"Emil Petaja - The Time Twister" - читать интересную книгу автора (Petaja Emil)

fat wife. About the little General Merchandise Store with the post-office boxes lined up in the corner where
Jack Temikka, the skinflint proprietor the villagers called 'Squire Temmy' behind his back, had his
bookkeeper's cage and the big iron safe with his name on it in fancy curlicues. He told me about Mamie
Puski's Boarding-house for single men and widowers, about the town pump where he toted potable water
home across his back with a yoke and two galvanized buckets. About the 'water things' the villagers who
lived along Hellmouth River had—the hand crank winches—for drawing up wash water and to water their
truck gardens in the back yards.
"You know, Doc, Dad got so wrapped up talking about Hellmouth—the Hellmouth he knew when he
was a kid—that I could visualize every rock in the road. The little schoolhouse across the field. The old
covered bridge across the bend in the river, and Izza Halvor's tar-paper farmhouse. Everything. He used to
tell me that, if he never made it back to Hellmouth, I was to go in his place. He never mentioned the big
fire. I don't believe he wanted to think what it might have done to his beloved town. No. Forest fire has a
way of skipping across ridges, treetopping where the lodgepole pines are highest. That's what happened up
there in Dad's wonderful valley. It had to be like that. Hellmouth was a dream that couldn't ever die. There
was something inevitable about it—everlasting. Like the rawboned, horn-handed Finns who built it. They
could not die! They were like the hills and the blue lakes and the tumbling mountain trout streams. Nothing
could kill them. Not the forty-below blizzards that raged down out of the Canadian Rockies. Not fire, nor
flood, nor the Anaconda Copper Mining Company and progress!"

Steve gazed off across the Bay where a Matson liner was steaming majestically out between the pylons
of the Golden Gate Bridge, the pilot boat making a V in the gold-tipped caps as it purred back to its dock.
Art had stopped his prologal recitation on a highly dramatic, highly uncharacteristic note. His father,
sweltering down in tropical Bolivia, had infused his son with a kind of supernatural longing for what he had
known and loved when he was young. A reliving of his Hellmouth boyhood through his son. Nothing so
strange about that. Yet—Steve's studies of the Finns and their mores and moods suggested more. Finns
were different, in a way, from everybody else. As if, Steve sometimes thought, they had originated racially
on another planet. In the Middle Ages, wizards were always said to come from the dark, cold north—and
that north was Finland. A Finnish sailor was a Jonah because he could sing up a storm or extract a tot of
rum from the ship's mast any time he wanted to by sticking his sharp pukko in it.
Art Mackey was being all of that now. Steve sensed it and the hair on the back of his neck prickled
while he waited. Also, it was as if Art was afraid to go on, as if all of this prelude was an evasion.
"What happened?" Steve whispered tautly. "What did you find up there?"
"I hiked up the back way into Hellmouth Valley, Doc. Missoula would have been closer, but—I really
don't know why I drove the secondhand jeep I bought up through the Flathead and around the long way, but
I played it cosy. I talked to nobody. Don't ask me why, only—something told me to play it that way.
Something is telling me not to talk this tape right now and if I were across the bridge on the Hellmouth side,
and not perched up here in the open loft door of Izza Halvor's barn, I wouldn't be able to. The talk would
not register on the tape. Don't ask me why, Doc."
The chill in Steve's spine deepened.
"I hiked in the last forty miles. Took two days. This country is really rough. I puffed up the last hunk of
trail, which was all grown together with weeds and snowmelts, and there was that big sentinel lodgepole
pine Dad always told me about. Still there. By that big lightning-split boulder that marks the summit and the
road that winds down into Hellmouth. It was dusky. Around seven thirty. I reached the rock, dropped my
pack, and leaned back for a rest. At first, I didn't even look down that winding road into town. As if—like
Dad—I was scared about what that 1906 fire had done to Hellmouth.
"Then I squinted down and there it was.
"It was lamplighting time. Down there the triple row of neat gray frame houses curving along the river
bank were blooming up with yellow light in their windows, one by one. I could just make out the town pump
on its plank platform, with the battered tin dipper set on the top of it for a fast drink. The barroom across
from Squire Temmy's General Merchandise Store showed light when a couple of booted figures tramped up