"Bruce Holland Rogers - What the Wind Carries" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rogers Bruce Holland)

What the Wind Carries
by Bruce Holland Rogers
This story copyright 1996 by Bruce Holland Rogers. This copy was created for Jean Hardy's personal
use. All other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

* * *


He was nineteen, driving back down the mountain at three in the morning with the windows rolled
down even though it was November, and cold. Marcy loved him, she loved him, and he wanted to feel
the freezing wind that made the black pines sway. He wanted no safety glass between him and the stars,
wanted to be in the world where this was happening, where Marcy had invited him to come see her on a
Saturday night when her parents were out of town. "If they knew you were here right now," she told him,
"my dad would kill you. He really might."
He was in love with the danger, even if Marcy made light of it by shooting him, bang, with her finger
and laughing into his mouth when he kissed her. He was in love with the feel of her hair in his hands, the
smell of her perfume. He had loved her anyway, loved her for being pretty and funny and smart, loved
her maybe for living at the Estates, for being out of his reach, but now he also loved her for loving him,
him! He was nobody, from a family of nobodies. He drove a car that was held together inside and out
with duct tape, and she had laughed when she had seen it, but there was no cruelty in her and now at
three in the morning he knew that she really did love him.
He wasn't like his friends. He knew that, for them, the excitement would have been in doing it.
Certainly, he thought it was wonderful, amazing, to have done what they had done. But the real wonder
was that she loved him, that she would take such a risk for him, that she was so warm and held him so
close and whispered into his ear. He took the hairpin curves coming down Lookout Mountain a little
faster than he should, feeling the car slide wide onto the narrow shoulder, and he didn't think it would
matter if he punched through the guard rail and went sailing into the black air, high over the colored lights
of Denver. No matter what happened, even if he died taking the next curve, this would be the night when
he lived forever.
When he drove under the stone archway that signaled the bottom of the mountain, he turned the car
around and drove up again, just to keep the feeling alive. He gunned the heavy engine on curves, weaving
back and forth, back up to where the radio towers flashed their lights like a red code for the sleeping
city.
He got out of the car to feel the cold wind at his back, to watch the stars, and to shout Marcy's name
so that the wind would carry it across the night. She was in everything, everything made him think of her,
including the wind that gusted so hard that he could lean back against it without falling. He thought that if
he jumped right now, high enough, the wind would lift him and carry him all night, setting him down
somewhere in Kansas near dawn.
Fifteen years later, when he had been twice married and twice divorced, he returned to the Front
Range-- not to Denver, where he still had family, but to Boulder. Boulder had the two things that he
thought he needed.
One was the wind that roared down the canyon some nights, tearing shingles from roofs, shattering
unshuttered windows, sweeping the streets below and scouring the skies above so that the stars on those
nights would blaze with unmatched brilliance. On windy nights he would drive his van to an intersection
where he could watch the signal lights buck and sway, where he could feel the van rock with each gust.
The wind always felt deliciously dangerous to him, and he liked to imagine it suddenly tearing the city
down, picking up his van and carrying him amidst the wreckage for a wild cartwheeling ride into the
plains.