"Thompson, Jim - South of Heaven" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thompson Jim)

I said, sure. I was waiting for the line to open. "What else would I be doing out here?"
"Then pass the word, Tommy. Tell your junglebird buddies I'll just be waitin' for 'em to start some trouble in town. Tell 'em the first bastard that pulls anything will get his skull parted."
"Tell them yourself," I said. "There's six hundred of 'em jungled-up along the creek bank, and I know they'd be tickled to death to see a nice guy like you."
"And here's some more news for you," he went on, as though he hadn't heard me. "I'm signing on with the line in a few days--special guard. And what I said about startin' trouble goes double for then."
"I'm glad to hear it," I said. "You won't be wearing a badge."
His eyes flickered. I weaved and tried to step back. But his gun was already out of its holster, upraised to slam me on the side of the head. I threw my hands up to protect myself. He laughed with a grunting sound, and the gun barrel whipped into my guts.
I went down on my knees, doubled over. By the time I could straighten up, he was clear over the other side of town, stopping in front of the general store and post office.
I managed to get to my feet. I patted and rubbed the soreness a little and then I went on toward the Greek restaurant.
I'd taken a lot more than a punch in the stomach before and I reckoned I probably would again. So I wasn't particularly upset by what had happened or frightened by the possibility of something worse. I didn't have enough imagination to be scared, I suppose. Enough imagination or experience. Young people just can't believe that they're ever going to die--everyone else is, but not them. They can't believe that they won't survive anything that's thrown at them.
When you're twenty-one, what you believe is that somehow you're going to be a famous ballplayer or lawyer or writer or something that will make you a million dollars, and that you'll marry a beautiful wife and live in a beautiful house, and, well, never mind. And never mind how you're going to do it. You just are, and that's that.
Still, a hard crack with a gun barrel can have a sobering effect even on a twenty-one-year-old, and mine had taken quite a little of the perkiness out of me. I took a long look at myself, trudging along in the dust, with my hat brim turned up front and back and my belly burning with before-breakfast booze. And the picture wasn't a nice one at all. There was nothing romantic or dashing about it. I was a drifter, a day laborer, a tinhorn gambler--a man wasting his life in a wasteland. That's what I was now. That's what I'd be in another twenty-one years if I lived that long, unless I started changing my ways fast.
I told myself that I would. The telling made me feel better, sort of removing the need, you know, to actually do anything.
I began to whistle, planning what I'd have for breakfast, planning how I'd spend my five dollars. Because, of course, I was going to blow it. That was what money was for, and there was always more where the first came from. Always and always.
There is no end to always when you're twenty-one.
I began to walk in time with my whistling. Sort of marching in time to it. Marching onward and upward to some vague but lofty goal. Or so I saw myself that long-ago morning.
What I was actually heading into was the big middle of the biggest mess of my thoroughly messed up life.

3
I suppose most of us aim a lot higher than the place we actually hit. Most of us mean to do better than we wind up doing. I know I did, anyway. In the beginning, that is.
I worked hard in school and I got better than good grades. The teachers at the consolidated high school in my native Oklahoma had pointed me toward college and put out feelers for scholarships. My grandparents--my only living kin--had done everything they could to help me, wanting for me what they had never had for themselves. Everyone was pulling for me, and I was doing plenty of pulling on my own. According to the high school yearbook, I was the student most likely to succeed. And no one could have convinced anyone that I wasn't.
Then, when I was just short of sixteen, my grandparents blew themselves up, and everything else seemed to blow up right along with them.
My grandma and grandpa, God bless them, sharecropped sixty acres of the world's sorriest land. Stab a stick down anywhere, and you'd hit rock after about eighteen inches. They needed a new privy, and, since you couldn't dig in the rock, grandpa got half a box of dyna from the landlord's store. He was used to working with it; so.was I and so was grandma. You live on a rocky farm long enough and you don't think much more of a stick of dynamite than you do of a stick of candy.
I was about a half-mile away, coming home from school, when I heard the explosion. And even that far away I could hear grandma scream. It seemed like I ran forever before I got to where she and grandpa were; and by then--well, I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to remember what they looked like. Because what it was, wasn't people.
