"Spider Robinson - C8 - Callahan' s Key" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

steering wheel.
Sure enough, the plow sailed by my home at a stately twenty miles an hour, trailing a long
line of cars and trucks nearly berserk with rage . . . and utterly buried my driveway with snow,
to the aforementioned waist height.
I knew perfectly well that there was nowhere else I could possibly park my car along that
stretch of two-lane highway anywhere within even unreasonable walking distance of home in either
direction-except the one driveway that I knew perfectly well the sonofabitching plow was about to
stop and plow out, which it did. The one right next door to mine. The driveway of the Antichrist,
where I would not have parked at gunpoint.
Of course the traffic stacked up behind that big bastard surged forward the instant it
fully entered Nyjmnckra Grtozkzhnyi's drive and got out of their way. Of course not one of them
gave an instant's thought to the fact that the road under their accelerating tires would now no
longer be cleared of snow and ice. And there I was, big as life, right in their way, with my
forehead on the steering wheel...
So by the time I got that snow in my pants, trying to clamber over the new dirty-white
ridge that separated my home from civilization, I no longer had to worry about parking the car. Or
fixing the damn heater, or putting gas or oil in it, or any such chores. Just paying for the final
tow-and, of course, the rest of the payments to the bank. Needless to say, the only car in the
whole pileup that had been totaled was mine; all the people who'd caused the accident drove away
from the scene. And of course they'd all agreed it had been my fault.
On the bright side, I was reasonably unhurt. Indeed, the only wound I had to boast of was
an extremely red face. Not from anger, or even from the cold. Those goddam air bags are not soft.
They never mention that in the ads.
So I was not looking forward to going through my front door. In the first place, I hated
having to tell Zoey that we were pedestrians again. A nursing mother does not often receive such
news gladly-and especially not when the temperature outside is twenty below and nothing useful
lies within walking range. And in the second place-
-in the second place I knew exactly what I was going to see when I walked-okay, hobbled-
through that door. And I just didn't know if I could take it one more time.
Is there anything sadder in all the world than a great big comfy superbly appointed
tavern. . . so unmistakably empty and abandoned that the cobwebs everywhere have dust on theme
I'd tried to keep up a brave front, and sustained it maybe six months. Then I'd gradually
slacked off on the mopping and dusting and vacuuming and polishing. By the end of a year, I wasn't
even fixing leaks. What was the point? No way in hell was Mary's Place ever going to reopen. We-I,
Jake Stonebender, its proprietor, and all of my highly irregular clientele-had made the single,
fatal mistake of pissing off Nyjmnckra Grtozkzhnyi. Our Ukrainian next-door neighbor-and the
beloved only aunt of Jorjhk Grtozkzhnyi.
Town Inspector Grtozkzhnyi...
Have you ever seen the total stack of paperwork required to legally operate a tavern in
the Town of Smithtown in the County of Suffolk in the great State of New York in these United
States of America~ I don't mean the liquor license: assume you have that. Let's just say if I'd
had that stack of paperwork-all of it six-point type, and consisting mostly of blanks for me to
fill in-in the trunk of the car with me that day, I could have just climbed up on top of it and
stepped over that goddam heap of snow left in my driveway by one of Inspector Grtozkzhnyi's
minions. In order to open Mary's Place at all, back in '88-in less than five years, for less than
half a million dollars-I had been forced to run it outlaw, counting on its isolation and the fact
that I made no effort at all to attract business to protect it from official attention.
But as Bob Dylan forgot to say, "To live outside the law, you must be lucky."
So it killed me, every time I walked through those swinging doors and saw my dream,
shrouded in spiderwebs. I always saw it, for a brief instant, as it had briefly been: full of