"Bowes-ShadowAndGunman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bowes Richard)

This thin, white-haired lady with great blue eyes looked at me and said:

BY FELL NIGHT

When I was small and down or scared, we had recited this verse. Tay Fallon was a
storyteller, a poet. I tried to slip by her, saying, "Come on, Tay, I'm fine."

BY FELL NIGHT

She repeated and stood in my way. With a bored sigh, I gave the response: WITH
STICK AND BONE

"Dilleachdan," she said in Gaelic, which I didn't understand. "It's hard for
those of us with the gift." It wouldn't surprise me if she knew I was thinking
about the revolver upstairs. Tay had been born with a caul and claimed a kind of
second sight.

She insisted that I too had a gift,. though what it was she never said. All I
knew for sure was that I lived under a teenage curse: I was too smart to be a
tough kid and too screwy to be a smart kid. The high school drama society was
where I hid out.

Maybe the ability to see and to believe two completely different things is the
very base of second sight. My mother had always said she wanted her effects to
be given away to charity. That fall her sisters-in-law turned what had been her
bedroom into a faceless guest room. Still, I managed to believe in one comer of
my mind that she was alive.

In an Irish household of my grandmother's generation, the eldest male, whatever
his age, was Himself. His wishes might not all be law, but his every failing
would surely be ignored as long as possible. My grandfather had died before I
could remember, so when my mother moved in with Gramny and Aunt Tay, I became
Himself.

That fall, I strained against the ropes and found there were none. My all-boys
public school downtown made everyone wear coat and tie. But away from there, I
started dressing like a street punk and growing my hair like JFK's. I carried
cigarettes and even smoked a few. I Shuck sips of whiskey at home and found
winos willing to buy me half pints. At the Y where I had learned to swim a
couple of years before, no one noticed when I started showing up again.

My grandmother's house, a gray Queen Anne on the hills of Dorchester, was a
minefield of memorabilia. But my favorite was the .38 hidden in the upstairs
hall closet. Oiled and cleaned and wrapped in a piece of chamois, it was
something I wasn't supposed to know about.

At first all I did was take it to my room and spin the cylinder. A box of ammo
was wrapped with the revolver, but at that time, I never loaded it. Once, I put
the barrel to the side of my head and pulled the trigger. When I did, I felt
that someone was with me. But when I looked, I was alone. That time, I was