"Robert F. Young - Ape's Eye View" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

apeтАЩs
eye
view
by...ROBERT F. YOUNG

It looked bad for the strange youngster, until his opponent screamed as if some one had stuck a knife
through his eyes.

Robert F. Young, author of WISH UPON A STAR, the lead novel in our December 1956 issue,
works at a machine shop in upstate New York, and writes stories, after work, which often criticize
the machine age.
Here is a gentler story, however, our cover story, about a strange boy.

TODAY you'd never guess that Appleseed Corners was once the scene of an occult phenomenon.
It's only been a month now since the entity swooped down cut of the blue and ate poor Pinky Fields, but
the people around here have gone back to their usual ruts and their favorite TV chairs already, and
nobody even speculates any more as to why the entity ate such a scrawny specimen of humanity as Pinky
when there were so many fatter and healthier specimens standing around. I suppose that I'd be back in
my own rut and chair too, instead of writing this, if I hadn't ransacked the attic yesterday for my fishing
tackle and happened to run across an old book.

It was a book I hadn't read since I was a kid and it wasn't at all the kind of bock you'd have
expected would throw any light on Pinky Fields and the entityтАФor anything else, for that matter. Yet the
minute I read the title I got a new slant on the entire incident.
I'd better start with Pinky Fields. Not that he's much to start with, but I've got to start somewhere. I
was in the same grades with him all through grammar school, and all through high school, so I guess I
knew him about as well as anybody did. I never liked him though. No one did. He was too stand-offish
for one thing, and too much of a physical wreck for another. And then there was that pink skin of his.
You just couldn't get used to it no matter how hard you tried, though I guess none of us ever tried very
hard. Calling him Pinky didn't help matters much either, but I don't know what mere appropriate
nickname you could give a kid whose complexion resembled a ripe peach without fuzz.

Pinky was a foundling, and the old timers used to tell it around that the reason his folks left him on the
Fields' doorstep was because they couldn't stand the sight of him. But I don't think anybody paid much
attention at the time, because that was the same summer the meteor landed in Ernie Crumley's apple
orchard and ruined four of his best McIntoshes. What with the government mineralogists digging up the
place and sifting ashes (that was all they ever found), and the newspaper photographers taking pictures,
and the city people snooping around every Sunday, Appleseed Corners probably had too much on its
mind to bother about foundlings. Anyway, the Fields took Pinky in and brought him up. They'd lost their
first child and couldn't have any more, so I imagine that had a lot to do with it. Maybe they were even
glad to get him.
As I said, I went to school with him, but I don't have any clear recollection of him before the fourth
or the fifth grade. In one of those gradesтАФI'm not sure whichтАФI had the seat behind him, and I
remember staring at the back of his small round head and marveling at his hair. That was another freakish
thing about him. It wasn't enough that his complexion should resemble a fuzzless peach; his hair had to
resemble the fuzz.
The next thing that sticks in my mind is his dumbness. In reading class, when the teacher called on
him to read a paragraph or two, you'd think he was the village idiot, he read so slow. I can still see him
standing there by his desk, his wizened face screwed up, his forehead plowed with little wrinkles, his
shriveled lips twisting as though they hurt him, and his skinny arms sagging with the weight of the primary