"Richard Brautigan - in_watermelon_sugar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brautigan Richard)

He was probably working on a lesson for the children.
We stopped on the bridge across the river. There were pale
green lanterns on the bridge. They were in the shape of human
shadows. Pauline and I kissed. Her mouth was moist and cool.
Perhaps because of the night.
I heard a trout jump in the river, a late jumper. The trout
made a narrow doorlike splash. There was a statue nearby. The
statue was of a gigantic bean. That's right, a bean.
Somebody a long time ago liked vegetables and there are
twenty or thirty statues of vegetables scattered here and there
in watermelon sugar.
There is the statue of an artichoke near the shingle factory
and a ten-foot carrot near the trout hatchery at ideath and a
head of lettuce near the school and a bunch of onions near the

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entrance to the Forgotten Works and there are other vegetable
statues near people's shacks and a rutabaga by the ball park.
A little ways from my shack there is the statue of a potato.
I don't particularly care for it, but a long time ago somebody
loved vegetables.
I once asked Charley if he knew who it was, but he said he
didn't have the slightest idea. "Must have really liked vegetables,
though," Charley'd said.
"Yeah," I'd said. "There's the statue of a potato right near
my shack."
We continued up the road to Pauline's place. We passed by
the Watermelon Works. It was silent and dark. Tomorrow
morning it would be filled with light and activity. We could see
the aqueduct. It was a long long shadow now.
We came to another bridge across a river. There were the
usual lanterns on the bridge and statues in the river. There
were a dozen or so pale lights coming up from the bottom of the
river. They were tombs.
We stopped.
"The tombs look nice tonight," Pauline said.
"Certainly do," I said.
"There are mostly children here, aren't there?"
"Yes," I said.
"They're really beautiful tombs," Pauline said.
Moths fluttered above the light that came out of the river
from the tombs below. There were five or six moths fluttering
over each tomb.
Suddenly a big trout jumped out of the water above a tomb
and got one of the moths. The other moths scattered and then
came back again, and the same trout jumped again and got
another moth. He was a smart old trout.
The trout did not jump any more and the moths fluttered
peacefully above the light coming from the tombs.