Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (phonics books TXT) 📕

but communicated with one another by means of this universal
tongue of weights and measures and purity.

The clerks who'd tended Alan's many stores -- the used clothing store in
the Beaches, the used book-store in the Annex, the collectible tin-toy
store in Yorkville, the antique shop on Queen Street -- had both
benefited from and had their patience tried by Alan's discursive
nature. Alan had pretended never to notice the surreptitious rolling of
eyes and twirling fingers aimed templewise among his employees when he
got himself warmed up to a good oration, but in truth very little ever
escaped his attention. His customers loved his little talks, loved the
way he could wax rhapsodic about the tortured prose in a Victorian
potboiler, the nearly erotic curve of a beat-up old table leg, the
voluminous cuffs of an embroidered silk smoking jacket. The clerks who
listened to Alan's lectures went on to open their own stores all about
town, and by and large, they did very well.

He'd put the word out when he bought the house on Wales Avenue to all
his protégés: Wooden bookcases! His cell-phone rang every day, bringing
news of another wooden bookcase found at this flea market, that thrift
store, this rummage sale or estate auction.

He had a man he used part-time, Tony, who ran a small man-with-van
service, and when the phone rang, he'd send Tony over to his protégé's
shop with his big panel van to pick up the case and deliver it to the
cellar of the house on Wales Avenue, which was ramified by cold
storages, root cellars, disused coal chutes and storm cellars. By the
time Alan had finished with his sanding, every nook and cranny of the
cellar was packed with wooden bookcases of every size and description
and repair.

Alan worked through the long Toronto winter at his sanding. The house
had been gutted by the previous owners, who'd had big plans for the
building but had been tempted away by a job in Boston. They'd had to
sell fast, and no amount of realtor magic -- flowers on the dining-room
table, soup simmering on the stove -- could charm away the essential
dagginess of the gutted house, the exposed timbers with sagging wires
and conduit, the runnels gouged in the floor by careless draggers of
furniture. Alan got it for a song, and was delighted by his fortune.

He was drunk on the wood, of course, and would have paid much more had
the realtor noticed this, but Alan had spent his whole life drunk on
trivial things from others' lives that no one else noticed and he'd
developed the alcoholic's knack of disguising his intoxication. Alan
went to work as soon as the realtor staggered off, reeling with a New
Year's Day hangover. He pulled his pickup truck onto the frozen lawn,
unlocked the Kryptonite bike lock he used to secure the camper bed, and
dragged out his big belt sander and his many boxes of sandpaper of all
grains and sizes, his heat strippers and his jugs of caustic chemical
peeler. He still had his jumbled, messy place across town in a
nondescript two-bedroom on the Danforth, would keep on paying the rent
there until his big sanding project was done and the house on Wales
Avenue was fit for habitation.

Alan's sanding project: First, finish gutting the house. Get rid of the
substandard wiring, the ancient, lead-leaching plumbing, the cracked
tile and water-warped crumbling plaster. He filled a half-dozen
dumpsters, working with Tony and Tony's homie Nat, who was happy to help
out in exchange for cash on the barrelhead, provided that he wasn't
required to report for work on two consecutive days, since he'd need one
day to recover from the heroic drinking he'd do immediately after Alan
laid the cash across his palm.

Once the house was gutted to brick and timber and delirious wood, the
plumbers and the electricians came in and laid down their straight
shining ducts and pipes and conduit.

Alan tarped the floors and brought in the heavy sandblaster and stripped
the age and soot and gunge off of the brickwork throughout, until it
glowed red as a golem's ass.

Alan's father, the mountain, had many golems that called him home. They
lived round the other side of his father and left Alan and his brothers
alone, because even a golem has the sense not to piss off a mountain,
especially one it lives in.

Then Alan tackled the timbers, reaching over his head with palm-sanders
and sandpaper of ever finer grains until the timbers were as smooth as
Adirondack chairs, his chest and arms and shoulders athrob with the
agony of two weeks' work. Then it was the floorwork, but *not the floors
themselves*, which he was saving for last on the grounds that they were
low-hanging fruit.

This materialized a new lecture in his mind, one about the proper role
of low-hanging fruit, a favorite topic of MBAs who'd patronize his
stores and his person, giving him unsolicited advice on the care and
feeding of his shops based on the kind of useless book-learning and
jargon-slinging that Fortune 100 companies apparently paid big bucks
for. When an MBA said "low-hanging fruit," he meant "easy pickings,"
something that could and should be snatched with minimal effort. But
*real* low-hanging fruit ripens last, and should be therefore picked as
late as possible. Further, picking the low-hanging fruit first meant
that you'd have to carry your bushel basket higher and higher as the day
wore on, which was plainly stupid. Low-hanging fruit was meant to be
picked last. It was one of the ways that he understood people, and one
of the kinds of people that he'd come to understand. That was the game,
after all -- understanding people.

