"Alan Dean Foster - Glory Lane" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

"Yeah, but," the fat guy would stutter, "it oughta be." Meanwhile, his
buddies would be yelling at him because he'd be holding up the game and
they'd get home late and their wives would yell at them.

Right, funtime. He crossed the street and made his way through the parking
lot, which was full of pickups and ten-year-old sedans. Nobody challenged
him either there or at the door.

The muzak almost drove him back outside. And they thought his kind of
music was intolerable! He steeled himself and kept going.

There were a couple of leagues running simultaneously, one for men and
another for women. The combined activ-ity on the thirty-six lanes made a
racket that sounded like the kamikazes at Iwo Jima.
He paused to consider the cacophony thoughtfully. When you thought about
it, bowling was nothing more than sublimated destruction. When he and his
buddies smashed a car window or busted a few bottles in the park, they
called it vandalism. Whereas here, in this temple of vio-lence, hour after
hour, day after day, the good citizens delighted in heaving fifteen pounds
of hardened plastic at innocent, immobile targets. The fact that the pins
didn't shatter in no way mitigated the delight the bowlers experi-enced at
knocking down something that couldn't fight back.

Invent bowling pins that screamed and bled, he thought, and you'd make a
fortune.

The steady din was easy to handle, but the music was actually painful.
Merle Haggard was braying from the speakers now. Any minute Seeth
expected to hear Johnny Cash or Hank Williams, Jr. or even the Judds. He'd
seen a picture of the Judds once. Mama was pretty foxy. Give her some
safety pins, warpaint and a decent hairdo and she could play the Hook.

He gravitated to the snack bar. The single attendant was close to his own
age and pretty good looking. While he walked he jingled his chains and
tried to make himself as conspicuous as possible. It didn't take much for
heads to begin turning. When they thought he wasn't looking they made
faces and whispered. He was enjoying himself immensely.

What was really riotous was that they thought he was funny-looking. This
from middle-aged housewives in tight green pants and beehive hairdos. The
first eighteen lanes were ladies league. From where he looked down on
them it was like watching the debris from a wrecked eighteen-wheeler full
of potatoes spilling across the road. He could sense if not actually hear the
"Oh my dears" and "Would you look at mats."

The mutterings from the men, as he moved closer to their end of the
building, were less amused and more dangerous. Even though there were
dozens of them and only one of him he represented a threat—to order,
stabil-ity, righteousness, God, and The American Way. The only ones who