"KW Jeter - Black Nightgown" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jeter K. W)

glass-fronted cabinets, the mounds of beef liver glistened like soft, wet
rubies. "Ask them and get told what a fool you are." Drops of blood
spattered the sawdust and the broken leather of his father's boots.
Outside the door, with the slow overhead fan trying to keep the flies
away, the little girls' ropes had been left behind like shed snakeskins.
He rang open the cash register and sorted out the dollar bills that the
neighborhood housewives had paid him for their deliveries. His hands still
smelled like raw sausages and the red water that had leaked through the
wrapping paper.
Later, he took a beer from the case kept just inside the door of the meat
locker, a privilege he'd earned when he'd started shaving, and sat in the
alley doorway. He tossed his stained white apron across a hook on the rail
that the slaughterhouse trucks backed up to, and tilted his head to drink
the bottle half-empty. He could watch, undetected as an evening ghost, as
the married women walked by the alley's mouth, flat summer sandals and
arms shining from the tarry pavement's heat. The shy, pretty one who had
married last autumn bent her head over her newborn. All their voices were
like the sounds of nesting birds, too soft to tell what they were saying.
He rolled the bottle between his wet hands. He knew that they were
probably talking, among other things, about him and the widow.
"She oughta wax that upper lip of hers." That was what his oldest sister
had said, not because the woman had a moustache, but because she was so
dark and wore hollow gold bracelets on her wrists like a gypsy. She looked
like their grandmother's wedding photograph, the framed sepia oval in the
hallway. His other sisters had giggled behind their hands, though the
widow wasn't any darker than any of them.
She hadn't been a widow then. Her husband was a Cracow dandy and still
alive. That was what his mother called a man who wore a pinstripe suit
with a waist nipped in like a woman's. A hat and a red silk tie that
turned black around the knot, like a hummingbird's throat. It must have
been winter when he'd heard his mother call the man that, because he
remembered the kitchen window being covered with steam from the pots upon
the stove. His father had sat at the table eating, his suspenders hanging
loose from his waist, his big-knuckled fists swallowing the knife and
fork. She'd glanced back at his father, her husband, then leaned across
the sink to look out the part of the window she'd wiped transparent with
her hand, looking out at the men talking under the streetlight, the
shoulders of their thin jackets hunched up against the cold, their breath
silver mingled plumes.
"A Cracow dandy," she'd said again, her voice filled with the same
terrible empty longing it held when she spoke of her dead father. It must
have been something she'd heard from her dead mother; she'd been born
here. What did she know of the old world? Nothing but the old language,
and less of that than her mother and her grandmother had known.
The last of the beer had warmed between his hands; on his tongue, it
tasted sour and flat. He leaned forward, elbows against his knees, and
watched the little girls run past the alley, called to set the tables for
their fathers and older brothers who would be coming home from work soon.
He had wondered if the widow still set a place for her dead husband. And
then he had found out.