"Jumper:Griffin _s Story" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gould Steven)

Chapter Three

Burning Bridges Consuelo lived with Sam, but it was a strange relationship, almost as if she was his girl-of-all-work and he was her little boy. I mean, she cleaned and cooked and did laundry. But she also scolded him constantly, long bursts of rapid-fire Spanish to which he almost always answered, "I Clam que si!" At first I thought they were married, but she had her own little bedroom in the back with a wall of religious icons, saints, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus.

They stayed at home the day after they'd found me but for the next four days after that, they loaded the truck up with the stretcher and medical supplies and bottled water and drove out.

Consuelo would make me a lunch and show it to me before leaving. "Ahi te deje listo to lonche." Then she would say, "Descanza y bebe mucha agua." And she would mime drinking from a bottle.

And I would say, "/Claw que si!"

And Sam would laugh and she would start scolding him again.

I did rest and drank mucha water the first day. And slept. It was very easy to sleep. I was tired but thinking about anything-well, about Mum and Dad-exhausted me. It was cry or sleep and sometimes both.

The second day I walked around outside. It was an old adobe house in the middle of the desert, with weathered outbuildings for livestock and horses but they were long gone. The only remotely domesticated animals on the property were a few feral cats.

"They keep having kittens but the coyotes keep their population down," Sam'd told me. "My dad sold off most of the land in the fifties, when he went from ranching to running the co-op in town, but it's been in the family since before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Wouldn't be if they hadn't married Anglos into the family, but that way the land grant stuck. Didn't hurt that nobody really wanted this desert crap."

He said there were neighbors about a mile away, but nobody closer. "Water's iffy. I've got a spring but most places around here you have to drill six hundred feet to get water."

I spent most of the time outside by the concrete tank that captured the spring. The runoff poured over a little notch in the edge and ran down into a gulley-I guess it would be called an arroyo. The little brook didn't last long before it sank into the sandy bottom, but this wet section of the arroyo was a riot of green. Three large cotton woods shaded the tank for most of the day and if I sat still I could count on seeing birds, jackrabbits, deer, and once Sam pointed at a track in the wet sand and said, "Desert bighorn. Very rare."

The third day I jumped to Balboa Park, on the southern edge near the aerospace museum, and crossed 1-5 on the Park Boulevard bridge to get to downtown and the public library on E street. It was a lot cooler in the city-near the ocean and all that-but I still had to rest often.

Outside the library, from the plastic window of a newspaper vending machine, my face stared at me, like they'd put me in that metal box.