"Robert McCammon - Gone South" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCammon Robert R)

like a surgeon with a precise scalpel. During the worst times it hit
and ran like a Mack truck and all he could do was chew on his rage and
lie there until his body came back to him.
It was a hard thing, dying was.
In this August of 1991, a summer that had been one of the hottest
in Louisiana's long history of hellish seasons, Dan was forty-two years
old. He looked ten years older, his rawboned, heavily lined face a
testament to his ceaseless combat with pain. It was a fight he knew he
couldn't win. if he knew for certain he would live three more years,
he wasn't sure if he'd be happy about it. Right now it was day-to-day.
Some days were all right, some weren't worth a bucket of warm spit.
But it wasn't in his nature to give up,

no matter how tough things got. His father, the quitter, had not
raised a quitter. In this, at least, Dan could find strength.
He drove on along the arrow-straight line of 70th Street, past
strip malls and car lots and fast-food joints. He drove on into the
merciless sun and the smell of murdered innocents.
Lining the commercial carnival of 70th Street was a score of
barbecue restaurants, and it was from their kitchen chimneys that this
odor of burned flesh rose into the scalded sky. It was just after nine,
and already the temperature sign in front of the Friendship Bank of
Louisiana read eighty-six degrees. The sky was cloudless, but was more
white than blue, as if all the color had been bleached from it. The
sun was a burnished ball of pewter, a promise of another day of misery
across the Gulf states. Yesterday the temperature had hit a hundred
and two, and Dan figured that today it was going to be hot enough to
fry pigeons on the wing.
Afternoon showers passed through every few days, but it was just
enough to steam the streets. The Red River flowed its muddy course
through Shreveport to the bayou country and the air shimmered over the
larger buildings that stood iron-gray against the horizon.
Dan had to stop for a red light. The pickup's brakes squealed a
little, in need of new pads. A job replacing rotten lumber on a patio
deck last week had made him enough to pay the month's rent and
utilities, and he'd had a few dollars left over for groceries. Still,
some-things had to slide. He'd missed two payments on the pickup, and
he needed to go in and see Mr. Jarrett to work something out. Mr.
Jarrett, the loan manager at the First Commercial Bank, understood that
Dan had fallen on hard times, and cut him some slack.
The pain was back behind his eyes. It lived there, like a hermit
crab. Dan reached beside himself on the seat, picked up the white
bottle of Excedrin, and popped it open. He shook two tablets onto his
tongue and chewed them. The light turned green and he drove on, toward
Death Valley.
Dan wore a rust-colored short-sleeve shirt and blue jeans


with patches on the knees. Under a faded blue baseball his
thinning brown hair was combed back from his fore and spilled over his