"Howard Waldrop - DisRxT" - читать интересную книгу автора (Waldrop Howard)

┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖



It was summer and it was hot. The days were long and filled with as much ennui as anyone could handle.
Any kid with sense and money was down at the movies, where it was three degrees cooler inside,
watching Phantom From Space or The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms or, best of all, the pee-inducing
Invaders From Mars, the one with the sand opening up at your feet and the big furry green Martians
grabbing you from below.

The swimming pools were all closed because of another polio scare.

If you were lucky you had TV (only Beanpole's folks did, and it was a used Dumont with an eleven-inch
screen, and Beanpole's dad was always watching Roller Derby or Wrestling From The Jamaica
Arena and stuff.)

What they had at the clubhouse were two radios, one in the regular clubhouse and, via a long cord buried
under the driveway and up the back of the tree, another radio up in the treehouse. (They'd found the
electricity to the old garage had never been cut off, and they'd run cords from one of the plugs inside to
the regular clubhouse.)

Well, music sucked, except when they played something old, like "Sing, Sing, Sing!" by Benny
Goodman, or "Big Noise From Winnetka." What was on the radio these days was Patti Page or Guy
Mitchell (who tried, anyway), stuff like that. Over on the end of the dial was the whiny honky-tonk
hillbilly noise.

One morning while Dave was up in the treehouse, he heard sounds like he'd never heard before. He
leaned out. "What's that?" he yelled.

Croupie stuck his head out the clubhouse window. "Wow!" he said. "870 on the AM dial! Listen to that!
"

Since the radio in the treehouse only got AM, Dave twisted the Bakelite knob over. It was scratchy, far
away, from one of the big cities. There were four or five voices in it, a bass, two or three middles, a high
one. The music came in and out on a wave of static, and then a voiceтАФa Negro voiceтАФtold him that had
been Billy Ward and the Dominoes singing "Sixty-Minute Man." Then they played a whole other song
called "Lightning Hit The Poorhouse."

Dave climbed down the ladder and pedaled away in the Mercury woodie wagon. He came back ten
minutes later with a hundred-foot roll of eight-gauge wire and made antennae for both radios, so the
static came in much clearer at first, and then the station. It was their favorite radio station in the whole
world. Sankandank had a strong desire to break off the tuning knob once they had the music coming in
strong.

That was all that happened the first half of the summer of 1953.




┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