"Charles de Lint - Coyote Stories" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Lint Charles)

in the sun. He's living in an abandoned factory these days, and he's got this
one wall, he's gluing feathers and bones to it, nothing fancy, no eagles' wings,
no bear's jaw, wolf skull, just what he can find lying around, pigeon feathers
and crows', rat bones, bird bones, a necklace of mouse skulls strung on a wire.
Twigs and bundles of weeds, rattles he makes from tin cans and bottles and jars.
He paints figures on the wall, in between all the junk. Thunderbird. Bear.
Turtle. Raven.

Everybody's starting to agree, that Albert he's one crazy skin.

Now when he's got money, he buys food with it and shares it out. Sometimes he
walks over to Palm Street where the skin girls are working the trade and he
gives them money, asks them to take a night off. Sometimes they take the money
and just laugh, getting into the next car that pulls up. But sometimes they take
the money and they sit in a coffee shop, sit there by the window, drinking their
coffee and look out at where they don't have to be for one night.

And he never stops telling stories.

"That's what we are," he tells me one time. Albert he's smiling, his lips are
smiling, his eyes are smiling, but I know he's not joking when he tells me that.
"Just stories. You and me, everybody, we're a set of stories, and what those
stories are is what makes us what we are. Same thing for whites as skins. Same
thing for a tribe and a city and a nation and the world. It's all these stories
and how they braid together that tells us who and what and where we are.

"We got to stop forgetting and get back to remembering. We got to stop asking
for things, stop waiting for people to give us the things we think we need. All
we really need is the stories. We have the stories and they'll give us the one
thing nobody else can, the thing we can only take for ourselves, because there's
nobody can give you back your pride. You've got to take it back yourself.

"You lose your pride and you lose everything. We don't want to know the stories,
because we don't want to remember. But we've got to take the good with the bad
and make ourselves whole again, be proud again. A proud people can never be
defeated. They lose battles, but they'll never lose the war, because for them to
lose the war you've got to go out and kill each and every one of them, everybody
with even a drop of the blood. And even then, the stories will go on. There just
won't be any skins left to hear them."

This Coyote he's always getting in trouble. One day he's sitting at a park
bench, reading a newspaper, and this cop starts to talk big to one of the skin
girls, starts talking mean, starts pushing her around. Coyote's feeling
chivalrous that day, like he's in a white man's movie, and he gets into a fight
with the cop. He gets beat up bad and then more cops come and they take him
away, put him in jail.

The judge he turns Coyote into a mouse for a year so that there's Coyote, got
that same lopsided grin, got that sharp muzzle and those long ears and the big
bushy tail, but he's so small now you can hold him in the palm of your hand.