"Dean Wesley Smith - Slowboat Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Dean Wesley)

rough with old skin and white whiskers, seemed to fight an enemy unseen on the
battleground of this tiny room. He jerked, then moaned softly, his labored
breathing working to pull enough air to get to the next breath.

I moved to him, my ex-husband, my Slowboat Man, and lightly brushed his
wrinkled
forehead to ease his sleep. I used to do that as we lay together in our
featherbed. I would need him to sleep so that I could go out and feed on the
blood of others. He never awoke while I was gone, not once in the twenty years
we were together.

Or at least he never told me he had.

I had never asked.

I was hunting the night we met. The spring of 1946, a time of promise and good
cheer around the country. The war was won, the evil vanquished, and the living
bathed in the feeling of a wonderful future. I had spent the last thirty years
before and during the war in St. Louis, but my friends had aged, as always
happened, and it was becoming too hard to answer the questions and the looks.
I
had moved on many times in the past and I would continue to do so many times
in
the future. It was my curse for making mortal friends and enjoying the
pleasures
of the mortal world.

I pleaded to my friends in St. Louis a sick mother in a far away city and
booked
passage under another name on an old-fashioned Mississippi riverboat named Joe
Henry. I had loved the boats when they were working the river the first time
and
now again loved them as they came back again for the tourists and gambling.

For the first few days I stayed mostly to my small cabin, sleeping on the
small
bed during the day and reading at night. But on the third day hunger finally
drove me into the narrow hallways and lighted party rooms of the huge
riverboat.

Many soldiers and sailors filled the boat, most still in uniform and most with
woman of their own age holding onto their arms and laughing at their every
word.
The boat literally reeked of health and good cheer and I remember that smell
drove my hunger.

I supposed events could have turned another way and I might have met Johnny
before feeding. But almost immediately upon leaving my cabin I had gotten
lucky
and found a young sailor standing alone on the lower deck.