"Thompson, Jim - Bad Boy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thompson Jim)

All man's troubles, he decided, sprang from ignorance--in this particular case ignorance of law and accounting. He did not know enough, but he would henceforth. He would acquire the knowledge to solve this immediate difficulty, then go on to improve and expand his learning in every possible field.
Somehow, he managed to acquire the funds necessary for correspondence courses in law and accounting. During every minute he had free from drudgery, he studied. After some two years, he received an LL.B. degree by mail, as well as a certificate as an expert accountant. Meanwhile, he had got in touch with former intimates in Oklahoma. Feeling toward him had died down. If he wanted to come back, they'd stake him to expenses and also go his bond while he was fighting the case.
Pop went back. He audited his own accounts and then argued his own case in court. He proved that not only did he owe the county nothing but that the county actually owed him several thousand dollars.
Eventually, he became attorney and official accountant for the Oklahoma Peace Officers Association and developed a large private practice. But even when he was well on the road to success, his open-handedness and his reluctance to dun a client brought on long periods of financial destitution. During such times, Mom, Maxine and I resumed a practice we had begun when he fled to Mexico.
We went to live with Mom's folks in a Nebraska country town.

6
I could say a great deal about the unpleasant features of living with relatives, of living in a gossipy small town where everyone knows your circumstances and has little else to talk about. But I have brooded overlong about these matters in other books (and out of them); so let us dismiss them with the statement that they did exist. Along with everything else, I often managed to have a wonderfully amusing time.
For this, for the attitude which enabled me to have it, I am largely indebted to my Grandfather Myers, the most profane, acid-tongued, harsh, kind, delightful man I ever knew.
I recall an evening when my ultra-pious grandmother had dragged me to a country revival meeting, and I lay shivering in my dark bedroom afterwards. I was too terrified to sleep. I was certain that my six-odd years of life-- all spent in sinning from the preacher's standpoint--had earned me one of the hotter spots in hell, and that I would certainly be snatched there before morning.
Then, though I had made no sound--I knew damned well what my grandmother would do if I waked her up-- my grandfather crept in in his undershirt and trousers. "Can't sleep, huh?" he jeered, in a harsh, mocking whisper. "Let some goddam fool scare the pee out of you, huh? Well, goddam, if you ain't a fine one!"
He ordered me into my overalls and led me out of the house, pausing in the kitchen where he picked up a pint cup of whiskey toddy which he always kept warming on the back of the stove. We went out into the back yard and sat down on the boardwalk to the privy. There, after each of us had had a mighty sip of toddy and I had been allowed a few puffs from his Pittsburgh stogie, he delivered himself of a lecture.
I cannot repeat it here, his acidly profane yet somehow hilarious discourse on certain types of religionists and the insanity of taking them seriously. Suffice it to say that, coupled with the toddy, it sent me into muffled gales of giggles. It sent me smiling to sleep, and left me smiling in the morning.
Having suffered the cruelest of childhoods himself, my grandfather believed that anything that contributed to a child's peace of mind was good, and that anything that disturbed that peace was bad. I hold to that same belief. It is one of the very few things I do believe.
Grandfather, or "Pa" as he was known to the entire clan, was an old man from my earliest recollection--just how old even he did not know. Orphaned shortly after birth in a period of indifferent vital statistics, he had been handed around from one family to another, worked always, fed seldom, and beaten frequently. For all that his memory could tell him he had been born big, raw-boned and doing a man's work.
He might have been fifteen when he enlisted as a drummer boy in the Union Army, but he believed he was nearer ten. By the end of the war he was a full-fledged sergeant, an inveterate gambler, a confirmed drinkei and a stout apostle of the philosophy of easy-come easy-go. He didn't know what he wanted to do, but he was certain that it must pay a great deal and have very little physical work attached to it.
