It’s not what you think, it’s what you see—
It’s not what you see, it’s what you be.
Crow’s feet hurt. He propped them up next to Milo on the railing and let the afternoon sun warm his soles. At times, Minneapolis felt like a small town, but not when you had to walk it. Milo, his tail twitching, examined the bare human feet, sniffing each of them with tremendous concentration.
Crow was feeling sorry for himself. He had no woman, no car, and very little money. Times like these called for a cocaine fantasy, but he resisted. The fantasy, he had learned, became reality. And vice versa. He picked up one of the sheets of paper balanced on his lap and tried, again, to read it. The documents looked good, pages filled with columns of numbers, copies of news articles about the investment potential of rare comic books and baseball cards, biographical data on F. B. Franklin and T. K. Jefferson, the founders and general partners of the Galactic Guardians Fund, plus an impressive foldout page featuring a four-color bar graph projecting the value of golden-age comic books well into the next century. It was a nicely designed package, very sober and official-looking. Crow turned again to the most astonishing page of all—the one on which he had scrawled his own jagged signature. He swayed between a gambler’s greedy joy at the potential windfall and the poker player’s sure knowledge that you’re not a winner until you’re out the door with the cash in your pocket, and sometimes not even then.
He forced his mind to the more immediate and practical problem of transportation. He wouldn’t have the Jag back for a couple of weeks, and maybe not even then unless he could figure out a way to pay for it. In the meantime, did he know someone who might have a spare vehicle? Only one name occurred to him: Sam O'Gara. Crow made a sour face. He hadn’t called Sam in weeks. Could he pick up the phone now and ask to borrow a car? Not yet, he decided. All the shit going down in his life, he wasn’t quite ready for Sam.
A banging at the door interrupted his thoughts. He pulled his feet down off the railing, let the Galactic Guardians Fund documents fall to the floor, and went to answer the door.
It was Debrowski, looking stark in black leather and red lipstick. “You got a beer?”
Crow went to the refrigerator and opened an O’Doul’s. Debrowski wandered out onto the porch and sat in Crow’s chair. “Hi, cat,” she said to Milo. Milo flicked his tail and squinted. Crow handed her the O’Doul’s and leaned his hip against the railing.
“Dressed for action,” he said, looking at the five feet of motorcycle chain wrapped twice around her hips.
“I’ve got a couple business meetings tonight. I'm trying to put together a midwestern tour for the Coldcocks, and they keep running me around. Don’t want to play this town, insist on playing that town, won’t do outdoor—bunch of prima donnas. What the hell happened to rock and roll, anyway? I don’t want to talk about it. How you doing with your buddy Dickie? He pay you?”
Crow pointed at the papers on the floor. Debrowski scooped them up and paged through.
“Comic books?” she said. “What the hell do you know about comic books?”
“Not much,” he said. “This is how Dickie has decided to pay me off.”
She flipped through the pages, frowning. “What the hell have you gotten yourself into, Crow?”
Crow cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, “there was this comic collector named John Jones—”
“John Jones? You got to be kidding me.”
“You want to hear this or not?”
“Sorry.” Debrowski crossed her arms. Crow waited for the sound of clicking chain links to subside, then told her, as best he could remember, the story of the Galactic Guardians.
Debrowski listened, asking few questions, taking tiny sips from her O’Doul’s. When Crow had finished, she said, “So the idea is to rip off some old lady for her brother’s comic books.”
“Something like that,” Crow said gloomily. Repeating Wicky’s sales pitch had underscored its absurdity. “They say she would have just let them rot if they hadn’t made her an offer.”
“Huh.” She scratched Milo behind the ears and drank the last of her beer.
“So what do you think?”
“You really want to know what I think?”
“Yeah,” said Crow, knowing from her tone of voice that he really didn’t.
“I think you’re getting sucked into the sewer. I think you’ll be lucky to come back up with your pockets full of shit. I think Dickie Wicky is leading you around by the nose, and I think you’re letting him do it.”
Crow searched his mind for a withering comeback. “Yeah?” he said.
“Yeah,” said Debrowski. Her “yeah” was the more convincing. She lit a cigarette and let the thick smoke trail from her nostrils.
