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

drizzling rain.
The lights came on. The men quickened, turned, gathered, and we with them.
A mechanical rabbit popped out of a little box at the far end of the stony yard
and ran. Eight dogs, let free from gates, yelping, ran after in a great circle.
There was not one yell or a murmur from the crowd of men. Their heads turned
slowly, watching. The rain rained down on the illuminated scene. The rain fell
upon tweed caps and thin cloth coats. The rain dripped off thick eyebrows and
thin noses. The rain beat on hunched shoulders. I stared. The rabbit ran. The
dogs ran. At the finish, the rabbit popped into its electric hatch. The dogs
collided on each other, barking. The lights went out.
In the dark I turned to stare at the director as I knew he must be turning to
stare at me.
I was thankful for the dark, the rain, so Johnny Murphy could not see our faces.
"Come on, now!" he shouted. "Place your bets!" We were back in Galway, speeding,
at ten o'clock. The rain was still raining, the wind was still blowing. The
ocean was smashing the shore with titanic fists. The highway was a river working
to erase the stone beneath as we drew up in a great tidal spray before the pub.
"Well, now!" said Johnny Murphy, not looking at us, but at the windshield wiper
beating, palpitating there. "Well."
The directors and I had bet on five races and had lost, between us, two or three
pounds. It worried Johnny.
"I won a great deal," he said, "and some of it, I keep telling you, over and
over. I put down in your names, both of you. That last race, I swear to God, I
bet and won for all of us. Let me pay you!"
"No, Johnny, thanks," I said.
"But you lost, what? in the States? nine dollars?"
"It's all right, Johnny," I said, my numb lips moving.
He took my hand and pressed two shillings into it. I didn't fight him. "That's
better!" he said, "Now, one last drink on me!"
We had the drink and walked back to my hotel. My director saw me to the door,
before going on his way to his house, alone. Wringing out his cap in the hotel
lobby he looked at me and said, "It was a wild Irish night, wasn't it?"
"A wild night," I said.
He left.
I hated to go up to my room. So I sat for another hour in the reading lounge of
the damp hotel and took the traveller's privilege, a glass and a bottle provided
by the dazed hallporter. I sat alone listening to the rain, and the rain on the
cold hotel roof, thinking of Ahab's coffin bed waiting for me up there under the
drumbeat weather. I thought of the only warm thing in the hotel, in the town, in
all the land of Eire this night, the script in my typewriter this moment, with
its sun of Mexico, its hot winds blowing from the Pacific, its mellow papayas,
its yellow lemons, its fiery sands and its women with dark charcoal-burning
eyes.
And I thought of the darkness beyond the town, the light flashing on, the
electric rabbit running, the dogs running, and the rabbit gone and the light
going out and the rain falling down on the dank shoulders and the soaked caps
and trickiing off the noses and seeping through the tweeds.
Going upstairs I glanced out of a steaming window. There, on the road, riding by
under a street light, was a man on a bicycle. He was terribly drunk, for the
bike weaved back and forth across the road, as the man vomited. He did not stop