"Kathleen Ann Goonan - Solitaire (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goose Mother)

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.