“What was I supposed to do, break his fingers?”
“I don’t know, Crow. Collection work is a little out of my area. All I know is, this Galactic Guardians thing smells a lot like eau de merde.”
Crow pulled back his left sleeve and held up the gold Rolex. “How does this smell to you?”
Debrowski shook her head. “It’s not you, Crow. It stinks. You get it from Dickie?”
“Collateral.”
“Right. I hope it’s real. Listen, I know a guy that’s into comic books in a big way. Natch Jorgeson. Has a little shop down on Fourth, just up the street. Do me a favor and go see him, ask him what he thinks of these 'Galactic Guardians.' You want me to give him a call?”
Crow looked at the agreement he had signed. He didn’t want to know any more about the Galactic Guardians. The whole deal was making him queasy. He started to tell Debrowski to forget it, but she was already on the phone, punching numbers.
“In the first place, dude, the nums are all wrong,” said Natch, fingering his gold earring.
Crow asked, “What do you mean? Which numbers?”
“All the ones you told me, and probably the rest of'em too.” Natch paged through the Galactic Guardians prospectus and agreement. “This is some weird shit, man. People actually buy this, huh?”
“I guess they must.”
He squinted and stabbed a long-nailed forefinger toward Crow’s chest. “How long you known L.D.?”
“Debrowski? Not long. About a year.”
“You two an item?”
“We're friends.”
“Yeah? She likes you, man. I could hear it in her voice. You don’t know shit about comics, do you?”
Crow shook his head. He had been sitting right there when Debrowski had made the phone call to Natch, and he hadn’t heard anything in her voice.
Natch pulled his bare feet off the countertop and stood up. He circled the end of the counter, locked the front door, and motioned Crow to follow him toward the back of the shop. “Show you something, dude.”
Natch was a thin, pale, angular creature wearing vintage bell bottoms and a T-shirt that read: HARD ROCK CAFE—MIDDLE EARTH.
Long gray-blond hair radiated out from a bald patch at the top of his head and trickled down over his shoulders. According to Debrowski, he’d been in the comic book business since the late sixties. His storefront business had survived several location and name changes—its present incarnation was called Ephemera—but it had retained that special sixties flavor. Perhaps it was a cone of strawberry incense burning somewhere among the piles of magazines, or the half- smoked joint propped behind Natch’s right ear. Crow followed him past uneven stacks of comic books and magazines. Overfilled boxes were jammed into narrow, sagging shelves, and piles of assorted magazines, books, and newspapers covered the baseboards. Dust bunnies scurried for cover. Natch pushed a stack of cardboard boxes to the side, revealing a metal door. He selected a key from the ring hanging at his belt, unlocked and opened the door. An invisible cloud of cool air touched Crow’s face. Natch flipped up a light switch, illuminating a bright white stairwell.
“Check it out, my man,” said Natch as he descended the steel staircase. “Close the door behind you. This is a controlled environment—constant fifty-five degrees and sixty percent relative humidity. I’ve got an electrostatic precipitator that’ll knock the lint right off a gnat’s pecker.” Crow closed the door and followed Natch down the steps. He could hear the hum of the climate control kicking in, restoring the atmosphere to its prescribed parameters.
The basement of Ephemera was a single rectangular room twenty feet long by twelve feet wide. The walls were pure white and, with the exception of a row of filtered vents, featureless. A set of flat files, chin high, ran the length of the room on two sides. A flat white table, nothing on it but a blue notebook, sat in the center of the room. After the barely controlled clutter and reek of the shop upstairs, this was like stepping into the far future. Crow gave Natch the stunned look he was waiting for.
“This is where I keep all my good shit,” said Natch, showing a set of long, smoke-stained teeth. “Check this out.” He opened a file drawer, gently lifted out a flat plastic package, and set it on the table. It was a comic book, yellow cover, Batman and Robin swinging from ropes high over Gotham City.
“You were talking about Batman #1? Well, there it is. Kind of gives you goose bumps, don’t it?”
Crow leaned closer and inspected the comic. It looked to be in perfect condition, but it also had a dated look, like a visitor from the past. “This is worth eighty thousand dollars?”
