"Chalker, Jack L. - Dancing Gods 01 - The River of the Dancing Gods" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

"Killed in his plane, in the finest traditions of the Air Force.
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Chalker, Jack L - The River of the Dancing Gods
Sucked a bird into his jets while coming in for a landing and
that was it, or so I'm told. I was much too young, really, to
JACK L. CHALKER 7
remember him any more than as a vague presence. And the
pictures, of course. Momma kept all the pictures. The benefits,
though, they weren't all that much. He was only a captain,
after all, and a new one at that. So Momma worked like hell
at all sorts of jobs to bring me up right. She was solid Oklahoma
—high school, no marketable skills, that sort of thing.
Supermarket checker was about the highest she got—pretty
good, really, when you see the benefits they get at the union
stores. She did really well, when you think about it—except
it was all for me. She didn't have much else to live for. Wanted
me to go to college—she'd wanted to go, but never did. Well,
she and the VA and a bunch of college loans got me there, all
right, and got me through, for all the good it did. Ten days
after I graduated with a useless degree in English Lit, she
dropped dead from a heart attack. I had to sell the trailer we
lived in all those years just to make sure she was buried right.
After paying out all the stuff she owed, I had eight hundred
dollars, eight pairs of well-wom jeans, a massive collection of
T-shirts, and little else."
He sighed. "Yeah, that's rough. I always wanted to go to
college, you know, but I never had the money until I didn't
have the time. I read a lot, though. It don't pay to get hooked
on TV when you're on the road so much."
She chuckled dryly. "College is all well and good and some
of it's interesting, but if your degree's not in business, law,
medicine, or engineering, the paper's only good for about thirtyeight
hundred—that's what I still owe on those loans, and it'll
be a cold day in hell before they see a penny. They track you
down all over, too—use collection agents. So you can't get
credit, can't get a loan, none of that. I got one job teaching
junior high English for a year—but they cut back and laid me
off. Only time I ever really enjoyed life."
"So you been goin' around from job to job ever since?"
"For a while. But a couple years of working hamburger
joints and all those other minimum-wage, minimum-life jobs
gets to you. I finally sat down one day and decided it was fate,
or destiny, or something. I was getting older, and all I could
see was myself years later, sitting in a rented slum shared with
a couple of other folks just like me, getting quickies from the
night manager. So I figured I would find a man, marry him,
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and let him pay my bills while I got into the cooking and baby
business."
"Well, it's a job like any other and has a pretty long history,"