"Kurt Vonnegut - Jailbird" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

and underpants and throw them down the mouth of hell. The mouth of hell looked like a sort of
wishing well, but without a bucket and windlass. You could lean over its rim and hear ever so
faintly the screams of Hitler and Nero and Salome and Judas and people like that far, far below. I
could imagine Hitler, already experiencing maximum agony, periodically finding his head draped
with my father's underpants.
Whenever Father had his pants stolen, he would come running to me, purple with rage. As like



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as not, I had just made some new friends and was impressing them with my urbanity - and there my
father would be, bawling bloody murder and with his little pecker waving in the breeze.
I complained to my mother about him, but she said she knew nothing about him, or about me,
either, since she was only sixteen. So I was stuck with him, and all I could do was yell at him
from time to time, "For the love of God, Father, won't you please grow up!"
And so on. It insisted on being a very unfriendly story, so I quit writing it.

******

And now, in July of 1945, Father came into Stegemeier's Restaurant, still very much alive. He was
about the age that I am now, a widower with no interest in ever being married again and with no
evident wish for a lover of any kind. He had a mustache like the one I have today. I was clean-
shaven then.
A terrible ordeal was ending - a planetary economic collapse followed by a planetary war.
Fighting men were starting to come home everywhere. You might think that Father would comment on
that, however fleetingly, and on the new era that was being born. He did not.
He told instead, and perfectly charmingly, about an adventure he had had that morning. While
driving into the city, he had seen an old house being torn down. He had stopped and taken a closer
look at its skeleton. He noticed that the sill under the front door was an unusual wood, which he
finally decided was poplar. I gathered that it was about eight inches square and four feet long.
He admired it so much that the wreckers gave it to him. He borrowed a hammer from one of them and
pulled out all the nails he could see.
Then he took it to a sawmill - to have it ripped into boards. He would decide later what to do
with the boards. Mostly, he wanted to see the grain in this unusual wood. He had to promise the
mill that there were no nails left in the timber. This he did. But there was still a nail in
there. It had lost its head, and so was invisible. There was an earsplitting shriek from the
circular saw when it hit the nail. Smoke came from the belt that was trying to spin the stalled
saw.
Now Father had to pay for a new sawblade and a new belt, too, and had been told never to come
there with used lumber again. He was delighted somehow. The story was a sort of fairy tale, with a
moral in it for everyone.
Uncle Alex and I had no very vivid response to the story. Like all of Father's stories, it was
as neatly packaged and self-contained as an egg.

******

So we ordered more beers. Uncle Alex would later become a cofounder of the Indianapolis chapter of
Alcohalics Anonymous, although his wife would say often and pointedly that he himself had never