"Robert F. Young - Ape's Eye View" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

reader.
Not that reading was the only subject that gave him trouble. Every subject gave him trouble. He
couldn't add, he couldn't subtract, he couldn't remember history dates, he couldn't get grammar through
his head, and to this day I don't think he ever did figure out the difference between the Tropic of Cancer
and the Tropic of Capricorn. He just couldn't do anything. And yet he got by. Somehow, someway, and
by the skin of his undersized teeth, he got by.
I suppose he seemed even dumber than he was because you'd naturally expect a kid with such a
scrawny body to have a few brains to make up for it. His reflexes were so slow that if you threw a
baseball or a basketball to him it was pretty sure to hit him—usually in the face—before he even realized
you'd thrown it. He couldn't even chin himself on the horizontal bar, and he ran like a sixty year old man
with lumbago. He was hopeless. Around the fifth or sixth grade the coach took pity on him, or gave up in
despair— I don't know which—and got him permanently excused from all athletic activities.

It doesn't take much imagination to figure out what the other kids were doing all this time. As I said,
they didn't like him anyway, not only because he was different, but because for all his mental and physical
inferiority he still seemed to think he was better than anybody else. One day it would be ink smeared on
the nape of his neck and the next day it would be a pencil point jabbed into his arm, and every day, day
in, day out, it would be persecution by the local example of what psychologists like to refer to as
agressive-neurosis.
At that time, the reigning bully in Appleseed Grammar School was Harve Randall, and with a kid like
Pinky Fields available, no bully ever had it so good. And then one day—
I like to remember that day, because while I didn't like Pinky Fields, I didn't like Harve Randall
either. In fact, I think I liked him even less than I liked Pinky. It was in May and school had just let out,
and Harve had just begun his daily defamation of Pinky's physique. "Chicken ears," he said, elbowing him
in the ribs. "Rabbit teeth!"
Pinky didn't say anything. He just kept on walking. Harve followed, "Peach head! Yellow belly...
Manna fight?" he added hopefully.
Pinky paused, and right away a crowd began to gather. Nobody really expected anything much
would happen, but nobody wanted to take a chance on missing a possible massacre. Besides, it was too
early to go home.
For a moment Harve was so taken aback that he couldn't say anything. He just stood and stared at
the smaller boy, his puffy eyes round with astonishment, his jaw even slacker than usual. But it didn't take
him long to recover himself. He stuck out his chest and knotted up his fists. "I'll knock your teeth down
your throat!" he said in the best aggressive-neurotic tradition.
Slowly, solemnly, Pinky laid down his books (he was always behind on his homework). He tightened
his own fists into little white knobs and raised them in front of his face. If he was afraid, he didn't show it.
Harve laughed, and swung contemptuously. Anybody else would have seen the punch coming and
would have dodged it easily, but not Pinky. The blow caught him in the neck and sent him toppling and in
an instant Harve was on top of him, pummeling away like mad. All I could think of was a young gorilla
attacking a muscular dystrophy victim.
It looked bad for Pinky and little as I liked him I couldn't help feeling sorry for him and wishing I was
big enough to pull Harve away. And then, all of a sudden, Harve stopped punching and started to
scream. It was the shrillest scream I'd ever heard—the kind of a scream a person might give out with if
somebody stuck a knife through his eye. But Pinky hadn't done anything so far as I could see, though he
did seem to have some kind of a hold on Harve's head—if you can call pressing your thumbs against
somebody's forehead a hold.
 Harve thrashed around for a while, though he didn't scream any more, and then—I don't know why,
because there wasn't any sonnd—I got the impression that something snapped inside his head, and right
after that he lay still. I don't mean he passed out, or anything like that. He just stopped thrashing around
and lay there on his back as though the school lawn was the most logical place in the world to lie down