"Mike Resnick - Alastair Baffle's Emporium of Wonders" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

тАЬMaury Gold,тАЭ he said, extending his hand. I took it, told him I was
Nate Silver, and we promptly lost all interest in each other when Alastair
Baffle began performing the Corinthian Rope Trick, followed by the
Vanishing Mouse. But I had an extra dime and we stopped for a soda when
we left, and we got to talking, and found that we had all kinds of things in
common despite his being a White Sox fan and me rooting for the Cubs.
We spent hours there, and finally decided weтАЩd better go home before our
parents called the cops, but we made arrangements to meet at the
Emporium of Wonders four weeks later.

We met every month for two years. Then his dad got transferred to
the north side, they moved, and he wound up in my school district. We
became inseparable. We played on the same teams, read the same
books, lusted after the same girls, and while we didnтАЩt go to Alastair BaffleтАЩs
Emporium of Wonders once a month any more, we remembered to go
once each year to celebrate our meeting.

World War II broke out just about the time we graduated from high
school. We both enlisted the same day, but I wound up in Europe and
Maury spent the next three and a half years in the Pacific. He was at Tarawa
and Okinawa, I was in Italy and the Battle of the Bulge, neither of us ever
caught a bullet or a social disease, and when we got out we decided to go
into business together.

Truth is, we went into a lot of businesses together, one after the other.
Never went broke, never got ahead. WeтАЩd try one for a couple of years,
then decide it wasnтАЩt going to make us rich, sell out or close up, start
another, and so on. We owned a drugstore, a pizzeria, a delivery service, a
hardware store, even a record shop. The record shop was the only one that
ever made a decent profit, but by then rock and roll had replaced real music
and we couldnтАЩt stand the sound of it, so we sold out once again.
 And then one day we turned around, and we were a pair of
eighty-two-year-old widowers. IтАЩd lost my first wife to cancer, my second to
a stroke. MauryтАЩs wife was killed in a car accident, he lost a son in Vietnam
and a daughter to drugs. We were living on our Social Security checks,
which werenтАЩt much. MauryтАЩs arthritis was getting worse every month; there
were days he couldnтАЩt drag himself out of bed, days he found it too painful
to walk. With me it was a bunch of thingsтАФIтАЩd lost a lung to cancer, I had
prostate problems, an artificial hip, a few other ailments, none of them fatal,
but theyтАЩd started to add upтАФand with no one around to care for either of us
we decided it was time to move into an assisted-living facility. We chose
the Hector McPherson Home, not because the service was any better, and
certainly not for the food, but because they had a small apartment with two
bedrooms, and we could keep each other company. Besides, no one else
wanted to listen to us. Most people would talk about Tiger Woods and
Michael Jordan and Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise. Us, weтАЩd talk about
Citation and the Bambino, Mae West and Bogart and Lefty Grove. TheyтАЩd
pin pictures of Pam Anderson and Paris Hilton on their walls; weтАЩd
remember pin-ups of Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth in our barracks.