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

heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust
turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you
listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where
it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the
briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm.
That’s what I believe.
The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence
that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good,
some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in
wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another.
It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best
to take that memory of magic away from us. You don’t know it’s happening until
one day you feel you’ve lost something but you’re not sure what it is. It’s
like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you “sir.” It just happens.
These memories of who I was and where I lived are important to me. They
make up a large part of who I’m going to be when my journey winds down. I need
the memory of magic if I am ever going to conjure magic again. I need to know
and remember, and I want to tell you.
My name is Cory Jay Mackenson. My hometown was a place called Zephyr, in
south Alabama. It never got too cold there, or too hot. Its streets were
shaded with water oaks, and its houses had front porches and screens on the
windows. There was a park with two baseball fields, one for the kids and one
for the grown-ups. There was a public swimming pool where the water was blue
and clear and children plumbed the deep end for pennies. On the Fourth of July
there was a barbecue, and at the end of summer a writing contest. When I was
twelve years old, in 1964, Zephyr held about fifteen hundred people. There was
the Bright Star Cafe, a Woolworth’s, and a little Piggly-Wiggly grocery store.
There was a house where bad girls lived out on Route Ten. Not every family had
a television set. The county was dry, which meant that bootleggers thrived.
The roads went south, north, east, and west, and at night a freight train
passed through on its way to Birmingham and left the smell of scorched iron in
its wake. Zephyr had four churches and an elementary school, and a cemetery
stood on Poulter Hill. There was a lake nearby so deep it might as well have
been bottomless. My hometown was full of heroes and villains, honest people
who knew the beauty of truth and others whose beauty was a lie. My hometown
was probably a lot like yours.
But Zephyr was a magic place. Spirits walked in the moonlight. They came
out of the grassy graveyard and stood on the hill and talked about old times
when Coca-Cola really had a bite and you could tell a Democrat from a
Republican. I know. I’ve heard them. The breeze in Zephyr blew through the
screens, bringing the incense of honeysuckle and awakening love, and jagged
blue lightning crashed down upon the earth and awakened hate. We had
windstorms and droughts and the river that lay alongside my town had the bad
habit of flooding. In the spring of my fifth year, a flood brought snakes to
the streets. Then hawks came down by the hundreds in a dark tornado and lifted
up the snakes in their killing beaks, and the river slinked back to its banks
like a whipped dog. Then the sun came out like a trumpet call, and steam
swirled up from the blood-specked roofs of my hometown.
We had a dark queen who was one hundred and six years old. We had a
gunfighter who saved the life of Wyatt Earp at the O.K. Corral. We had a