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

revolver, see? The way I got it notched and oiled, it’s like loves-me-loves-me-not on a daisy, has to do
with evens & odds -I always knew how the thing’d shake out. There’s a sucker dies every minute, don’t
they say? Last time, like always, the mark blew his head off on schedule, but here’s the goddam kicker.
He’d lied to me. The bastard had lied to me. I went through every pocket and lining and orifice, Blackie -
picture it if you have the stomach - and they wasn’t a silver nor sawbuck. Blackie, boy, it puts a fellow in
doubt of human decency, I swear it does. Stiffed by a stiff. I liked to slide through them border checks
by means of a greased palm, didn’t I, but here I was flat busted. It panicked me so, I dropped the
business. Lost my appetite for it. Now I’m down to this. Pass the mustard?”

“You made that up.”

“I didn’t.”

“You don’t fool me. You’re a sweetheart, Spot, aren’t you?”

“The mustard.”

How had a grifter like Spot worked the perilous Frisco terrain? How had he held his own on those
famous squads of “half-shattered de-miners who daily offered up their other half,” as the Chronicle put it?

“What? You kidding?” says Spot when I put it to him. “Scammed the whole business, Blackie boy. I
never put in a day. It was all done with fake ID’s and Muff the supervisor’s craps chits - I’d bought them
off a guy I know, and I knew I was buying me Muff.”

I didn’t believe a word of it. Damn me but there was something to Spot. I liked him.

Me and Spot worked up a passable “Dead and Alive” routine. We knock shoulders and he falls down
dead - looks like. But when I try to drag off the corpse, an arm pops up. I push it down and try to drag
him off again, but then, say, his head curls up. So I push it down with my heel. I lift his legs to drag again,
but the other arm rises. Then a leg, maybe. Or he hinges up, legs and arms both, like a sprung bear trap,
and I’m nearly squished pushing those appendages back down. It goes faster and faster, me frantic to get
rid of the corpse. You get the picture. Meantime he’s winking to the audience, and they’re howling.

I’m the stupid one.

One time Sonny says to me, “The bit you and Spot do, ‘Dead and Alive,’ you shouldn’t call it that.”

“Why the hell not?”

“You’re one or the other, aren’t you? Can’t be both.”

“Sure. That’s the point. It’s a joke, Sonny.”

“It’s not funny. Take bugs.”

“Bugs?”

“Bugs that make you sick and kill you.”

“What about them?”