"Dickson, Gordon - Dragon And The George Txt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

They drove on for a little while longer without talk- ing.

"There it is," said Jim, nodding to the right, off the highway.

Chapter 2

The Bellevue Trailer Court had not been laid out with an eye to attractiveness and none of its own- ers in the past twenty years had done anything to amend the oversight. Its present proprietor, in his fif- ties, was as tall and heavy as Jim Eckert, but his skin was now too large for his long face. The flesh had fallen into folds and creases, and the Prussian blue shirt he wore ballooned loosely about him. His faded maroon pants were drawn into deep puckers at his waist by a thin black belt. His breath smelled as if he had just been snacking on overripe cheese, and in the sun-hot interior of the empty mobile home he showed Jim and Angie this aspect of him was hard to ignore.

"Well," he said, waving at the mobile home walls about them, "this is it. I'll leave you to look it over. Just come back to the office when you're ready."

He took his breath outside, leaving the door open behind him. Jim looked at Angie, but she was run- ning her fingers over the cracked varnish on one of the cupboard doors above the sink.

"It's pretty bad, isn't it?" Jim remarked.

It was. Obviously the mobile home was in the last stages of its life. The floor canted visibly behind Jim and as visibly canted toward the trailer's other end, where Angie now stood. The sink was stained and gritty, the dusty windows sat loosely in their fram- ing, and the walls were too thin to give anything but minimum insulation.

"It'd be like camping out in the snow when winter comes," Jim said.

He thought of the ice-hard January of a Minnesota winter, both of them twenty-three miles from Riveroak College and the Gorp running on threadbare tires plus a wom-out motor. He thought of summer sessions at the college and the baking heat of a Minnesota July as they both sat in here with endless test papers to correct. But Angie did not answer.

She was opening and shutting the door to the trail- er's shower-and-toilet stall. Or, trying to shut it. The door did not seem to latch very well. Her shoulders in the blue jacket were small and square. He thought of suggesting they give up, go back and check the list- ings at the Student Housing Bureau once more for an apartment around the college. But Angie would not admit defeat that easily. He knew her. Besides, she knew he knew it was hopeless, their trying to find any- thing the two of them could pay for close in.

Some of the dreary grittiness of the mobile home seemed to blow through his soul on a bleak wind of despair. For a moment he felt a sort of desperate hun- ger for the kind of life that had existed in the Euro- pean Middle Ages of his medievalist studies. A time in which problems took the shapes of flesh-and-blood opponents, instead of impalpable situations arising out of academic cloak-and-dagger politics. A time when, if you ran across a Shorles, you could deal with him with a sword, instead of with words. It was un- real that they should be in this situation simply be- cause of an economic situation and because Shorles did not want to disturb the political balance of his de- partment.

"Come on, Angie," Jim said. "We can find some- thing better than this."

She wheeled around. Under her dark hair, her brown eyes were grim.

"You said you'd leave it up to me, this last week."

"I know..."

"For two months we hunted around the campus, the way you wanted. Staff meetings for the fall se- mester start tomorrow. There isn't any more time."

"We could still look, nights."

"Not anymore. And I'm not going back to that co- op. We're going to have a place of our own."

"But... look at this place, Angie!" he said. "And it's twenty-three miles from the campus. The Gorp could throw a rod tomorrow!"

"If he does, we'll fix him.'And we'll fix up this place. You know we can do it if we want to!"

He yielded. They went back to the trailer park of- fice and the manager.

"We'll take it," Angie told him.

"Thought you'd like it," said the manager, getting papers out of a drawer in his littered desk. "How'd you happen to hear about it, anyway? I haven't even advertised it yet."

"Your former tenant was the sister-in-law of a friend of mine," Jim answered, "guy I play volley- ball with. When she had to move to Missouri, he told us her mobile home was available."