"Eliot Fintushel - Uxo, Bomb Dog" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fintushel Eliot)

Uxo, Bomb Dog
by Eliot Fintushel
My bomb dog Uxo, my sweetie, my pal, he sweated and huffed, tongue unscrolled, forelegs folded. His
fur was matted and dripping.

I held Mumps back with both my arms around her shoulders. The kid had lobbed stones at old Ux and
tied soup cans to his tail, but now she’d jump mines to pet him.

“Stay put, little one. Uxo’s pacing himself, is all.”

“You can beat that pile of tin, Uxy.” Mumps’s chin was tear wet. Her voice choked and tumbled over
the words. “Damn Volkovoy! Damn him! Cheater!”

We stood on a hill overlooking the meadow. A bunch of other kids ambled behind us, rags and bones,
scruffy faces, some little ones on the shoulders of the bigger. Bit by bit, as Uxo and the damn machine
cleared the meadow, we’d advance to the new safe zone for a better look.

It was a comical sight, if not for the stakes: Volkovoy, dull gray heap, like a breaching whale, trundled
and pivoted, roared and smoked, extruding claws and spades and hammers. It plowed up the sod. Now
and then, if it couldn’t defuse a dinger, Volkovoy flashed and shook, encasing and detonating the thing,
then dropping it out the back, busted metal dung. Meanwhile, Uxo, sweetie, his tail curled back like the
tongue of a letter “Q,” walked and sniffed and walked. His smart flat face was matted and dirty, but
when he yipped and looked back at me and the kids - “A bomb here, boss!” he seemed to say. “Look
how good I am!” - his eyes were full of light. Then I’d tiptoe out to fetch the dinger and disable it. He
knew not to lick me then.

The bombs in Sheep’s Meadow were easy and few. That’s the great thing about your Neo-Luddites:
their effectiveness as terrorists is limited by their disdain for the machine. (We share that.) Of course, it
only takes one mine - or the rumor of one - to put forty acres off limits. They’d done a neat job of
quarantining Central Park, you’ll have to grant, with a little TNT and a lot of tongue wag.

My hip ached like hell over the plastic leg, and it was a job and a half keeping those kids back. The girls
were the worst, because they knew I hesitate to swat them. Queenie and her half-sisters, Mumps and
One Finger, might have lost some toes, dangling them down at the rim of the clean zone - such as they
had to lose. I’d yell, and they’d smile back and root old Uxo on. Mumps, of course, you’d have had to
know her to know she was smiling: love peck from a Jack-in-the-box smithereened half her chin. Sweet
kid, what, nine or ten? She watches for wires underfoot since then, I’ll guarantee. And she idolizes
Queenie - something sad in that, truth to tell: it’s because Queenie is perfect, tall and blond, a wiry
ten-year-old with brains to spare and nothing missing.

Spot pushed through them and leaned into me. “You should throw in the towel,” he said. “General
Checkers don’t give a damn if your hound explode or drop down dung and gizzard pie. Volkovoy’s just
about bagged it. Think of the dog, Blackie, and don’t be so goddam proud.”

Spot had all his bodily parts, lucky bastard. He was a de-mining vet from Frisco, from when they blew
up the Golden Gate Bridge and ringed San Fran with black ball belly busters. He’d been a year at it
when he got smart and kicked himself upstairs to be a Mine Safety Specialist. That’s what I am, but I
came to it the other way: I got a leg blown to hell, and then MSS was all I was good for. The government
threw me and Spot together–two itinerant clowns with an easel lecture and a barrel of all day suckers.