"Фредерик Браун. Night of the Jabberwock (англ) " - читать интересную книгу автора

source of news is the sheriff's department and, at the moment, Sheriff
Rance Kates was just about my worst enemy. Kates is honest, but he is also
stupid, rude and full of race prejudice; and race prejudice, although it's
not a burning issue in Carmel City, is one of my pet peeves. I hadn't pulled
any punches in my editorials about Kates, either before or after his
election. He got into office only because his opponent who wasn't any
intellectual heavyweight either had got into a tavern brawl in Neilsville a
week before election and was arrested there and charged with assault and
battery. The Clarion had reported that, too, so the Clarion was probably
responsible for Rance Kates' being elected sheriff. But Rance remembered
only the things I'd said about him, and barely spoke to me on the street.
Which, I might add, didn't concern me the slightest bit personally, but it
forced me to get all of my police news, such as it is, the hard way.
Past the supermarket and Beal Brothers and past Deak's Music Store
where I'd once bought a violin but had forgotten to get a set of
instructions with it and the corner and across the street.
The walk home.
Maybe I weaved just a little, for at just that stage I'm never quite as
sober as I am later on. But my mind ah, it was in that delightful state of
being crystal clear in the center and fuzzy around the edges, the state that
every moderate drinker knows but can't explain or define, the state that
makes even a Carmel City seem delightful and such things as its squalid
politics amusing.
Past the comer drugstore Pop Hinkle's place where I used to drink
sodas when I was a kid, before I went away to college and made the big
mistake of studying journalism. Past Gorham's Feed Store, where I'd worked
vacations while I was in high school. Past the Bijou Theater. Past Hank
Greeber's Undertaking Parlors, through which both of my parents had passed,
fifteen and twenty years ago.
Around the corner at the courthouse, where a light was still on in
Sheriff Kates' office and I felt so cheerful that, for a thousand dollars
or so, I'd have stopped in to talk to him. But no one was around to offer me
a thousand dollars.
Out of the store district now, past the house in which Elsie Minton had
lived and in which she had died while we were engaged, twenty-five years
ago.
Past the house Elmer Conklin had lived in when I'd bought the Clarion
from him. Past the church where I'd been sent to Sunday School when I was a
kid, and where I'd once won a prize for memorizing verses of the Bible.
Past my past, and walking, slightly weaving, toward the house in which
I'd been conceived and born.
No, I hadn't lived there fifty-three years. My parents had sold it and
had moved to a bigger house when I was nine and when my sister now married
and living in Florida had been born. I'd bought it back twelve years ago
when it happened to be vacant and on the market at a good price. It's only a
three-room cottage, not too big for a man to live in alone, if he likes to
live alone, and I do.
Oh, I like people, too. I like someone to drop in for conversation or
chess or a drink or all three. I like to spend an hour or two in Smiley's,
or any other tavern, a few times a week. I like an occasional poker game.