"James Van Pelt - A Flock Of Birds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pelt James Van)

Later that evening, he tucked Tillie into bed. The room smelled of peppermint.
From the bulge in her cheek, he guessed she was sucking on one. In a
little-girl voice, she said, "Can you put in my video?" Her expression was
alert, but her eyes were red-rimmed and watery. He smiled. This was as good as
she got. Sometimes he could play gin rummy with her and she'd stay focused for
an hour or so before she drifted away. If he asked her about her past, she'd
be unresponsive for days. All he knew about her came from the suitcase she
carried when he'd found her. There was a sheet of letterhead with a name at
the top: "Tillie Waterhouse, Marketing Executive," and an athletic club
identification card with her picture and name. But there was no Tillie
Waterhouse in the Denver phone book. Could she have wandered away from the
airport when air travel was canceled? The first words she had said to him,
when she finally spoke, were, "How do you bear it?"
"Did you have a good day?" He turned on the television and pressed rewind on
the VCR.
Her hands peeked out from under the covers and pulled them tight under her
chin. "Something magical is going to happen. The leaves whispered to me."
The video clicked to a stop. "I'm glad to hear that," he said. The television
flickered as the tape started, a documentary on the 2001 New York City
Marathon a decade earlier. It opened with a helicopter flyover of the racers
crossing the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge into Brooklyn. The human crowd surged
forward, packed elbow to elbow, long as the eye could see. Then the camera cut
to ankle level. Feet ran past for five minutes. Then it went to face level at
a turn in the course. The starting crush had spread out, but the runners still
jogged within an arm's length of each other, thousands of them. Carson had
watched the video with her the first few times. The video was a celebration of
numbers. Thirty-thousand athletes straining over the twenty-six mile course
through New York City's five boroughs.
"Here's the remote if you want to watch it again."
"So many American flags," she said.
"It was only a month after that first terrorist thing." Carson sat on the end
of her bed. Some runners wore stars and stripes singlets or racing shorts.
Others carried small flags and waved them at the camera as they passed.
"I won't be able to sleep," she said.
He nodded. "Me either."
Before he left, he pressed his hand to her forehead. She looked up briefly,
the blanket still snug against her chin. A little fever and her breath sounded
wheezy.
Later that night he made careful entries in his day book. A breeze through the
open window freshened the room. He'd spotted a mountain plover, a long-billed
curlew, a burrowing owl and a horned lark, plus the usual assortment of lark
sparrows, yellow warblers, western meadowlarks, red-winged blackbirds, crows,
black terns and mourning doves. Nothing unusual beside the strange bird in the
starling flock. Idly he thumbed through his bird identification handbook. No
help there. Could it actually be a new bird? Something to add to his life
list?
Tomorrow he'd take the camera. Several major flocks roosted in the elms along
the Platte River. He hadn't done a riparian count in a couple months anyway.
After visiting the distribution center, he'd go to the river. With an early
enough start, he would still have ten hours of sun to work with.