"Scott Bradfield - Dazzle Redux" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradfield Scott)

Times like this Dazzle felt like wandering down to PCH and hurling himself under
the first eighteen-wheeler that came along.

"Not quite, Heckle," Dazzle pronounced finally, with all the parental patience
he could muster. "But at least you pointed to a geometric figure, and not a dead
beetle like last time. So what say we sleep on it, and take another shot in the
morning. As I've told you before --Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals wasn't
written in one day."

"Maybe I'm not all I should be in the Family Skills Department," Dazzle
confessed that night to his erstwhile mate, Edwina. "But getting through to
those kids of yours is like having a conversation with a block of wood, I swear.
If I try to instruct them in the most basic math and science skills, they're not
interested. If I try to teach them which way to look when crossing the street,
they're still not interested. If I try to point out the most obvious cultural
contradictions of multinational capitalism, why, forget about it. They're really
not interested. If you can't eat it or fuck it, it's not important, that's their
attitude. And you want to know what pisses me off most? They just may be right.
Maybe fucking and eating really are the ne plus ultra of canine development. And
in the long run of history, I'm the biggest boob in town."

Dazzle's mate Edwina was a pretty faithful bitch (at least since menopause,
anyway) and had long provided Dazzle everything he considered crucial to a
long-term relationship. She never questioned his judgment. She rarely bit him
hard enough to draw blood. And she never once kicked him out of bed for snoring.
At the same time, though, Edwina wasn't the sort of dog who knew how to hold up
her end of a conversation. In fact, whenever Dazzle started pouring out his most
heartfelt anxieties, she promptly curled into a fetal ball and fell fast asleep.

"Growwwl," Edwina muttered, while the whites of her eyes flickered out the weird
morse of dreams. "Wolves aren't welcome 'round these parts. And neither are you
mailmen."

Nevertheless, Dazzle found something infinitely comforting about a good night's
sleep with Edwina. Her ambient heat soothed the knots in his shoulders, and her
inattention dissolved the perplexities in his brain. As a result, Dazzle awoke
every morning filled with fresh intentions and resolve.

"I'm going to be more understanding and thoughtful," Dazzle would assure
himself, performing his ablutions in the piney-smelling creek. "And I won't be
so quick to lose my temper, either." But once Dazzle had shaken himself dry with
a few soul-rattling shivers and climbed back up the flinty hill, his resolutions
always vanished with the breeze. He saw his lazy foster progeny licking
themselves around the extinguished campfire. He smelled the unburied heaps of
sour bones and dead mice. And he heard the casual yips of random lovemaking fill
the rough-hewn settlement with a sort of ambient hum. ("Roll over, sweetheart,"
or "You kids go chase a gopher or something. Mum and Dad need a little alone
time -- dig?") If there was one thing that really got Dazzle's dander up, it was
watching his fellow dogs take the best things in life for granted, such as
liberty, well-stocked provisions, and properly functioning reproductive organs.