"Jack Dann - Ting-A-Ling" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dann Jack)

Jack Dann has written or edited over fifty books, including the international bestseller The Memory Cathedra
His Civil War novel The Silent has been compared to Huckleberry Finn. He's won the Nebula Award, the World
Fantasy Award, and two Ditmar Awards, among others.
He's also been a buddy of mine for twenty-five years, which had absolutely nothing to do with the story you'r
about to read.
For Redshift he presents an absolute treat: an alternate history concerning Marilyn Monroe and James Dea

Ting-a-Ling
Jack Dann

It was the same dream, the same ratcheting, shaking, steaming, choo-chooing dream of b
back on the ghost train with his mother. She is imprisoned in a lead casket in the baggage c
and he knows that she is alive and suffocating. But he can't reach her, even as he runs from
car of the Silver Challenger Express to another. The cars are huge and hollow and endless,
he is exhausted; James Dean, forever the nine-year-old orphan, on his way again-and again
again- to bury his mother in Marion, Indiana.
Mercifully, the whistle of the train rings-a telephone jolting him awake.
"Hello, Jimmy?" The voice hesitant, whispery, far away.
"Marilyn? ..."
"Well, who do you think it is, Pier Angeli?"
"You're a nasty bitch."
"And you're still in love with her, you poor dumb fuck, aren't you."
Fully awake now, he laughed mordantly. "Yeah, I guess I am."
"Jimmy? . . ."
"Yeah?"
"I'm sorry. I love you."
"I love you, too. Are you in Connecticut with the Schwartzes or whatever the rack their
name is?" Jimmy felt around for cigarettes and matches . . . without success. He slept on a
mattress on the floor of the second-floor alcove. Shadows seemed to float around him in the
darkness like clouds.
Marilyn giggled, as if swallowing laughter, and said, "Anti-Semite. You mean the Green
and I'm not staying with them anymore, except to visit and do business. I'm living in New Y
now-like you told me to, remember? I'm at the Waldorf Towers. Pretty flashy, huh? But tha
not where I am this very minute."
"Marilyn ..."
"I'm right here in L.A., and I've got news, and I want to see you." She sounded out of bre
but that was just another one of her signatures.
"I got a race in the morning," Jimmy said, feeling hampered by the length of the phone co
and the darkness as he felt through the litter around his mattress. "It's in Salinas, near Monte
You want to come and watch?"
"Maybe I do . . . maybe I don't."
"Shit, Marilyn. What time is it? I've got to get up at seven o'clock in the morning. And I'v
got to be awake enough so as not to crash into a goddamn wall. And-"
The phone was suddenly dead. Marilyn Monroe was gone.
 Jimmy should have known better. But it was-he got up and flicked on the light switch-tw
o'clock in the morning. Not late for Jimmy when he wasn't racing; he'd often hang out with t
ghoul Maila Nurmi and the ever-present Jack Simpson at Googie's or Schwab's on S
set, which were the only places in L.A. open after midnight, or he'd drive . . . or talk throug
the night to Marilyn, who would call whenever she felt the need.
The lights hurt Jimmy's eyes, and although he hadn't been drinking or doing any drugs,