"Joe Haldeman - Guardian" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

with my obvious education, and so be able to continue living under an assumed name and
false background— but even in Dodge, that would not be possible. A schoolteacher had
to establish her credentials. So I gave them my real name and they wired Wellesley for
my bona fides.
 I suspected then that it was only a matter of time before Edward would follow that
trace back to Dodge. As it turned out, he would be slow, and we would have more than
four years of grace.
Almost sixty years later, I wonder what was in my head. When they asked for my
credentials, I should have demurred and put Daniel back on the train, and traveled on,
perhaps to Mexico or Central America. Anywhere the law could reach us, a lawyer could
as well. For all his faults, Edward was a good lawyer.
And he was not a man to be bested by a woman.
None of that was in my mind when the train pulled away from the depot in
Dodge, leaving us alone, tired, dusty, and baking under the Kansas summer sun. There
was no one in charge at the depot, just an empty telegraph room, but there was a sign
offering rooms for rent up on Central Avenue, with a simple map. With no conveyances
in sight, we hoisted our belted-together footlockers and headed up the hill.
It was a rooming house run by a Mrs. Clifton, who was a strange and unpleasant
woman, suspicious and querulous. I took two rooms for a month because they were
cheap, nine dollars apiece, and we were too tired to go off searching for another place.
We had been on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe for more than twenty-four hours,
including an interminable wait in Hays City, and of course there were no sleepers. I
checked our beds for vermin and, finding nothing macroscopic, gratefully collapsed for
all the afternoon and night.
In the morning we had a wholesome breakfast of grease and eggs on hard bread,
and set out to explore. Daniel wanted to see Boot Hill, where desperados slightly slow on
the draw would wind up, but it wasn't there anymore—in fact, if we'd come four years
earlier, I might have wound up teaching over those old graves. The bodies had been
relocated to Prairie Grove in 1878, and a school-house was built on the lot. But it burned
down in '90, and was still charred rubble when we sought it out.
Daniel was not unprepared for the lack of excitement in Dodge; I'd told him about
the sarcastic magazine article I'd read, describing how tame it was now. But still I think
he was hoping against hope that some cowboy would come around the corner, all
clinking spurs and creaking leather. It never happened. No cows, no cowboys, at least in
town.
What did happen was a game of stickball near the ruins of the Boot Hill school.
They said they could use another player, so Daniel got to work off some energy while I
sat on a bench and contemplated our limited future.
There was no shade. Every tree in Dodge was one that had been brought from the
East, transplanted and carefully nurtured. Few public areas had trees then—although an
enterprising citizen had planted and cultivated an extensive vegetable garden along the
railroad tracks, to demonstrate the land's potential fertility to people who might be lunatic
enough to try farming.
I went back to Mrs. Clifton's to take a bath, and when Daniel came in he used the
water after me (fairly turning it to mud). When night fell we lit kerosene lamps. There
were electric lamps on the street, but the house was not wired—Mrs. Clifton thought
electricity was dangerous, and she was probably right, at that time and place. Wooden
houses like hers were dry tinderboxes.
The next day I went to the Third Ward School and found the principal, Leroy
Roberts. He did have an opening for a college-educated teacher, to teach grades nine