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

Suppose you took Irma to this here Tundra and told her to walk home. Flies, she says last night,
flies all over you and you drunk as a pig. God, I pretty near shut her up for good. But she just don't know
no better. She don't have too much of a life with a busted-down hack like me that couldn't even last five
rounds with Willie Donohue.
Dr. West went on about bor-rowing a plane from a friend has got this lodge in the north woods, and
flying over the tundra till he saw like a blue spark down there. Landed and picked up the ob-ject, size
and shape of a basket-ball he said, not really blue, more like daylight split and turned a million ways. It
hummed when he held it to his ear. That's when he broke off to ask me is there a basement under this
part of the bar.
He knows damn well it's got no basement. He was in town when I got this addition added on.
Al-ready a cellar under the main part, I didn't need another, got this part done with merely the footing
and concrete under the lino, I mean if there is any exca-vation in forty miles Dr. West will be there
watching. It's the people with an Independent In-come or them with not any that get the excavation
watched. Guys like me that work for a living, we are up that creek with a little bity plastic spoon and no
breeze. All's I said was Hell no, this here is an addition was added on, it's got no basement.
Unless somebody walled it off on you, says Judge Van Anda. You won't find a better way to dispose
of a body, the Judge says, that's if you have time and materials and don't mind the labor. Well, the Judge
is retired after forty years on what they call the bench, and keeps saying with his experience he ought to
write detective stories. Yes sir, he says, if the walling off has been done right, proper pains taken, you
can give the whole thing a very attractive finish. I guess he meant the wall. You never know, with the
Judge. I must of said to him a hundred times, Look, I've said, the surprising type things that have
happened to me, you ought to put them into a book if you're going to write one. He just goes hrrm hrrm
and Ha.
I hated him sounding off about bodies that way, account of Lu-lu's nerves. Before Dr. West be-gun
his story Lulu was talking to me about that murderer over to Lincolnsville, the one that done in his whole
family with a kitchen knife, and the shooting down in Jonesburg a couple weeks ago. She was real
nerved up. His whole family, and with a plain kitchen knife. When the cops come for him тАФ Jesus, he
was like asleep, it said. Lulu takes the news pretty personal, it's the woman of it.


Dr. West's little blue eyes тАФwhy, damn, they're near the same color as my bugs, like
sky with the sun caught in it. Maybe the bugs are something new to science that Dr. West has to keep
top secret? Then this tundra story would be the edu-cated crappola he's obliged to shovel over it? His
eyes are bloodshot like mine have been getting the last few weeks. I been losing weight too and it ain't
my ulcer. The blood the bugs take out couldn't make no such differ-ence, and them so gentle тАФ I float
off into the dreams almost as soon as they come settle on me.
I'd give anything to have an-other dream where Irma is like when we got married, not bony and mean
but soft, brown hair with all them goldy lights, voice like country cream.
When Dr. West quit talking Lulu was crying. She says she feels sometimes like everything was on top
of her, usually goes to the Ladies and comes back with a rebuilt mouth and a fresh bounce to her. Lulu
could put her shoes in my trunk any time. She ain't had a real happy life.
Aw, who does? For young peo-ple it's always a maybe-tomor-row, for the rest, it's
where-did--everything-go? The Judge, he should be happy looking across all them years of playing God
and sticking people in jail? Dr. West never married, chases moonblink over the world with his
Independent Income, but once he told me what he honestly craved was hearth and home, nice woman to
warm his slippers and his bed, only a devil in him couldn't ever let him rest. And I have this ulcer.
The Bible or somebody says if you build a better mousetrap they'll like put you on teevy. All's I got is
a better mousehole. What do they give you for that?