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

The wind.
 He stopped to feel it. He spread his arms, feeling the wind wash over him, closing his eyes to see the
wind. As old as the canyon, as old as Boulder Valley, but with a young woman's face, a young woman's
black hair trailing behind her.
The wind as a lover. How wonderful that would be. If the wind loved him, she wouldn't let him down,
would she? He laughed at the idea, but he also walked home feeling the wind press at his back and
caress his arms with each step.
"All right," he told the wind. "Let's see. Let's have a courtship." Here was a lover to cure him. Here
was a lover he could not disappoint.
His old habits were hard to break. He still spent time in bookstores and seminars and the right bars.
He still wrote down the names of the women he met, still fished for phone numbers. But it was just the
habit that drove him. "I'll call you," he would say. "Maybe some time we'll have a drink together." But he
didn't call.
When the wind came gusting down the canyon, he would go outside to stand in it, to let it wrap itself
around him. His favorite nights were the ones when the wind blew hard past midnight, when he could
walk the mall alone, up and down Pearl Street, leaning so far into the wind that sometimes, if she let up
for a moment, he would pitch forward and catch himself, laughing, on the paving bricks. She had a sense
of humor!
But she could be angry, too, pulling the limbs from trees and bringing them slamming down on the
roofs of parked cars. More than once she hurled things near him-- sheet metal from a construction site, a
section of fence, a branch as thick as his leg. With sudden gusts, she threw dust in his eyes, grit in his
mouth, but he decided to love her for that, too, for the variety of her moods.
"I do love you," he told her. The more often he said it, the more he felt that she really could hear him,
that the face he kept not quite seeing was more than imagined. He craved to see her plainly, ached to
look where he thought she was and actually see her.
The worst days and nights were the ones when she didn't come at all.
He was thirty-eight years old, and he had traded women for the wind. So he was still ridiculous. But
now, at least, he could be more secretly ridiculous. Who, in Boulder, would notice him, a man who took
frequent walks in the night wind? There were so many more obvious eccentrics among the panhandlers
on Pearl Street or the drunks sleeping it off on the lawn in front of the court house. This was better than
falling in love with women who were younger than he was, increasingly younger every year, and breaking
their hearts. And this wouldn't have to end, for how could he ever test this love?
So he longed for the windy nights, and when they came, he walked up and down the mall, feeling her
all around him. "I love you," he chanted, and she carried off the words. "I love you." A fool. A crazy man,
but happier than before.
At last one September night, as the wind stripped green leaves from the trees, he walked, hands out to
catch himself, leaning into her, telling her again that he loved her, loved her. Tonight, he wanted her to be
a woman. Tonight, he wanted to hold her. It was two in the morning. He was alone on the street, alone
except for the wind, and he saw her in the corner of his eye. When he turned, she was still there for a
moment, looking at him with her shining eyes.
Her hair was as long as she was tall, and it trailed from her like a black river. Her body was lean like a
tree in winter, and she rocked slightly in time with herself. He took a step toward her, and she was gone
so suddenly that he doubted he had really seen her. "I love you," he said to her. "Let me see you again!"
He felt her hair whip across his face. He turned, and she was standing between him and the mountains.
As before, she vanished as he took a step toward her, but he glimpsed her again farther up Pearl Street,
closer to the mountains, to the canyon. Upwind.
He chased her and kept catching glimpses of her just ahead, leading him toward the canyon. She
outdistanced him, and he shouted, "Wait for me!"
But still she sprinted farther and farther ahead. How could he catch her, running right into the teeth of
the wind? He kept his legs moving all the same, followed her onto Canyon Boulevard and into the mouth