"Spider Robinson - The End of the Painbow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

obscenity he was in the middle of, and spat on the floor.
"Goddamn," Ish said, wiping his eye and looking the little man up and down, "he's so ugly his nails
ain't got cuticles, honey."
She nodded. "Somehow I sensed it," she said.
The cluricaune snarled. "Blind as a bat, in the bargain, bedad! Jazus, yer lucky: ya don't know yer
ugly, ya corpulent sow."
 His anger had the massive dignity and rolling majesty that only the magnificently drunk can achieve.
His voice was a little like the Duck's: you couldn't call it pretty, exactly, but it held your attention
somehow. Somehow he kept that long-stem pipe clenched in his teeth as he talked, without losing any
enunciation at all. From behind the bar, I could smell his breath. It smelled like every drop of alcohol I
had thought I owned, earlier in the evening. The wonder was his pipe didn't set it alight.
"Damn, little fella," Isham said, too bemused to be angry at the slurs on his beloved, "who'd you
come here with?"
"Nobody, yet," the munchkin menace snapped, "and bedad, by the looks of your wife here, it's sure
to be some little while if it's left up to me! Bondage, is it, with the handcuffs and all? Small wonder you
carry these plague-take-it things on your person, ya batfaceтАФthat must be what got you a husband atall!
Sure, for you to be callin' me ugly is just like the pot tellin' kettles they're Afro-American. Cease and
unhand me, ya chocolate moose, or I'll raise up a spell that'll give yez the root canal every Thanksgivin'
from now till you give up an' cut yer own throat!"
Then all at once, with the mercurial changeability of the magnificently smashed, he forgot he was
angry at her. "You know," he said conversationally, "it's a long time indeed I been wonderin' why your
own folk ever gave up so gorgeous a name as The ColoredтАФI don't understand it, be dipped if I do.
Now what in the name of old Ca Chullain's cummerbund ever possesed yez to call yerselves
BlackтАФwhen yer not, and the word stands for everythin' scary and evil there is? I traveled the world in
me youth, and I noticed yez mocha, mahogany, chestnut and cocoa ... ochre and umber and amber and
gold.. .." His eyes were literally twinkling, as if someone had focused a baby spot on them. ". .. Coffee
with cream, coffee with milk, coffee with nothin' but Tullamore Dew ... amber and anatase, russet and
chocolate ... both the siennas, the burnt and the raw, hazel and sepia, several more ... an' never a black
man or woman I saw. Most perishin' colorful people on Earth, and 'black' is the word for the absence of
color! Go cobble a new pair o' shoes from the hide of the darkest of darkies in Africa: see if they'll let yez
be wearin' them shoes to a wakeтАФby old Balor's bumbershoot, what made yez claim yez a name ya
can't wear, even on the outside? The Black Irish, now: there's a people that's black, have yez got any
insights to share on the matter?" Whereupon he belched with shattering force, crossed his twinkling eyes,
winked the one that was now facing Tanya ... then slowly winked the other as well, and passed out.

The silence was refreshing.
He remained in midair, on his back, breathing noisily. His elongated white pipe had slipped at last
from his teeth, hovered below him, about a foot from the floor.
"Tanya, Ish, Doc," I barked, "hang on for dear lifeтАФhe could be faking." The sense of relief was
overwhelming.
"Voice on him like a model airplane," Doc Webster said, shaking his big head. "And yet somehow
it'd be kinda pleasant to listen toтАФif there wasn't so much of it. So that's a leprechaun, huh, Jake? I
forget what the deal is now: we're supposed to not take our eyes off him?"
"Don't be silly, Doc," Noah Gonzalez said. "It's the cuffs that'll hold him, if anything will."
"Is it true he knows where to find some Acapulco Gold?" Tommy Janssen asked excitedly. "The
famous pot at the end of the rainbow?"
"Aw, rot at the end of the painbowтАФthat's an old wives' tale," Shorty Steinitz said.
"What's wrong with old wives?" Maureen Hooker asked dangerously.
"Sorry, troops," I said hoarsely. I tried to clear my throat, but I didn't seem to have my E-meter. Get
thee behind me, Thetan! "He's not a leprechaun. It's much worse than that. He's a cluricaune.