There was no such vocation, of course, for a brash young man who could barely read and write. Back in his home state of Iowa, he worked for a few years as a stonemason, the only trade he knew, and usually gambled away his money as fast as he got it. When his luck at last changed for the better, he took the resulting several hundreds and went to St. Louis. There he sat in one of the big games for seventy-two hours straight, leaving at its end with more than ten thousand dollars.
He liked big things, simply for the sake of bigness, and about the intrinsically biggest business in those days, for the small capitalist, was hardware and farm implements. Pa bought out his hometown dealer in those things and set out, to all appearances, on the career of a prosperous and respectable merchant.
These appearances were deceptive. He was not respectable, by many definitions of the term, and any prosperity he may have enjoyed was as brief as it was accidental. He liked to gamble and carouse as much as he ever had. He felt a fatal friendliness for the financially distressed, and as fatal an indifference for the well-heeled. To his way of thinking, the loss of one's money in a poker game was an entirely valid reason for failing to pay a bill, and to such an unfortunate he was prepared to extend credit indefinitely. Fiscally excellent risks, on the other hand, were apt to be dunned ahead of time and to have their bills padded: this on the theory that they had probably stolen their money, anyway, and that he could put it to better use than they could.
But his biggest trouble, perhaps, was his complete unreadiness to settle down. Now "chained," as he thought of it, to a wife, children and business, he grew more impatient with every passing day. He could not bear to haggle. A customer who hesitated over a purchase would first receive a sharp reduction in price, and then, if he still hesitated, the exasperated suggestion that he get the hell out until he made up his mind.
Such shenanigans as these could only end in one way. Very late one summer's night, Pa loaded a covered wagon with his family and such personal chattels as he could get onto it and quietly drove away, leaving his home and his business behind him. The word "his" is used loosely. They were no longer his and the lighter articles he carted away would not have been if his creditors had caught him.
He homesteaded in Nebraska territory, and, for more years than he cared to remember, he did two men's work. He farmed, he ran a dairy, he carried on an extensive masonry contracting business. Finally, as he was nearing the age of fifty, he paused to take inventory.
He owned his own comfortable home and several acres on the edge of town. (And he had set his married son up on a valuable farm.) He owned several small rental properties in the town proper. It was enough, Pa decided. With his Civil War pension, he could get by nicely. For the rest of his life, he would never do another damned lick of work.
He bumped his masonry carts together, loaded them with tools and implements, piled his working clothes on top--and set fire to the lot. Then, donning his "gentleman's" uniform of blue serge suit, large black hat, and Congress gaiters, he set about catching up with his fun.
Alas, times had changed sharply for the worse during his long spell of industry. There were no real gambling games any more--only penny-ante skirmishes which were an insult to a spirited man. There were no real two-fisted drinkers any more--only molly-coddles who sipped halfheartedly at their drinks and then went on about their business. There were no real men any more. If you "called" a man, the ninny would have you hauled into court instead of making the proper response with fists and feet.
A practical man (by his own admission), Pa drew such satisfaction as he could from his whiskey jug, his boxes of long black stogies, and verbal jousting with his wife. But the first two were only adjuncts to the good life, not the life itself, and my grandmother would not play fairly with him. After a few relatively feeble remarks about how "nasty-mouthed," "filthy," and "no-account" he was, she would simply lock herself in her room, leaving Pa more frustrated than ever.
Surcease came--or, rather, began--with Pa's decision that he needed a horse and buggy to get around in. There are tamer animals in the jungles of Africa than the one he brought home. Not only was it unbroken, as the seller had honestly pointed out, but it declined to be broken. And, slowly, as the terrifying beast kicked to pieces his brand new buggy, Pa's face lit up in a beautiful smile.
That was the beginning. The end did not come until Pa, by breeding and selection, had populated the barnyard with the muliest cow, the fightingest chickens and the fiercest hogs ever assembled by man. The chickens did not lay and were too tough to eat. The hogs were lean, musclebound warriors which no stock-buyer would have as a gift. The horse could not be made to perform for more than a few minutes at a time. The cow--the only one I have ever seen do so--gave skimmed milk and very little of that.
