CINDY WAS A SUPREMELY BEAUTIFUL WOMAN, AND SHE SAT not three inches from me, having just reduced a large salami to a pile of scrapings.
My heart should have soared at the mere sight of her, but instead my heart sank like a lead turtle. I felt like I had ingested the lead turtle while Cindy was ingesting salami.
What did it was her indifference to Big John Flint. How could I be falling in love with an antique dealer who didn’t want to hear the story about Big John? Most of the antique dealers in America sat in their stores all day, gasping like fish out of water for want of the latest news about Big John.
In fact, I had the latest news, which was that he had bought a small town in north Georgia and was dismantling it house by house, mainly to get the antebellum fireplace moldings. His passion for duck decoys was as nothing to his passion for antebellum fireplaces. There had only been twenty-seven people left in the town and all of them were tired of it, so they sold it to Big John.
So far as I know, Big John Connolly has never done anything as interesting as buying a town in order to get fifty or sixty fireplace moldings.
I don’t mean to suggest that the general public should be expected to judge the two men accurately. The general public knows nothing of Big John Flint, a quasi-mythical figure even in Zanesville.
But Cindy wasn’t the general public. She was an antique dealer, whose stock, though predictable, was far from hopeless. She had had an ivory-tipped elephant goad, for example. I bought it instantly and sold it to Boog two days later.
In certain moods Boog could be persuaded to buy almost anything. Objects and people constantly vie for space in his houses.
“Hell, I got a daughter who’s an elephant,” he said, handing me $400 and waving the goad playfully in the direction of Linda Miller, a sweet teenager who happened to be going through a pudgy phase.
“Get fucked, Daddy!” Linda said, whacking at him with a razor strop I had sold him a few days earlier. It had not yet made its way off the kitchen table.
The Miller kids were scrappers. Linda’s whack caused Boog to spill most of his breakfast toddy on a suit that was the color of fresh slime.
Micah Leviticus was sitting next to Boss, eating a bowl of Cheerios and watching an early morning Mary Tyler Moore rerun on his tiny TV. I glanced at it just in time to watch Mary fling her cap up to be freeze-framed. The sight seemed to cheer Micah immensely. His tiny face lit up.
“Look,” he said. “It’s Mary.”
We all looked. It was Mary, sure enough.
“Don’t you love her perky smile?” Micah said.
Boss reached over and ruffled Micah’s hair.
“It’s because of you I’m fat—it’s your genes,” Linda said, still whacking her father. “I wish I didn’t love you!”
Boss laughed, a loud immediate peal of delight that filled the kitchen. It startled Micah so much that he blinked and looked up from his milk-logged Cheerios, looking almost as out of it as had the Congressman from Michigan, when Pencil Penrose’s two black pugs trotted across the seventeenth-century table and began to eat his coq au vin.