"Steven Gould - Jumper" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gould Stephen Jay)

slowly. Then his arm jerked forward and the belt sung though the air and my body betrayed me,
squirming away from the impact and...

I was leaning against bookshelves, my neck free of Dad's crushing grip, my body still braced to
receive a blow. I looked around, gasping, my heart still racing. There was no sign of Dad, but this
didn't surprise me.

I was in the fiction section of the Stanville Public Library and, while I knew it as well as my own
room, I didn't think my father had ever been inside the building.

That was the first time.



The second time was like this.

The truck stop was new and busy, an island of glaring light and hard concrete in the night. I went
in the glass doors to the restaurant and took a chair at the counter, near the section with the sign that
said, DRIVERS ONLY. The clock on the wall read eleven-thirty. I put the rolled-up bundle of stuff
on the floor under my feet and tried to look old.

The middle-aged waitress on the other side of the counter looked skeptical, but she put down a
menu and a glass of water, then said, "Coffee?"

"Hot tea, please."

She smiled mechanically and left.

The drivers' section was half full, a thick haze of tobacco smoke over it. None of them looked
like the kind of man who'd give me the time of day, much less a lift farther down the road.

The waitress returned with a cup, a tea bag, and one of those little metal pitchers filled with not
very hot water. "What can I get you?" she asked.

"I'll stick with this for a while."

She looked at me steadily for a moment, then totaled the check and laid on the counter. "Cashier
will take it when you're ready. You want anything else, just let me know."

I didn't know to hold the lid open as I poured the water, so a third of it ended up on the counter.
I mopped it up with napkins from the dispenser and tried not to cry.
 "Been on the road long, kid?"

I jerked my head up. A man, sitting in the last seat of the drivers' section, was looking at me. He
was big, both tall and fat, with a roll of skin where his shirt neck opened. He was smiling and I could
see his teeth were uneven and stained.

"What do you mean?"

He shrugged. "Your business. You don't look like you've been running long." His voice was