Pa loved them all. They gave him what he needed.
Every trip into the barnyard was an adventure. The chickens ran at him, wings beating furiously. The cow butted and tried to crush him against her stall. The hogs were constantly attempting, with occasional success, to knock him down and gnaw on him. The horse kicked, bucked and nipped.
The animals were at some disadvantage in being unable to curse, but otherwise the incessant warfare was carried on on terms as even as Pa could devise. The kicking horse got kicked. The butting cow got butted. The zooming chickens, with their furiously beating wings, were in turn zoomed at, Pa thrashing his arms wildly. The hogs, who used everything they had on him, got considerably better than an even break. Pa met their onslaughts with nothing more than his boots and cane.
Although Pa's bathing was confined to washrag-andbasin dabbling, this should not be interpreted as meaning that he was hygienically careless. He simply had his own ideas about personal hygiene. Nights, mornings, and numerous times in between, he took great draughts of whiskey to "kill the poisons" in his system. To maintain his body at the same even temperature, he wore heavy woolen underwear winter and summer. He ate large quantities of liver, brains and kidneys (to fortify his own). And bedtime found him battening down every window in the house to shut out the noxious night air. Finally, to get back to the subject of animals, he would not sit down in the privy in the normal fashion, but stood up on the seat and hunkered over the hole.
He was in this semi-helpless position one day when the privy door blew open. A huge dominecker rooster, seeing a once-in-a-lifetime chance, dashed in and pecked him severely about the loins. Pa was outraged by this grossly unfair attack, but he did not resort to an axe as a less fair man would have. He simply ignored that particular rooster from then on.
When the fowl flew at him, he would ward it off brusquely or merely step aside, then calmly proceed on his way. After a few days of such rebuffs, the rooster began to stand by himself in lonely corners of the barnyard. His comb wilted; his beak drooped nearer and nearer to the ground. Now and then the other chickens, always quick to spot an outcast, would swoop at him and peck him sharply on the head. But he never fought back.
One day, when he was dreaming no doubt of happier times, he wandered too close to the hog lot. A sow poked her snout through the rails and ended his misery forever. Pa said it served the son-of-a-bitch right, and let that be a lesson to me--why me, I don't know--but I could see that he was badly upset over the affair. Stamping into the house, he emptied the pint toddy cup without pausing. When my grandmother, anticipating the usual outburst of prandial profanity, remarked that if he didn't like her cooking he knew what he could do, Pa only looked at her moodily. In fact he ate almost a half a pie--"leather and lard," to use his customary appellation--before getting back to normal and hurling the plate into the garden.
All my life I have been the victim of the inhumane and unjust botching of potentially good food. My mother was a woman of indifferent appetite, and thus lacked the basic essential of a good cook. My wife--well, my wife is a wonderful cook, but I usually do the family cooking. I got ptomaine poisoning from the very first restaurant meal I remember eating. Looking back from my present state of antiquity, I can't recall eating more than a few dozen good meals that I did not prepare myself.
If I dine at a friend's house a treasured recipe, handed down in the family for generations, will suddenly go sour. A restaurant with an unimpeachable reputation will blithely risk all for the dubious pleasure, say, of serving me stale eggs fried in goat grease. I have known but one other person to suffer from such a frightful conspiracy. A small con man named Allie Ivers (of whom much more later), he had a way of protesting which only insufficient nerve has kept me from using.
Allie owned an enormous sponge, selected with much care for its unusual powers of absorption. Before dining out he would fill this sponge with dirty water. When his meal was served him, he would slide this sponge under his napkin, hold the napkin to his mouth, and . . . but need I say more? Suffice it to say that the sight of Allie staggering about in apparent agony, a horrible liquid spouting from his napkin, could empty a crowded restaurant in the space of five minutes.
But I was about to speak of Ma's--my grandmother's cooking. And since I cannot use Pa's descriptive terms, and no others are adequate, I am somewhat at a loss as to how to proceed. I must settle, I suppose, for the statement that nowhere--in hobo jungles, soup kitchens, greasy spoons, labor camps--nowhere, I repeat, have I eaten anything as bad.
