"Theodore Sturgeon - The Perfect Host" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sturgeon Theodore)

like a large soft breeze in some springtime place, and perhaps tickling the side of my neck with
feather-touches of her moving lips ... it was my useful, questing, thirsty thought which killed
her, killed her.
The accident was all of two years ago--almost two years anyway. We had driven all the way back
from Springfield without stopping, and we were very tired. Grace and Mr. Share and I were squeezed
into the front seat.
Mr. Share was a man Grace had invented long before, even before we were married. He was a big
invisible fat man who always sat by the right-hand window, and always looked out to the side so
that he never watched us.
But since he was so fat, Grace had to press up close to me as we drove.
There was a stake-bodied truck bowling along ahead of us, and in the back of it was a spry old
man, or perhaps a weatherbeaten young man--you couldn't tell--in blue dungarees and a red shirt.
He had a yellow woolen muffler tied around his waist, and the simple strip of material made all
the difference between "clothes" and "costume."
Behind him, lashed to the bed of the truck just back of the cab, was a large bundle of burlap.
It would have made an adequate seat for him, cushioned and out of the wind. But the man seemed to
take the wind as a heady beverage and the leaping floor as a challenge.
He stood with his arms away from his sides and his knees slightly flexed, and rode the truck
as if it were a live thing. He yielded himself to each lurch and bump, brought himself back with
each recession, guarding his equilibrium with an easy virtuosity.
Grace was, I think, dozing; my shout of delighted laughter at the performance on the bounding
stage before us brought her upright. She laughed with me for the laugh alone, for she had not
looked through the windshield yet, and she kissed my cheek.
He saw her do it, the man on the truck, and he laughed with us.
"He's our kind of people," Grace said.
"A pixie," I agreed, and we laughed again.
The man took off an imaginary plumed hat, swung it low toward us, but very obviously toward
Grace. She nodded back to him, with a slight sidewise turn of her face as it went down that
symbolized a curtsey.
Then he held out his elbow, and the pose, the slightly raised shoulder over which he looked
fondly at the air over his bent arm, showed that he had given his arm to a lady. The lady was
Grace, who, of course, would be charmed to join him in the dance . . . she clapped her hands and
crowed with delight, as she watched her imaginary self with the courtly, colorful figure ahead.
The man stepped with dainty dignity to the middle of the truck and bowed again, and you could
all but hear the muted minuet as it began. It was a truly wonderful thing to watch, this
pantomime; the man knew the ancient stately steps to perfection, and they were unflawed by the
careening surface on which they were performed. There was no mockery in the miming, but simply the
fullness of good, the sheer, unspoiled sharing of a happy magic.
He bowed, he took her hand, smiled back into her eyes as she pirouetted behind him. He stood


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back to the line waiting his turn, nodding slightly to the music; he dipped ever so little, twice,
as his turn came, and stepped gracefully out to meet her, smiling again.
I don't know what made me look up. We were nearing the Speedway Viaduct, and the truck ahead
was just about to pass under it. High up over our heads was the great span, and as my eyes
followed its curve, to see the late afternoon sun on the square guard posts which bounded the
elevated road, three of the posts exploded outward, and the blunt nose of a heavy truck plowed