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

on.
Pinky had removed his thumbs by then, and now he picked up his books and got to his feet. His nose
was bleeding and his cheek was skinned, otherwise he was none the worse for wear. He walked off
without saying a word, leaving the rest of us standing there with our jaws hanging almost to our knees.
Pretty soon Harve seemed to get tired of lying in one position and he rolled over on his side. There
were a couple of dandelions growing right by his nose and he picked one of them and held it up and
stared at it. From the look that came into his eyes you'd have thought it was the most beautiful flower in
the world instead of just a plain dandelion. After a while he sat up and fastened it in one of the
buttonholes in his shirt, then he got up and walked away as though there wasn't anybody else in the whole
world besides him. To this day I don't think he realizes that there is anybody besides him. There's always
a blank look on his face when you pass him in the street, and all he ever does, when he's not working on
his father's farm, is look at trees, watch birds, and pick flowers.
Well, you'd naturally have expected Pinky's popularity to take a turn for the better after that. But it
didn't. Nobody picked on him any more, that's for sure, but nobody liked him either. And then too, his
victory over Harve never got the publicity it deserved, because the very next day Abel Struey snagged a
skeleton when he was plowing the south patch he'd let go fallow twenty years back.
According to the coroner's statement in the Appleseed Corner's Gazette, the skeleton was that of a
small woman, or girl, and had gone undiscovered from five to ten years. There was no evidence of foul
play, and in a way that was disappointing because there's nothing like a good local murder mystery to
stimulate intellectual activity in a Place the size of Appleseed Corners. Even so, kids and grown-ups
talked of nothing else for a whole week, and by that time Pinky's victory was ancient history.
The next thing that comes to mind about Pinky is his dislike for girls. All boys dislike girls at a certain
age—or if they don't, they pretend to—but Pinky seemed to despise them, and the older he grew the
more he seemed to despise them. The girls in his grammar school classes, and later on in his high school
classes, weren't by any means the most beautiful girls in the world, but they weren't the slimy reptilian
monsters he seemed to think they were either. Yet whenever he looked at one, he actually shuddered.
But I don't think any of the girls ever noticed. They were too busy shuddering themselves.
That brings me to Pinky's high school days.
To say that his high school days approximated his grammer school days would be almost, but not
quite, true. He went on being awkward and conceited and everybody went right on disliking him, but as
the subjects grew harder and more complex, his dumbness began to fade. Not that he ever became
smart—he graduated with an average in the low eighties—but compared to the way he'd been before,
he seemed smart. And the odd part of it was, you got the impression that if he'd gone on to college he'd
have become smarter and smarter. But that's a matter for pure speculation, because he never went to
college. He went to work on his father's farm instead. And now we'll never know, because a month ago
the entity ate him.
Everybody knows about the entity by now—about the way it swooned down into Apple-seed
Corners on that hot Saturday afternoon and scooped Pinky right out of the crowd of shoppers with its
long red tongue and swallowed him whole. I didn't see it myself—I had to repair the north pasture fence
and couldn't get to town that day —so I have to take other people's word for the way it looked.
According to Mrs. Hitchcock, who runs the post office, it was as big as Ben Snedley's new barn, had six
enormous blue eyes, a big slavering mouth, and no body. But Abe Moorehouse, who tends bar at the
Horse and Wagon, has a different description. He says that the entity had green eyes, was at least twice
as big as Ben Snedley's new barn, and had three golden legs and a long silver tail. I don't know about
Abe, though. He does a lot of sampling when he's behind the bar and is liable to see anything.
Anyway, I've talked to most of the people who were in town shopping that day and I've come to the
conclusion that none of them saw same thing. Either the entity came and went so fast that no one got a
good look at it, or everybody was so scared they couldn’t see straight, or both.
You'd have thought an event like that would furnish conversational material for at least a year in a
place the size of Appleseed Corners. But when it became fairly evident that the entity wasn't going to