"Thomas Marcinko - The Nixon Wrangler's Tale" - читать интересную книгу автора (Marcinko Thomas)

fuss as possible. I shoved my foot into my boot, tried to pull on my
pants. I took off the boot so I could push my foot into the pant leg. Then
I put the boot back on.
"It's all about your father, isn't it?" Marjorie asked. "Good lord, it was
only a few flowers. It's not like it was the worst of the Veg-O-Disasters.
What about the McMurdo Krill-Killer? Or the Provence Dustbowl?
Ghost-lights . . . God, everybody thinks your father's are much prettier
than the licensed brands."
"He bootlegged a patent. He could have caused a lot of harm. And everybody
knows it."
"It's also the past. The Design Guild is a bunch of neo-Darwinist
reactionaries. Ever since the 'teens they've looked for scapegoats Ч"
"I said I don't want to talk about it." My thwarted wishes were my own
business. All I'd wanted as a child was to grow things. Now I could never
get into the Designer's Guild, not with this blot on my family's record. I
could never get away from my father's crimes. Ghost-lights bloomed every
season and followed me around the globe. They burned pink and purple and
lime and robin's-egg blue, all the colors of anarchy.
I did what I could to make up for his crime. I did not communicate with my
mother or my brother or my sister or my stepmother. I had no friends
besides those allowed by the buttons. Unbuttoned friends could always
betray you. I did not visit my father's grave. I was a fighter, a
scrapper. I toughed it out alone.

The bootleggers seemed to be lying low, so Marjorie and I got loaned out
to other divisions. We worked together better than ever, now that our
affair was over. We rescued some bootlegged marilyns and madonnas from a
bunch of creeps who used them for fucking but more often just beat them
up. We tracked an abused amnesiac elvis who'd escaped a nightclub where
they overfed him and tried to hide him, not too successfully, in an
otherwise legal milhous band called Foreign Policy Triumph. The elvis
looked pretty strange with the ski-slope nose grafted onto his pie-pan
face. So did their sinatra frontman.
We corralled a bootleg kennedy. The Grace Through Golf charismatics who
hijacked it from the test labs meant no harm. They just wanted to play
nine holes with it. But we couldn't return the kennedy to the
entertainment sector. There's not much demand for kennedys. The real ones
keep tumbling out of wombs, regular as clockwork.
Maybe because we let up the pressure, the milhous bootlegs came flooding
back. We followed a tip to Kansas, where an unscrupulous promoter ran off
enough nixons to man opposing football teams. They acted tough but played
like wimps. They circled and attacked, then cringed and minced around each
other. They bit, gouged, whined, and blamed far more than they tackled or
scored. It was like watching a Busby Berkeley nightmare starring a bunch
of old ladies at a bitch-slapping party. We found the milhous coach hidden
in the locker room, gobbling down cottage cheese. "To celebrate," it
explained through ketchup-blooded lips. I opened fire. Just then I was a
Master Gardener like my father before me, and his father before him. The
nixons were weeds. So many, many weeds.