"Jack Dann - The Diamond Pit" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dann Jack)

Charleston, which had just become all the rage, and all hell broke loose with
everybody swaying back and forth, slapping their knees, swiveling around on
the balls of their feet, and falling over like they'd been dancing in a
marathon for two weeks. After a while I started playing slower tunes again
like "All by Myself" and "Who's Sorry Now," and then even a little Lizst and
Bach, and the party broke up, and --
"You can't sleep on the piana."
I don't know how he did it, but somehow Skip got me up and dragged me
or walked me or rolled me toward my room. I remember seeing open doors that
led into rooms with pool tables and ping-pong tables. I remember a kitchen and
gymnasium and a room that was so bright I could barely look into it. I passed
the fabled library that God had provided with all the classics but no
up-to-date _Saturday Evening Posts_, and I remember feeling a pressure around
my temples; I imagined that Joel and I were back in the Moth, and the engine
was on fire, and my forehead was hot, and then something squeezed my stomach,
and from far away Joel or Skip or somebody said, "Hot damn," and I dreamed
about beautiful Phoebe looking down at me from the perfect golf-course gardens
and tennis courts of Heaven. Her eyes, set in her sun-bronzed face like
perfectly shaped transparent gems, were impossibly blue. Sky blue freedom.
And then I woke up in Skip's room.
"Drink this. Hair of the dog."
Skip probably looked worse than I did. I couldn't see him very well --
my head was pulsing with pain. I guess I wasn't used to drinking real hooch.
The rotgut I'd been drinking since '20 hadn't killed me, but it sure felt like
the vintage Johnny Walker and Chivas Regal would.
I drank the tomato juice and brew, which Skip called "Virginia Dare."
It went down like razor blades, and when I stopped being sick, I asked him why
he'd decorated most every surface in the room with a towel -- there was a
white bath towel neatly tacked over his desk, a white dish towel on the bed
table, a red face towel placed like a doily over the back of his stuffed
chair, another added color and warmth to a utilitarian tallboy, and towels of
various sizes and hues decorated the inside of every drawer open to my view.
"I learned how to do that when I was a kid. I spent a few years in an
orphanage." He grinned. "Well, not exactly an orphanage. A private school. But
same difference. After Dad popped it, and Mom decided she'd follow by sticking
her head in a stove, Dad's best friend kept me in the best schools for as long
as my inheritance money held out, which wasn't long."
That was more than I wanted to know about Skip's schooldays, but he
seemed cheerful about it all, even about finding his mother, who he said was
"blue as a curtain." He said he'd learned about making things cozy in "the
orphanage," and he'd got used to decorating with towels.
"Thanks for the bed," I said, "but you didn't have to sleep on the
floor. You could've slept in my room, if you couldn't drag me that far."
"I could barely get you _this_ far," Skip said. "You're heavier than
you look. But I never sleep anywhere but right here. It's as much home as
anything else. Some of the other guys move around. You know -- "
I didn't, and I could feel the nausea working its way up to my throat.
" -- sleep with each other, like that. No girls here, what else you
going to do? Except get really friendly with Madam Palm and her five
daughters." He grinned again, looking pop-eyed and childlike, and wagged his