"A Wild Night in Galway" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradbury Ray)

but from the exquisite torture of the drink scalding our throats. Thus pressed
like shy flowers in a huge warm-mouldy book, the director and I lingered on,
waiting for some vast event.
At last my director's patience thinned. "Johnny!" he called across the seethe.
"It's been wild, so far, all right, but we want it wilder, I mean, the biggest
night Ireland ever saw!"
Whereupon Johnny whipped off his apron, shrugged his meatcleaver shoulders into
a tweed coat, jumped up in the air and slid down inside his raincoat, slung on
his beardy cap and thrust us at the door.
"Nail everything down till I get back!" he advised his crew. "I'm taking these
gents to the damnedest evening ever! Little do they know what waits for them out
there!"
He opened the door and pointed. The wind threw half a ton of ice-water on him.
Taking this as no more than an additional spur to rhetoric, Johnny, not wiping
his face, added in a roar, "Out with you! Here we go!"
"Do you think we should?" I said, doubtful now that things seemed really letting
go.
"What do you mean?" cried the director. "What do you want to do? Go freeze in
your room? Rewrite that scene you did so lousily today?"
"No, no!" I said, and slung on my own cap.
I was first outside thinking, I've a wife and three loud but lovely children,
what am I doing here, eight thousand miles gone from them on the off side of
God's behind? Do I really want to do this?
Then, like Ahab, I thought on my bed, a damp box with its pale cool
winding-sheets and the window dripping next to it like a conscience all night
through. I groaned. I opened the door of Johnny Murphy's car, took my legs apart
to get in, and in no time we shot down the town like a ball in a bowling alley.
Johnny Murphy at the wheel talked fierce, half hilarity, half sobering King
Lear.
"A wild night, is it? You'll have the grandest night ever!" he said. "You'd
never guess, would you, to walk through Ireland, so much could go on under the
skin?"
"I knew there must be an outlet somewhere," I yelled.
The speedometer was up to one-hundred kilometres an hour. Stone walls raced by
on the right, stone walls raced by on the left. It was raining the entire dark
sky down on the entire dark land.
"Outlet indeed!" said Johnny. "If the church knew, but it don't! or then maybe
it does but figures - the poor buggars! and let's us be!"
"Where, what-?"
"You'll see!" said Murphy.
The speedometer read 110. My stomach was stone like the stone walls rushing left
and right. Up over a hill, down into a valley. Does the car have brakes? I
wondered. Death on an Irish road, I thought, a wreck and before anyone found us
strewn we'd melt away in the pounding rain and be part of the turf by morn.
What's Death, anyways? better than hotel food.
"Can't we go a bit faster?" I asked.
"It's done!" said Johnny, and made it 120.
"That will do it nicely," I said, in a faint voice, wondering what lay ahead.
Behind all the slatestone weeping walls of Ireland, what happened? Somewhere in
this drizzling land were there hearth-fleshed peach-fuzz Renoir women bright as