"Joe Haldeman - Manifest Destiny" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

MANIFEST DESTINY
This is the story of John Leroy Harris, but I doubt that name means much to you unless
you're pretty old, especially an old lawman. He's dead anyhow, thirty years now, and
nobody left around that could get hurt with this story. The fact is, I would've told it a long
time ago, but when I was younger it would have bothered me, worrying about what people
would think. Now I just don't care. The hell with it.
I've been on the move ever since I was a lad. At thirteen I put a knife in another boy and
didn't wait around to see if he lived, just went down to the river and worked my way to St.
Louis, got in some trouble there and wound up in New Orleans a few years later. That's
where I came to meet John Harris.
Now you wouldn't tell from his name (he'd changed it a few times) but John was pure
Spanish blood, as his folks had come from Spain before the Purchase. John was born in
Natchitoches in 1815, the year of the Battle of New Orleans. That put him thirteen years
older than me, so I guess he was about thirty when we met.
I was working as a greeter, what we called a "bouncer," in Mrs. Carranza's whorehouse
down by the docks. Mostly I just sat around and looked big, which I was then and no fat, but
sometimes I did have to calm down a customer or maybe throw him out, and I kept under
my weskit a Starr pepperbox derringer in case of real trouble. It was by using this weapon
that I made the acquaintance of John Harris.
Harris had been in the bar a few times, often enough for me to notice him, but to my
knowledge he never put the boots to any of the women. Didn't have to pay for it, I guess; he
was a handsome cuss, more than six feet tall, slender, with this kind of tragic look that
women seem to like. Anyhow it was a raw rainy night in November, cold the way noplace
else quite gets cold, and this customer comes downstairs complaining that the girl didn't do
what he had asked her to, and he wasn't going to pay the extra. The kate came down right
behind him and told me what it was, and that she had too done it, and he hadn't said nothing
about it when they started, and you can take my word for it that it was something nasty.
Well, we had some words about that and he tried to walk out without paying, so I sort of
brought him back in and emptied out his pockets. He didn't even have the price of a drink on
him (he'd given Mrs. Carranza the two dollars but that didn't get you anything fancy). He
did have a nice overcoat, though, so I took that from him and escorted him out into the rain
head first.
What happened was about ten or fifteen minutes later he barges back in, looking like a
drowned dog but with a Navy Colt in each hand. He got off two shots before I blew his
brains out (pepperbox isn't much of a pistol but he wasn't four yards away) and a split
second later another bullet takes him in the lungs. I turned around and everybody was on the
floor or behind the bar but John Harris, who was still perched on a stool looking sort of
interested and putting some kind of foreign revolver back into his pocket.
 The cops came soon enough but there was no trouble, not with forty witnesses, except for
what to do with the dead meat. He didn't have any papers and Mrs. Carranza didn't want to
pay the city for the burial. I was for just taking it out back and dropping it in the water, but
they said that was against the law and unsanitary. John Harris said he had a wagon and
come morning he'd take care of the matter. He signed a paper and that satisfied them.
First light, Harris showed up in a fancy landau. Me and the driver, an old black, we
wrestled the wrapped-up corpse into the back of the carriage. Harris asked me to come
along and I did.
We just went east a little ways and rolled the damned thing into a bayou, let the gators
take it. Then the driver smoked a pipe while Harris and me talked for a while.
Now he did have the damnedest way of talking. His English was like nothing you ever
heard—Spanish his mother tongue and then he learned most of his English in Australia—