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

insides, arranging all their bloody guts out on newspapers.
One time he hung up a dead toad from a tree and invited me to watch the
flies eat it with him. He brought home a burlap sack full of leaves, dumped
them in the front room, and examined each of them with a magnifying glass,
writing down their differences in one of his hundreds of Nifty notebooks. He
collected cigar butts and dried spits of chewing tobacco, which he kept in
glass vials. He could sit for hours in the dark and look at the moon.
 Maybe he was crazy. Maybe crazy is what they call anybody who’s got magic
in them after they’re no longer a child. But Granddaddy Jaybird read the
Sunday comics to me, and he told me stories about the haunted house in the
small hamlet of his birth. Granddaddy Jaybird could be mean and stupid and
petty, but he lit a candle of wonder in me and by that light I could see a
long way beyond Zephyr.
On that morning before the sun, as I sat eating my breakfast with my dad
and mom in our house on Hilltop Street, the year was 1964. There were great
changes in the winds of earth, things of which I was unaware. All I knew at
that moment was that I needed another glass of orange juice, and that I was
going to help my dad on his route before he took me to school. So when
breakfast was over and the dishes were cleared, after I had gone out into the
cold to say good morning to Rebel and feed him his Gravy Train, Mom kissed
both Dad and me, I put on my fleece-lined jacket and got my schoolbooks and
off we went in the coughy old pickup truck. Freed from his backyard pen, Rebel
followed us a distance, but at the corner of Hilltop and Shawson streets he
crossed into the territory of Bodog, the Doberman pinscher that belonged to
the Ramseys, and he beat a diplomatic retreat to a drumroll of barks.
And there was Zephyr before us, the town quiet in its dreaming, the moon
a white sickle in the sky.
A few lights were on. Not many. It wasn’t five o’clock yet. The sickle
moon glittered in the slow curve of the Tecumseh River, and if Old Moses swam
there he swam with his leathery belly kissing mud. The trees along Zephyr’s
streets were still without leaves, and their branches moved with the wind. The
traffic lights—all four of them at what might be called major
intersections—blinked yellow in a steady accord. To the east, a stone bridge
with brooding gargoyles crossed the wide hollow where the river ran. Some said
the faces of the gargoyles, carved in the early twenties, were representations
of various Confederate generals, fallen angels, as it were. To the west, the
highway wound into the wooded hills and on toward other towns. A railroad
track cut across Zephyr to the north, right through the Bruton area, where all
the black people lived. In the south was the public park where a bandshell
stood and a couple of baseball diamonds had been cut into the earth. The park
was named for Clifford Gray Haines, who founded Zephyr, and there was a statue
of him sitting on a rock with his chin resting on his hand. My dad said it
looked as if Clifford was perpetually constipated and could neither do his
business nor get off the pot. Farther south, Route Ten left Zephyr’s limits
and wound like a black cottonmouth past swampy woods, a trailer park, and
Saxon’s Lake, which shelved into unknown depths.
Dad turned us onto Merchants Street, and we drove through the center of
Zephyr, where the stores were. There was Dollar’s Barbershop, the Stagg Shop
for Men, the Zephyr Feeds and Hardware Store, the Piggly-Wiggly grocery, the
Woolworth’s store, the Lyric theater, and other attractions along the