, and sometimes it makes
    for good finds. Part of my theory of yard-sale karma holds that if I miss one
    day at the thrift shops, that'll be the day they put out the big score. So I hit
    the stores diligently and came up with crapola. I had offended the fates, I
    knew, and wouldn't make another score until I placated them. It was lonely work,
    still and all, and I missed Craphound's good eye and obsessive delight.
    I was