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

lamps you could hold your hands out to and warm your palms? Beneath the
rain-drenched sod, the flinty rocks, at the numbed core of living was there one
small seed of fire which, fanned, might break volcanoes free and boil the rains
to steam? Was there then somewhere a Baghdad harem, nests awriggle and aslither
with silk and tassel the absolute perfect tint of women unadorned? We passed a
church. No. We passed a convent. No. We passed a village slouched under its old
men's thatch. No. Stone walls to left. Stone walls to right. No. Yet . . .
I glanced over at Johnny Murphy. We could have switched off our lights and
driven by the steady piercing beams of his forward-directed eyes snatching at
the dark, flickering away the rain.
Wife, I thought, to myself, children, forgive me for what I do this night,
terrible as it might be, for this is Ireland in the rain of an ungodly time and
way out in Galway where the dead must go to die.
The brakes were hit. We slid a good ninety feet, my nose mashed on the
windshield, Johnny Murphy was out of the car.
"We're here!" He sounded like a man drowning deep in the rain.
I looked left. Stone walls. I looked right. Stone walls.
"Where is it?" I shouted.
"Where, indeed!" He pointed, mysteriously. "There!"
I saw a hole in the wail, a tiny gate flung wide.
The director and I followed at a plunge. We saw other cars in the dark now, and
many bikes. But not a light anywhere. A secret, I thought, oh it must be wild to
be this secret. What am I doing here? I yanked my cap lower. Rain crawled down
my neck.
Through the hole in the wall we stumbled, Johnny clenching our elbows. "Here!"
he husked. "Stand here. I'll be a moment. Swig on this to keep your blood high!"
I felt a flask knock my fingers. I got the fire into my boilers and let the
steam up the flues.
"It's a lovely rain," I said.
"The man's mad," said Murphy, and drank after the director, a shadow among
shadows in the dark.
I squinted about. I had an impression of midnight sea upon which men like little
boats passed on the murmurous tides. Heads down, muttering, in twos and threes,
a hundred men stirred out beyond.
It has an unholy air. Good God, what's it all about? I asked myself, incredibly
curious now.
"Johnny-?" said the director.
"Wait!" whispered Johnny. "This is it !"
What did I expect? Perhaps some scene like those old movies where innocent
sailing ships suddenly flap down cabin walls and guns appear like magic to fire
on the foe. Or a farmhouse falls apart like a cereal box, Long Tom rears up to
blast a projectile five hundred miles to target Paris. So here, maybe I thought,
the stones will spill away each from the others, the wails of that house will
curtain back, rosy lights will flash forth and from a monstrous cannon six, a
dozen, ten dozen pink pearly women, not dwarf-Irish but willowy French, will be
shot out over the heads and down into the waving arms of the grateful multitude.
Benison indeed! What's more - manna!
The lights came on.
I blinked.
For I saw the entire unholy thing. There it was, laid out for me under the