Read McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 for Free Online Page B

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