Random Walk: A Novel for a New Age
- Автор: Блок Лоуренс
- Год: 1988
- Язык: английский
- Год: A Tor Book
- ISBN: 978-0-312-93092-9
- Жанр: Фэнтези
Электронная книга - «Random Walk: A Novel for a New Age». Краткое содержание книги:
But the bikers were curious, not hostile. They asked their questions, cracked their jokes, offered various illegal substances around, then gunned their engines and took off.
A few miles away, Dingo accelerated to pull up even with two brothers who were riding double. “Hey, let Weasel ride with me some,” he said.
“What, are you two sweethearts?”
“Yeah, I want a cock to play with while I ride and I can’t reach my own.”
“If it wasn’t so fuckin’ small you could reach it.”
“Yeah, well, your mama never complained. Pull the fuck over, will you?”
Riding with Weasel, he said, “How’d you like those people we met just now?”
“The walkers? Assholes.”
“Maybe. Got to be some kind of righteous duty, though. Walking across the country.”
“Got to be crazy to do it.”
“Maybe,” he said. Then he said, “Hey, Weeze, you like my hog?”
“This here bike?”
“Yeah. You like it?”
“Shit yes.”
“You want it?”
“Huh?”
“I said do you want it?”
“The bike? Do I want it?”
“Do you?”
“Fuck, man. Would a dog lick hisself? Of course I want it.”
“It’s yours.”
“Huh?”
“It’s yours, Weasel. All you got to do is run back with me to where the walkers are, and you can keep the bike.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“Walk.”
“You gotta be crazy, Dingo.”
“So?”
When they’d caught up with the group Dingo uncoupled a bag with his gear in it and slung it over his shoulder. He gave the Harley a pat and told Weasel to take over.
“Just treat her good,” he said. “You do right by her and she’ll always give you her best.”
“Like a woman,” Weasel said.
“Well, no,” Dingo said. “You got to kick the shit out of a woman now and then.”
He started walking, picked up his pace, and took a position around the middle of the group, falling into step with John Powers. “Hey, nice day, huh?” he said.
“Real nice,” John said.
“My name’s Dingo.”
“Mine’s John.”
“Oh, yeah? My name used to be John. Before it was Dingo.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. It sure is a beautiful day.”
Later, walking with Gary, he said, “Cowboys and bikers, now there’s two kind of people never did get along.”
“I know. We always hated you people.”
“Yeah, we felt the same about you. Cowboy walks into a biker bar, he’s askin’ to get stomped. No other way to look at it.”
“That’s a true statement. Only thing dumber is for a biker to walk into a cowboy bar.”
“I saw a cowboy get killed once.”
“Yeah?”
“Biker hit on a girl, cowboy and his friends didn’t like it, biker took a beating. Biker came back with his brothers, couldn’t find but one cowboy, and it was nothing but boots and chains. He wasn’t even the one who started the whole thing, I don’t know if he was even part of it.”
“If you saw it,” Gary said slowly, “you must have been one of the bikers.”
“Well, fuck, I wasn’t the girl. Man, we were fucked up. I mean, crank and reds is a destructive combination.”
“I don’t know about drugs,” Gary said. “Seems to me cowboys get mean enough on beer and whiskey. I never saw nobody killed, but I did see a biker get cut once.”
“What, stabbed?”
“Nutted. You know, castrated. His balls cut off.”
“Is that true?”
“I’m afraid it is.”
“What’d he do?”
“Nothin’. He was just there, is all. There was a bunch of hands spent the whole day nuttin’ calves.”
“What for?”
“Are you shitting me? That’s how you get steers, man. You take the calves and cut their balls off. You order a steak, that’s what you’re eating.”
“You’re eating the calves’ nuts?”
“No, shit, don’t you know anything?” He laughed. “You get a bull calf, you nut him, and then he’s a steer and that’s what your beef is. If you don’t cut him he grows up to be a bull and you can’t control him on the range and the meat’s not right. I thought everybody knew that.”
“I grew up in Oakland, man. Meat came in packages wrapped in plastic. Milk came in cartons. Chicken came fried. What happened to this biker? You wouldn’t know what bunch he rode with, by any chance? Like Hell’s Angels, Rebels, Savage Skulls? One of those?”
“Hell, I don’t know. He was a biker is all, and he was there. And these guys been cutting calves all day, and big surprise they’re drinking pretty good, and somebody gets the idea of cutting the biker same as they been cutting the calves. And so they do it.”
“He lets ’em?”
“They didn’t give him much choice. There was six or eight of them, and they just held him down and did it.”
“They cut off his whole works?”
“No, just his balls. You cut the cock, a man might bleed to death.”
“Cut the balls off and he’ll just wish he did. I never heard anything like that. Didn’t his brothers come back at you?”
“Never.”
“Maybe he never said anything. Maybe he didn’t want to spread it around. Fuck. That is some story.”
“Well, cowboys got a lot of stories,” Gary said. “I guess bikers got a few, too.”
“I guess,” said Dingo.
Gene was a jack-Mormon who lived in a shack on federal land. He trapped, hunted, and made a little beer and whiskey. He had two wives, Essica and Lily, and five children between the ages of eight and eleven. The first chance he got, Thom asked one of the older boys whether there were any Chinese Mormons. The boy said he’d never met any.
“You got a nice little family,” Jody told Gene. “I didn’t think Mormons could still have more’n one wife.”
“You can’t,” Gene said, “but there’s a lot that do. What are they going to do, run around locking people up? Of course you can’t be in good standing with the church, but that only matters if you give a shit about it. Which I don’t.”
“Yeah. How is it having two wives, anyway?”
“Well, I’d say it’s good,” Gene said judiciously. “They sort of keep each other company. They’re in the kitchen together, they care for the children together, they do their chores together. It works real good that way.”
“They don’t get jealous?”
“Naw.”
“You have some kind of schedule?”
“Schedule? Oh, you mean for who to sleep with? No, we just all three sleep together.”
“Oh.”
“It works real fine that way.”
“I guess,” Jody said, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Just one more question, hoss. Who do I see if I want to join this church of yours?”
Kate and Jamie were picking raspberries at roadside just east of Lowman. Kate was Boston Irish, and she had gone through a period in her late teens when she had Gaelicized her name to Caitlin. Jamie was a black woman from the South Side of Chicago. Both were nearing thirty, both had short hair, and both were dressed alike in baggy fatigues from Banana Republic and unpatterned flannel shirts from Norm Thompson and duck hunter boots from L. L. Bean.
They lived together at a lesbian commune half a mile up a dirt road, and the group waited while they went back there to fill a pair of backpacks and say their good-byes. They returned with a couple of spare backpacks and some extra canteens, a hamper of food, and two half-gallon jugs of homemade elderflower wine. They also brought Neila, a big-eyed thin-limbed waif of a woman with a skittish manner and a haunted look about her.
“She doesn’t say much,” Kate told Martha and Sara, “but you should have seen her when she turned up back in November. I don’t think she spoke a word the first week she was with us. Somebody must have done a number on her. I thought she probably should have stayed with the other women, but she wanted to come. Something told her to come to the Hen House when she needed us, and the same thing must be telling her to leave.”