"Andy Duncan - Fortitude" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duncan Andy)

fussing with my leg, I suppose, though I saw only the top of his helmet
and his mud-encrusted shoulders moving. I could look only at Papa. Angelo
straightened, ripping a long strip of white fabric from a roll, then
ducked again, muttering."Jesus God. Hold on, Colonel. This'll be over in a
sec."
"Just look at me, Papa." I tried to laugh. Angelo reached up to my face
and daubed at my lips with a handkerchief. "Look at me. Lying helpless in
the goddamn mud."
Papa stiffened, brought his invisible chair back down to all fours with a
thunk I could almost hear. "No public man uses coarse speech, Georgie."
I flushed -- the first sensation I had felt since the shot, hot and full
in the face. "No, sir."
"Helpless," Papa said, and looked away from me. Crawling through him,
Private Angelo knelt at what might have been the corner of the study,
tugged at his pants, and began to piss, spattering the dirt and himself.
"Papa, I couldn't even walk to the foxhole! The private here had to carry
-- " Papa looked back at me, stern. "Had to drag me," I finished.
Angelo moved well away from his muddy pissoir and sat in the dirt, arms
clasping his knees, chin resting on arms, staring at me.
"Hold on, Colonel," Private Angelo whispered.
"Papa," I said. "Papa, I've been here before."
His eyes narrowed, and he leaned forward. "What's that, Georgie?"
"Here, in this shell hole. Years before. I'm doing it all over again,
Papa, everything. I don't know whether it's my will or God's will or fate,
but -- I've got another chance, Papa."
"Another chance," Papa said, rubbing his chin and looking up, toward the
east. His face flickered with reflected gunfire.
Private Angelo rubbed his face and muttered, "Christ Almighty, I bet
they're ice fishing at home."
"You know, I was almost a soldier once, Georgie ... more than thirty years
ago."
"You were a soldier, Papa. You commanded 'A' Company at VMI. You led the
cadets in Philadelphia, at the centennial parade."
Now Papa and Angelo talked at once, only not quite. They paused between
sentences, and overlapped their speeches only slightly, so that the effect
was of two impatient, self-centered people having a conversation, or of
one person speaking and the next person, translating. Papa was a trained
public speaker, and was telling a story long familiar to both of us, but
Angelo was halting, less sure, speaking mostly to himself.
"Parades. That's not soldiering, son. Before you were born, before I met
your mother, I signed up to join the Hicks Expedition, to fight in the
Sudan against the Mahdi."
"You know what everybody in the unit says about you, Colonel? I'll tell
you. We think you're the all-time eternal brass-plated bastard from hell."
"I read in the papers they were recruiting in Los Angeles, and during a
recess in yet another interminable civil case I told my second to resume
without me if I was delayed, and I trotted downstairs and ran down the
street, coattails flying, to the hotel listed in the ad."
"But you know what else we say about you, Colonel? We tell all the other
guys that you're our bastard, and furthermore we all think you're a damn