"Kathleen Ann Goonan - Solitaire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goonan Kathleen Ann)

Solitaire
by Kathleen Ann Goonan

Stumblebum was not his real name, but Norman had taken early to playing lots of solitaire and not paying much attention to his surroundings or anything else except cards. Early means seven years old and understandably this warped his thinking. When other kids were playing Cowboys and Indians, a popular pursuit in 1956, SB was making sure his playing surface was clean and dry so as not to gum up the cards, and took care to avoid windy places which meant that he was usually inside with the windows shut.

As for his name, SB's father could be cruel at times or at least rather short-tempered, and it was he who took to yelling "You idiotic card-sharp stumblebum, I told you to bring me that jar of screws from down in the basement ten minutes ago now where is it? I'll show you to waste your time with those stupid cards" loud enough for the neighbors to hear, in the summer, anyway. The other kids, by rights SB's natural playmates, heard this epithet wafting out the windows often enough and it struck them as just right. The Stumble, or SB, as it finally boiled down to, did have a penchant for clumsiness, and once had committed the atrocity of yelling, panicked, for some kid's dad to get him down out of a tree. His real name was Norman and he told them for awhile, then gave up.

SB's mother was not your normal fifties Lassie type mom, and though she did wear an apron when she cooked it was usually spattered with last week's dinner. She was sharp-faced with stringy blonde hair she kept in a pony tail at the nape of her neck, smoked all the time, and complained that SB (even she took to calling him that) had tied her down--right to his face--so often that after awhile it ceased to bother him. He wasn't sure why it was supposed to bother him, actually, but he was pretty certain that it was meant to.

Their house was a big white house. It sat on a corner lot, and had peeling paint and a dirt-packed yard where the grass grew in raggedy patches which his dad complained bitterly about having to mow with the metal push mower that went clip clip clip on Saturday mornings. SB had friends, sort of, for awhile, two neighbor boys. They were brothers, one his age the other a year younger, both with limpid brown eyes and freckles. But then a doctor did something wrong--so SB's mom told him--and the big brother died suddenly and the family moved away real fast. Jim, the dead one, had been all right. At least he'd play war, or fish. Boring, but at least you had cards in your hand.

SB kind of liked his new name, eventually, so that in school even the teachers called him that except Miss Gaymond, his second grade teacher. She called him Norman which always made everyone snicker until she made them write sentences on the board and then they stopped. As for the other things the kids did, SB did not mind baseball too much--not to play, of course, since he was taunted for his clumsy throws and never picked till last to be on a team. But he liked it when on Saturday afternoons his dad sat opening one can of Hamm's after another with an opener he kept next to him on the tv table, and watched the tiny men shift places like cards in a solitaire game on the small black and white Crosley which sat in a corner of the living room. SB absorbed the rules; he liked rules, and this was one of the main reasons he lacked interest in playing with the other kids--somebody was always changing the rules. He had no objection to sitting down and making up the rules to a game such as Indians could die twice but no more or that when you ran out of lovely sharp-sounding acrid-smelling caps which unreeled through your gun in a papery red tape you changed from a Cowboy to an Indian. But you just couldn't depend on the other kids to stick to those rules. The players on the gray diamond watching, waiting, while the crowd sat, then stood and roared, reminded him of cards. It could be anyone there on third but when they were there they took on special characteristics depending on how the other parts of the game were going. There was chance like when he shuffled the cards and his uncle had taught him some pretty fancy shuffles, a bridge where he bent the cards in an arc which forced them to cascade together and so on, but once that was over it was up to his wits to see every opening, and up to his judgment to decide whether or not to move a card or wait for a better one and up to the sharpness of his memory to recall the position of a formerly turned up card.

You might have thought SB was lonely but he was not, particularly. He had a large blue Huffy bike which his dad had bought so big that he could barely reach the pedals even with the seat down as low as it would go. One nice thing he always remembered about the old man was that he told SB that training wheels were for sissies, even though everyone else in the neighborhood had them and SB had pleaded for them, thinking that it was impossible to learn to ride without them. SB learned to ride his bike in just a day, his dad said he'd damned well better because the method was that his dad would run along behind the bike holding it up by the rear fender. SB was forbidden to look back to see if he was being held onto, and when he did of course he crashed, which cured him of looking back. The first time he got to the end of the block he got confused and crashed anyway, scraping his arm pretty bad. He looked back and there was his dad standing way back at the other end of the block, and SB realized that he could ride his bike just fine. His dad was good in those ways, and seemed to come in for his share of the blame for tying mom down so SB felt a kind of kinship with him.

