"Carroll Brown - The Borderlands" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Carroll)

"Albert," I said, a little more harshly.

After a long moment he lowered his gaze, turning toward me, and for a brief
instant I thought I saw something there, a fire in the emptiness, a spark of
"life." But that wasn't possible, and he turned away from me, shuffling off down
the aisle as the store filled again with the soft rasping of straw on linoleum.

In retrospect, it feels like it was that moment that the thought first entered
my mind. It's not possible, of course; I didn't yet know what I later learned,
hadn't yet discovered what Albert saw, what was to be seen through the eyes of
the dead. But perhaps some premonition, some shiver of a guess, had already set
my mind in motion.

And I noticed, as Albert walked away from me, that he had not stopped weeping.

Life has a way of pushing you in directions you never intended to go, of
carrying you in its currents to whatever eddy or tidepool it chooses to deposit
you. We had certainly never intended to own a comer grocery, my wife Gwendolyn
and I. That was too "normal" for us, so damnably normal that I used to wake at
night with knives in my stomach, the small but potent daggers of regret,
cowardice, self-loathing. We had wanted adventure, high times and glamor.
Unfortunately we were both dogged by an equally strong streak of reasonableness,
a prudence that belied our years. When I finished school, working my way through
as a stocker and then assistant manager at Brock's Groceries, we made plans to
escape the city, settle someplace where adventure lurked around the comer
(though you could still come home to a soft bed and a warm house at the end of
the day). Colorado, maybe. Or Idaho.

Depressions have a way of changing plans.

When the time came, we just couldn't justify packing up for parts unknown
without a job waiting, not in the state the country was in. The odds were
against finding anything, and we had neither the savings to wait it out nor the
passion to risk starvation. In the end, we settled.

I stayed on at Brock's, and Gwen at Swanson's department store, and we kept
telling ourselves that one day we would just do it, just pack up and go, but
right now we still owed on the car and couldn't afford to make the payments and
insurance without a steady income. As soon as that was paid off, we'd head east,
to the mountains.

Then came the furniture payments, and the credit card bills we'd racked up.

We bought Brock's the year I turned thirty. We'd thought long and hard, but in
the end couldn't pass up the security; old man Brock offered it to me at a
special price, seeing as how I'd been there thirteen years and basically running
it the last five. The bank considered me stable and gave me the loan.

And that was that. Roots. Foundations. We were stuck.