"John Kessel - Another Orphan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kessel John)

Another Orphan
John Kessel

And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.
—JOB



one

HE WOKE TO DARKNESS AND SWAYING AND THE STINK OF
MANY bodies. He tried to lift his head and reach across the bed and found
he was not in his bed at all. He was in a canvas hammock that rocked back
and forth in a room of other hammocks.

"Carol?" Still half-asleep, he looked around, then lay back, hoping that
he might wake and find this just a dream. He felt the distance from
himself he often felt in dreams. But the room did not go away, and the
smell of sweat and salt water and some overwhelming stink of oil became
more real. The light slanting down through a latticed grating above
became brighter; he heard the sound of water and the creak of canvas,
and the swaying did not stop, and the men about him began to stir. It
came to him, in that same dreamlike calm, that he was on a ship.

A bell sounded twice, then twice again. Most of the other men were up,
grumbling, and stowing away the hammocks. "What ails you, Fallon?"
someone called. "Up, now."
two

His name was Patrick Fallon. He was thirty-two years old, a broker for
a commission house at the Chicago Board of Trade. He played squash at
an athletic club every Tuesday and Thursday night. He lived with a woman
named Carol Bukaty.

The night before, he and Carol had gone to a party thrown by one of the
other brokers and his wife. As sometimes happened with these parties,
this one had degenerated into an exchange of sexual innuendo, none of it
apparently serious, but with undertones of suspicion and the desire to
hurt. Fallon had had too much wine and had said a few things to the
hostess and about Carol that he had immediately wanted to retract.
They'd driven back from the party in silence, but the minute they'd closed
the door it had been a fight. Neither of them shouted, but his quiet
statement that he did not respect her at all and hers that she was sickened
by his excess, managed quite well. They had become adept at getting at
each other. They had, in the end, made up, and had made love.

As Fallon had lain there on the edge of sleep, he had had the idle
thought that what had happened that evening was silly, but not funny.
That something was wrong.