"Baker,_Kage_-_Pueblo,_Colorado_Has_the_Answers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baker Kage)

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Pueblo, Colorado Has the Answers
by Kage Baker
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Copyright (c)2001 by Kage Baker


Fictionwise Contemporary
Science Fiction


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Marybeth Hatta had survived a lot. Not as much as her parents, certainly; her one failed marriage had ended without drama. The fact that she had been a Customer Serviceperson for a financial institution, and had worked her patient way over years to within inches of the glass ceiling before being laid off when the company was purchased and dismantled for Corporate looting -- well, that wasn't noteworthy either, given the state of California's economy.
It _had_ happened to Marybeth three times in a row, however, over a period of twenty years, and even the girl at the Unemployment office had agreed the odds against that were probably high. It looked funny on a resume, too. At the age of forty she found herself with no job, no Wilshire Boulevard apartment, and no prospects at all. Under the circumstances she was grateful to be able to go home to the tiny coastal town where she'd grown up, to do what she'd adamantly refused to do twenty years earlier when her life hadn't been irrelevant: take a job in her parents' store.
Nothing had changed there. Not the stained green linoleum, not the candy display rack with its rolls of tin Lifesavers, not the ceiling fan describing the same wobbling circle it had described since June 1948, not the bright plastic beach toys and bottles of sun lotion. The little town hadn't changed either, with its rusted hotel signs and weatherbeaten cottages. It was lively with tourists on weekends, but by Five P.M. on Sunday afternoon you could still fire a shotgun down Pomeroy Street without hitting a living soul. Once it had made her want to scream with frustration; now the permanence of the past was comforting. She had learned that the future, far from being inevitable, sometimes drains away like water vanishing into sand.
So she was the Branch Postmistress in the little store now, selling stamps and weighing envelopes for the year-round population, who were mostly pensioned retirees living in the trailer park on the edges of the dunes. All day she sat behind the humidor cabinet and watched the bright glare of the sea outside, or watched the fog advance or recede between the old pool hall and the secondhand store.
On this particular afternoon her view was occluded for a moment by an old man limping in. The limp identified him for her, because otherwise he looked like most of her customers: past seventy, in a stained nylon windbreaker, wearing a baseball cap pinned with military insignia. He had neither the pink plastic hearing aid nor the reading glasses in black plastic frames that went with the geriatric uniform, however.
"How are you today, Mr. Lynch?" she inquired.
"So-so. Something gave me the runs last night like you wouldn't believe." He smacked an envelope down on the counter and stared at her earnestly.
"Really."
"I think I inhaled some of that bug spray, that's what I think did it," he affirmed.
"Working in your garden?" This one was proud of his garden, she remembered. He had an acre behind his trailer, enclosed by snow fence to keep the dunes from encroaching. He leaned forward now and his voice dropped to a loud whisper.
"Have you ever heard," he wanted to know, "of a bug or a virus or anything that makes the bottom of corn stalks go _soft_?" Wow, his breath was like a crypt. She tried not to draw back involuntarily as she frowned and shook her head.
"Gosh, no. You mean like, rotten or something?"
"Not rotten, no, they're still green and all right -- but they're all bent over! Like the stalk went soft and they melted, then got hard again. Damnedest thing I ever saw. You ever heard of that?"
She had, in fact. Her gaze darted momentarily to the rack of magazines with titles like _Paranormal Horizon, Journal of the Unproven _and _Alien Truth!!! _But she blinked and replied "No, I can't imagine what would do that."
"I just thought, you being Japanese and all, you might know. Your father might garden or something." Mr. Hatta didn't garden; he sat on the couch in his black bathrobe doing crossword puzzles. So did Mrs. Hatta, in her pink bathrobe. As far as Marybeth could tell, they had done nothing else since she'd been home. Marybeth smiled apologetically and shook her head.
"Nope. No idea."
"Well, I'll tell you who will know." He reached for his wallet. "U.S. Government will, that's who. You know those commercials they put on about writing to Pueblo, Colorado for free Government information on everything? No? They're on at Five A.M. I get up at Four-thirty most mornings, earlier when I got the runs like I did, and you can learn a lot from those. I mail this, they'll send me a free booklet on garden pests special for our area -- this part of the coast right here. Now, isn't that a deal?"
"Sounds great." She weighed the envelope in her hand. "One stamp ought to do it, Mr. Lynch."
"Okey-doke." He counted out change. "You should write to them, you know. Pueblo, Colorado. People don't know about all the free stuff they're missing out on."
"I'll have to remember to do that." She smiled, peeling off a stamp and fixing it to the envelope.
"There's the Post Office Box number right there." He reached out to tap the address insistently. "You want to copy it down before I mail it?"
"Okay, sure." She took a pen and copied out the address on the back of a scrap of paper. When she had finished, he took the envelope and dropped it through the OVERSEAS -- OUT OF STATE slot in the wall.
"She's on her way now, all right," he stated cheerily. "Now, you can sell me a bottle of Milk of Magnesia. The cherry kind."
* * * *
A week later the fan was still going around and Marybeth was arranging the various needlecraft monthly magazines in their places when Mr. Lynch came through the door. He looked troubled.
"Good morning, Mr. Lynch." She looked up from a cover featuring a particularly hideous hooked rug. "What can I do for you today?"
"Well, I sort of thought -- " He waved a booklet at her helplessly. It was printed on newsrag, like a tax form guide. "You remember I sent off to Pueblo, Colorado, for free information on garden pests? Well, they sent it, all right, but I think they must be Army guys wrote it -- the language is awful technical. And I remembered your father said you went to College, so I wondered if you couldn't tell me -- "
"You want me to look at it for you?" Marybeth returned to her seat behind the humidor and held out her hand for the booklet. She skimmed through it, reading about Artichoke Plume Moths, Meadow Spittlebugs, Corn Earworms and a host of others.
Mr. Lynch shifted uneasily from foot to foot.
"And the problem's getting worse," he told her.
"The diarrhea?" She looked up in mild alarm.
"No, the ... the whatever it is. I can't find anything like what's happening to my corn in that book. It's just laying right over."
"Maybe it's jackrabbits." She went on reading.