"Chalker, Jack L - G.O.D. Inc 1 - Labyrinth of Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

who you knew and what you had that counted. More than once I wished the Air
Force had decided to make me an accountant or a medic or something. Right now I
could forget the twin BMWs and the big house in the suburbs. I wasn't ambitious
and material things had never much mattered to me; still, I'd settle for being
lower middle class.
I figured we'd talk it out tonight. It wouldn't be the first time, but we'd
never been this far down and this behind before. We were approaching the point
where we could never catch up, and fast.

2.
Something Big


Sitting around a little apartment-building laundry room in your underwear on a
hot, muggy night at about three in the morning feeding quarters into a Korean
War vintage washer and dryer and watching the moths dive-bomb the lone light
bulb was not exactly the most romantic of situations, but it increased my
already deep depression.
One of the craziest curses of being poor is that you get fat. That's because the
kind of stuff that's cheapest to buy is full of fat and starches. Most of me
stayed automatically thin, so it all went to the gut. I had three rolls of fat
there, which I named Goodyear, Firestone, and Michelin. Brandy was five five and
admitted to weighing two-twenty, all of it in her breasts, hips, and thighs. I
didn't mind -- she was still sexy to me -- but neither of us had any clothes that
really fit or any money to get new ones. My shirts were on their third set of
buttons and still opened themselves when I sat down, and I split my pants so
much there's nothing in the seats but repairs. I wasn't sure I could even get
into my one old suit if I had to. Brandy's whole wardrobe consisted of jeans she
could barely get into and tee shirts so faded you couldn't tell what color they
started out being, and that old hooker's outfit she'd used way back when (but
since, only over my dead body). It wasn't that we were so poor we couldn't
spring for new clothes, it was just that at twenty bucks a shirt, thirty bucks
for pants, never mind her wardrobe, we'd be up around five hundred bucks, and
when you start thinking that way the money goes elsewhere.
I sighed. "Babe, we got to talk."
"You got that surrender look in your eyes," she said accusingly.
"Yeah, but a good general knows when. We owe Corbone Properties seventeen
hundred bucks for back rent and utilities on the office. We owe this dump about
seven hundred more. The car's so bad, if we take it to the mechanic's he'll
pronounce it dead -- that is, if we paid him what we owed him so he'd even look at
it. We got another two, three thousand bucks in other bills, and we got eight
hundred and fifty-two dollars in the bank. And none of that counts what we owe
the IRS. It's over, babe. I got the word today. End of the month, pay up or out
at the office. End of the month, pay up or out here. Peter Pan time's over.
They're ordering us to grow up."
She sat down and put her arms around me. "I know. I didn't know 'bout the
landlord, but I knew the rest. Can't run even what we have, with no phone and no
office. I guess I knew it was comin' all along. I just kept hopin', somehow,
that something would walk in. Something big, you know? It ain't gonna walk in,
though, is it?"