"08 - Zeke by Timothy R. Sullivan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Awards)

By the time I got to the canal bridge, I couldn't stop thinking of Danny. I hadn't wanted a child, judging the two of us far too immature for such a responsibility, but Joannie had refused to consider abortion. I never told her how scared I was that the child would be a freak like me. But when I saw that normal, beautiful baby, I was happy for the one and only time in my life. At first Danny was kind of a novelty, but when he got a little older and we started to get to know each other, I think we were more than father and son. We were friends.
Still, the bickering between Joannie and me got worse and, oh, she always had a sharp tongue. When we finally decided to split, there was never any doubt about who was better suited to bring up Danny. I was an aging albino hippie earning a shaky income from the exporting trade. She, on the other hand, was solidly establishment; she'd never touched a drug, never even smoked a cigarette. I knew it was only right, and yet I resented her for the way things had turned out.
A year had passed since she took my son away from me. He was only five when his home fell apart. On Sunday he'd be celebrating his sixth birthday, and his father was too scared of
a verbal whipping-"Why don't you get a job where you can make enough money to provide the things Danny needs?"-to be where he could help Danny blow out the candles. I'd have to mail him a present in the morning. Would it get to Miami in time?
The jog road was dusty and bumpy as the night descended. On the other side of the canal there were no orange groves, just palmetto clumps and Florida pines. Down the road was a house made of cinder blocks, one story high, with no windows in the front, like a porn parlor. The house was flanked by two sago palms in the terminal stages of "lethal yellowing disease," their drooping fronds like black spiders' legs in the deepening gloom.
1 parked in front of the house, and the Horizon bogged down in the sugary sand. I wondered if its wheels would be able to spin free, and, if not, whether Boca Blanca had a wrecker. As I walked toward the house, I reflected that mine had not always been such a defeatist attitude.
"Whatever happened to the Woodstock Generation?" I muttered, recalling a more innocent time when I could toke up and consider obliterating war, racism, and injustice. Particularly the injustice that I suffered because I happened to be born a "whiter shade of pale," to borrow a phrase from the old Procol Harum song.
A light around the side of the little house threw a patch of amber on the sand. There was a screen door, and what looked like the kitchen on the other side of it. I took a whiff of jasmine-scented air and rapped.
From within came a stirring, a rustling of paper, the creaking of a chair sliding across the floor, footsteps; there was no television or radio to dilute these intimate sounds, only the chirruping of crickets. A shadow appeared on the screen, followed by a thin, stooped old man, wearing baggy pants and smiling.
"I've, uh, come to see the freak show," I said.
He nodded and unhooked the screen door. "Through here," he said, leading me through a room filled with books

and magazines, literary and scientific journals in a state of disarray on tables, sofa, and floor. Curiouser and curiouser.
The back door opened into a dark shed, and the old man pulled a dangling string, illuminating a naked hundred-watt bulb that cast swinging shadows on four small cages and, something draped with a greasy cloth. The cages were made: of pine and chicken wire. In them were four unfortunate animals-not the usual circus freaks, but strange enough in their various ways.
How do you define a freak, anyway? The word is used to hurt more often than to inform or amuse. At least these creatures would never know what people called them.
The most striking of the animals was a two-headed calf. One of the heads was a shrunken, lolling appendage with dead eyes and flaccid lips, but the rest of the calf seemed healthy enough.
In spite of the terrible stench, I moved closer to the cages
Next to the calf, so help me, was a snake with legs. Spindly little useless things, but four limbs nonetheless. It was asleep on a pile of hay inside its two-foot-square prison.
Then there was a "giant lizard," as the old man called it nothing but an iguana.
The fourth cage held a featherless chicken, its hideously
pocked flesh a repulsive sight. In its nakedness, the fowl resembled a scrawny old man. It stared at me so murderously
that it must have thought I plucked it myself. _
"Donations appreciated," my affable host said as he shuffled toward the door.
"Uh, fine. But I don't think I've seen everything yet, have: I?" I turned toward the thing under the greasy cloth, in a cage that appeared to be circular at the top, unlike the others. -
Hitching up his trousers, the old man looked from me to. the covered object and back again. "Well . . ."
I waited. The old man clearly didn't want to show me what was under that cloth, which naturally made me want to~ see it all the more.
"He's asleep, I think."
"He?"
The old man didn't seem to hear me. He lifted a corner of the cloth and peeked under it. "No, it's all right . . . if you're sure you want to see him."
"Yes."
Without ceremony, he undraped a large glass terrarium, standing back with the greasy cloth in his gnarled farmer's hands.
I don't know how long I stood there with my mouth open, staring at that incredible sight. I remember the old man speaking to me as if in a dream: "That's the way most folks act when they see him."
The thing was an albino monkey . . . no . . . the white fur was flesh . . . bald, like the chicken . . . arms and legs bent at ridiculous angles . . . as stooped as the old man ....
No, not stooped. The impossible thing stood erect on a bed of dark chips. Its joints suggested a Rube Goldberg cartoon in their complexity. With delicate, hinged hands much too large for its eighteen-inch body, it grasped the lip of the terrarium, gazing at me from between its pipe stem arms with crimson eyes.
It was a mockery, an image from a funhouse mirror in a nightmare. As if to imitate my gape, the creature opened its mouth, revealing a ribbed whiteness inside, a furrowed snowfield here in the stifling Florida summer. No discernible sound came from that virginal cavity.
The chicken clucked, the sound bringing me a little closer to reality. Without taking my eyes off the creature, I whispered, "What is it?"
"He," the old man corrected me. "He's a person. Might look and act a little different, but he's folks. Just like me . . . just like you."
"What?" I glanced at him to see if he was goading me as Mrs. Nickerson had at the motel. But there was no malice in his weather-beaten face. He nodded at the strange creature.
"Ain't he sum'p'n?"

"Where did you get him?"
"Well, he's been livin' with me since I was, let's see . . . twenty-six. Before that he stayed with of Bo Wadley till Bo passed away, and Bo told me his daddy kept him 'fore Bo was born. Claimed he was livin' around here 'fore white men ever come to Florida."
"Boca' Blanca," I said. A revelation. The Spanish must have named their settlement for this creature perhaps four centuries ago. "But how could he have been around so long?"
The old man sucked on his false teeth. "Jis longer-lived that.. us, I guess."
"What does he eat?"
"Dead plants, rotten wood, peat moss. Takes a little water with it."
I could make out the baroque pattern of the ribs, a surrealist structure beneath striated bands of muscle and smooth, milky flesh. The physique was vaguely humanoid, and the gleaming red eyes were unfathomable. These features were grotesque enough, but that mouth twisted the ridged skull into a painful prognathous expression that opened like a funnel-a scream of silence that touched an empathic chord inside me.
"Why do you keep him in this shed with these deformed animals?" I demanded.
"Why, it was his idea," the old man said reproachfully. "We got to have money to get along on, so he come up with the idea of a freak show some years back. After a while, he got in the habit of sleepin' out here, sorta keepin' a eye on things."
"His idea? Did I hear you right?"