Natch shook his head. “You don’t get it, do you? Man, I look at these things and I get a rush you wouldn’t believe. Guys like you, all you want to know is how much it’s worth. That’s how come this business has gotten so fucked up the last decade. You know those prices you were quoted? They told you this comic is worth eighty thousand, right? Well, I am ever so fucking sorry to tell you this, my man, but comics like these do not sell for, they trade for.”
“I don’t get the difference.”
“Look, man, this here is what you call a key issue. It’s got historical significance, it’s got a primary character, and there're only about a dozen other mint-condition copies on planet Earth. But if I wanted to sell this comic for cash money, I could get fifteen, maybe twenty thousand for it—assuming I could even find a buyer. And this is the good shit.”
“How come I keep hearing these big numbers thrown around?”
“Those are trades, man. All these old comics get rated by Overstreet’s or one of the other price guides. They're worth anything from their cover price up to maybe ten or twenty thousand dollars. If that. There are maybe four or five very rare and important comics that could sell for fifty thousand in perfect condition. Not many comics are worth more than a few hundred. When you hear about these huge figures, a hundred thousand dollars, what you’re hearing is what the comic traded for. That means that a guy who trades Batman #1 for eighty thousand dollars probably got a little bit of cash, if any, plus a stack of comic books that is supposed to be worth the eighty thousand.”
“And the comics he gets aren’t worth that much?”
“It’s in everybody’s interest to pump up the nums, my friend. Except for the small collector. The guy who really loves comics, he gets screwed. Big trades kick up the value for the pros but leave the little guy sucking air. But nobody ever pays a hundred thousand cash for a comic book. I'm not saying it won’t ever happen—with these auction houses getting into the act, there are some real cash-for-comics sales happening, but the true nums aren’t like that. That’s one of the reasons comic values have been inflating like crazy the past few years. You get a few responsible dealers that say 'Now wait a minute,' but those guys get left in the dust. It’s like the stock market, only without the SEC.”
“I can see why Dickie likes it.”
“That’s the dude sold you this shit? Those guys are raising four hundred thou, spending three quarters of it to acquire a collection that sounds like a dealer’s wet dream and probably is. You ever hear of Edgar Church? This John Jones character sounds an awful lot like Edgar Church. Too similar. The Church collection is legend in the comics business. It surfaced about twenty years ago. Hit the market like a goddamn tidal wave. We’ll never see a collection like that again, my friend. Only in our dreams. This Galactic Guardian thing? Dreams, dude.”
Crow nodded glumly, staring at the Batman comic on the table. A memory tugged at him.
“Do you have any old Spider-Man comics?” he asked.
Natch said, “Spidey? I’ve got most of the older ones. You have a particular issue in mind?”
“There was this one with a green guy that flew around on a little rocket. The Green Goblin.”
Natch put the Batman comic away, then opened the blue notebook and flipped through it. The pages were covered with tiny, cramped entries. It looked like an accountant’s ledger. He ran his finger down a page of entries, stopped, and said, “Far out.” He went to a file on the other side of the room, opened it, and handed Crow a comic book in a plastic sleeve. “Number fourteen,” he said. “Introduces the Green Goblin.”
Crow looked at the cover. Spider-Man clinging to the top of a cave, being attacked by the Green Goblin. He felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. He had once owned this comic book, or one exactly like it. It was as if he was looking through a window back onto his childhood. He looked at Natch, who was grinning.
“Can I take it out of the plastic?”
Natch smiled and said, “Maybe there’s hope for you yet, dude.”
The walk home from Ephemera seemed to take hours. Crow let himself in, walked out onto his porch, picked up Milo, draped him over his shoulders, and stood watching the traffic pass below. After a time, Milo grew impatient and inserted a set of claws into his perch. Crow bent forward and let the cat dismount. What the hell, he decided. He swallowed his pride and phoned his old man to see if he could borrow a car. The way he was feeling, there wasn’t much to swallow.
Sam O'Gara answered the phone with his characteristic unintelligible croak.
“Sam, this is Joe.”
“Son!”
“How you doing?”
