The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps
- Автор: Anderson Lars, Barr Randolph
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Vintage Books
- ISBN: 978-0-307-28048-0
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps». Краткое содержание книги:
Weighing in at over a thousand pages, containing over forty-seven stories and two novels, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train — a bullet couldn’t pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best.
He took on the look of one who is kept waiting at a rendezvous, and tries to convince himself that he will not be disappointed. His nights became restless; the least creaking of the clapboard barrack or the stirring of a sleeping man would bring him erect in bed.
One afternoon the boiler of a small hoisting engine exploded. A hole was blown in the storehouse wall, but no one was hurt. Feach raced the others to the spot and stood grinning across the wreckage at Morphy. Carey, the superintendent, came up.
“Every season it’s got to be something!” he complained. “But thank God this ain’t as bad as the rest — like last year when the roof fell in and smashed everything to hell and gone.”
Feach stopped grinning and went back to work.
Two nights later a thunderstorm blew down over the canning-factory. The first distant rumble awakened Feach. He pulled on trousers, shoes, and shirt, and left the bunk-house. In the north, approaching clouds were darker than the other things of night. He walked toward them, breathing with increasing depth, until, when the clouds were a black smear overhead, his chest was rising and falling to the beat of some strong rhythm.
When the storm broke he stood still, on a little hummock that was screened all around by bush and tree. He stood very straight, with upstretched arms and upturned face. Rain — fat thunder-drops that tapped rather than pattered — drove into his round face. Jagged streaks of metal fire struck down at ground and tree, house and man. Thunder that could have been born of nothing less than the impact of an enormous something upon the earth itself, crashed, crashed, crashed, reverberations lost in succeeding crashes as they strove to keep pace with the jagged metal streaks.
Feach stood up on his hummock, a short man compactly plump, hidden from every view by tree and undergrowth; a little man with a pointed nose tilted at the center of the storm, and eyes that held fright when they were not blinking and squinting under fat rain-drops. He talked aloud, though the thunder made nothing of his words. He talked into the storm, cursing God for half an hour without pause, with words that were vilely blasphemous, in a voice that was suppliant.
The storm passed down the river. Feach went back to his bunk, to lie awake all night, shivering in his wet underwear and waiting. Nothing happened.
He began to mumble to himself as he worked. Carey, reprimanding him for over-cooking a basket of tomatoes, had to speak three times before the little man heard him. He slept little. In his bunk, he either tossed from side to side or lay tense, straining his eyes through the darkness for minute after minute. Frequently he would leave the sleeping-house to prowl among the buildings, peering expectantly into each shadow that house or shed spread in his path.
Another thunderstorm came. He went out into it and cursed God again. Nothing happened. He slept none after that, and stopped eating. While the others were at table he would pace up and down beside the river, muttering to himself. All night he wandered around in distorted circles, through the pines, between the buildings, down to the river, chewing the ends of his fingers and talking to himself. His jauntiness was gone: a shrunken man who slouched when he walked, and shivered, doing his daily work only because it required neither especial skill nor energy. His eyes were more red than brown, and dull except when they burned with sudden fevers. His fingernails ended in red arcs where the quick was exposed.
On his last night at the cannery, Feach came abruptly into the center of the group that awaited the completion of night between house and river. He shook his finger violently at Morphy.
“That’s crazy!” he screeched. “Of course there’s a God! There’s got to be! That’s crazy!”
His red-edged eyes peered through the twilight at the men’s faces: consciously stolid faces once they had mastered their first surprise at this picking up of fortnight-old threads: the faces of men to whom exhibitions of astonishment were childish. Feach’s eyes held fear and a plea.
“Got your proof with you tonight?” Morphy turned on his side, his head propped on one arm, to face his opponent. “Maybe you can show me why there’s got to be a God?”
“Ever’ reason!” Moisture polished the little man’s face, and muscles writhed in it. “There’s the moon, and the sun, and the stars, and flowers, and rain, and—”
“Pull in your neck!” The big man spit for emphasis. “What do you know about them things? Edison could’ve made ’em for all you know. Talk sense. Why has there got to be a God?”
“Why? I’ll tell you why!” Feach’s voice was a thin scream; he stood tiptoe, and his arms jerked in wild gestures. “I’ll tell you why! I’ve stood up to Him, and had His hand against me. I’ve been cursed by Him, and cursed back. That’s how I know! Listen: I had a wife and kid once, back in Ohio on a farm she got from her old man. I come home from town one night and the lightning had came down and burnt the house flat — with them in it. I got a job in a mine near Harrisburg, and the third day I’m there a cave-in gets fourteen men. I’m down with ’em, and get out without a scratch. I work in a box-factory in Pittsburgh that burns down in less’n a week. I’m sleeping in a house in Galveston when a hurricane wrecks it, killing ever’body but me and a fella that’s only crippled. I shipped out of Charleston in the Sophie, that went down off Cape Flattery, and I’m the only one that gets ashore. That’s when I began to know for sure that it was God after me. I had sort of suspected it once or twice before — just from queer things I’d noticed — but I hadn’t been certain. But now I knew what was what, and I wasn’t wrong either! For five years I ain’t been anywhere that something didn’t happen. Why was I hunting a job before I came up here? Because a boiler busts in the Deal’s Island packing-house where I worked before and wiped out the place. That’s why!”
Doubt was gone from the little man; in thequarter-light he seemed to have grown larger, taller, and his voice rang.
Morphy, perhaps alone of the audience not for the moment caught in the little man’s eloquence, laughed briefly.
“An’ what started all this hullabaloo?” he asked.
“I done a thing,” Feach said, and stopped. He cleared his throat sharply and tried again. “I done a thi—” The muscles of throat and mouth went on speaking, but no sound came out. “What difference does that make?” He no longer bulked large in the dimness, and his voice was a whine. “Ain’t it enough that I’ve had Him hounding me year after year? Ain’t it enough that everywhere I go He—”
Morphy laughed again.
“A hell of a Jonah you are!”
“All right!” Feach gave back. “You wait and see before you get off any of your cheap jokes. You can laugh, but it ain’t ever’ man that’s stood up to God and wouldn’t give in. It ain’t ever’ man that’s had Him for a enemy.”
Morphy turned to the others and laughed, and they laughed with him. The laughter lacked honesty at first, but soon became natural; and though there were some who did not laugh, they were too few to rob the laughter of apparent unanimity.
Feach shut both eyes and hurled himself down on Morphy. The big man shook him off, tried to push him away, could not, and struck him with an open hand. Sandwich picked Feach up and led him in to his bed. Feach was sobbing — dry, old-man sobs.
“They won’t listen to me, Sandwich, but I know what I’m talking about. Something’s coming here — you wait and see. God wouldn’t forget me after all these years He’s been riding me.”
“Course not,” the freckled ex-sailor soothed him. “Everything’ll come out all right. You’re right.”