"Esther M Friesner - Jesus At The Bat" - читать интересную книгу автора (Friesner Esther M)

around the bases in those tight-fitting pants, all moved him in ways he could
not yet hang a name on. It was a source of spiritual pain to him that his team
so seldom won.

It was a pain less spiritual every time Jase McClellan knocked him down in the
school yard and taunted him with the fact that he wouldn't be on the Bobcats
team at all if not for the fact that his old man was the coach.

Vic Junior could have tattled on Jase, but he was what adults called a good
child. In other words, there were sponges adorning the ocean floor who had more
backbone than he. He went to church without a fuss and riven listened to what
his Sunday school teacher had to relate of Hell. He tithed his allowance not
because his mother made him but in the sure and certain hope that he was making
time payments on one colossal, outsize, super-mega-omniprayer of his own asking
being answered some day. He wasn't sure what he was going to request when he
finally submitted his sealed bid to Glory, but he knew it would be something
much better than just asking God to burn Jase McClellan in the fiery pit until
his eyeballs melted and his hair frizzled away and the skin on his face
blackened and cracked and flaked from the charting bones and his dick fell off.

And then, one day, something happened. Who knows how these things get started?
So much depends on serendipity. Pharaoh's daughter might have kept on walking
when she heard that wailing in the bulrushes. "Just one of the sacred cats being
devoured by one of the sacred crocodiles," she'd say with a shrug of her sweet
brown shoulders, and Charlton Heston's resume would have been several pages
shorter.

What serendipped in this case was Vic Junior came into La Belle to see his Morn
and by some karmic radar happened to find the one copy of Sports Illustrated in
the whole establishment. Like a crow among the lilies it reposed in dog-cared
splendor amidst the issues of Woman's Day and Mademoiselle and Good
Housekeeping. Last desperate refuge of the male compelled for whatever unholy
cause to accompany his woman into the lair of glamor, its well-thumbed antique
pages gave moving testimony that a man will submerge himself in last year's
sports "news" sooner than he will open a copy of Cosmopolitan to willingly read
"Impotence: Things Are Looking Up."

"Mom!" Vic Junior cried, bursting in on his hardworking parent, waving the
tattered magazine. "More, did you see this?"

Barb was giving Edna Newburgh a streak job. More couldn't see much of anything
for all the ammonia fumes peeling her eyeballs raw. "Don't bother Mommy now,
sweetheart," she said testily.

"But Mom, look! There's an article in here about how the American Little League
champions got to go to Japan!" Vic Junior was insistent. Despite the noxious
atmosphere he jiggled closer to Edna Newburgh's reeking head and thrust the
magazine under his mother's nose.

"So what's that to you? Champions means winners. I said not now!" Barb snapped,