"Gordon Eklund - CrossRoad Blues" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eklund Gordon)

GORDON EKLUND

THE CROSS ROAD BLUES


I went to the crossroad
fell down on my knees
I went to the crossroad
fell down on my knees
Asked the Lord above "Have mercy
save poor Bob, if you please."

--Robert Johnson

What rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards...?
(And so on.)

--W. B. Yeats

Chapter Zero -- Who Do You Love/(11/1)

The short, hard-boiled, shaven-headed young woman comes energetically hopping in
through the front door like a cat out of the rain and the first thought Leary's
thinking is how it's been seven, eight months since the last time he's had any
other human being inside this here personal domicile. (In reality: a raw sewage
dump of a communed roomapt in a nasty comer of the Little Hell Projects.) And
with various of his soiled personal possessions, records and socks mostly,
chaotically strewn about the bare dirt floor, half empty bottle of mescal (with
Leary, mescal bottles are always half empty, never half full) resting forlornly
atop the clanking radiator like a mourner at a funeral. Well shit in the sink,
thinks Leary, struggling to sit and taking a squint at his caller, so here he
lies a drunken spent dick of a lowzone ex-cop and here waltzes in some kind of
skin pale-as-death, big wet doe brown eyes, grab-your-balls and
squeeze-for-sweet-Jesus class act of a bebopping girl-child's face and body in a
red vinyl leather vest, boots, and bursting blue velvet pantaloons.

So what gives?

Then he recognizes her. (And freezes up inside: ohjesuschristnotagainoh please
not fucking again.)

She purrs: "Hi, I'm Sunny," plopping her fetchingly boyish little butt
unceremoniously down beside him, knees crossed seductively, boot tops clinging
to bare calf skin. "What's that music you're playing? I think I know it."

"Robert Johnson," he lies. "Now get out of here. I'm retired."
She smirks, showing far too much gum. "Forcibly retired."

"So?"