"Boy's Life" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCammon Robert R)

Miss Grace didn’t have much of a smile. Her lips were thin and her nose was broad and flat and her brows were black-penciled streaks above deep-set blue eyes. She thrust the Lorna Doones at me. “Want a cookie?”
I wasn’t hungry, but my folks had always taught me never to refuse a gift. I took one.
“Have two,” Miss Grace offered, and I took a second cookie. She ate a cookie herself and then sucked on the cigarette and blew smoke through her nostrils. “Your daddy’s our milkman,” she said. “I believe you’ve got us on your list. Six quarts of milk, two buttermilks, two chocolates, and three pints of cream.”
I checked the list. There was her name—Grace Stafford—and the order, just as she’d said. I told her I’d get everything for her, and I started putting the order together. “How old are you?” Miss Grace asked as I worked. “Twelve?”
“No, ma’am. Not until July.”
“I’ve got a son.” Miss Grace knocked ashes from her cigarette. She chewed on another cookie. “Turned twenty in December. He lives in San Antonio. Know where that is?”
“Yes ma’am. Texas. Where the Alamo is.”
“That’s right. Turned twenty, which makes me thirty-eight. I’m an old fossil, ain’t I?”
This was a trick question, I thought. “No ma’am,” I decided to say.
“Well, you’re a little diplomat, ain’t you?” She smiled again, and this time the smile was in her eyes. “Have another cookie.” She left me the box and walked to the door, and she hollered into the house: “Lainie! Lainie, get your butt up and come out here!”
My dad emerged first. He looked old in the hard light of morning, and there were dark circles under his eyes. “Called the sheriff’s office,” he told me as he sat in his wet seat and squeezed his feet into his shoes. “Somebody’s gonna meet us where the car went in.”
“Who the hell was it?” Miss Grace asked.
“I couldn’t tell. His face was…” He glanced quickly at me, then back to the woman. “He was beat up pretty bad.”
“Must’ve been drunk. Moonshinin’, most likely.”
“I don’t think so.” Dad hadn’t said anything over the phone about the car’s driver being naked, strangled with a piano wire, and handcuffed to the wheel. That was for the sheriff and not for Miss Grace’s or anybody else’s ears. “You ever see a fella with a tattoo on his left shoulder? Looked like a skull with wings growin’ out of its head?”
“I’ve seen more tattoos than the Navy,” Miss Grace said, “but I can’t recall anything like that around here. Why? Fella have his shirt off or somethin’?”
“Yeah, he did. Had that skull with wings tattooed right about here.” He touched his left shoulder. Dad shivered again, and rubbed his hands together. “They’ll never bring that car up. Never. Saxon’s Lake is three hundred feet deep if it’s an inch.”
The chimes sounded. I looked toward the door with the tray of milk quarts in my arms.
A girl with sleep-swollen eyes stumbled out. She was wearing a long plaid bathrobe and her feet were bare. Her hair was the color of cornsilk and hung around her shoulders, and as she neared the milk truck she blinked in the light and said, “I’m all fucked up.”
I think I must’ve almost fallen down, because never in my life had I heard a female use a word that dirty before. Oh, I knew what the word meant and all, but its casual use from a pretty mouth shocked the fool out of me.
“There’s a young man on the premises, Lainie,” Miss Grace said in a voice that could curl an iron nail. “Watch your language, please.”
Lainie looked at me, and her cool stare made me recall the time I’d put a fork in an electric socket. Lainie’s eyes were chocolate brown and her lips seemed to wear a half smile, half sneer. Something about her face looked tough and wary, as if she’d run out of trust. There was a small red mark in the hollow of her throat. “Who’s the kid?” she asked.
“Mr. Mackenson’s son. Show some class, hear?”
I swallowed hard and averted my eyes from Lainie’s. Her robe was creeping open. It hit me what kind of girl used bad words, and what kind of place this was. I had heard from both Johnny Wilson and Ben Sears that there was a house full of whores somewhere near Zephyr. It was common knowledge at the elementary school. When you told somebody to “go suck a whore,” you were standing right on the razor’s edge of violence. I’d always imagined the whorehouse to be a mansion, though, with drooping willow trees and black servants who fetched the customers mint juleps on the front porch; the reality, however, was that the whorehouse wasn’t much of a step up from a broken-down trailer. Still and all, here it was right in front of me, and the girl with cornsilk hair and a dirty mouth earned her living by the pleasures of the flesh. I felt goose bumps ripple up my back, and I can’t tell you the kind of scenes that moved like a slow, dangerous storm through my head.
“Take that milk and stuff to the kitchen,” Miss Grace told her.
The sneer won out over the smile, and those brown eyes turned black. “I ain’t got kitchen duty! It’s Donna Ann’s week!”
