"Wilson-Retired" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robin)

ROBIN WILSON

THE RETIRED MEN'S SOCIAL CLUB & LADIES' AUXILIARY

People had called Edward Jay Elson "Pop" ever since 1952, when at twenty-eight
he was promoted from journeyman lineman to pusher on the 300 KVA line they were
stringing down the Feather River Canyon from the new Caribou hydro station. Now
newly into his seventies, a tall, lean man whose shock of white hair and
weathered face at last suited the nickname, he continued to display the good
nature that had earned it. He was "Pop" because of his paternal care for the men
who worked for him as he rose through the blue collar ranks in Pacific Gas and
Electric; a nice guy who had paid his way in the world with quiet, unassuming
kindness.

Which, he supposed -- being a man of self-knowledge but limited religious
conviction -- made it a balancing of scales according to some vast eternal plan,
that he be rewarded for a life of modest good works with the sudden removal of
the cancerous tumor that had grown long undetected in the dark of his groin like
some mysterious truffle.

Whatever the ultimate cause -- God or Nature or simply The Way Things Are -- the
proximate instrument of his sudden return to health was a small, golden cylinder
held with sure purpose in the six-fingered left hand of one of the three little
guys with bald and bulbous heads and luminous kid eyes who, late on a March
Saturday afternoon, sucked him up from his Sears aluminum bass boat into their
strange, organic craft, one toroidal end of which hovered briefly over a snaky
little inlet of Lake Oroville.

"Thing like one of those little Magna-Lite flashlights," he told Amie Heckshire
at nine-thirty on the following Saturday morning in the storefront clubroom on
Third Street in Oroville's shabby old downtown. "Except it was kind a gold
colored and hummed." The ancient Wurlitzer in the comer writhed purple and
played a mournful Crystal Gayle.

"Yeah, right," said Arnie, a friend of fifty years and fellow member of the
Retired Men's Social Club & Ladies' Auxiliary. He was not a morning person,
hated Saturday clean ups. He shrugged his narrow shoulders and tugged the belt
on his Expansoslacks up over his prolapsed abdomen, "Okay, I'll bite. What's the
gag?"

"I'm not kiddin'. It really happened." Pop's voice was low, intense, his face
serious. He pulled the front of his blue polo shirt free from his pants,
unbuckled them, and slipped the waistband down over a pelvis still flat and hard
to reveal in the dim morning light of the barroom a small, pink, puckering
blemish.

"Shit," said Arnie, shaking his head to scoff away his growing credulity. "Looks
like a goddamn hickey, like where maybe Marianne bit you, you been doin' that