"Andy Duncan - The Executioners' Guild" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duncan Andy)

The Executioners' Guild by Andy Duncan

When the stranger walked into Blackburn's that Friday morning, there were no
other customers in the store, unless you counted Stumpy Turlis, which Mrs.
Blackburn, a woman of standards, certainly did not. The stranger's entrance set
the cowbell above the door to jangling, but Mrs. Blackburn did not look up. She
figured the bell was just the youngest Cooper child skipping, or, more
accurately, stomping outside with her fistful of already-sodden licorice. The
child's penny, suspiciously shiny, still lay on the counter where she had, on
tiptoe, placed it. Before putting it in the register, Mrs. Blackburn would give
it a chance to dry. In the meantime, she had returned to the task at hand, the
slicing of a fresh wheel of cheese, always a delicate operation, and one that
couldn't wait until noontime when the sandwich crowd came in, jamming up to the
counter and talking at once and wanting everything right then and not even
having the decency to wash the horse sweat and axle grease and chicken feed off
their hands before they unwrapped the wax paper and bit into the
cheese-and-baloney sandwiches that would not get made, Mrs. Blackburn felt, if
she had to waste her whole morning waiting hand and foot on every white-trash
ragamuffin in town. Do I look like some old nigger mammy? she sometimes asked
Mr. Blackburn in the quiet of the evening, I am not being hateful but I
genuinely want to know, because if that is what I am, the lowliest servant of
every ditch-born lint-picker in the county, I suppose I should claim my rightful
place, and collect my meager belongings, and leave this bed that my very
presence defiles, and sleep in the stable with the other dumb beasts of God's
dominion, and having said this, Mrs. Blackburn would dab her eyes with the
corner of an apron, and enjoy what, from Mr. Blackburn, passed for reassurance.
All that clomp, clomp, clomp, Mrs. Blackburn thought (biting her lip as the wax
skin welled up on either side of her sharpest knife), you'd think the child was
trying to dig postholes in the floor, and it just now polished to a
fare-thee-well, and that only after nagging at Mr. Blackburn for a solid
month-and thus preoccupied, she allowed Stumpy Turlis to be the first person in
Andalusia, Mississippi, actually to speak to the stranger, a humiliation that
would gall her to her grave.
"Morning," said Stumpy Turlis.
"Good morning," said the stranger, and Mrs. Blackburn looked up, startled.
"I'm not in your way, am I?" asked Stumpy Turlis.
"Not at all."
"Cause if I am, I'll move. I don't want to be no trouble. I can find me some
other place to lie."
"You're fine. No trouble at all. Please stay where you are."
Stumpy Turlis, as usual, was lying full-length on the hardware counter, hat on
his chest, arms outflung and hanging down on either side. His right hand held a
cigarette; his left hand, though it was behind the counter and temporarily out
of sight, certainly held a Coca-Cola in some stage of emptiness. On the crown of
his hat was a crumpled paper packet commemorating the headache powder he had
taken when he came in.
Standing over Stumpy, his back to the grocery counter and to Mrs. Blackburn, was
a tall, white-haired, broad-shouldered man in a derby hat, striped gray
trousers, and a black knee-length coat. In his right hand was a gray suitcase.
Some drummer with a line of brushes, Mrs. Blackburn decided, or liniment, or