The good woman was an omnivorous reader of farmmagazine food and health "authorities," and her ideas changed with theirs from day to day. Salt caused hardening of the arteries--so that condiment might be omitted from a dish which had to have it. Baking powder "had been known to cause digestive disturbances"--so Ma, until she was advised to the contrary, would leave it out of her biscuits. On the other hand, a few drops of vanilla added to baked beans not only gave them an "unusually piquant" flavor but was "a certain safeguard" against pellagra. So you know what went into the bean pot.
It made no difference to Ma that one might prefer unpiqued flavors, pellagra and even death to beans with vanilla in them. You got vanilla. At least you got it until she learned, say, that leftover chocolate custard made a "marvelous addition "--whatever that meant--to Boston's favorite vegetable.
The fact that Ma might not have any leftover chocolate custard was no deterrent to her compounding of such a recipe. She would make some and leave it over. Ma, need I say, had a decidedly literal mind.
Mom, Maxine and I were in no position to complain, although, following Pa's precepts, I often did to my eventual sorrow. But Pa protested enough for all of us. Insofar as he could, he stuck to a diet of meat, cooked by himself or eaten raw, and he encouraged us to do the same. But every meal-time brought on an outburst of profanity, table pounding and hurled dishes, as furious as it was futile. It was one of my regular after-meal chores to go out into the garden and bring in any dishes which had not been shattered.
I think the fates must have provided Ma with a steellined stomach as recompense for depriving her of all sense of taste. In no other way can I account for her ability to eat heartily and healthfully of her own fortunately inimitable cooking. As for the Thompsons, I think we certainly should have died except for Pa's constant dosing of us with whiskey.
Both on arising and retiring, we were required to take generous drinks of toddy. And when school was in session, we kids got another big drink upon our arrival home in the evenings. In 'winter, the whiskey was a cold preventative, to Pa's notion; in warm weather, it served to "purify the blood." In days to come, I was to regret this early acquired taste for alcohol. But, at the time, I do not believe we could have survived without it.
While Ma could botch a meal quite capably by herself, it cannot be denied that she received considerable inadvertent assistance from Pa. For Pa was the official firebuilder, and he pursued this vocation more as an outlet for his tempestuous temperament than for any utilitarian purpose.
Pa began the chore by opening all the drafts on the kitchen range, and walloping it fore and after with an extra-heavy duty steel poker. This shook the soot out of it, so he said (and judging by the ineradicable carbon-hue of the kitchen there was no reason to doubt him). It also put him in the fine and furious fettle necessary for the task ahead.
Removing every lid from the top of the stove, Pa piled in kindling, corn cobs, coal, newspapers and everything else handy with a wild indiscrimination that was marvelous to behold. Onto this pile, which normally extended a foot or so above the top of the stove, he dropped an incendiarist's handful of burning matches. Then, snatching up a gallon can of kerosene, he emptied the better part of its contents into and over the range.
No fire in the hell which Pa incessantly referred Ma to could have been more awe-inspiring. It didn't just burn; it exploded. It groaned and panted and heaved, snatching at persons and objects ten.feet away and leaping clear to the ceiling. By the time it had burned down enough for Pa to replace the stove lids, weird things were happening to its internal structure. Coal was smothering the kindling; halfburned newspapers were clogging the drafts. According to whim, it might go out entirely at the very moment Ma began her alleged cooking. Or, suddenly puffing smoke and sparks through every crevice in the range, it might begin to burn anew and with an intensity that made mock of the original blaze.
Beyond beating it with the poker, which was ever ready to do, Pa refused to take any responsibility for the stove's fractious actions. It wasn't his fault if Ma didn't know how to keep a good fire going. Anyway, as he pointed out with some truth, nothing short of taking Ma out and shooting her--a course he frequently recommended-- could greatly improve the household cookery.