'I guess you must have had a chance to read my story by now,' Shooter said. He spoke1 as casually2 as a man commenting on the weather.
'I did.'
Shooter nodded gravely. 'I imagine it rang a bell, didn't it?'
'It certainly did,' Mort agreed, and then, with studied casualness: 'When did you write it?'
'I thought you'd ask that,' Shooter said. He smiled a secret little smile, but said no more. His arms remained crossed over his chest, his hands laid against his sides just below the armpits. He looked like a man who would be perfectly3 content to remain where he was forever, or at least until the sun sank below the horizon and ceased to warm his face.
'Well, sure,' Mort said, still casually. 'I have to, you know. When two fellows show up with the same story, that's serious.'
'Serious,' Shooter agreed in a deeply meditative4 tone of voice.
'And the only way to sort a thing like that out,' Mort continued, 'to decide who copied from whom, is to find out who wrote the words first.' He fixed5 Shooter's faded blue eyes with his own dry and uncompromising gaze. Somewhere nearby a chickadee twittered self-importantly in a tangle6 of trees and was then quiet again. 'Wouldn't you say that's true?'
'I suppose I would,' Shooter agreed. 'I suppose that's why I came all the way up here from Miss'ippi.'
Mort heard the rumble7 of an approaching vehicle. They both turned in that direction, and Tom Greenleafs Scout8 came over the nearest hill, pulling a little cyclone9 of fallen leaves behind it. Tom, a hale and healthy Tashmore native of seventy-something, was the caretaker for most of the places on this side of the lake that Greg Carstairs didn't handle. Tom raised one hand in salute10 as he passed. Mort waved back. Shooter removed one hand from its resting place and tipped a finger at Tom in a friendly gesture which spoke in some obscure way of a great many years spent in the country, of the uncountable and unrecollected number of times he had saluted11 the passing drivers of passing trucks and tractors and tedders and balers in that exact same casual way. Then, as Tom's Scout passed out of sight, he returned his hand to his ribcage so that his arms were crossed again. As the leaves rattled12 to rest on the road, his patient, unwavering, almost eternal gaze came back to Mort Rainey's face once more. 'Now what were we saying?' he asked almost gently.
'We were trying to establish provenance,' Mort said. 'That means -'
'I know what it means,' Shooter said, favoring Mort with a glance which was both calm and mildly contemptuous. 'I know I am wearing shitkicker clothes and driving a shitkicker car, and I come from a long line of shitkickers, and maybe that makes me a shitkicker myself, but it doesn't necessarily make me a stupid shitkicker.'
'No,' Mort agreed. 'I don't guess it does. But being smart doesn't necessarily make you honest, either. In fact, I think it's more often apt to go the other way.'
'I could figure that much out from you, had I not known it,' Shooter said dryly, and Mort felt himself flush. He didn't like to be zinged and rarely was, but Shooter had just done it with the effortless ease of an experienced shotgunner popping a clay pigeon.
His hopes of trapping Shooter dropped. Not all the way to zero, but quite a considerable way. Smart and sharp were not the same things, but he now suspected that Shooter might be both. Still, there was no sense drawing this out. He didn't want to be around the man any longer than he had to be. In some strange way he had looked forward to this confrontation13, once he had become sure that another confrontation was inevitable14 - maybe only because it was a break in a routine which had already become dull and unpleasant. Now he wanted it over. He was no longer sure John Shooter was crazy - not completely, anyway - but he thought the man could be dangerous. He was so goddam implacable. He decided15 to take his best shot and get it over with - no more dancing around.
'When did you write your story, Mr Shooter?'
'Maybe my name's not Shooter,' the man said, looking faintly amused. 'Maybe that's just a pen name.'
'I see. What's your real one?'
'I didn't say it wasn't; I only said maybe. Either way, that's not part of our business.' He spoke serenely16, appearing to be more interested in a cloud which was making its way slowly across the high blue sky and toward the westering sun.
'Okay,' Mort said, 'but when you wrote that story is.'
'I wrote it seven years ago,' he said, still studying the cloud - it had touched the edge of the sun now and had acquired a gold fringe. 'In 1982.'
Bingo, Mort thought. Wily old bastard17 or not, he stepped right into the trap after all. He got the story out of the collection, all right. And since Everybody Drops the Dime18 was published in 1983, he thought any date before then had to be safe. Should have read the copyright page, old son.
He waited for a feeling of triumph, but there was none. Only a muted sense of relief that this nut could be sent on his merry way with no further fuss or muss. Still, he was curious; it was the curse of the writing class. For instance, why that particular story, a story which was so out of his usual run, so downright atypical? And if the guy was going to accuse him of plagiarism19, why settle for an obscure short story when he could have cobbled up the same sort of almost identical manuscript of a best-seller like The OrganGrinder's Bay? That would have been juicy; this was almost a joke.
I suppose knocking off one of the novels would have been too much like work,
Mort thought.
1 spoke | |
n.(车轮的)辐条;轮辐;破坏某人的计划;阻挠某人的行动 v.讲,谈(speak的过去式);说;演说;从某种观点来说 | |
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2 casually | |
adv.漠不关心地,无动于衷地,不负责任地 | |
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3 perfectly | |
adv.完美地,无可非议地,彻底地 | |
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4 meditative | |
adj.沉思的,冥想的 | |
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5 fixed | |
adj.固定的,不变的,准备好的;(计算机)固定的 | |
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6 tangle | |
n.纠缠;缠结;混乱;v.(使)缠绕;变乱 | |
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7 rumble | |
n.隆隆声;吵嚷;v.隆隆响;低沉地说 | |
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8 scout | |
n.童子军,侦察员;v.侦察,搜索 | |
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9 cyclone | |
n.旋风,龙卷风 | |
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10 salute | |
vi.行礼,致意,问候,放礼炮;vt.向…致意,迎接,赞扬;n.招呼,敬礼,礼炮 | |
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11 saluted | |
v.欢迎,致敬( salute的过去式和过去分词 );赞扬,赞颂 | |
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12 rattled | |
慌乱的,恼火的 | |
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13 confrontation | |
n.对抗,对峙,冲突 | |
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14 inevitable | |
adj.不可避免的,必然发生的 | |
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15 decided | |
adj.决定了的,坚决的;明显的,明确的 | |
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16 serenely | |
adv.安详地,宁静地,平静地 | |
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17 bastard | |
n.坏蛋,混蛋;私生子 | |
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18 dime | |
n.(指美国、加拿大的钱币)一角 | |
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19 plagiarism | |
n.剽窃,抄袭 | |
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