"Fritz Leiber - Best of Fritz Leiber" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

As soon as Joe curled his toes inside his boots, his Mother knew what he was up to. тАЬGoing bumming,тАЭ
she mumbled with conviction. тАЬPants pockets full of cartwheels of house money, too, to spend on sin.тАЭ
And she went back to munching the long shreds she stripped fumblingly with her right hand off the
turkey carcass set close to the terrible heat, her left hand ready to fend off Mr. Guts, who stared at her
yellow-eyed, gaunt-flanked, with long mangy tail a-twitch. In her dirty dress, streaky as the turkeyтАЩs
sides, JoeтАЩs Mother looked like a bent brown bag and her fingers were lumpy twigs.

JoeтАЩs Wife knew as soon or sooner, for she smiled thin-eyed at him over her shoulder from where she
towered at the centermost oven. Before she closed its door, Joe glimpsed that she was baking two long,
flat, narrow, fluted loaves and one high, round-domed one. She was thin as death and disease hi her
violet wrapper. Without looking, she reached out a yard-long, skinny arm for the nearest gin bottle and
downed a warm slug and smiled again. And without a word spoken, Joe knew sheтАЩd said, тАЬYouтАЩre going
out and gamble and get drunk and lay a floozy and come home and beat me and go to jail for it,тАЭ and he
had a flash of the last time heтАЩd been in the dark gritty cell and sheтАЩd come by moonlight, which showed
the green and yellow lumps on her narrow skull where heтАЩd hit her, to whisper to him through the tiny
window in the back and slip him a half pint through the bars.

And Joe knew for certain that this time it would be that bad and worse, but just the same he heaved up
himself and his heavy, muf-fledly clanking pockets and shuffled straight to the door, muttering, тАЬGuess
IтАЩll roll the bones, up the pike a stretch and back,тАЭ swinging his bent, knobbly-elbowed arms like
paddlewheels to make a little joke about his words.

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 best of fritz leiber




When heтАЩd stepped outside, he held the door open a handтАЩs breadth behind him for several seconds.
When he finally closed it, a feeling of deep misery struck him. Earlier years, Mr. Guts would have come
streaking along to seek fights and females on the roofs and fences, but now the big torn was content to
stay home and hiss by the fire and snatch for turkey and dodge a broom, quarrelling and comforting with
two house-bound women. Nothing had followed Joe to the door but his MotherтАЩs chomping and her
gasping breaths and the clink of the gin bottle going back on the mantel and the creaking of the floor
boards under his feet.

The night was up-side-down deep among the frosty stars. A few of them seemed to move, like the white-
hot jets of spaceships. Down below it looked as if the whole town of Ironmine had blown or but-toned
out the light and gone to sleep, leaving the streets and spaces to the equally unseen breezes and ghosts.
But Joe was still in the hemisphere of the musty dry odour of the worm-eaten carpentry behind him, and
as he felt and heard the dry grass of the lawn brush his calves, it occurred to him that something deep
down inside him had for years been planning things so that he and the House and his Wife and Mother
and Mr. Guts would all come to an end together. Why the kitchen heat hadnтАЩt touched off the tindery
place ages ago was a physical miracle.

Hunching his shoulders, Joe stepped out, not up the pike, but down the dirt road that led past Cypress
Hollow Cemetery to Night Town.

The breezes were gentle, but unusually restless and variable tonight, like leprechaun squalls. Beyond the
drunken, whitewashed cemetery fence dim in the starlight, they rustled the scraggly trees of Cypress