"Bradbury, Ray - Death Is A Lonely Business" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradbury Ray)

could walk no one knew.
God, I heard myself whisper.
I sensed that she had ventured forth in my world late nights and knew people I knew. There were
breaths of near meetings between us.
Go, I thought, bang the brass lion knocker on her shore-front door.
No. I shook my head. I was afraid that only a black-and-white film ectoplasm might answer.
You do not really want to meet your special love, you only want to dream that some night she'll step
out and walk, with her footprints vanishing on the sand as the wind follows, to your apartment where
she'll tap on your window and enter to unspool her spirit-light in long creeks of film on your ceiling.
Constance, dear Rattigan, I thought, run out! Jump in that big white Duesenberg parked bright and
fiery in the sand, rev the motor, wave, and motor me away south to Coronado, down the sunlit coast!
No one revved a motor, no one waved, no one took me south to sun, away from that foghorn that
buried itself at sea.
So I backed off, surprised to find salt water up over my tennis shoes, turned to walk back toward cold
rain in cages, the greatest writer in the world, but no one knew, just me.
I had the moist confetti, the papier-mвchй mulch, in my jacket pocket, when I stepped into the one
place where I knew that I had to go.
It was where the old men gathered.
It was a small, dim shop facing the railway tracks where candy, cigarettes, and magazines were sold
and tickets for the big red trolley cars that rushed from L.A. to the sea.
The tobacco-shed-smelling place was run by two nicotine-stained brothers who were always
sniveling and bickering at each other like old maids. On a bench to one side, ignoring the arguments like
crowds at a boring tennis match, a nest of old men stayed by the hour and the day, lying upward about
their ages. One said he was eighty-two. Another bragged that he was ninety. A third said ninety-four. It
changed from week to week, as each misremembered last month's lie.
And if you listened, as the big iron trains rolled by, you could hear the rust flake off the old men's
bones and snow through their bloodstreams to shimmer for a moment in their dying gaze as they settled
for long hours between sentences and tried to recall the subject they had started on at noon and might
finish off at midnight, when the two brothers, bickering, shut up shop and went away sniveling to their
bachelor beds.
Where the old men lived, nobody knew. Every night, after the brothers grouched off into the dark, the
old men dispersed like tumbleweeds, blown every which way in the salt wind.
I stepped into the eternal dusk of the place and stood staring at the bench where the old men had sat
since the beginning of time.
There was an empty place between the old men. Where there had always been four, now there were
only three, and I could tell from their faces that something was wrong.
I looked at their feet, which were surrounded by not only scatterings of cigar ash, but a gentle
snowfall of strange little paper-punchouts, the confetti from hundreds of trolley line tickets in various L
and X and M shapes.
I took my hand out of my pocket and compared the now almost dried soggy mess with the snow on
the floor. I bent and picked some of it up and let it sift from my fingers, an alphabet down the air.
I looked at the empty place on the bench.
"Where's that old gent...?” I stopped.
For the old men were staring at me as if I had fired a gun at their silence. Besides, their look said, I
wasn't dressed right for a funeral.
One of the oldest lit his pipe and at last, puffing it, muttered, "He'll be along. Always does."
But the other two stirred uncomfortably, their faces shadowed.
"Where," I dared to say, "does he live?"
The old man stopped puffing. "Who wants to know?"
"Me," I said. "You know me. I've come in here for years."