"BAILEY-AnencephalicFields" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bailey Dale)

DALE BAILEY

THE ANENCEPHALIC FIELDS

The prolific Mr. Bailey continues to send us stories from his Tennessee home at
a good clip. This latest one (his fifteenth story for us in seven years) is a
dark, lush tale that turns Kentucky into something creepy, fabulous, and new.
Enjoy.

DADDY LEFT WITH A BIG-CITY dollymop when I wasn't but six years old, and Mama
got a job tending the corpse gardens outside of Scary, Kentucky. By the time I
was twelve, a tow-headed not-quite boy in his daddy's hand-me-down jeans, I
remembered the dollymop better than I did the man himself. She was a loud, brash
redhead with tits like jugs and a mouth like a wound, but Daddy had faded to a
dull blur of memory. I couldn't for the life of me remember how he looked and
Mama said the resemblance was minimal; but I could remember how it felt when he
touched me, and if I tried I could still smell his jackleg whiskey and the
black-market smoke that always hung about him. Mostly, though, I could recollect
his hands. I used to lie awake nights, fingering over that memory in my mind,
like a miser with a bag full of gold--the memory of those big, callused hands
against my face and the sound of his voice when he said, "You're the man of the
house now, Kemp. You've got to take care of your mama." That was just before he
left--I remember the dollymop waiting in her car, while Mama cussed them both in
the background--and I hadn't seen either one of them since.

Mama claimed this particular memory was a lie, but when it came to Daddy, Mama
had her own issues, and I'd learned not to press her on them. I took what I
had--the dollymop and her tits, Daddy and his hands--and let Mama do her own
grieving.

Meanwhile we moved to Scary, Kentucky.

The good folks of Scary didn't cotton to outsiders, so Mama and I were pretty
much alone out there with six acres of the not-quite dead. Rust-dimpled No
TRESPASSING signs hung on the razor-wire fence surrounding the compound.
DANGER!
BIOGENE RESEARCH FACILITY
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
BEWARE ATTACK DOCS

they read, but I never knew of any dogs. Not that it much mattered. Mostly this
all happened during the crash and people had more important things on their
minds, like food. Our land was too hardscrabble to make it worth stealing, and
nobody wanted to eat what we were raising anyway. The rumors were enough to keep
anyone else away. When I was little, I always expected to look out the front
windows one night and see a line of torches winding out of the surrounding
hills, like the villagers in a flat-screen Frankenstein, but the worst trouble
we ever had was townies throwing rocks at the signs on Halloween--and even that