"Edgar Pangborn - A Better Mousehole" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pangborn Edgar)

A
Better
Mousehole
by EDGAR PANGBORN

Trouble with those blue bugs was they didn't hurt you . . . they did something
far worse!

So now Irma will be at me to do something about them blue bugs. I got to do something about
Irma.
Dr. West is wise too, as good as said so when him and Judge Van Anda was in today for a couple
beers. Pity Dr. West is not the doctoring type doctor but just has letters and stuff. Sort of ex-plorer
people say, account of his Independent Income, gone for months till the town's forgot him and then he
turns up full of what the bull was done with.
I don't think the Judge knows about the blue bugs. If they bit him like they done me he'd never go to
dreaming, not him up there, six feet five, (looking back at what he thinks the world used to be. Still if you
was old like him, you might want big dreams more than ever, about being young.
If you could tell them bugs, if you could name your own dream! No way, I guess. I take the dreams
I can get.
Dr. West certainly knows something. I'd no sooner drawed them beers when he starts men-tioning
mice. I told him, Look, I said, you do not see the Health Department climbing all over my back the way
they would if I had mice. He asks me, so what is that hole in the floor below the liquor shelves? I had to
make like hunting for it, and act surprised. Knothole, I says. Oh, knothole, he says, knothole the regal
twin-cushioned back of my lap, how come a knothole in linoleum? So I had to say it could be mice.
Judge Van Anda says Ha.


I went down the bar to pass the time with Lulu who doesn't get much business in the after-noon
because the light is too strong. Lulu is like blonde this week. If only I could tell the bugs to put Lulu into a
dream with me! The only time they done it she turned into Irma. I can't figure that.
What if Lulu got bit and had some dreams herself?
I suppose Irma thinks I mar-ried her so I can't do nothing without she comes clomping in onto it? If
she's solid gold why don't she move to Fort Knox?
I had not hardly started talk-ing to Lulu when Dr. West goes to booming. Desolation, he says, do
you think you know what desolation is? It's the sub-Arctic tundra, he says, and me alone in that
borrowed Cessna that might've got its engine tuned three or four months earlier, and no reason to be
there except my itch to see more of the poor wonderful planet before they blow it up. Lulu, what do you
think? What do you say desola-tion is?
Oh, she says, maybe the Sta-dium, game over, crowd gone and you know, empty popcorn bags and
match cards and spit.
You, Al? he says to me. What's desolation?
I said, oh, maybe a dark night and nobody shows you where to go. I believe Dr. West is sad in his
heart in spite of that educa-tion which is over my head. It would be like him to take off in a borrowed
plane for the flat side of nowhere. I like to watch him standing by Judge Van Anda who he is always
telling siddown siddown and the Judge merely says Ha. I can feel sad without no Independent Income. I
am 42 and I have this ulcer.
The tundra, says Dr. West тАФa nothing of dun colors, rotting snow, and you wonder when the whole
earth will look like that.
No! says Lulu about to cry. Don't talk thataway!
Never mind, chicken, he says, I was just bleating.