"Eliot Fintushel - Breakfast with the Ones You Love" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fintushel Eliot)

Breakfast With the Ones you Love
By
Eliot Fintushel
Brought to you by Winterborn

For Ariel and Mollie and Noelle

The Yid Paints the Ceiling of Our Spaceship Gold
If you want to be safe, a person like myself, you have to kill your face. Otherwise people get their
hooks in you, which, who needs it? I already killed my face by the age of twelve. Problem is, my
tits invaded. I tried not eating, which I hear stops tits in their tracks, but I couldn’t keep it up. In
spite of everything, there is something in you that wants to keep you alive. It’s like a disease that
you just can’t shake, no matter how hard you try. At least you can kill your face, see? Me, I can kill
people, too. I can kill them whenever I want to.
My cat doesn’t like me killing people. The ones I murdered, I figured, they’re better off. Tule said
no. I said, what, don’t you like the blood, pussums, is that it? She said, no, even when there isn’t
any blood it’s bad for you, it’s just bad for you, honey baby, and I don’t care about anybody else.
I’m no psycho. I know if somebody else had been there, all they would have seen was blinks and
rubs, and all they would have heard was meow. It wouldn’t have made them almost cry, like it did
me. When you understand an individual, it makes you almost cry.
Like this one night that I was standing outside the kitchen door of this restaurant where I worked.
Across the street some bag lady was slumped by a flophouse door—“By the Day and by the
Week”—all bundled in rags and booze and snoring her death-rattle snore. My sleeves were rolled
up; my arms were all wet and sudsy and steaming. The moon was steaming too, it looked like,
playing peek-aboo through this moon steam; maybe it was the souls of my dead victims, if they
had any.
I don’t know what I was thinking about, but I was crying, and it was starting to sting my eyes, so I
went back inside. Tule rode my shoulder. Sarge was in the kitchen, arms akimbo, nodding and
tapping his foot and twisting that sausage puss of his and eyeballing Tule.
“Lea! Plates! Silverware!”
He acted like a sarge, so that’s what they called him at the Wee Spot, but his name was really
Serge. He was a Uky guy, big guy, the kind where you can’t tell what’s muscle and what’s fat.
“You ever hear of health code?” he said.
“You ever hear of ‘mind your own business’?” I said.
While he was chewing on that one, I pulled open the dish-washing machine—a cloud of steam
rolled out and I piled a stack of plates onto a towel on my forearm faster than most people can
deal cards. Tule jumped off my shoulder and disappeared under the butcher block. I grabbed the
silverware tray and walked right past Mr. Openmouth to the waiters’ station with the clean stuff.
I didn’t kill him. I didn’t maim him. I didn’t knock him onto his knees or terrify him inside his own
mind. I didn’t do anything. I just put out the goddam dishes and silverware like he wanted. Like
Tule told me to.
At 2:00 A.M. when all the tables and bus trays were wiped down and the floors were clean and
steaming and the mop bucket was upside down in the sink, me and Tule slammed out the back
door into the alley and hustled to the Sears and Roebuck, blowing white breath by moonlight. I
mean, I was blowing the breath—Tule was inside my shirt and my leather jacket, where I held her
curled up against my stomach, keeping the both of us warm. I climbed us up the fire escape onto
the roof. I hated that dirty rust that made your hands red and gritty—it stung in the cold—but I was
damned if I’d wipe them off on my leather.
Up top, my associate, the Yid, had stuff to wipe your hands on. He wasn’t there yet, but I knew
where his stash was. I wedged up the tar-papered plywood on top of the old elevator shaft and