"Paul Di Filippo - Up Around the Bend" - читать интересную книгу автора (Di Filippo Paul)

DelMonte peaches in light syrup….

All salted with plasticized nuggets of windshield glass, seasoned with rain and wind and sun.

Mitch pulled his head and shoulders out of the blue SUV with a seasonally incongruous ski rack atop. In
one hand, a crack pipe and a vial of rocks. A grin split his wheaten-whiskered face.

“Hey, Vee, check it out!”

Verna turned from her own inspection of a Volkswagen minivan painted in Beardsley motifs. She saw
Mitch leaning against the blue woodie wagon with useless surfboards racked on its roof. He was flaunting
a baggie holding a small drift of weed and a packet of rolling papers.

Tucking the abused paperback she had just found into her low-slung backpack, Verna crossed the hot
tar strip separating her from her brother. She took the baggie from his hands.

“Cool. Looks like good stuff. No sticks.”

Mitch slung an arm around his wife’s waist and pulled her close to him: denim’d hip against denim’d hip.
He kissed her honey-colored neck before she broke away.

“Wanna fire ‘er up?
“Sure.”

Mitch reclaimed the pipe and vial. “Let’s get into some shade. How ‘bout in here?”

Verna shivered and shook her head, sending her long russet-roan hair scrimming and unscrimming her
face. “Not gonna crawl into any of these hulks. All moldy and ghosty….”

“All right, all right, lessee….”

The nearest tree stood several yards away, a lone sentinel watching the distant city’s advance over the
years, beyond the impenetrable wild grapes and across the marshy land surrounding the slough. Mitch
looked elsewhere.

“How ‘bout over there?”

The billboard cast a lozenge of shade across the weeds at its base.

“‘kay.”

They walked along the road a short distance, Verna’s wooden-soled clogs, almost invisible beneath her
bell-bottoms, clonking on the pavement, while Mitch’s Adidas’d feet made slight scuffing sounds.

They dropped their packs near the stanchions of the hoarding—Mitch’s pack all stained Army surplus
canvas, rivets and leather straps; Verna’s a fresh Patagonia affair of colored synthetics, zippers, and
plastic interlocks—and nimbly folded their legs to lower their butts to the ground. Verna watched as
grinning Mitch expertly rolled a joint. His smile infected her, and she grinned too.

“I remember the first time I saw you doing that. Caught you in the basement after school. Good thing