"Daniel da Cruz - Texas Trilogy 01 - The Ayes of Texas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Da Cruz Daniel)

"Clear the bridge!" the captain shouted, his voice barely audible above the din of exploding
short-fused shells. The kamikaze was now headed directly, un-waveringly toward them. It couldn't
miss. Gwillam Forte dashed for the starboard ladder leading down and aft to the main deck. From
the corner of his eye he saw the captain gripping the arms of his chair, bracing himself for the
impact. Forte leapt through the doorway, reaching for the ladder rails.
What happened next he could never quite recall. He could remember looking straight at the
kamikaze plane and seeing a bright red flash. That would have been the five-inch shell from one
of the destroyers, a piece of its shrapnel apparently striking the control surfaces and causing the
pilot to lose control. The suicide plane disappeared from Forte's line of vision, as if it had been
wiped from a slate. Though he didn't know it, the craft had winged over and slammed into the sea.
A blinding flash was followed by a huge detonation that rocked the ship, buckling splinter shield
around the main-deck 20-mm gun mounts, and raining shrap-nel off the ship's armor plate.
Gwillam Forte was blown back against the side of the pilot house like a dry leaf in a winter's gale.
He passed out.
When he came to, he was lying alone on the steel deck behind a ready box. His mind was still
filled with the vision of that huge black bomb homing on him. He tried to rise, desperate to find
cover. But in that brief moment of unconsciousness, the deck had be-come so slippery he
couldn't gain his footing. In his disordered mind all he could think of was that an oil line had been
severed, spilling its contents all over the deck. But then, he reminded himself, there wasn't any oil
line way up there. Ball bearings, he thought muzzily as he again tried to get to his feet. That must
be it- ball bearings from . . . from . . . somewhere.
He put out his hand to try once more. Then he understood: he had no hand, only a mangled
stump that spurted blood with each beat of a weakening heart. He stared at it dumbly. There was
no pain, only an overpowering languor. He wanted to cradle his head in his arms, stretch out in
the warm sun on clean white sands, and sleep forever.
Just before he lapsed again into unconsciousness, he heard from far away the captain's voice.
He was yell-ing, "Corpsman! Corpsman!" He had never heard the old man sound so upset.
He was wondering why as the rising sun was swal-lowed up in a slowly descending curtain of
blood, and he remembered no more.

1946-1951
It was a strange fellowship, that which developed between Gwillam Forte and Otis Creech, for
they were as unlike as any two patients in the veterans hospital. Forte was barely seventeen, a
triple amputee, morose, uncommunicative, and white. Otis Creech was fifty-five, a giant of a man
with seam-straining muscles, full of laughter, and black. Odd as the relationship seemed, their
fellow patients would have been even more surprised to discover that its basis was mutual envy.
Creech was an old-timer. He had been in and out of veteranтАЩs hospitals since World War I, when
he had been wounded by shrapnel in the Battle of Belleau Wood and, lying helpless in the mud,
nearly smothered in a wave of phosgene gas. Saved by counterattacking Marines and a shift in
the wind, he lost a leg above the knee and the use of his right lung. A determined and proud man,
he refused to become a charge of the U.S. government. Once fitted with a wooden leg, and
having adjusted to a diminished vitality and range of activity, he limped out of the hospital to begin
civilian life as an apprentice auto mechanic. In time, he became expert. But time also worked
against him, for the strain of breathing on one lung ravaged his heart, and with increasing
frequency he had to return for hospi-talization. On the eve of World War II he found him-self
permanently confined in the veterans hospital in Houston, living on pills and potions, waking nights
to the throb of a heart that beat with wild and disturbing rhythms, like a jungle drum.
In January 1946, Gwillam Forte was brought on a stretcher into the ward that had been Creech's
home so long he felt the pride of ownership. There had been a lot of new faces during the
previous two years, mostly young, but a sadder and more hopeless one than Gwil-lam Forte's