The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories by Geoffrey Household

Author:Geoffrey Household [Household, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Thriller & Suspense, Short Stories (Single Author)
Publisher: Open Road Media Mystery & Thriller
Published: 2015-01-23T20:42:07+00:00

KANGAROO LOVES ME

HE wore a bowler hat. There was a faded velvet collar on his dark blue overcoat. His gayly striped tie was worn and greasy with years of constant use. His teeth were decayed. One knew at first sight that he was married to a woman much bigger than himself. He was obviously a Londoner.

He had no part in the New York crowd. A townsman, yet racy of the soil, his place was in some pub of the London suburbs, where the landlord was a dog fancier and the local bookmaker had his sacred corner table and the best chair in the saloon bar. The odor that his memory most lovingly selected was a mixture of beer and iodine; so the pub had smelt whenever a new litter of prize terriers entered the world, and their little tails were being docked on the bar before a choice crowd of the landlord’s favorites. He had often held the pup; the dirty hands were very gentle. He had been a favorite of the bookmaker, too. Knew a bit about the gees, he did. His bandy legs suggested an early training as a stableboy, and indeed he had ridden a race or two, but lost his job before he was old enough to know when and how to drink.

He stood before one of the kangaroo enclosures in the Bronx Zoo. A female kangaroo lay on her side close to the wire, listening to him. She reclined in the curious manner of kangaroos: full length and leaning on one elbow, like a Roman lady at a banquet. Her grey underside was luxuriously displayed. With her spare paw she fanned the flies from her nose. She watched him with languorous interest, and waved her ears when he spoke to her.

The crowd, a cross section of central Europe, loud-mouthed, well-fed, and feeding as they walked, passed by the kangaroos with little interest; they were bound for the capybara and the anteater, distorted creatures to which they had a certain affinity. When people joined him at the railing, he glanced sidelong at them like a fox. If they belonged to the usual run of visitors, he ducked his peaked head into his dirty butterfly collar and waited resignedly till they moved on; but if the intruder was a man, and alone, and likely to be sympathetic, he motioned to him to be still. He showed uncanny judgment in picking those whom he chose to trust. They seldom let him down, but watched, smiling, while he continued the interrupted conversation.

“Ain’t yer a li’l bleeder?” he would say softly. “Like to be back in Austrylia, wouldn’t yer?”

His voice was a caress of curious vowel sounds. The kangaroo fanned herself, and listened with obvious delight.

His name was Breown—so he pronounced it, and his associates, to whom such immigrant names as Szczewc were easy because they never saw them written, took him at his own valuation of it. His wife was a roaring Irish-American, red-faced and bulging. She ran a small hand laundry of her own.

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