"Allen Steele - See Rock City" - читать интересную книгу автора (Steele Allen)

See Rock City
by Allen Steele

Junior pulls into the gravel parking lot outside Doc’s place and switches off the
headlights. He lets the engine run for a few moments, listening to a Nashville country
music station as he savors a last toke from the joint he’s been smoking since he
crossed the De Kalb County line, then he switches off the ignition, stubs out the joint
in the ashtray, opens the Camaro’s mismatched door, and climbs out.
The night is hot, the air swollen with the kind of midsummer Tennessee
humidity that brings out the cicadas and lightning bugs and causes men to drink long
past midnight because they can’t sleep. Junior pauses to tuck his sweaty white t-shirt
down the front of his jeans and shake his legs a little to make the pants cuffs slide
back down over the top of his cowboy boots. A silent flash of heat lightning on the
horizon draws his eyes past the parking lot, out to the abandoned cornfield behind
the farmhouse where the spaceship squats upon its hydraulic landing gear, listing
slightly to one side. it’s a moonless night and Doc has turned off the floodlights
surrounding the vessel, but Junior can see its vague shape against the treeline, like a
giant Dairy Queen ice cream cone turned upside-down in the middle of a farm field.
He spits a big hock on the ground, then the soles of his boots crunch softly
against the gravel as he saunters to the door. The front porch lights are off, the
shades have been drawn, the little Pepsi Cola sign in the window has been turned
around so that it now reads “Sorry, We’re CLOSED,” but Junior didn’t drop out of
the eighth grade fifteen years ago before he learned not to believe everything he
reads. The door is unlocked; a tin cowbell jangles as he shoves it open and walks in.
Two men are seated at a lunch counter on the far end of the room, silhouetted
by the dim glow cast by the fluorescent menu board above the kitchen grill. Between
the door and the lunch counter are half a dozen tables, piled chest-high with the
detritus of Doc’s livelihood for the past twenty months, two weeks, and six days:
T-shirts, posters, keyrings, cheap ceramic mugs made in Taiwan, plastic replicas of
the spaceship custom-manufactured by a company in Athens, postcards of women
in bikinis, and at least fifty different items with rebel flags, Elvis, or that stupid
spaceship printed on them. This used to be Doc’s living room, but things change.
“Hey, Junior. C’mon in.”
Doc’s dry voice, like the creak of old sunburned leather, comes across the
darkened room as the two men twist around on the lunch counter stools. “Have
yourself a set, boy. Take a load off.”
“Howdy, Doc.” Junior walks slowly past mounted dead squirrels holding
miniature golf clubs and glass balls which shower fake snow upon tiny replicas of
the spaceship when you turn them over until he reaches the lunch counter. “Hot
tonight.”
 “It’s hot, all right.”
“Hotter’n Jesus,” Junior adds, and immediately regrets his choice of words
when Doc’s face, a bit of weatherbeaten burlap framed by long white sideburns,
turns stolid and cold. Doc’s a good Christian: member of First Calvary Baptist,
attends eight o’clock services each and every Sabbath, pays his tithes and all that
happy Sunday school horseshit. “Hotter’n the devil,” he quickly adds.
“Amen,” says the other man seated at the counter, then he belches into his
hand. “|Scuse me.”
Doc chooses to ignore the blasphemy, as Junior knew he would. “Need a
beer?” he asks as he lowers himself from his stool and begins to walk behind the