"Don Webb - The Great White Bed" - читать интересную книгу автора (Webb Don)

The Great White Bed
by Don Webb
In Don Webb’s new story collection, When They Came, Bruce Sterling is
quoted as saying, “Don Webb is a genius. He’s not widely appreciated. There are
some things mankind was not meant to know.” Perhaps humanity was not meant
to know the things alluded to in this new story. Or maybe it’s more frightening if
we were meant to know these things....
****
I wanted to write about the bed because I thought it would be therapeutic. For
pretty obvious reasons I never got over that summer, and I know there’s a mental
part to go along with the physical part. I don’t write about the book. And see, I’m
already there. I can’t make myself think about what I need to think about. The room.
The bedroom. I can start with that. It smelled of geraniums. My grandmother had
loved them and it had become my job to keep them alive after she died. She grew
them in coffee cans, and when they got too root-bound she would put them in
plastic buckets that she got working at the cleaners. Clay pots were an extravagance.
There were five of the big light blue buckets on a special shelf built across the
windows in the bedroom, so the bedroom always had a green smell.
It was hot too. There were two swamp coolers that cooled the house down.
One in the living room at the front of the house, one in the den in the back. Neither
supplied much cool air to the place where I slept. I remember the first thing that
Grandpa had asked when I moved in with him that summer was if I wanted to sleep
with him. I thought that was creepy and I said I’d sleep in the guest bedroom, where
Granny did her sewing. It was so hot that I never turned down the big white thick
bedspread on the bed and lay on the sheets. I just lay on top of it. I didn’t want
anything over my body. At home I slept on a twin bed; the king size bed seemed the
biggest thing in the world to me.
I was thirteen. Next year would be junior high.
I helped Grandpa out. I cooked his meals, did his laundry, cut the grass. In
retrospect it was a big job for someone my age, but I came from a family of
workers. I didn’t do a good job with the laundry and my food repertoire relied
heavily on Spam baked in the oven covered with ketchup.
My friends were rich kids, mainly in camp or hanging out at the private
swimming pool. These days I know they weren’t rich, but they seemed rich to me. I
amused myself with TV, watching old black and white comedies in syndication. I
remember that summer had a good dose of The Dick Van Dyke Show mixed up
with the strangeness. Cable TV was new to Doublesign that year. We got
twenty-eight stations. Grandpa would get up early and wake me up. He had been a
farmer, before they moved to town. Kids are not supposed to see the dawn in
summer, no matter what anyone says. He liked cereal for breakfast. He really liked
one called Team, I don’t think they make it anymore. He would make coffee and I
would pour the cereal. Afterward he would go off to read the paper and I would do
the dishes. If I had any yard work to do I would do it in the mornings before it got
too hot. I trimmed the hedge, cut the grass, weeded out the dandelions. Early on I
had tried to keep a little garden going. I had planted some tomatoes and cucumbers.
But one day Grandpa weeded them all out of the bed where I had planted them. His
mind was going, but no one in the family would say so. When I tried to stop him he
hit me with his cane and said I was stupid. Like I say, even without the weirdness, it
was a big job.
Noon would come around and Mom would join us for lunch, which I had