"MacDonald, John - Travis McGee 06 - Bright Orange for the Shroud" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacDonald John D)

Judging I was at the exact moment, I said, "Small favor?"

"Anything at all, Trav darling."

"I'm cutting you in on a lame duck who showed up. In bad, bad shape. It would be sort of for old time's sake for you."

"Who?"

"Arthur Wilkinson."

I thought I saw a momentary softness in her eyes before they turned fierce. She leaned forward. "I tell you what I am not. I 10

am not a trash basket. I am no place you can dump the leavings from that pig."

"Put your wheels down, Chookie. Who's the most naive little chick in your troupe?"

"Huh? Well... Mary Lou King."

"She engaged?"

"Sort of. What is this, anyway?"

"Now suppose say... Rock Hudson came barreling in at her, all guns blazing. What would Mary Lou do?"

Chook giggled. "Gawd, she'd roll over like a dead bug."

"I'm under a handicap. I never did find out what status you reached with Arthur. He'd never volunteer that sort of informa tion, as you well know. It was my guess it got pretty humid."

She studied her nails. "When Frankie took off that time, he busted my place up before he went. Everything. He even tore up my scrapbooks. He said I'd never lay eyes on him again as long as I lived. And I don't even know what it was we were fighting about. Okay, so I needed a gentle guy. Not for sex. I'm not coldЧmaybe I'm more the other way than I should be, but, hell, I can always put on old music and dig out old routines and a practice uniform, work hard for a few hours and sleep like a baby." She gave me a quick dark glance. "I guess I should be honest. Mostly it was to have somebody close, but that's no reason to knock the other part of it. And maybe I was trying to use him to tear loose from Frankie. At first I told him all my lousy troubles. And we took some walks. And then after one walk, we ended up in my bed. And if I left it entirely up to Arthur, we wouldn't have. I had to make it easy for him without letting him catch on to what I was doing. You know me, Trav. I'm not a pig. I suppose... if I taught third grade in Webster Falls, I wouldn't last too long. But in the business I'm in... I'm thought square. You know?"

"I know."

For just an instant I had a feeling of waste and loss. There was so much shrewdness, native intelligence, perception there. The awareness of self, undistorted, a virtue growing ever more rare in our times. It made you wonder what this creature of such vast vitality could have become if she had taken some other

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direction with her life. Too many of the good ones aren't being used up all the way.

But a little personal resonance got to me. Because I'd never found the right way of using myself up. So I had settled for a variation of the lush life, bumming along the golden strand until funds sagged too low, then venturing forth to clip the clip artists, wresting the stolen meatЧlegally stolen usuallyЧout of the bandit jowls, then splitting the salvage down the middle with the victimЧwho, without the services of McGee, would have had to settle for nothing, which, as I have often pointed out, is considerably less than half.

It isn't a very respectable dedication. So just say it's a living. Sometimes I get a very faint echo of the knight errant psychosis. And try to make more out of it than is there. But everybody's hall closet is full of lances and shields and other tourney gear. The guy who sells you insurance gets singed by his own secret kind of dragon breath. And his own Maid Marian yoo-hoos him back to the castle tower.

Maybe, somewhere along the line, I could have gone the other route. But you get a taste for the hunt. You keep wondering how close the next one is going to get to you. And you have to see. And nothing can slow the reflexes like the weight of mortgages, withholding, connubial contentment, estate program, regular checkups and puttering around your own lawn.

But now they are phasing out the hunters. Within this big complex culture, full of diodes, paperclips, account numbers, they are earnestly boarding up the holes, sealing the conduits, installing bugs and alarms in every corridor. In a few years there'll be no room left for the likes of McGee. They'll grab him, carry him away and adjust him to reality, and put him to work at something useful in one of the little cubicles in the giant structure.

So who are you to think of a fuller life for Miss Chookie McCall?

"Could it have worked out with Arthur?" I asked her.