“It’s whose week I say it is, missy, and you know why I ought to put you in the kitchen for a whole month, too! Now, you do what I tell you and keep your smart mouth shut!”
Lainie’s lips drew up into a puckered, practiced pout. But her eyes did not register the chastisement so falsely; they held cold centers of anger. She took the tray from me, and standing with her back to my dad and Miss Grace, she stuck out her wet pink tongue in my face and curled it up into a funnel. Then the tongue slicked back into her mouth, she turned away from me, and dismissed all of us with a buttstrut that was as wicked as a sword slash. She swayed on into the house, and after Lainie was gone Miss Grace grunted and said, “She’s as rough as a cob.”
“Aren’t they all?” Dad asked, and Miss Grace blew a smoke ring and answered, “Yeah, but she don’t even pretend she’s got manners.” Her gaze settled on me. “Cory, why don’t you keep the cookies. All right?”
I looked at Dad. He shrugged. “Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“Good. It was a real pleasure to meet you.” Miss Grace returned her attention to my father and the cigarette to the corner of her mouth. “Let me know how everything turns out.”
“I will, and thanks for lettin’ me use the phone.” He slid behind the wheel again. “I’ll pick up the milk tray next trip.”
“Ya’ll be careful,” Miss Grace said, and she went into the white-painted whorehouse as Dad started the engine and let off the hand brake.
We drove back to where the car had gone in. Saxon’s Lake was streaked with blue and purple in the morning light. Dad pulled the milk truck off onto a dirt road; the road, both of us realized, was where the car had come from. Then we sat and waited for the sheriff as the sunlight strengthened and the sky turned azure.
Sitting there, my mind was split: one part was thinking about the car and the figure I thought I’d seen, and the other part was wondering how my dad knew Miss Grace at the whorehouse so well. But Dad knew all of his customers; he talked about them to Mom at the dinner table. I never recalled him mentioning Miss Grace or the whorehouse, however. Well, it wasn’t a proper subject for the dinner table, was it? And anyway, they wouldn’t talk about such things when I was around, even though all my friends and everybody else at school from the fourth grade up knew there was a house full of bad girls somewhere around Zephyr.
I had been there. I had actually seen a bad girl. I had seen her curled tongue and her butt move in the folds of her robe.
That, I figured, was going to make me one heck of a celebrity.
“Cory?” my father said quietly. “Do you know what kind of business Miss Grace runs in that house?”
“I…” Even a third-grader could’ve figured it out. “Yes sir.”
“Any other day, I would’ve just left the order by the front door.” He was staring at the lake, as if seeing the car still tumbling slowly down through the depths with a handcuffed corpse at the wheel. “Miss Grace has been on my delivery route for two years. Every Monday and Thursday, like clockwork. In case it’s crossed your mind, your mother does know I come out here.”
I didn’t answer, but I felt a whole lot lighter.
“I don’t want you to tell anybody about Miss Grace or that house,” my father went on. “I want you to forget you were there, and what you saw and heard. Can you do that?”
“Why?” I had to ask.
“Because Miss Grace might be a lot different than you, me, or your mother, and she might be tough and mean and her line of work might not be a preacher’s dream, but she’s a good lady. I just don’t want talk gettin’ stirred up. The less said about Miss Grace and that house, the better. Do you see?”
“I guess I do.”
“Good.” He flexed his fingers on the steering wheel. The subject was closed.
I was true to my word. My celebrityhood took flight, and that was that.
I was about to open my mouth to tell him about the figure I’d seen in the woods when a black and white Ford with a bubble light on top and the town seal of Zephyr on the driver’s door rounded the corner and slowed to a stop near the milk truck. Sheriff Amory, whose first name was J.T., standing for Junior Talmadge, got out and Dad walked over to meet him.
Sheriff Amory was a thin, tall man whose long-jawed face made me think of a picture I’d seen: Ichabod Crane trying to outrace the Headless Horseman. He had big hands and feet and a pair of ears that might’ve shamed Dumbo. If his nose had been any larger, he would’ve made a dandy weather-vane. He wore his sheriff’s star pinned to the front of his hat, and underneath it his dome was almost bald except for a wreath of dark brown hair. He pushed his hat back up on his shiny forehead as he and my dad talked at the lake’s edge and I watched my father’s hand motions as he showed Sheriff Amory where the car had come from and where it had gone. Then they both looked out toward the lake’s still surface, and I knew what they were thinking.
That car might’ve sunken to the center of the earth. Even the snapping turtles that lived along the lakeshore couldn’t get far enough down to ever see that car again. Whoever the driver had been, he was sitting in the dark right now with mud in his teeth.