"Blackwater - 01 - The Flood" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDowell Michael)

"I want to see what's in the rooms, Bray. Go on over."
The black man reluctantly turned the boat in the direction of the town hall, and gave a hard, smooth impetus to the paddle. They sailed close. The boat actually bumped against the marble balustrade of the second-floor balcony.
"You not going in!" cried Bray, when Oscar Gas-key reached out and grasped one of the thick balusters.
Oscar shook his head. The baluster was covered with the slime of the flood. He attempted to wipe it off on his trousers, but succeeded only in transferring some of the stink.
"Nearer that window."
Bray maneuvered the boat to the first window to the right of the balcony.
The sun hadn't got around to that side of the build-
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ing yet, and the office—that of the town registrar— was dim. The water lay in a shallow black pool over most of the floor. Chairs and tables were scattered about, and a number of file cabinets had been toppled. Others, whose thickly packed contents had become sodden with floodwater, had burst open under the pressure of expansion. Thick rotting sheaves of official county and town documents lay scattered everywhere. A rejected application for voting privileges in the 1872 election lay on the windowsill, and Oscar could even make out the name on it.
"What you see, Mr. Oscar?"
"Not much. I see damage. I see trouble ahead when the water goes down."
"This whole town's gone have trouble when the water go down. So let's don't look in no more windows, Mr. Oscar. Don't know what we gone see."
"What could we see?" Oscar turned around and looked at the black man. Bray had worked for the Caskeys since he was eight years old. He had been hired as a playmate to Oscar, then only four; had graduated into an errand boy, and then to the Gas-keys' principal gardener. His common-law wife, Ivey Sapp, was the Caskey cook.
Bray Sugarwhite continued to paddle the little green boat down the middle of Palafox Street. Oscar Caskey gazed to the right and the left, and attempted to recollect whether the barbershop had a triangular pediment with a carved wooden ball atop it, or whether that ornament belonged to Berta Hamilton's dress shop. The Osceola Hotel loomed up on the right, fifty yards farther on. Its hanging sign had been dislodged sometime on Friday, and probably by this time, was knocking upside of a shrimp boat five miles out in the Gulf of Mexico.
"We not gone look in any more windows, are we, Mr. Oscar?" said Bray apprehensively as they got nearer the hotel. Oscar in the prow was peering this way and that around the sides of that building.
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"Bray, I thought I saw something move in one of those windows."
"That the sun," said Bray quickly. "That the sun on them dirty windows."
"It wasn't a reflection," said Oscar Caskey. "You do like I tell you, and you paddle up to that corner window."
"I'm not gone do it."
"Bray, you are gone do it," said Oscar Caskey, not even turning around, "so don't bother telling me you're not. Just go up to that corner window."
"I'm not gone look in no more windows," said Bray, not completely under his breath. Then aloud, as he was changing course and paddling nearer the second floor of the hotel, he said, "Pro'bly rats in there. When the water 'gin to rise in Baptist Bottom, I see the rats come up out of their holes, and they run along the top of the fences. Rats know where it's dry. Ever'body get out of Perdido last Wednesday, it was. So not nothing in that hotel but them smart rats."
The boat bumped against the eastern facade of the brick hotel. The sun reflected a blinding red against the glass panes. Oscar peered through the window nearest him.
All the furniture inside the small hotel room— the bed, the dresser, the chifforobe, the washstand, and the hat rack—were jumbled together in the middle of the floor as if thrown together at the center of a maelstrom that had sunk into the first story. All of it was covered with mud. The carpet, muddy and stiff and black, was bunched together in the corner against the door. In the dimness Oscar could not make out the high-water mark on the dark wallpaper.
The carpet trembled, and Oscar saw two large rats rush from a fold of the rug toward the hill of furniture in the center of the room. Oscar jerked his gaze from the window.
"Rats?" asked Bray. "See! I tell you, Mr. Oscar,
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nothing in this hotel but rats. Don't need to be looking through no more windows."
Oscar Caskey didn't answer Bray, but he stood up, and, grasping the frame of the tattered awning of the next window, he pulled the boat toward the corner of the hotel.
"Bray," said Oscar Caskey, "this is the window where I saw something move. I saw something pass in front of this window, and it wasn't any rat 'cause rats aren't five feet high."
"Rats been feeding on the flood," said Bray, though what he meant to suggest Oscar wasn't certain.
Oscar leaned forward in the boat, grasping the concrete casement of the window with both hands. He peered through the dirty panes.
The corner room appeared to have been untouched by the floodwaters. The bed, quietly made, stood where it ought, against the long corridor wall, and the rug was squarely arranged beneath it. The chif-forobe and the dresser and the washstand were in their places. Nothing had fallen to the floor and broken. However, where the sun, shining through the eastern window, illuminated a large patch of the carpet, Oscar saw that it was sopping wet—so that he was forced to conclude that the water had risen through the floorboards.
But why the furniture in this room should have remained so placidly in place while everything in the adjoining chamber had been broken apart and tossed together and—as a last indignity—sheeted in black mud, Oscar could not puzzle out.
"Bray," he said, "I don't know what to make of it."
"Don't you try to make nothing of it," replied Bray. "And I don't know what you talking about anyway, Mr. Oscar."
"Nothing's disturbed in this room. The floor's just wet."
Oscar had turned to speak these last words to
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Bray, who shook his head and again indicated his wish to be well away from this half-submerged building. He was afraid Oscar would want to circle the hotel and look in every last window.
Oscar turned back in order to push off from the concrete casement. He glanced in the window, and then fell back into the boat with a small strangled cry of alarm.
In that room, which five seconds before had been patently unoccupied, he had seen a woman. She sat quietly on the edge of the bed with her back to the window.
Bray, not waiting for an explanation for Oscar's evident fright—and wanting none—immediately began to paddle off away from the hotel.
"Bray! Go back! Row back!" cried Oscar when he had recovered his voice.
"No, Mr. Oscar, I ain't gone."
"Bray, I'm telling you..."
Bray reluctantly paddled back. Oscar was reaching for the casement when the window shot up in its frame.
Bray stiffened with his paddle in the water. The boat rammed against the brick wall, and the black man and the white man rocked backward and forward with the shock.
"I have waited and waited," said the young woman standing in the open window.
She was tall, thin, pale, erect, and handsome. Her hair was a kind of muddy red, thick, and wound in a loose coil. She wore a black skirt and a white blouse. There was a rectangular gold-and-jet brooch at her throat.