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

“Throw in the towel, huh?” My bomb dog was dead tired and footsore. Wretched to the bone, wretched
to the fiber, he ran on love and will. He panted, limped, sniffed dirt, panted, limped. “You go straight to
hell,” I told Spot. “Uxo’ll take him.”

#



Yes, they sent me Spot for a partner. He came with orders from General Checker’s staff. I wasn’t
inclined, but I couldn’t say no. Pudgy fellow, a head taller than me, muffin of a man with a sweet baby
face, strawberries and cream. (Me, I’m a scarecrow, all bone and ball bearings, face it, a rangy beast,
was and will be, pop eyed, with the shoulders and neck of a vulture. Throw in the gimp leg, a couple
gone fingers, and a heart condition. Guess I’ve the sort of visage only a mother could love, and she’s
dead.)

I hadn’t had a friend since my Uxo wandered off at the Zimbabwe frontier. That was when I lost the use
of my left leg. It was not from a landmine exactly, though the place was lousy with mines that the
Rhodesian Army had laid there way back during the revolution. Local bosses called us in. Bad enough,
said they, that no one in these regions can fetch wood or water without they risk their life, but with every
accident, your tourism hits the skids. And investment goes down - look at New York today. Still, it
wasn’t a landmine hobbled me. No, the landmine hobbled a lion, and the lion hobbled me. Animals go
crazy when a mine gets them, and it happens all the damn time. Turns them into raging man-killers. I
woke up in a lean-to with one leg chewed to shit - and no Uxo.

What dog?, they said. You’re lucky to be alive, they said. No more room in the cemeteries, and we dare
not make more - because of the mines.

I’d been two years without Uxo when they sent me Spot. A fellow gets lonely. I made my peace.

Spot was a quick fellow, a thinker, and never without an angle. The way he always worked his lips,
worked and worked his lips, it put me in mind of a rock sucker at the Frisco aquarium before the
dambuster leveled it.

I showed him the ropes. Pretty straightforward: gather a crowd, get ‘em laughing, then the pitch:

NO SPORT–

REPORT! REPORT!

“KARELESSNESS KAN KILL.”




Spot was the White Face, me the Buffoon. The White Face fellow is the one who kicks and barks,
which suited old Spot to a tee.

“Dammit all, Blacks,” he said to me over knockwurst and cola the very first day we met, “I was flush and
pretty before I had to move here. I had this trick used to make me a pile of dough. Ever hear of the
Russian Roulette? Me and some pigeon, we take turns spinning the cylinder on this here army issue