"Howard Waldrop - Night of the Cooters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Waldrop Howard)

One of the best short-story writers in the business, Howard Waldrop also has perhaps the wildest and
most fertile imagination of any SF writer since R. A. Lafferty. And, like Lafferty, he is known for his
strong, shaggy humor, offbeat erudition, and bizarre fictional juxtapositions. These qualities are strongly
evident in the wild and wooly tale that follows; it examines some of the events that might have occurred
on the periphery of and simultaneously with the central action of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds, but
from a perspective very different from any Wells would ever have come up with…

Born in Huston, Mississippi, Waldrop now lives in Austin, Texas. He has sold short fiction to markets as
diverse as Omni, Analog, Playboy, Universe, Crawdaddy, New Dimensions, Shayol, and Zoo World
. His story "The Ugly Chickens" won both the Nebula and World Fantasy Award in 1981. His first
novel, written in collaboration with fellow Texan Jake Saunders, was The Texas-Israeli War: 1999. His
first solo novel, Them Bones, appeared in 1984. His first collection, Howard Who?, appeared in 1986
and was quickly recognized as one of the most important collections of the decade. It was followed in
1987 by another important collection, All about Strange Monsters of the Recent Past: Neat Stories
by Howard Waldrop. His story "Man-Mountain Gentian" was in our First Annual Collection; his "Flying
Saucer Rock and Roll" was in our Third Annual Collection; and his "Fair Game" was in our Fourth
Annual Collection.

NIGHT OF THE COOTERS

Howard Waldrop

This story is in memory of Slim Pickens (1919—1983)

Sheriff Lindley was asleep on the toilet in the Pachuco County courthouse when someone started
pounding on the door. "Bert!" the voice yelled as the sheriff jerked awake.

"Goldang!" said the lawman. The Waco newspaper slid off his lap onto the floor.

He pulled his pants up with one hand and the toilet chain on the water box overhead with the other. He
opened the door. Chief Deputy Sweets stood before him, a complaint slip in his hand.

"Dang it, Sweets!" said the sheriff. "I told you never to bother me in there. It's the hottest Thursday in the
history of Texas! You woke me up out of a hell of a dream!"

The deputy waited, wiping sweat from his forehead. There were two big circles, like half-moons, under
the arms of his blue chambray shirt.

"I was fourteen, maybe fifteen years old, and I was a Aztec or a Mixtec or somethin'," said the sheriff.
"Anyways, I was buck naked, and I was standin' on one of them ball courts with the little bitty stone rings
twenty foot up one wall, and they was presentin' me to Moctezuma. I was real proud, and the sun was
shinin', but it was real still and cool down there in the Valley of the Mexico. I look up at the grandstand,
and there's Moctezuma and all his high muckety-mucks with feathers and stuff hangin' off 'em, and more
gold than a circus wagon. And there was these other guys, conquistadors and stuff, with beards and rusty
helmets, and Italian priests with crosses you coulda barred a livery-stable door with. One of
Moctezuma's men was explainin' how we was fixin' to play ball for the gods and things. I knew in my
dream I was captain of my team. I had a name that sounded like a bird fart in Aztec talk, and they
mentioned it and the name of the captain of the other team, too. Well, everything was goin' all right, and I
was prouder and prouder, until the guy doing the talkin' let slip that whichever team won was gonna be
paraded around Tenochtitlan and given women and food and stuff like that; and then tomorrow A.M.