"Eddings, David - High Hunt" - читать интересную книгу автора (High Hunt)

"Well, Dad took a deep breath. He knew Granddad had been awful fond of that old hound. 'Had to shoot him,' he said. 'Wouldn't hunt — wouldn't even hunt his own food. Caught him feeding on Pete's kill.'

"Well, I guess Granddad thought about that for a while. Then he finally said, 'Only thing you could do, Sam, I guess. Kind of a shame, though. Old Buell was a good dog when he was younger. Had him a long time.'"

The wind in the chimney suddenly sounded very loud and cold and lonesome.

"But why'd he shoot him?" I finally protested.

"He just wasn't any good anymore," Dad said, "and when a dog wasn't any good in those days, they didn't want him around. Same way with people. If they're no good, why keep them around?" He looked straight at Jack when he said it.

"Well, I sure wouldn't shoot my own dog," I objected.

Dad shrugged. "It was different then. Maybe if things were still the way they were back then, the world would be a lot easier to live in."

That night when we were in bed in the cold bedroom upstairs, listening to Mom and the Old Man yelling at each other down in the living room, I said it again to Jack. "I sure wouldn't shoot my own dog."

"Aw, you're just a kid," he said. "That was just a story. Grandpa didn't really shoot any dog. Dad just said that."

"Dad doesn't tell lies," I said. "If you say that again, I'm gonna hit you."

Jack snorted with contempt.

"Or maybe I'll shoot you," I said extravagantly. "Maybe some day I'll just decide that you're no good, and I'll take my gun and shoot you. Bang! Just like that, and you'll be dead, and I'll betcha you wouldn't like that at all."

Jack snorted again and rolled over to go to sleep, or to wrestle with the problem of being grown-up and still being afraid, which was to worry at him for the rest of his life. But I lay awake for a long time staring into the darkness. And when I drifted into sleep, the forest in the kitchen echoed with the hollow roar of that old rifle, and my shadowy old dog with the sad, friendly eyes tumbled over and over in the snow.

In the years since that night I've had that same dream again and again — not every night, sometimes only once or twice a year — but it's the only thing I can think of that hasn't changed since I was a boy.



The Gathering


1

I guess that if it hadn't been for that poker game, I'd have never really gotten to know my brother. That puts the whole thing into the realm of pure chance right at the outset.

I'd been drafted into the Army after college. I sort of resented the whole thing but not enough to run off to Canada or to go to jail. Some of my buddies got kind of excited and made a lot of noise about "principle" and what-not, but I was the one staring down the mouth of that double-barrelled shotgun called either/or. When I asked them what the hell the difference was between the Establishment types who stood on the sidelines telling me to go to Nam and the Antiestablishment types who stood on the sidelines telling me to go to a federal penitentiary, they got decidedly huffy about the whole thing.

Sue, my girlfriend, who felt she had to call and check in with her mother if we were going to be five minutes late getting home from a movie, told me on the eve, as they used to say, of my departure that she'd run off to Canada with me if I really wanted her to. Since I didn't figure any job in Canada would earn me enough to pay the phone bill she'd run up calling Momma every time she had to go to the biffy, I nobly turned her down. She seemed awfully relieved.

I suppose that ultimately I went in without any fuss because it didn't really mean anything to me one way or the other. None of it did.

As it all turned out, I went to Germany instead of the Far East. So I soaked up Kultur and German beer and played nursemaid to an eight-inch howitzer for about eighteen months, holding off the red threat. I finished up my hitch in late July and came back on a troopship. That's where I got into the poker game.

Naturally, it was Benson who roped me into it. Benson and I had been inducted together in Seattle and had been in the same outfit in Germany. He was a nice enough kid, but he couldn't walk past a deck of cards or a pair of dice if his life depended on it. He'd been at me a couple times and I'd brushed him off, but on the third day out from Bremerhaven he caught me in the chow line that wandered up and down the gray-painted corridors of the ship. He knew I had about twenty dollars I hadn't managed to spend before we were shipped out.

"Come on, Alders. What the hell? It's only for small change." His eyes were already red-rimmed from lack of sleep, but Ms fatigue pockets jingled a lot. He must have been winning for a change.

"Oh, horseshit, Benson," I told him. "I just don't get that much kick out of playing poker."