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

She shrugged those strong shoulders. "He's almost five years older, but he seemed kind of like a kid. I don't know. So considerate and so... grateful. He was getting to be a better lover. It was like at first, getting him to think things were his idea, on

Trav, honest to God, what was I supposed to do? Ask him to please come to Jacksonville with me? I mean there's pride too. He wanted to. But he thought it wouldn't be right. I wanted him there. Maybe it was like putting up a wall, a little at a time, shutting out the hurt from Frankie. Maybe we could have made the wall thick enough and tall enough. Maybe not. Maybe when Frankie came back, it would have been the same for me, Arthur or no Arthur, Frankie crooking his finger and I crawl to him. I won't ever know, will I, because Arthur didn't go up to Jax with me, and so we didn't have that three weeks and we didn't have the four months back here before Frankie came back, broke and sick and mean as a basket of snakes. I came back and Wilma had Arthur skinned and nailed to the bar, and the son of a bitch shook hands with me as if he couldn't remember my name. Pride still counts with me. I am not going to be a damned rescue mission, Trav. Believe me. Go look for a little mother somewhere else. He made his lousy choice."

"Okay. I see your point. But just stop by the boat and take a look at him."

"No! You don't get clever with me. Once in Akron the dressing room was alive with mice, and I set a trap. All it did was maim one little bastard, and three weeks later, after I got him back on his feet, I turned him loose. He'd lick peanut butter off my fingertip. Trav, I wouldn't go anywhere near Arthur."

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w

HEN

WHEN I got back to The Busted Flush with Chook, Arthur Wilkinson was as I had left him, the note still there. I put on the overhead light. I heard her suck air. Her strong cool fingers clamped on my hand. I looked at her thoughtful profile, saw her tanned forehead knotted into a frown, white teeth indenting her lower lip. I turned the light off and turned her, and we went back to the lounge, two closed doors between us and Arthur.

"You should get a doctor to look at him!" she said indignantly.

"Maybe. Later on. No fever. He passed out, as I told you, but he said he just felt faint. Malnutrition is my guess."

"Maybe you got a license to practice? Trav, he looks so horrible! Like a skull, like he was dying instead of sleeping. How do you know?"

"That he's sleeping? What else?"

"But what could have happened to him?"

"Chook, that was a very nice guy, and I don't think he had the survival drive you and I have. He's the victim type. Wilma

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was his mousetrap, and nobody cared if he got maimed. No peanut butter. We had one in Korea. A big gentle kid fresh out of the Hill School. Everybody from my platoon sergeant on down tried to get the green off him before he got nailed. But one rainy afternoon he got suckered by the fake screaming we'd gotten used to, and he went to help and got stitched throat to groin with a machine pistol. I heard about it and went over as they were sticking the litter onto a jeep. He died right then, and the look on his face was not pain or anger or regret. He just looked very puzzled, as if he was trying to fit this little incident into what he'd been taught at home and couldn't quite make it. It's the way some earnest people take a practical joke."

"Shouldn't we see if Arthur is really all right?"

"Let him get his sleep. Fix you a stinger?"

"I don't know. No. I mean yes. I'm going to take another look at him."

Five minutes later I tiptoed into the companionway beyond the head. The guest stateroom door was closed. I heard the tone of her voice, not the words. Gentleness. He coughed and answered her and coughed again.

Back in the lounge I locked the big tuner into WAEZ-FM, and fed it into the smaller speakers at low volume, too low to drive my big AR-3's. I stretched out on the curve of the big yellow couch, took small bites of the gin stinger, listened to a string quartet fit together the Chinese puzzle pieces of some ice-cold Bach, and smiled a fatuous eggsucking smile at my prime solution to the Arthur problem.

In about twenty minutes she joined me, eyes red, smile shy, walking with less assurance than her custom. She sat on the end of the couch beyond my feet and said, "I fixed him some warm milk and he went right to sleep again."

"That's nice."

"I guess it's just being exhausted and half starved and heartsick, Trav."

"That was my guess."