Walter M. Miller - The Hoofer

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 43.75KB 7 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

THE HOOFER

Walter M. Miller, Jr.

THEY ALL KNEW he was a spacer because of the white goggle marks on his sun-scorched

face, and so they toler-ated him and helped him. They even made allowances for him when he

staggered and fell in the aisle of the bus while pursuing the harassed little housewife from seat to

seat and cajoling her to sit and talk with him.

Having fallen, he decided to sleep in the aisle. Two men helped him to the back of the bus,

dumped him on the rear seat, and tucked his gin bottle safely out of sight. After all, he had not

seen Earth for nine months, and judging by the crusted matter about his eyelids, he couldn't have

seen it too well now, even if he had been sober. Glare-blindness, gravity-legs, and agoraphobia

were excuses for a lot of things, when a man was just back from Big Bottomless. And who could

blame a man for acting strangely?

Minutes later, he was back up the aisle and swaying giddily over the little housewife. "How!" he

said. "Me Chief Broken Wing. You wanta Indian wrestle?"

The girl, who sat nervously staring at him, smiled wanly, and shook her head.

"Quiet li'l pigeon, aren'tcha?" he burbled affectionately, crashing into the seat beside her.

Two men slid out of their seats, and a hand clamped his shoulder. "Come on, Broken Wing,

let's go back to bed."

"My name's Hogey," he said. "Big Hogey Parker. I was just kidding about being a Indian."

"Yeah. Come on, let's go have a drink." They got him on his feet, and led him stumbling back

down the aisle. "My ma was half Cherokee, see? That's how come I said it. You wanta hear a war

whoop? Real stuff."

"Never mind."

He cupped his hands to his mouth and favored them with a blood-curdling proof of his

ancestry, while the fe-male passengers stirred restlessly and hunched in their seats. The driver

stopped the bus and went back to warn him against any further display. The driver flashed a

deputy's badge and threatened to turn him over to a constable.

"I gotta get home," Big Hogey told him. "I got me a son now, that's why. You know? A little

baby pigeon of a son. Haven't seen him yet."

"Will you just sit still and be quiet then, eh?"

Big Hogey nodded emphatically. "Shorry, officer, I didn't mean to make any trouble."

When the bus started again, he fell on his side and lay still. He made retching sounds for a time,

then rested, snor-ing softly. The bus driver woke him again at Caine's junc-tion, retrieved his gin

bottle from behind the seat, and helped him down the aisle and out of the bus.

Big Hogey stumbled about for a moment, then sat down hard in the gravel at the shoulder of the

road. The driver paused with one foot on the step, looking around. There was not even a store at

the road junction, but only a freight building next to the railroad track, a couple of farmhouses at

the edge of a side-road, and, just across the way, a deserted filling station with a sagging roof. The

land was Great Plains country, treeless, barren, and roll-ing.

Big Hogey got up and staggered around in front of the bus, clutching at it for support, losing

his duffle bag.

"Hey, watch the traffic!" The driver warned. With a surge of unwelcome compassion he trotted

around after his troublesome passenger, taking his arm as he sagged again. "You crossing?"

"Yeah," Hogey muttered. "Lemme alone, I'm okay."

The driver started across the highway with him. The traffic was sparse, but fast and dangerous

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Walter M. Miller - The Hoofer.pdf

共7页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Walter M. Miller - The Hoofer

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: