"Blaylock, James P - The Other Side" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blaylock James P)

The Other Side
by James P. Blaylock


It was evening, half past five on a late autumn Thursday, and the sun had already gone down on the changing season. The homely smell of wood smoke from fireplace chimneys lingered in the air of the lamplit neighborhood, and there was the smell of damp vegetation from yesterday's rain. Nina, Art and Beth's five-year-old daughter, was at a friend's house where she had stayed for dinner despite its being a school night, and Art was on a mission to pick her up and haul her home while Beth fixed their own supper of steamed crab legs and drawn butter, food that no right-minded child of five would eat, any more than she'd eat onions or mushrooms or a fish head at the Chinese restaurant.

He opened the car door and sat down on the cold upholstery, and in that moment, abruptly and incongruously, there came into his mind the starkly clear picture of a possum crossing a road, illuminated by a car's headlights. Just as quickly the image was gone, as if he had caught a second's worth of a television program while switching through the channels. He looked out through the windshield at the empty street, his thoughts interrupted and scattered.

As he drove, he recalled the image clearly, rerunning it in his mind out of curiosityЧa dark grove of some sort, the weedy dirt shoulder of the road, the big possum angling across the asphalt, caught for a moment in his headlights as it scurried toward the shrubbery on the far side. He rolled the window down an inch to let in the night air and headed down Cambridge Street toward Fairhaven Avenue, barely seeing the human shadows in the silent cars that passed him, bound for their own lighted living rooms and fireplaces and suppers.

At the stop sign opposite the cemetery he waited for a car to swing past in front of him, and then he turned left onto Fairhaven, remembering suddenly that he was supposed to stop at the market for a container of sour cream for the baked potatoes. Thinking about it, his mind drifted back on course, which at this time of night inevitably meant food, and he realized that he was ravenously hungry and that the evening ahead looked to him like a paid vacation.

Fairhaven was dark, with only a few lights glowing in the cemetery chapel. His headlights illuminated the turned earth of the first rows of the orange grove on his left and the shadowy oleander bushes that hedged the shoulder on the right. And just then something appeared ahead of him, moving across the road. He braked the car, slowing down more out of amazement than necessity: a big possum had appeared from the grove and was running with a heavy gait toward the oleanders, its fur showing silver in the headlights. In a moment the animal had disappeared in the night.

A horn honked behind him, and he accelerated, realizing that he had come to a full stop there in the middle of the road, and for a moment he was so addled that he couldn't recall his destination. The thought came to him that he should pull over and go back on foot to see if he could find the possum, just to make sure that he hadn't imagined it, but he gave the idea up as lunacy and drove on across Tustin Street and into the neighborhood on the far side, slowly returning to his senses.




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"So you didn't get the sour cream?" Beth asked him, setting the big plate of crab legs on the table. She poured him a glass of white wine as he hacked open his baked potato.
"I was too Е shook up, I guess."

"By a possum? You didn't hit it, did you?"

"Heck no. I was nowhere near it. It was Е seeing it, you know, after what happened when I got into the car. I don't think you're following what I'm saying. I'm not talking about a simple dщjр vu or something."

Nina came into the kitchen, dressed in her pajamas, skinny as an orphan. She had her mother's dark hair and eyes. "I have homework," she said. She held out an empty shoebox.

"In kindergarten you have homework?" Art picked up a crab leg and pulled it open along the slit that Beth had cut into it with a knife.

"She has to make a collection," Beth said. "Mrs. Barnes was talking about it at back-to-school night, remember?"

"Sure," Art said. "I think she told everyone it shouldn't be bugs."

"Nothing dead," Beth said, taking the butter out of the microwave and sitting down. "You don't have to kill things to have a collection."

"How about leaves?" Art asked helpfully. He doubled a long piece of crab and dipped it into the drawn butter right up to his fingertips. "Do leaves count as dead?"

"Leafs?" Nina wrinkled up her nose in the style of a rabbit. "What's that thing?"

"That thing is a crab leg," Art said. "Hey! I'll tell you what. How about a crab leg collection?"

Nina frowned and shook her head in small jerks. "Those smell."

"And they're dead," Beth added. The telephone rang, and Beth stood up again to answer it.

"Anthony Collier," Art said, looking up sharply. The name had simply popped into his head, arriving out of nowhere, like a light blinking on.