"John Kessel - The Pure Product" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kessel John)

second time that day I tested the Citation’s acceleration; Ruth’s door
slammed shut and we were gone.

“You scut,” she said as we hit the entrance ramp of the interstate.
“You’re a scut-pumping Conservative. You made me miss.” But she was
smiling, running her hand up the inside of my thigh. I could tell she hadn’t
ever had so much fun in the twentieth century.

For some reason I was shaking. “Give me one of those seromeths,” I
said.

****

Around midnight we stopped in St Louis at a Holiday Inn. We registered as
Mr and Mrs Gerald Bruno (an old acquaintance) and paid in advance. No
one remarked on the apparent difference in our ages. So discreet. I bought
a copy of the Post-Dispatch and we went to the room. Ruth flopped down
on the bed, looking bored, but thanks to her gunplay I had a few more
things to take care of. I poured myself a glass of Chivas, went into the
bathroom, removed the toupee and flushed it down the toilet, showered,
put a new blade in my old razor and shaved the rest of the hair from my
head. The Lex Luthor look. I cut my scalp. That got me laughing, and I
could not stop. Ruth peeked through the doorway to find me dabbing the
crown of my head with a bloody Kleenex.

“You’re a wreck,” she said.

I almost fell off the toilet laughing. She was absolutely right. Between
giggles I managed to say, “You must not stay anywhere too long, if you’re
as careless as you were tonight.”

She shrugged. “I bet I’ve been at it longer than you.” She stripped
and got into the shower. I got into bed.

The room enfolded me in its gold-carpet, green-bedspread
mediocrity. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that things were ever
different. In 1596 I rode to court with Essex; I slept in a chamber of
supreme garishness (gilt escutcheons in the corners of the ceiling, pink
cupids romping on the walls), in a bed warmed by any of the trollops of the
city I might want. And there in the Holiday Inn I sat with my drink, in my
pastel blue pajama bottoms, reading a late-twentieth-century newspaper,
smoking a cigar. An earthquake in Peru estimated to have killed eight
thousand in Lima alone. Nope. A steelworker in Gary, Indiana, discovered
to be the murderer of six pre-pubescent children, bodies found buried in
his basement. Perhaps. The President refuses to enforce the ruling of his
Supreme Court because it “subverts the will of the American people.”
Probably not.

We are everywhere. But not everywhere.