"R. A. Lafferty - Stories 5" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lafferty R A)

from becoming quite old. He had a grubby little room. Je would get up at three
o'clock every Friday morning and begin to pull coins one at a time (there was
no possible way except one at a time) out of his pocketbook. It was one of
those small, three-section, snap-jaw pocketbooks such as men used to carry to
keep their coins and bills in. It was old, but it was never-failing. Matthew
would draw the coins out one at a time. He would count them into piles. He
would roll them into rolls. And at eight o'clock in the morning, when his
weekly rent was due, he would pay it proudly, twenty-seven dollars and fifty
cents. So he would be fixed for another week. It took him from three until
eight o'clock every Friday morning to do this; but he cat-napped quite a bit
during that time. All oldsters cat-nap a lot.
And it didn't really take him very long (no more than five or six
minutes) to draw out enough coins for one of his simple lunch-counter meals.
But some people are a little bit testy at having to wait even five or six
minutes behind an old man at the cashier's stand.
"I was known as the Four-Bit Man for a few years, and that was all
right," Matthew Quoin said. "Then I was known as the Two-Bit Man for a few
other years, and that was all right too." This was a different day, and
Matthew was talking to a flock of grackle-birds who were committing slaughter
on worms, slugs, and other crawlers in the grass of City Park. "It didn't
begin to hurt till I was known as the Dime-a-Time Man," Matthew said, "and
that stuck in the throat of my pride a little bit, although it shouldn't have.
I was still the cock of the grassy walk even though I didn't have as many hens
as I had once. I had good lodgings, and I had plenty to eat and drink. I could
buy such clothes as I needed, though it flustered me a bit to make a major
purchase. We had come into the era of the hundred-dollar overcoat then, and to
draw out one thousand coins, one by one, with people perhaps waiting, can be a
nervous thing.
"I began to see that there was an element of humor in that dubious
transaction that I had made so many years ago, and that part of the joke was
on me. 0h, I had won every point of argument when we had made that deal. The
pocketbook was calfskin, triple-stitched, and with German silver snap-latch.
It was absolutely guaranteed never to be clear empty of coin, and it should
last forever. Each coin appeared in the very bottom of the pocketbook, that's
true, and the contrivance was rather deep and with a narrow mouth, so it did
take several seconds to fish each dime out. But it was a good bargain that I
made, and all parties still abide by it. The Dime-a-Time years weren't bad.
"Nor were the nickel years really. There is nothing wrong with nickels.
Dammit, the nickel is the backbone of commerce! It was in the nickel years
that I began to get rheumatism in my fingers, and that slowed me down. But it
had nothing to do with the bargain, which was still a good one."

When the penney years rolled around, Matthew Quoin was quite old. Likely
he was not as old as he claimed to be, but he was the oldest and stringiest
cock around.
"But it's all as bright as one of my new pennies," he said to a
multitude of army caterpillars that was destroying the fine grass in City
Park. "And this is the eighth and final eon of the overflowing money, and it
will go on forever for me unless I tell it to stop. Why should I tell it to
stop? The flow of money from my pocketbook is is vital to me as the flow of