"Neal Stephenson & J. Frederick George - The Cobweb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

leaves of frost.

Clyde Banks was on the outside and Desiree Dhont was on the inside, which was typical of their lives at
that point. He did not mind the cold, because this arrangement enabled him to stand and stare through the
frosty windows at Desiree without her being aware of it.

Clyde was a quiet sort who spent a lot of time thinking about things. During this period he primarily
thought about Desiree. He had not spent much time outside the upper Midwest and so had not graduated
to more cosmic and general issues--for example, whether it was advisable to live in a part of the country
so inimical to life that buildings only a few dozen feet apart had to be connected by expensive glass
tunnels.

Clyde was not the only young man staring at Desiree, but he did have a more highly developed
contemplative faculty than most of the others, and so he had come up with a rationalization for why
Desiree and he were a natural match for each other: neither one of them was technically from
Wapsipinicon. Clyde lived on the other side of the river, just outside Nishnabotna, and should have been
going to the county high school, but his grandfather and guardian, Ebenezer, who had a thing about
education, wouldn't hear of this and dug up a wad of money from one of his hundreds of tiny, secret,
widely dispersed bank accounts, or perhaps just dug up some gold coins from one of his many secret,
widely dispersed coffee cans, and actually paid tuition to send Clyde to school in Wapsipinicon.

Desiree's family lived several miles south of town, on a farm. The farm lay adjacent to a spur on the
Denver–Platte–Des Moines Railway. This particular spur ran up into the middle of the Eastern Iowa
University campus, taking coal to the university power plant. When Dan Dhont, Jr., the oldest Dhont
boy, had reached junior high school, the Wapsipinicon City Council had voted to annex the first few
miles of the railway spur. The Wapsipinicon town line now sported a long, needle-thin, Aleutian-like
isthmus running straight out to the Dhont farm. Accordingly, Dan Dhont and all the other Dhonts
matriculated and, more to the point, wrestled in Wapsipinicon.

So there was sort of a connection between Clyde and Desiree from the very beginning, or so Clyde had,
by dint of lengthy contemplation, led himself to believe. He had not yet figured out a way to parlay this
uncanny link into an actual conversation with the girl, but he was working on it. He had run through a
number of options in his head, but all of them required ten or fifteen minutes of preliminary explanation,
and he did not think this was the best way to get started.

Equally absorbed in the charms of Desiree Dhont was a Nishnabotna boy standing just behind her in line.
Naturally, he was traveling with a whole group of other Nishnabotna boys. Just as naturally they egged
him on, shouldering him forward playfully until he was almost rubbing up against her. After all, what was a
Wapsipinicon/Nishnabotna athletic event without a few incidents of assault, battery, rape, and even
attempted murder, perpetrated by Injuns against Little Twisters?

Finally the boy from Nishnabotna made the stupid but (to Clyde) wholly understandable mistake of
reaching out and grabbing Desiree Dhont's left buttock.

Not in his worst nightmares did this boy imagine that Desiree might be in any way related to the Dhonts.
There was no family resemblance. After bearing five consecutive male children, Mrs. Dhont had
concluded, contrary to medical opinion, that she was biologically incapable of having little girls, so she
and Dan, Sr., had gone out and adopted Desiree from somewhere. Then she had vindicated her decision,
and flummoxed the doctors, by having another three boys.