"Charles de Lint - Someplace To Be Flying" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Lint Charles)

-Rev. Henry Ward Beecher (mid-1800s)


it's a long long road
it's a big big world
we are wise wise women
we are giggling girls
we both carry a smile
to show when we're pleased
both carry a switchblade
in our sleeves
-Ani DiFranco,
from "If He Tries Anything"




POETRY IN A TREE
Everything is held together with stories. That is all
that is holding us together, stories and compassion.
-barry lopez,
from an interview in poets and writers,
vol. 22, issue 2 (march/april 1994)

1.
Newford, Late August, 1996
The streets were still wet but the storm clouds had moved on as
Hank drove south on Yoors waiting for a fare. Inhabited tenements
were on his right, the derelict blight of the Tombs on his left, Miles
Davis's muted trumpet snaking around Wayne Shorter's sax on the tape
deck. The old Chev four-door didn't look like much; painted a flat gray,
it blended into the shadows like the ghost car it was.
It wasn't the kind of cab you flagged down. There was no roof light
on top, no meter built into the dash, no license displayed, but if you
needed something moved and you had the number of the cell phone,
you could do business. Safe business. The windows were bulletproof
glass and under the body's flaking paint and dents, there was so much
steel it would take a tank to do it any serious damage. Fast business,
too. The rebuilt V-8 under the hood, purring as quiet as a contented cat
at the moment, could lunge to one hundred miles per hour in seconds.
The car didn't offer much in the way of comfort, but the kinds of fares
that used a gypsy cab weren't exactly hiring it for its comfort.
When he reached Grasso Street, Hank hung a left and cruised
through Chinatown, then past the strip of clubs on the other side of
Williamson. The clock on his dash read 3:00 A.M. The look-at-me
crowd was gone now with only a few stragglers still wandering the wet
streets. The lost and the lonely and the seriously screwed-up. Hank
smiled when he stopped at a red light and a muscle-bound guy crossed
in front of the cab wearing a T-shirt that read, "Nobody Knows I'm a
Lesbian." He tapped his horn and the guy gave him a Grasso Street