“I got a devil in my belly. Doctor says it’s acid, on account of the snoose, but I think it’s the Big C, son.”
“Sounds rough. Say, you got a vehicle I could borrow for a few days?”
“Your old dad’s dying, and you want to borrow his car?”
“Sam, you’ve been dying since the day I met you. You’ll still be dying ten years from now. I’ll have it back before then.”
He listened to his father’s harsh breath.
“ Welp, I got this big red fucker you can use.”
Sam O'Gara lived across the river in East Saint Paul—an hour and a half on the bus—in a former shotgun shack that he had expanded in every direction. It looked like a piece of dirty popcorn. Sam shared his home with four cats, two dogs, and an occasional girlfriend. He boasted that he could make one cat last longer than any three women.
Sam made his living as a shade-tree mechanic and used-car dealer, buying, fixing, and reselling as many cars as it took to meet the monthly food bill. He always had two or three vehicles in various states of disassembly in his backyard and had been at war with the city housing inspectors ever since Crow could remember. “Ain’t no car. It’s a sculpture,” was one of his favorite and most effective lines.
Crow found him back by the alley, with most of his wiry little body inside the engine compartment of an old Ford flatbed truck. It was the only red vehicle in sight, so Crow assumed that this was the “red fucker” he had come to borrow. The body looked as if it had been painted in the dark with a stiff brush. A matching set of spotted yellow mutts that looked more like hyenas than dogs jumped up from their resting place in the shade of a rusted-out blue Chevy and charged. Crow froze and waited, ready to protect his groin with one hand and his throat with the other if they failed to recognize him.
Sam looked up and shouted, “Chester! Festus!” The dogs stopped a few feet away, growling. Crow had to run this gauntlet every time he visited Sam. He slowly lowered himself into a crouch. The dogs consulted each other, then one of them came forward slowly, sniffed his proffered hand, and started to wag its tail. The other mutt joined in. Crow rubbed the dogs' heads, stood up, and joined his father. He leaned over the grille. Sam was pulling the valve cover.
“What’s going on?” Crow asked.
“Just a little adjustment I got to make.” This was a typical Sam O'Gara ploy. If he wanted to borrow the truck, Crow would have to spend the next hour passing tools over the fender, listening to the old man’s bullshit.
“I just need it so it runs, Sam.”
“Yep. Just a litde adjustment’s all she needs. You want to grab that fucker for me?” He pointed a grease-blackened forefinger toward a row of tools on the far fender. Crow handed him an open-end wrench.
“Not that fucker, t'other one.”
Crow had never heard his father call a tool by any other name. He put his hand on a smaller wrench.
“That’s the fucker,” Sam said, looking full into his son’s face for the first time.
As always, Crow felt a javelin of recognition pierce his gut. Strip away the wrinkles, whiten the teeth and eyes, and add a few pounds—it was as if he was looking into a mirror made of slow glass, seeing his future in this foul-mouthed old man. Crow had been eighteen years old the first time he met his father. The old man had come to watch him graduate from Westland High School. Until then, Crow had not even known he was alive. The first thing the old man had said to him was, “I'm the fucker knocked up your mama, son.”
Since then, they had maintained a cautious and distant relationship, trading favors back and forth, keeping the scales in balance. Crow had never been comfortable with his father, never felt quite the way he imagined a son should feel, but he stayed in touch. Whenever he asked the old man for help with something, it was with a measure of shame, as if suddenly he was not complete without the part that had sired him.
“How come you need wheels all of a sudden, son? Thought you had some fancy-ass fucker you was driving.”
“It’s in the shop.”
“Shoulda brought it on over. I’d a fixed 'er up for you.”
“It’s a Jaguar, Sam.”
“So what?” He pulled a tin of Skoal from his pocket, snapped his forefinger against the tin top, opened the can, and took a pinch between grease-blackened fingers.
“So it’d be like asking a veterinarian to take out my appendix, that’s what.”
Sam inserted the Skoal into his cheek, then pulled a Pall Mall from behind his ear, lit it with his battered stainless-steel Zippo. Crow could almost feel the double dose of nicotine ripping through the old man’s arteries. “You got trouble with your appendix, son?”