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

sidewalked thoroughfare. It wasn’t much, though; if you blinked a few times,
you were past it. Then Dad crossed the railroad track, drove another two
miles, and turned into a gate that had a sign above it: GREEN MEADOWS DAIRY.
The milk trucks were at the loading dock, getting filled up. Here there was a
lot of activity, because Green Meadows Dairy opened early and the milkmen had
their appointed rounds.
Sometimes when my father had an especially busy schedule, he asked me to
help him with his deliveries. I liked the silence and stillness of the
mornings. I liked the world before the sun. I liked finding out what different
people ordered from the dairy. I don’t know why; maybe that was my granddaddy
Jaybird’s curiosity in me.
My dad went over a checklist with the foreman, a big crew-cut man named
Mr. Bowers, and then Dad and I started loading our truck. Here came the
bottles of milk, the cartons of fresh eggs, buckets of cottage cheese and
Green Meadows’ special potato and bean salads. Everything was still cold from
the ice room, and the milk bottles sparkled with frost under the loading
dock’s lights. Their paper caps bore the face of a smiling milkman and the
words “Good for You!” As we were working, Mr. Bowers came up and watched with
his clipboard at his side and his pen behind his ear. “You think you’d like to
be a milkman, Cory?” he asked me, and I said I might. “The world’ll always
need milkmen,” Mr. Bowers went on. “Isn’t that right, Tom?”
“Right as rain,” my dad said; this was an all-purpose phrase he used when
he was only half listening.
“You come apply when you turn eighteen,” Mr. Bowers told me. “We’ll fix
you up.” He gave me a clap on the shoulder that almost rattled my teeth and
did rattle the bottles in the tray I was carrying.
Then Dad climbed behind the big-spoked wheel, I got into the seat next to
him, he turned the key, and the engine started and we backed away from the
loading dock with our creamy cargo. Ahead of us, the moon was sinking down and
the last of the stars hung on the lip of night. “What about that?” Dad asked.
“Being a milkman, I mean. That appeal to you?”
“It’d be fun,” I said.
“Not really. Oh, it’s okay, but no job’s fun every day. I guess we’ve
never talked about what you want to do, have we?”
“No sir.”
“Well, I don’t think you ought to be a milkman just because that’s what I
do. See, I didn’t start out to be a milkman. Granddaddy Jaybird wanted me to
be a farmer like him. Grandmomma Sarah wanted me to be a doctor. Can you
imagine that?” He glanced at me and grinned. “Me, a doctor! Doctor Tom! No
sir, that wasn’t for me.”
“What’d you start out to be?” I asked.
My dad was quiet for a while. He seemed to be thinking this question
over, in a deep place. It occurred to me that maybe no one had ever asked him
this before. He gripped the spoked wheel with his grown-up hands and
negotiated the road that unwound before us in the headlights, and then he
said, “First man on Venus. Or a rodeo rider. Or a man who can look at an empty
space and see in his mind the house he wants to build there right down to the
last nail and shingle. Or a detective.” My dad made a little laughing noise in
his throat. “But the dairy needed another milkman, so here I am.”
“I wouldn’t mind bein’ a race car driver,” I said. My dad sometimes took