Сергей Огольцов – The Tallest Story Ever (страница 6)

[–]

M1919 Browning, special modification for the .303 caliber used by the British RAF.

[–]

but I can't hear the falling Junkers with my plugged ears – our airbus continues to gain altitude.

The air defense missile specialist proudly stroked her bob haircut helmet, henna camouflaged with deep, dark copper color. The wretched dot plopped to the floor, kicking her right hind paw. Could the fly still wake up?

But no way! Vain are all hopes. The wide as the tracks of Mark I,

[–]

that lovely unforgettable hunk of metal that was the first to iron out the battlefields in the world slaughterhouse number one

[–]

heel on an-like- endless, like by a basketballer, foot of the flight attendant clanged on the floor squish-ending the fly's final agony.

A control stamp in passing, like a control shot in the brow, is a humanitarian act of mercy.

Game over. The bitchy insect’s flights are done with. No more smuggling of subversive eggs that inspire dissenters and threaten the very foundation of police states.

The balled fist crowns the arm, triumphantly thrust high into the air; the wrinkly tight skin, alike both to old parchment and dried date rind wrap the gesture of the witch-winner . She withdraws to her firing position behind the rows of seat backs across the passageway.

‘Good job, Nemesis,’ mutters Uncleton-Blackseasky. ‘Fit as a fiddle, the Kuril archipelago population have all the right to be proud of islanders like you!’ The visible bit of his countenance shined from under his shaggy eyebrows hanging over his face with the sham delight of a bootlicker.

My ears don’t feel like plugged any more. It seems our celestial craft has climbed at last the altitude assigned for its air corridor, and we've settled into cruising speed.

‘My respect, Chronosovna!’ He still went on with his unaddressed praises.

To whom? About what? I wondered. There were just three of us there: the praiser, me, and the porthole, but none of us female.

‘The interception, I mean,’ explained the Linguo-Mystic, without waiting for me to repeat my questions aloud. ‘Clean job, two moves – snap! – and the bastard's gone. As the whore nonnarias at Colosseum used to say: “Do ut des,” meaning, “give it to me, and you'll get me"’.

‘You mean, she's a prostitute or something?’ I didn't get it. ‘That jumping old junk? Or are you talking about the flight attendant?’

‘Shut your yap!’ Hissed the fellow traveler, without moving a hair about his lips, ‘And pray to the immortals she’ll never know about your brainless sputter. Otherwise, it'll be the end of both the one who blurted it out and everybody else been within the earshot.’

I could respond with just a shrug – damn lucky, I was flying with a lunatic on his run from the madhouse. However, I shrugged with only my right shoulder, saving the left one for judo, which I couldn't recollect, even at that moment: my neighbor wasn't just crazy, he was barking mad.

A barrel-shaped, sweater-clad torso rolled in abrupt jerks to and fro across the seat next to me. The eyes in the hairless quarter of the face kept firmly closed. Something like a death mask made of crimson plaster span in counter direction to the barrel, emitting senseless cries:

‘Chronosovna, please! Come on, Okeanovna! Don't! I and your dad… Even with both of your dads… It's not my fault! A random ticket from the box office… Seeing this half-wit, for the first time in my life… Fate was bribed!’ He started shrill shrieks, his eyes still shut, then grabbed the roots of the beard oozing from his scarlet cheeks and howled in a register inaccessible to human vocal cords. ‘No! Anything but that!’

My ears felt plugged again. The roar of the turbine engines outside the Boeing interior swayed to the squeal of circular saws. Gigantic ones. Rasping shrilly, at times in unison, then each one at its own pitch.

The worst news though the sways of immense swing were back. However, this time in reverse: back and down, back and down… And faster with each sway…

The Boeing obviously fell out of the flight allocated corridor…

Bookoff

_

04

A shadow from the other side of the window pane flitted across the iris of Bookoff's frozen gaze. His eyes, on this side of the pane, blinked, losing their stillness. He fell out of being a part in the old chair. He winked.

Bookoff missed catching what exactly had interrupted his furniturized state. The twinkle had been too brief for the flank of a cloud to accidentally touch the sun's disk. However, its duration overshot that of a random hoopoe flight, their family were the largest birds that had taken up residence in the neglected garden.

