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

"He's harmless. I don't see any reason to discriminate against somebody just because he's crazy. He's just one of the losers, that's all."

"The losers?" Flood turned and looked at him.

"You're not very observant, Damon. This whole street is filled with losers."

"The whole town's a loser, baby." Flood went back to the couch and sprawled on it. "Wall-to-wall zilch."

"Not exactly. It's a little provincial-sort of a cultural backwater-but there are people here who make it all right. The real hard-core loser is something altogether different. Sometimes I think it's a disease."

Flood continued to look at him thoughtfully. "Let's define our terms," he suggested.

"There's the real Reed approach."

"Maybe that's a disease, too," Flood agreed ruefully. "Okay, exactly what do you mean when you say `loser'?"

"I don't think I can really define it yet." Raphael frowned. "It's a kind of syndrome. After you watch them for a while, it's almost as if they had big signs on their foreheads-`loser.' You can spot them a mile off."

"Give me some examples."

"Sure, Winnie the Wino, Sadie the Sitter, Chicken Coop Annie, Freddie the Fruit, Heck's Angels-"

"Hold it," Flood said, raising both his hands. "Crazy Charlie I understand. Who are all these others?"

"Winnie the Wino lives on the floor beneath Crazy Charlie. She puts away a couple gallons of cheap wine a day. She's bombed out all the time. Sadie the Sitter lives on the other street there. She baby-sits. She plops her big, fat can in a swing on her porch and watches the neighborhood while she stuffs her face-with both hands. She's consumed by greed and envy. Chicken Coop Annie is a blonde-big as a house, dirty as a pig, and congenitally lazy. She makes a career of sponging. She knows the ins and outs of every charity in Spokane. She's convinced that her hair's the same color as Farrah's, and every so often she tries to duplicate that hairdo-the results are usually grotesque. Freddie the Fruit is a flaming queen. He lives with a very tough girl who won't let him go near any boys. He has to do what she tells him to because her name's the one on the welfare checks. Heck's Angels are a third-rate motorcycle gang. There are eight or ten of them, and they've got three motorcycles that are broken-down most of the time. They swagger a lot and try to look tough, but basically they're only vicious and stupid. They've lumped together the welfare checks of their wives and girlfriends and rented the house up the street. They peddle dope for walking-around money, and they sneak around at night siphoning gas to keep their cars and motorcycles running."

"And you can see all this from your rooftop?"

Raphael nodded. "For some reason they don't look up. All you have to do is sit still and watch and listen. You can see them in full flower every day. Their lives are hopelessly screwed up. For the most part they're already in the hands of one or two social agencies. They're the raw material of the whole social-service industry. Without a hard-core population of losers, you could lay off half the police force, ninety percent of the social workers, most of the custodians of the insane, and probably a third of the hospital staffs and coroners' assistants."

"They're violent?" Flood asked, startled.

"Of course. They're at the bottom. They've missed out on all the goodies of life. The goodies are all around, but they can't have them. They live in filth and squalor and continual noise. Their normal conversational tone is a scream-they shriek for emphasis. Their cars are all junkers that break down if you even look at them. Their TV sets don't work, and they steal from each other as a matter of habit. Their kids all have juvenile records and are failing in school. They live in continual frustration and on the borderline of rage all the time. A chance remark can trigger homicidal fury. Five blocks from here last month a woman beat her husband's brains out with a crowbar after an argument about what program they were going to watch on TV."

"No shit?" Flood sat looking at Raphael, his dark eyes suddenly burning. "What are you doing in this sewer, Raphael?"

Raphael shrugged. "Let's call it research. I think there's one single common symptom that they all have that makes them losers. I'm trying to isolate it."

"How much consideration have you given to sheer stupidity?"

"That contributes, probably," Raphael admitted, "but stupid people do occasionally succeed in life. I think it's something else."

"And when you do isolate it, what then? Are you going to cure the world?"

Raphael laughed. "God, no. I'm just curious, that's all. In the meantime there's enormous entertainment in watching them. They're all alike, but each one is infinitely unique. Let's just say that they're a hobby."

The expression on Flood's face was strange as he listened to Raphael talk, and his eyes seemed to burn in the faint red glow of the winking scanner. It might have been Raphael's imagination or a trick of the. light, but it was as if a great weight had suddenly been lifted from the dark-faced young man's shoulders-that a problem that had been plaguing him for months had just been solved.

iii
Raphael worked only a half day on Wednesday, since he was just about to the bottom of the pile of repairable shoes that lay to one side of his worktable.