But mostly SB studied his solitaire game. He learned many new and esoteric games from various sources including a book from the library, where his teacher took them all once a week in second grade. At that time he thought "The Cat In The Hat" was what fiction was all about, and was amazed that other people could stand reading such junk. It bored him silly. His aunt Ethyl brought him a whole slew of books like that one day, and it frightened him so to see the awful stack of them he pried open the screen of his bedroom window and shoved them out, one after another. As luck would have it his mom and Ethyl were sitting on the porch smoking and saw the books fly past and he got a spanking and his cards taken away from him. He didn't mind, though, because hidden in his closet he had four Bee decks he'd bought from Al's corner grocery by trading in pop bottles. He slit open a new pack and laid out a rather successful game of eight-up, pleased to win because though eight-up was an easier game than the one he usually played, he usually lost because he didn't know what to expect.


One day, about midday on a summer's morning, when most of the kids were building a tree fort, SB's mom threw him out of the house, so he jumped on his Huffy and sped away.

He rode down the smooth mica-sparkled sidewalk for two blocks, swerving onto the street down driveways to avoid curbs, and cut a sharp left a few blocks past the ballfield. His street had houses on one side, and across from his house was the ballfield, with damp concrete steps leading down to it through the woods, and then past the ballfield, facing the houses for a mile or so, were just woods and fields, mysterious and free.

This was a dirt road where he was forbidden to go by his mother, but the only reason he was out on his bike, a deck of Bee cards bouncing around in the basket in front of the handlebars, was that his mom had yelled at him and told him to go outside and get some fresh air. Besides, she had messed up a particularly promising game and acted more than a little nuts. Somehow this sequence of events combined in his mind to mean that no matter what he did it would be all right just as long as he stayed outside.

He had been down this road a little ways once and turned back, because the sky had been gray and the wind had been chill and the branches black and this had all scared him somewhat. The other boys said that the Bogeyman of Mill Creek lived down there.

But on the other hand he had once walked right up the cracked and slanted walk of the old lady that everyone called a witch, through her many twining cats, while she called, "Come on up here, little boy, I know your mother," through the screen door in her old voice which did in fact sound haunted and witchlike. He was positive Ricky and Denny had watched like chickens from behind the fence, and she gave him milk and cookies and he had not died. His mother had not called her a witch, he recalled, as he savored the plain vanilla cookies, but an old crackpot. And a sweetie.

So though he had turned back from the prospect of the bogeyman once, he had braved Mystery and found it delightful. The memory kept him bouncing farther down the road than he had ever been before, standing up on his pedals when approaching particularly big ruts. Mill Creek came in and joined the side of the road, wide and green with big overhanging white scaly sycamores. Lots of blue flowers were scattered through the verge of woods along the creek, and to his left was a cornfield with corn taller than he was. Even if he didn't find the bogeyman--he realized that he had begun to actively look for him--he liked it here. He decided to come back often. Maybe he'd find a good place to swim. He found himself liking his mother more for kicking him out.

He backpedaled fast, braking, when he came upon a clearing.

The cornfield angled sharp left, and the creek bent in a gentler curve along one side of it, so that the deep blue sky was freed of trees and wide. SB caught his breath.

In the middle of the clearing was an unpainted gray shack. This was shocking to SB, as he had never suspected that so much as a toolshed would be back here. He was sure his dad would call it a shack. On the ramshackle porch was an empty rocking chair. The wind caught it. The chair rocked while the corn and the sycamore leaves rustled and then hushed. SB did not like this.

SB was so sure that the bogeyman was in that chair, only invisible, that his throat got narrow and he gasped for breath. He yanked his bike around and just about died when blocking the road was a man, and the first thing SB noticed was a tall misshapen gray hat which he found menacing. The man wore overalls and over them an old brown suit jacket and no shirt.

"What're--you--doing here?" The man asked, his speech oddly slow as if he didn't use it much. Beneath gray hair his face was unaccountably odd. Paralyzed, SB watched as the man came over and picked the deck of cards out of his basket. He saw that what made the man's face look so strange and so like a bogeyman's was that he had no eyebrows. The man looked at SB and then at the cards.

He did not say anything else. Instead, he held onto the cards and crashed off into the cornfield.

SB was astonished, but did not chase after the man. The man was a lot bigger and stronger than him and it occurred to SB that if the man wanted to he could seriously damage him. So he pumped hard down the bumpy road, not breathing easy until he got back to the street. He looked both ways. It all looked normal. What was behind him, he felt, was something not normal.

He thought about it all week. But he did not seriously consider going back. In fact he never would have gone back except that one day a week later he was riding his bike down the road looking for discarded pop bottles as he was down to his last deck of cards when a boy ran out of the dirt road, which was tucked into the street edge like no other egress in the neighborhood, and stood there wordlessly watching SB come closer and then SB noticed that he had that deck of cards in his hand.

"Show me," he said, when SB stopped, determined to get his cards back.

"Show you what?" SB asked.