"Thomas M. Disch - After Pottsville" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

Terry was not compelled to answer, but like most of us he was pleased when
someone else was curious. "I’m not a Boy Scout anymore," he said quietly.

The rebbe chuckled. "You could fool me."

"I do still wear the uniform. It meant a lot to me. I had nearly all the merit
badges I needed to be an Eagle Scout."

"And then–what? So young, it must have been a highway accident. Or some
one-in-a-million kind of cancer?"

"I committed suicide," said Terry, "when I realized that I was gay."

Rabbi Rosen nodded and stroked his beard. Slowly his feeling of incipient
sympathy for this dead goy became a feeling of revulsion–and of horror at his
own situation, adrift in an afterlife for which he lacked any map or compass,
a Jew with no homeland but this Iowa cow pasture, no comforter but a queer.



"Do you want to hear something completely crazy?" said Deborah Carr as she
plunked down a cup of coffee and a slice of pie on the counter in front of
George Scully.

He didn’t, but that was part of the deal when you ate at the Corner Cafe. You
listened to what Deborah had to say.

"What," said George.

"You will never guess who I thought I just saw, standing out in front of
here."

"Who."

"Terry Goren."

George swallowed the wrong way, choked, brought up the bolus of chewed apple
pie and let it lodge inside his cheek, tobacco-like–while he scalded his
throat with too-hot black coffee.

"Remember him?"

George nodded. He remembered him all right. They had been best friends in high
school until the kid had revealed his sick secret.

"Jesus," said George. "What made you think of him? He’s been dead
since...since when?"

"Nineteen seventy-eight. The year Sharon Gates moved to Chicago. Who knows why