So the floors would come last, after the molding, after the stairs,
after the railings and the paneling. The railings, in particular, were
horrible bastards to get clean, covered in ten or thirty coats of enamel
of varying colors and toxicity. Alan spent days working with a wire
brush and pointed twists of steel wool and oozing stinging paint
stripper, until the grain was as spotless and unmarked as the day it
came off the lathe.

*Then* he did the floors, using the big rotary sander first. It had been
years since he'd last swung a sander around -- it had been when he
opened the tin-toy shop in Yorkville and he'd rented one while he was
prepping the place. The technique came back to him quickly enough, and
he fell into a steady rhythm that soon had all the floors cool and dry
and soft with naked, exposed woody heartmeat. He swept the place out
and locked up and returned home.

The next day, he stopped at the Portuguese contractor-supply on
Ossington that he liked. They opened at five a.m., and the men behind
the counter were always happy to sketch out alternative solutions to his
amateur construction problems, they never mocked him for his
incompetence, and always threw in a ten percent "contractor's discount"
for him that made him swell up with irrational pride that confused
him. Why should the son of a mountain need affirmation from runty
Portugees with pencil stubs behind their ears and scarred fingers? He
picked up a pair of foam-rubber knee pads and a ten-kilo box of
lint-free shop rags and another carton of disposable paper masks.

He drove to the house on Wales Avenue, parked on the lawn, which was now
starting to thaw and show deep muddy ruts from his tires. He spent the
next twelve hours crawling around on his knees, lugging a tool bucket
filled with sandpaper and steel wool and putty and wood-crayons and shop
rags. He ran his fingertips over every inch of floor and molding and
paneling, feeling the talc softness of the sifted sawdust, feeling for
rough spots and gouges, smoothing them out with his tools. He tried
puttying over the gouges in the flooring that he'd seen the day he took
possession, but the putty seemed like a lie to him, less honest than the
gouged-out boards were, and so he scooped the putty out and sanded the
grooves until they were as smooth as the wood around them.

Next came the beeswax, sweet and shiny. It almost broke his heart to
apply it, because the soft, newly exposed wood was so deliciously tender
and sensuous. But he knew that wood left to its own would eventually
chip and splinter and yellow. So he rubbed wax until his elbows ached,
*massaged* the wax into the wood, buffed it with shop rags so that the
house shone.

Twenty coats of urethane took forty days -- a day to coat and a day to
dry. More buffing and the house took on a high shine, a slippery
slickness. He nearly broke his neck on the slippery staircase treads,
and the Portuguese helped him out with a bag of clear grit made from
ground walnut shells. He used a foam brush to put one more coat of
urethane on each tread of the stairs, then sprinkled granulated walnut
shells on while it was still sticky. He committed a rare error in
judgment and did the stairs from the bottom up and trapped himself on
the third floor, with its attic ceilings and dormer windows, and felt
like a goddamned idiot as he curled up to sleep on the cold, hard,
slippery, smooth floor while he waited for his stairs to dry. The
urethane must be getting to his head.

The bookcases came out of the cellar one by one. Alan wrestled them onto
the front porch with Tony's help and sanded them clean, then turned them
over to Tony for urethane and dooring.

The doors were UV-filtering glass, hinged at the top and surrounded by
felt on their inside lips so that they closed softly. Each one had a
small brass prop-rod on the left side that could brace it open. Tony had
been responsible for measuring each bookcase after he retrieved it from
Alan's protégés' shops and for sending the measurements off to a glazier
in Mississauga.

The glazier was technically retired, but he'd built every display case
that had ever sat inside any of Alan's shops and was happy to make use
of the small workshop that his daughter and son-in-law had installed in
his garage when they retired him to the burbs.

The bookcases went into the house, along each wall, according to a
system of numbers marked on their backs. Alan had used Tony's
measurements and some CAD software to come up with a permutation of
stacking and shouldering cases that had them completely covering every
wall -- except for the wall by the mantelpiece in the front parlor, the
wall over the countertop in the kitchen, and the wall beside the
staircases -- to the ceiling.

He and Tony didn't speak much. Tony was thinking about whatever people
who drive moving vans think about, and Alan was thinking about the story
he was building the house to write in.

May smelled great in Kensington Market. The fossilized dog shit had
melted and washed away in the April rains, and the smells were all
springy ones, loam and blossoms and spilled tetrapak fruit punch left
behind by the pan-ethnic street-hockey league that formed up
spontaneously in front of his house. When the winds blew from the east,
he smelled the fish stalls on Spadina, salty and redolent of Chinese
barbecue spices. When it blew from the north, he smelled baking bread in
the kosher bakeries and sometimes a rare whiff of roasting garlic from
the pizzas in the steaming ovens at Massimo's all the way up on
College. The western winds smelled of