"This is
for me, and you're keeping the glasses. And I'll look at this and feel. . ."
"You understand," Craphound said, looking somehow relieved.
And I _did_. I understood that an alien wearing a cowboy hat and sixguns and
giving them away was a poem and a story, and a thirtyish bachelor trying to
spend half a month's rent on four glasses so that he could remember his
Grandma's kitchen was a story and a poem, and that the disused fairground
outside Calgary was a story and a poem, too.
"You're craphounds!" I said. "All of you!"
Craphound smiled so I could see his gums and I put down the cowboy trunk and
clapped my hands.
#
Scott recovered from his shock by spending the night at his office, crunching
numbers talking on the phone, and generally getting while the getting was good.
He had an edge -- no one else knew that they were going.
He went pro later that week, opened a chi-chi boutique on Queen Street, and
hired me on as chief picker and factum factotum.
Scott was not Billy the Kid. Just another Bay Street shyster with a cowboy
jones. From the way they come down and spend, there must be a million of them.
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