The Ballad of Dingus Magee

Начало книги

Turkey Doolan’s crotch itched. His scalp was gamy. Poised in the saddle, with one freckled hand inside his jeans and several stumpy fingers of the other beneath his sombrero, he relieved himself by scratching simultaneously and with vehemence.

But Turkey’s complaint was also mental. He knew this for a true fact as he shifted his buttocks athwart the hot leather, waiting while his companion emerged from a sheltered turning on the trail behind him. “Because I done rode with him for almost two weeks now,” he reasoned, “and still there ain’t nothing happened. Even accompanied with Mister Dingus Billy Magee hisself, and it ain’t happened yet.”

Up ahead, where the trail shelved gradually onto a low broad mesa, Turkey had noticed a cavalry patrol approaching in the distance. “But it ain’t about to happen in the middle of no sweaty desert neither,” he knew.

What he was waiting for made something of a story. He was the only child of an itinerant tinker who died when he, Turkey, was nine, and it might have had its beginnings even before that. Because he seemed ready even then, looking ahead solemnly to the occurrence of some fabulous and unpredicated event of which only he, privately, had any intimation. He waited three years in the fourth grade alone.

Читать дальше →