I'm not sure how it happened. But I suppose a charge misfired on them. They waited a while, making sure that it wasn't going to explode. Then, they started to put a new cap and fuse on it. And then, then just when they were bending over it . . .
Don't tell me Dyna's a good girl, that it isn't dangerous. I know better.
As I say, I was just short of sixteen at the time of the accident; in another month, I'd have graduated from high school. But I didn't wait around to do it. I knew what happened to sixteen-year-olds who didn't have kinfolk, and I didn't want any part of it.
I went down and hid in the weeds along the railroad rightof-way. I caught the first freight train that was traveling slow enough to catch and I kept right on going.
The wheat harvest all the way to Canada. The stoop crops in California. The apples in Washington and Oregon. The potatoes in Nebraska and Idaho and Colorado. And then the oil fields and the big construction jobs through the Midwest and West and Far West. I'd made plenty of money to finish my education--college and anything else I wanted. I'd made plenty, and peed it all off.
A couple of years ago, Four Trey Whitey and I had worked almost six months steady, and, what with gambling, I came off the job with around six thousand dollars. And the Lord only knows how much Whitey had. So we went into highlivin' Dallas and got a suite at the biggest hotel in town, and then we got drunk. And stayed that way.
Just booze--no women. Whitey was impotent, I think, so it wouldn't have been polite for me to suggest women. I probably wouldn't have, anyway, since I'd been raised a strict Baptist, and when you drink like we did you don't think much about sex.
At the end of the month we were both broke, and I was having the d.t.'s. But Four Trey managed to get me into the county hospital alcoholic ward before he left town. That was his way; nice and considerate up to a point, but not taking anyone to raise. He'd work with you or go on a party with you, but he was a loner--a guy who didn't want anyone hanging on him. And he could get awfully damned sharp if you got in his way. So. . . .
So here I was again, trudging the red dust of another Godforsaken town, starting out on another job in the wilderness. And telling myself that this time it would be different, that I would be different.
I was walking past the deserted hotel when I heard the sound of voices, sort of mumbling and singing, and I stooped down and looked under the porch. Three boes were under it, sprawled around a big old-fashioned chamber pot and sipping from its contents.
I figured, correctly, that they'd stolen the pot out of the hotel and what they had in it was anti-freeze mixed with water from the Pecos. But I called to them, kidding.
"You boys getting pretty hard up drinking pee, aren't you?"
They whooped and hollered. "Best you ever tasted, Tommy. Come an' join us."
I said thanks, but I guessed not. "Bud Lassen's in town. Maybe you'd better play it kind of low."
They all said what Bud Lassen could do to himself, and what they'd do to him. "Hey, listen, Tommy. I got a new joke about pipeliners."
It wasn't new. I'd probably heard it a hundred times--a kind of dirty dialect joke. But I listened to humor them:
"_Mammy, mammy! Big bunch o' pipeliners comin'!_"
"_Hush yo' mouf, gal! Them pipeliners screws each other an' does their own washing_."
"That's rich," I said. "Very funny. Well, you boys be good." I hurried on before they could stop me, and their singing trailed down the street.
_Throw out the lifeline,_
_Here comes the pipeline._
_Some bo is going to drag-up!_
An old Dodge panel truck was parked a couple of doors down from the Greek's restaurant. A panel truck fixed up like a housecar, with windows Cut into the sides and the top knocked out and hooped over with canvas to make it higher. The rear tire was flat, and a kid in jeans and jumper and a stocking cap was trying to pry it off the rim. He couldn't do it, because he hadn't let all the air out of it. Which made him a pretty dumb kid in my book.
I spoke to him, pointing out what he had to do. But he was hunkered down with his back to me, and his stocking cap apparently kept him from hearing. So I put my foot out and toed him in the butt.
There was a wild shriek. He rose straight up in the air, and his stocking cap flew off, and--and it wasn't a he. It was a girl.
And was she ever mad! And was she ever pretty! And was she ever built!