"Michael Marshall Smith - The Man Who Drew Cats" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Michael Marshall)

THE MAN WHO DREW CATS

by

Michael Marshall Smith



Old Tom was a very tall man. He was so tall he didn’t even have a nickname for it. Ned Black, who was at least a head
shorter, had been ‘Tower Block’ since the sixth grade, and Jack, the owner of the Hog’s Head Bar, had a sign up over
the door saying ‘Mind Your Head, Ned’. But Tom was just Tom. It was like he was so tall it didn’t bear mentioning
even for a joke: be a bit like ragging someone for breathing.
Course there were other reasons too for not ragging Tom about his height or anything else. The guys you’ll find
perched on stools round Jack’s bar watching the ball game and buying beers, they’ve known each other for ever.
Gone to Miss Stadler’s school together, got under each other’s Mom’s feet, and double-dated together right up to
giving each other’s best man’s speech. Kingstown is a small place, you understand, and the old boys who come
regular to Jack’s mostly spent their childhoods in the same tree-house. Course they’d gone their separate ways, up to
a point: Pete was an accountant now, had a small office down Union Street just off the square and did pretty good,
whereas Ned, well he was still pumping gas and changing oil and after forty years he did that pretty good too. Comes
a time when men have known each other so long they forget what they do for a living most of the time because it just
don’t matter: when you talk there’s a little bit of skimming stones down the quarry in second grade, a bit of dolling up
to go to that first dance, and going to the housewarming when they moved ten years back. There’s all that and more
than you can say so none of it’s important ’cept for having happened.
So we’ll stop by and have a couple of beers and talk about the town and the playoffs and rag each other and the
pleasure’s just in shooting the breeze and it don’t really matter what’s said, just the fact that we’re all still there to say
it.
But Tom, he was different. We all remember the first time we saw him. It was a long hot summer like we haven’t
seen in the ten years since and we were lolling under the fans at Jack’s and complaining about the tourists. And
believe me, Kingstown gets its share in the summer even though it’s not near the sea and we don’t have a McDonalds
and I’ll be damned if I can figure out why folk’ll go out of their way to see what’s just a peaceful little town near some
mountains. It was as hot as hell that afternoon and as much as a man could do to sit in his shirt-sleeves and drink the
coolest beer he could find, and Jack’s is the coolest for us, and always will be, I guess.
And then Tom walked in. His hair was already pretty white back then, and long, and his face was brown and tough
with grey eyes like diamonds set in leather. He was dressed mainly in black with a long coat that made you hot just to
look at it, but he looked comfortable like he carried his very own weather around with him and he was just fine. He got
a beer and sat down at a table and read the town Bugle and that was that.
It was special because there wasn’t anything special about it. Jack’s Bar isn’t exactly exclusive and we don’t all
turn round and stare at anyone new if they come in, but that place is like a monument to shared times and if a tourist
couple comes in out of the heat and sits down nobody says anything and maybe nobody even notices at the front of
their mind, but it’s like there’s a little island of the alien in the water and the currents don’t just ebb and flow the way
they usually do, if you get what I mean. But Tom he just walked in and sat down and it was all right because it was like
he was there just like we were, and could’ve been for thirty years. He just sat and read his paper like part of the same
river and everyone just carried on downstream the way they were.
Pretty soon he goes up for another beer and a few of us got talking to him. We got his name and what he did.
Painting, he said, and after that it was just shooting the breeze. That quick. He came in that summer afternoon and
just fell into the conversation like he’d been there all his life, and sometimes it was hard to imagine he hadn’t been.
Nobody knew where he came from, or where he’d been, and there was something very quiet about him, a real stillness.
Open enough to have the best part of friendship but still somehow a man in a slightly different world. But he showed
enough to get along real well with us, and a bunch of old friends don’t often let someone in like that.
Anyway, he stayed that whole summer. Hired himself a place just round the corner from the square. Or so he said: