"Dickson, Gordon - Stranger Txt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

"Listen" Hear thap"

With the tail echo of his words still hanging m the air, the other two, old man and young woman, seemed to feel rather than hear something that had just ceased It was like sensing that a sound had been, rather than that a sound was

"What is it, Sonny^" Betty asked her husband She stood by the stove, her apron caught up in the act of wiping her hands

"I don't know," said Sonny, jumping suddenly to his feet "But I'm sure as heck going to find out " He snatched up his jacket from the back of his chair and strode swiftly to the kitchen door

"Wait!" cried Betty. "I'll go with you."

"Girl!" said the old man.

"Oh, just stay where you are, Dad!" she flung over her shoulder at him. "I'll be back, I'll be back!"

Lifting a sweater from its hook near the kitchen door, she ran out after her husband, shutting the door behind her. On the steps she paused. Then she made out Sonny's dark shadowy form at the far edge of the back yard, looking over the duckpond into the blackness of the woods behind the farmhouse. Lightly, she ran to him.

"Sonny," she said, in a low voice, taking his arm. "What was it?"

"Don't know," he said, frowning at the woods. He turned his head to look down at her. "Something smashed out there." He gestured to the woods. "The old man giving you a specially hard time tonight?"

"Oh, he's tired," she said.

"If you'd stand up to him, he wouldn't be ordering you around all the time like a servant."

She squeezed his arm. "I don't mind."

"Well, I mind," said Sonny. "You're my wife. not his."

"It's that that bothers him," she said. "With your stepmother gone, and him not able to work the way he used to, he feels like someone extra around the place."

"He don't have to," said Sonny.

"I know. Sonny—" she said, "what was it like— what you heard?"

"Like a car coming, a long way off," he said. "And then a smash. A real light smash, crackling, sort of—like an orange crate being splintered and busting wide open."

She looked past him, into the woods. "Out there?" she said.

"Sounded like it."

He started off suddenly, down the slope toward the duckpond. She came after him.

"Maybe you better go back to the house," he said.

"No," she answered. "I want to come."

"Stay close, then," he said.

He went on, his slim shoulders bobbing in the moonlight as he detoured around the duck pond. He looked thin and small, but quick and dangerous like a ferret. Betty followed, thinking how much hitler— and yet, in other ways, how much bigger he was than the long, heavy-jointed man, his father.