"Howard Waldrop - Winter Quarters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Waldrop Howard)

WINTER QUARTERS
by HOWARD WALDROP

┬й 2000 by Howard Waldrop and SCIFI.COM (August 2, 2000).



Perhaps I should start "When he was twelve, he ran away from the circus."
Maybe I should begin "As circuses go, it was a small one. It only had two mammoths."
I'll just start at the beginning: The phone rang.



-<*>-



"Hey, Marie!" said the voice of my friend Dr. Bob the paleontologist. "Do you remember Arnaud?"
"Was the Pope Polish?" I asked.
"Well, the circus is in town, and he's in it. Susie Neruda took her nieces and nephews yesterday and
recognized him. She just called me." Then he paused. "You want to go see him?"
"I didn't think you and circuses got along," I said.
"For this, I'll ignore everything in my peripheral vision."
"When would you like to go?"
"Next show's in forty-five minutes. I'll swing by and pick you up."
"Uh, sure," I said, looking at the stack of departmental memos on my desk. I threw the antimacassar
from the back of my office chair over them.
He hung up.



-<*>-



When he was twelve, he ran away from the circus. Dr. Bob Oulijian, I mean. His father had managed
two of them while Bob was trying to grow up. One day he showed up on the doorstep of his favorite
aunt and said, "If I ever have to see another trapeze act or smell another zebra's butt in my life, Aunt
Gracie, I'll throw up." Things were worked out; Aunt Gracie raised him, and he went on to become the
fairly respected head of the paleontology department in the semi-podunk portion of the state university
system where we both teach. What was, to others, a dim, misty vista of life in past geologic ages, to him
was, as he once said, "a better circus than anyone could have thought up."



-<*>-



We whined down the highway in his Toyota Heaviside, passing the occasional Daimler-Chrysler