Possibly, another of the measurement visits by civilian citizens of the state that had won the upper hand in the hang-fire armed conflict.

Leaning forward, Bookoff planted his hands upon his knees and helped his body get up from the sitting position. On leaving the kitchen, aka living-room, he turned right, toward the door leading into the garden, where from the tour group – the real estate appraisers – would come in to wander around the big house. He didn't care, but it was still unpleasant. It would be better they wait until it’ll happen, what he waited for.

His ears were bursting with a noise that only Bookoff could hear. They'd got plugged from the morning, and he'd be half-deaf all day long, carrying the ringing hum within his ears. Bookoff didn't beef of it before anyone, like of everything else. And had he even someone to complain to, he wouldn't. What’s the use?

The fact of the outside span about the backdoor being paved with fragments of marble tiles had to be known beforehand and kept in mind. Tufts of tall weeds, breaking through the seams between irregular pieces of divers thickness hid it with their lavish growth. A stray throwaway piece of paper dropped by the wind lingered atop a goose-foot stalk to the right of the door.

Bookoff didn’t know why he took those three steps to the throwaway. Of course, it was not a premeditated move, just an instance of mistake resulting from absent-mindedness which no one was there to blame for.

The steps were taken not by Bookoff from the past life, but by the old man with his head half-switched-off in endless waithing. However, the body used to serve Bookoff, the knit-picking Bookoff, tilted and reached for the paper piece to take the trash from before the door to the trash bag in the kitchen.

Pain sliced sharply across the spine of both Bookoffs: the neatness upholder and the absent-minded ruin.

[–]

Absence of guilt does not exclude punishment. Especially for those immediately nearby the scene of wrongdoing. And it does not matter aware or otherwise they were then. Bad luck, Mrs. Surratt, yes, you were in the kitchen and the conspirators in the living-room, yet, the gallows at ready, the pablic a-waiting for the show, follow the hangman, please…

[–]

Bookoff and his state of waiting broke up. He was rudely woken up. And his body simply fell to its knees. A reflex, triggered by the fall, thrust his hand forward, toward the thick rebar pole, to grasp it. The knees didn't reach the marble rubble under the grass. The man froze in a semi-squat, waiting for the wave of pain to whoosh off.

The pain did not subside, and Bookoff began to carefully straighten up his back. The muscles in his strained arm helped the knees to heave the body…

The pole had been planted by Bookoff many years ago. Driven into the ground at the request of his wife. Next to a bush of climbing roses. Though the plant hardly deserved to be named a bush – just a trinity of grass blades stuck out of the dirt.. The support looked an overkill for them.. Bookoff said, ‘For their future grows, I’ve got no other darn thing to hammer in.’

Now a mesh of wiry stalks braided the iron pole up to the top. From there, hanging from the attached linen cable, a gigantic openwork tube of lacy walls braided of impenetrable twigs and leaves reached the next support. In how many years it followed the first one, Bookoff could no longer remember.

Still later, along the following steely cable, the tube crawled farther, around the corner of the big house to where it had its blind wall of no windows.

In summertime, for half a week, small roses of tenderest shades set the openwork of interwoven stems abloom. It created the effect of a rozy cloud whiff puffed out across the garden at about 2 m height from the vegetable beds.

In those weeks, even the boor knit-picker happened to stop on a paved (in those days cleared of weeds) marble span, and murmur under his nose, who knows who to and what about: "Well, sure"…

The remaining 350 days, he simply tolerated the openwork model of a prehistoric anaconda in the backyard, and annually trimmed its scales with garden shears. When reminded by his wife, it should be done…

The ungrateful plant scratched his hands, but he didn't want to spend on welding gloves for a couple of days a year. Besides, the shears were unWhieldy for thickly gloved hands…

Bookoff finally straightened up. He took his hand off the rebar pole.

‘Age brings no joy, eh? Old man?’

Those two were not appraicers. Both in light shirts with short sleeves. The one with a big stomach wore even a necktie, plus rimless cheaters.