I
think I'm going to be making my own way home."
The fireman and Billy's mom both stared at me. My cheeks flushed. "Aw, c'mon," I
said. "I'll drive you home."
"I think I prefer the bus," Craphound said.
"It's no trouble at all to give you a lift, friend," the fireman said.
I called it quits for the day, and drove home alone with the truck only
half-filled. I pulled it into the coach-house and threw a tarp over the load and
went inside and cracked a beer and sat on the sofa, watching a nature show on a
desert reclamation project in Arizona, where the state legislature had traded a
derelict mega-mall and a custom-built habitat to an alien for a local-area
weather control machine.
#
The following Thursday, I went to the little crap-auction house on King Street.
I'd put my finds from the weekend in the sale: lower minimum bid, and they took
a smaller commission than Sotheby's. Fine for moving the small stuff.
Craphound was there, of course. I knew he'd be. It was where we met, when he bid
on a case of Lincoln Logs I'd found at a fire-sale.
I'd known him for a kindred spirit when he bought them, and we'd talked
afterwards, at his place, a sprawling, two-storey warehouse amid a cluster of
auto-wrecking yards where the junkyard dogs barked, barked, barked.
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