"Norman Spinrad - tHE FAT VAMPIRE" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

But it was certainly ideal for present purposes.

The dining room was done up as a giant eat-in farmhouse kitchen. Rough-hewn splintery gray wood flooring. A high red ceiling from which old wagon-wheels ringed with phony kerosene lanterns hung low over round redwood picnic tables draped with red- and-white checked cloths. Electric logs glowed bucolically in the hearth of a big brick fireplace. Low country and western Muzak twanged in the background.

The Good Old Country Kitchen itself opened onto the dining room over a big wooden counter, and inside, the latest version of Mom herself, a huge middle-aged woman tented in gingham dress and white apron and wearing a white chef's hat over a cheap gray fright-wig, was visible bustling about, assisted by three teenaged chicanas done up as midwestern farm-girls.

The place wasn't even half-full--a fat old couple, a family of huge hearty blond German or Dutch tourists; two enormous Japanese who looked like sumo wrestlers; their American counterpart, a man- mountain who went by the handle of Little Abner, accompanied by a date who looked right off the plane from Vegas; a table of Hell's Angels--and Christine and the Count were seated immediately by a surfer-type in designer bib overalls and an idiot straw hat.

Count Kubescu glanced around the room rather dubiously. "A rather peculiar place to have chosen," he muttered.

"Don't worry, Armand," Christine said with a little smile, "it's as American as Mom's apple pie. Of which, believe me, there is plenty."

There was no menu. Mom and her helpers loaded the goods onto the counter as they came off the stove, the waiters piled the food onto flat-topped wheelbarrows, and offered you everything at your table.

First came the so-called appetizers. Barbecued baby back-ribs. Buffalo chicken-wings. Pigs-in-a-blanket which were actually enormous knackwursts wrapped in pizza-dough. Fried catfish fingers swimming in red-hot tomato sauce. Hush-puppies with melted butter and honey. Scrambled eggs with oysters and bacon. Half a dozen different cold-cuts and as many cheeses.

Armand's attitude brightened considerably as he perused this impressive offering. "Uh, the ribs, and the fish-fingers, and the
eggs, and let's see--"

"Oh come on, Armand, this is my treat," Christine said gaily. "We'll just have everything," she told the waiter. "With schooners of beer, and a nice big pitcher of buttermilk."

The waiter began unloading more-or-less human-sized portions of this and that onto the huge wooden platters set before them. "More," Christine demanded. "We didn't come here to eat like birds. Don't be so mingy!"

By the time the waiter had left, each of their plates was heaped high to overflowing with enough food to feed the Rams' offensive line or sink the Queen Mary.

Armand tucked into it in his usual manner, eating everything with his silverware like a European gentleman, but managing to pack it all away steadily like the perfect all-American farmboy. Christine ate a good deal less fastidiously in her efforts to keep up, but keep up she did, even though by the time they had cleaned their plates, her stomach seemed to be pressing against her rib-cage and the back of her throat.

"Quite nice," Armand said, taking a hearty swallow of beer. "Simple, perhaps, but ample."

"Glad you like it," Christine said sweetly. "Let's have seconds."

Armand's gaze may have narrowed a tad, but when the wide-eyed waiter had finished refilling their plates, he went at it again with no noticeably diminishment of his seemingly bottomless appetite.

Christine, though, had to force herself to cram it all down her throat by act of will, had to choke back doing what should have come naturally, and by the time she had managed to push the last hush- puppy down past enormous resistance, her ears were ringing, her diaphragm was pressing on her lungs, and she was starting to see spots before her eyes.

She was somewhat encouraged by the new look on Armand Kubescu's face. Not that he looked what you could call sated, but he did indeed seem to be eyeing her speculatively, as if he was beginning to realize that something was going on.

"Ah, the main course!" he said when the waiter arrived with a wheelbarrow loaded with roast beef, fried chicken, ham-steaks in red eye gravy, pork chops, legs of lamb, roast turkeys, and barbecued Texas hot-links. He smiled at her as he said it, but there was a certain wolfish edge to it, a stripping away of a certain amount of civilized veneer, and there was something challenging in his voice that seemed to indicate that he now understood that he was in a real contest.

And it was Armand, this time, who told the waiter that they would have everything and lots of it.

Christine's memory of the meat course was to be a bit vague later. She clearly remembered that they started in on the hot links and ham steaks with knives and forks like a lady and a gentleman, but by the time it came down to the pork chops, her brain had entirely disconnected, her stomach had become completely anesthetized, and she seemed to have been reduced to a set of jaws and a pair of hands, gnawing pork off the bone like a hound-dog, ripping apart chicken and turkey with her fingers, even, perhaps, picking up an entire leg of lamb and attacking it like a famished lioness.

The Count, all civilized pretense gone by now, was down to eating with his fingers too, glaring back at her with feral eyes, ripping off chunks of meat with his teeth, fairly growling at her as
he bolted them down, as if they were pieces of her own enemy flesh.

By the time the waiter arrived with the side dishes, they were snarling at each other like animals, spitting spent bones on their plates, glaring across the midden-heap of the table at each other with blood in their eyes.

Vast platters of corn on the cob in melted butter appeared on the battlefield. Baked potatoes with sour cream and chives. Boiled green beans. Candied yams. Peas and carrots with pearl onions. Onion rings. Deep-fried mushrooms. Mountains of mashed potatoes soaked in butter and thick country gravy. Someone called for more meat. Someone demanded the bread trolley.