"Richard Wadholm - Orange Groves Out to the Horizon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wadholm Richard)

ORANGE GROVES OUT TO THE HORIZON
RICHARD WADHOLM


THE WAY THEY WORK IT, the prison calls ahead of time. This robot voice says,
“You are about to receive a call from an inmate of the federal prison
system.” They ask if you are willing to accept the call, and that’s a question
you want to think about.
Ken called while I was crawling around behind our network server,
testing ports on a flaky router.
I knew he would call me. All his other friends had invested their futures
in wives and children, and could not be imposed upon. Who else did we
have but each other?
I tried to picture him the way he would be now, with a little gravity to
the eyelids. An aging marsupial, anxious and friendly. But all I could see
was the way he was in the tenth grade. His earnest sarcasm. Long hair,
washed furiously, the way boys do - without conditioner, so that it hung
straight and dry as late-summer grass.
In my mind, the greetings come and go—How are you holding up? No,
too brave. Are they treating you right? Right according to whom?
And before I could settle on what to say, he was there, singing Time is
on My Side. I’m sure he thought that was hilarious.
“Jesus you’re stupid sometimes,” I said.
“You sound like my last performance review at work.” He laughed—
Phoo phoo phoo, like he was laughing around a cigarette.
“Is that the way they talked to you at work?”
“Come on, man. Like it matters now.”
“Look, I can call you stupid. I’m your friend. I don’t like it your work
called you stupid.”


Polyphony 6 279
RICHARD WADHOLM


“Reliant Pharmaceuticals, those fucks. They wouldn’t know E. coli from
mi culo, you know what I’m saying, Hoss?”
Yet they knew the recipe for ricin when they found it on his computer.
They recognized its traces in his one-cup coffee maker. How stupid could
they be? A bad thought came to me, like a craving. It gnawed at me,
wouldn’t leave me alone. “You sure you had nothing, you know—personal
in mind for anybody.”
“You mean, was I going to poison their lame asses? You know I don’t
believe in that revenge shit. I wasn’t going to hurt anybody.”
“Ricin. The hell were you thinking, anyway?”
“Gophers. You know.”
I could tell you what happened. Ken had seen the recipe on a web site
somewhere. He wanted to know if it worked. Does that sound stupid? Not
if you’re Ken Rafael, who had been a child prodigy in chemistry, (ask any
kid in our high school, they’ll tell you.) who had taken a low level job at