"David Eddings - Losers, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eddings David)

"Fuckin' bastard," she said.

"Oh, my God!" the fat woman trundling down the sidewalk exclaimed. "Oh, my God!" She was very fair-skinned and was nearly as big as Sadie the Sitter. Her hair was blond and had been stirred into some kind of scrambled arrangement at the back of her head. The hair and her clothes were covered with flecks of lint, making her look as if she had slept in a chicken coop.

She clutched a tabloid paper in her hand and had an expression of unspeakable horror on her face. "Oh, my God!" she said again to no one in particular. "Did you see this?" she demanded of Sadie the Sitter, waving the paper.

"What is it?" Sadie asked without much interest.

"Oh, my God!" the woman Raphael had immediately tagged "Chicken Coop Annie" said. "It's just awful! Poor Farrah's losin' her hair!"

"Really?" Sadie said with a faint glint of malicious interest. Sadie was able to bear the misfortunes of others with great fortitude.

"It says so right here," Chicken Coop Annie said, waving the paper again. "I ain't had time to read it yet, but it says right here in the headline that she's losin' her hair. I just hadda bring it out to show to everybody. Poor Farrah! Oh, poor, poor Farrah!"

"I seen it already," Sadie told her. "Oh." Annie's face fell. She stood on the sidewalk, sweating with disappointment. "Me 'n her got the same color hair, you know," she ventured, putting one pudgy hand to her tangled hairdo.

"That so?" Sadie sounded unconvinced.

"I gotta go tell Violet."

"Sure." Sadie looked away.

Annie started off down the street.

"Oh, my God!" she said.

Their cars broke down continually, and there were always a half dozen or so grimy young men tinkering with stubbornly exhausted iron brutes at the curbs or in the alleys. And when the cars did finally run, it was at best haltingly with a great deal of noise and smoke, and they left telltale blood trails of oil and transmission fluid on the streets behind them.

They lost their money or their food stamps, and most of the men were in trouble of one kind or another. Each time a police car cruised through the neighborhood, back doors slammed all up and down the street, and furtive young men dashed from the houses to run down the alleys or jump fences and flee through littered backyards.

Raphael watched, and gradually he began to understand them. At first it was not even a theory, but rather a kind of intuition. He found that he could look at any one of them and almost smell the impending crisis. That was the key word-crisis. At first it seemed too dramatic a term to apply to situations resulting from their bumbling mismanagement of their lives or deliberate wrongheaded stupidity, but they themselves reacted as if these situations were in fact crises. If, for example, a live-in boyfriend packed up and moved out while the girl in question was off at the grocery store, it provided her with an irresistible opportunity to play the role of the tragic heroine. Like a Greek chorus, her friends would dutifully gather around her, expressing shock and dismay. The young men would swagger and bluster and leap into their cars to go importantly off in search of the runaway, forming up like a posse and shouting instructions to each other over the clatter of their sick engines. The women would gather about the bereaved one, commiserating with her, supporting her, and admiring her performance. After a suitable display of grand emotion-cries, shrieks, uncontrollable sobbing, or whatever she considered her most dramatic response-the heroine would lapse into a stoic silence, her head nobly lifted, and her face ravaged by the unspeakable agony she was suffering. Her friends would caution each other wisely that several of them at least would have to stay with her until all danger of suicide was past. Such situations usually provided several days of entertainment for all concerned.

Tobe was roaring drunk again. He staggered out into the yard bellowing curses and waving his wine bottle. Sam came out of the house and stood blearily on the porch wringing his hands and pleading with the little man to come back inside.

Tobe turned and cursed him savagely, then collapsed facedown in the unmowed grass and began to snore.

Sam stumbled down off the porch, and with an almost maternal tenderness, he picked up the sleeping little man and bore him back into the house.

Mousy Mary lived in the house on the corner directly opposite Raphael's apartment and right beside Tobe and Sam's house. She was a slight girl with runny eyes and a red nose and a timid, almost furtive walk. She had two children, a girl of twelve or so and a boy about ten. Quite frequently she would lock herself and her children in the house and not come out for several days. Her telephone would ring unanswered, sometimes for hours.

And then a woman Raphael assumed was her mother would show up. Mousy Mary's mother was a small, dumpy woman with a squinting, suspicious face. She would creep around Mary's house trying all the doors and windows. Then she would return to her car and drive slowly up and down the streets and alleys, stopping to jot down the license numbers of all the cars in the neighborhood. Once she had accomplished that, she would find a suitable spot and stake out the house, sometimes for as long as a day and a night. The blinds in Mousy Mary's house would move furtively from time to time, but other than that there would be no sign that anyone was inside. When it grew dark, no lights would come on, and Raphael could imagine Mary crouching in the dark with her children, hiding from her mother.

"I wonder if I might use your telephone," Mousy Mary's mother said to Sadie one afternoon.

"What's the problem?" Sadie asked.

"I have to call the police," the old woman said in a calm voice that seemed to indicate that she had to call the police quite frequently. "Somebody's holding my daughter and her children hostage in her house there."

"How do you know?" Sadie sounded interested.