"Avram Davidson - Knox's 'Nga" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davidson Avram)

heard from, almost, again.
The baby was called The Baby as long as was reasonable, and then a bit more.
The Baby began to walk, lurch, stagger, teeter, totter, "Come to Great-Grandmother,
Knox. Come to Grand," said Guess Who: "Knox."
"Knox" came. Totter, teeter, stagger, lurch, walk. Collapse. "There, see he knows
who he is and he knows who I am," said the Dragon Lady.
The three Owenses are at home. "Knox," said Bob.
His firstborn shows no sign.
"I know," says Lou.
"We could call him 'Philander'."
"No, we could-n't!"
Bob bares all, did his wife think there was no gamey secret she did not know?
Hah! "I had a great-aunt named Rectalyna," says he. Lou screams.
No he did-n't! Oh yeah, yes he did. She was long ago and far back on the
Coonass and Peckerwood sides of the family, gummed snuff and thought shit was a
household word. Her most famous, well, only well-known, wehhell only known
utterance, was, "The government is going to punish this nation because poor Mr.
Bryan is dead," came to the attention of H.L Mencken, who said Hot diggetty! and
made a note and on finding out the woman's name said, "Hot diggetty, poor old
Jehovah, woo-hoo, Rectalina with a long i? Oh with a y. Godfrey Daniel!" and it
appeared in some preliminary work on The American Language but got cut out of
the regular editions. "So my sweet, compared to Rectalyna, I guess we can live with
Knox, hey we could call him 'Phil'!"
It was all in vain. No, they couldn't. He simply was too young and a baby to be a
Phil.
They took to calling him My Son. Where's My Son. Come here My Son.
Grand of course, well, what do you think. Grand liked a ride in the country but
Grand did not like to drive. Once there had been a chauffeur, or, as he was called in
the highly democratic Welles house, a driver. McDowd. McDowd, returning to
Antrim for a visit, had been convicted of an uncommonly brutal murder and jerked
to Jesus in no time at all. Anyway. Grand dearly loved to be called for and driven
around with her descendants, whom she would treat to ice-cream cones and
Coca-Cola and suggest they drop into country sales and so on and afterwards she
would slip something into Bob Owens's hand. He said that at first he thought it was
a Merry Widow (Lou: A what?) a French letter (Lou: a WHAT?). Oh Hell. But it
was a twenty-dollar bill, folded small and thick.
"Oh look there. What does the sign-y say, Knox? Read it for Grand. It says,
Ya-a-r-d Sale. Yard sale. Oh Bob do you think we—"
Bob plays it up. Milk-buckets? he asks. If Grand wants a nice bucket he Bob has
a friend who can make them a good price for a dozen. Soon the old lady has passed
from pshaw and the idea into giggles, and there they are, Rumplemayer's or
whatever the name of the place was, the worn inhabitata of three generations, out for
sale, nary a tear. "What, those old pie-an-o rolls," says Mrs. Rumplemayer, "Oh they
blonged to my older sister she had infantile pralysis and my folks got her the player
pie-an-o but then she got like pralysis of the brain so nobody had no more use for
them, why she died years ago, how much the tag says? Three dollars? Shucks. Why
you just take 'em all for two."
Knox is a little bit testy. He does not exactly reject Grand, would he dare, all
those gravel road bonds, but he doesn't want his parents to move away, either. "He
wants his bottle," Grand remarks.