"Charles L. Grant - Oxrun Station 4 - The Grave" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Charles L)

 THE BUICK STALLED ON THE RAILROAD TRACKS

Then Josh saw the light. Small, glaring, and unquestionably moving toward him.
He tried the engine again, with no result. He pushed at the driver's side door. It didn't open. Neither
did the passenger door. And though the windows were open, an invisible barrier held him in the car.
The tracks rumbled and groaned; the heavy wheels of the train cracked over the gaps in the rails. The
light grew brighter.
A scream for a whistle, and Josh spun around to stare in fear: the engine was a locomotive,
coal-bearing, not diesel. Where had it come from? The cowcatcher was painted bright red, the bulging
sides of the engine sleek, black, spouting brilliant white steam.
He swallowed, wondering how it would feel when the locomotive stopped an inch from the door,
wondering how he would explain his predicament. Then he stopped wondering.
And the locomotive didn't stop.
 ____________ 1
T
he end of April in Oxrun Station; and the dying was reversed with the temperature's slow rise and the
week's worth of rain that added to the thawing. Pavement and blacktop were washed to a shimmering,
storefronts were polished, streetlamps seemed taller, and the air lost the melancholy that had turned it
November grey. A faint green hazeтАФstill a promise, though no longer a winter's dreamтАФ appeared as a
cloud among branches and twigs, while lawns once brown showed heartening signs of struggle. Pedestrians
walked instead of shuf-fled, smiled instead of grimaced, and automobiles slowed for passengers and drivers
to examine the change.
The bench in front of the Centre Street luncheon-ette was repainted a pale blueтАФfor the newspapers
stacked there and for those who used it to wait for the bus. Patrolmen leaving their headquarters down on
Chancellor Avenue tugged more confidently at their tapered tunics, set their caps at a slight angle just this
side of rakish, did the same for their grins as if they had just had a raise. And in front of the Town Hall
(across from the jail) the first circle of crocus broke stiffly through black soil.
 It was a stretching, smiling, we-made-it-again time when only the deepest of the snowfalls was
remem-bered and made worse.
The evenings were still destined to be chilly, the afternoons not quite June, and there were already
muttered complaints about all the rain; nevertheless, the past was done for another nine months, and New
Year's was no longer the first day of the year.
Over the farmland valley beyond the village, howev-er, cupped in a bowl of low and rounded hills, the
greening was more prominent. Acres of it, square miles of it, blended into a freshly bright carpet; slopes of
it and orchards of it luring the birds back from the South. There were newly energetic prowlings at night
тАФsmall creatures looking for a leisurely meal, larger ones that refused to be driven away by progress.
Motors were tuned with an ear cocked and listening, implements sharpened, gutters cleaned, cellars and
attics aired without screens. For those who had lived for a time in the city it was quiet, an almost numbing
silence only temporarily shattered by the passing of a train; and for those who had lived in the Station and
the valley for more than one year there was no silence at all: the streams hissed, trees groaned, birds
stalked and chattered, the ground itself shifting to accommo-date the pattern.
Josh Miller listened.
He did not pretend to be a man of the soil or a huntsman more at home in the woods. He preferred, much
preferred, to sit in the front of his television set and watch an old movie with Greenstreet and Lorre, or read
a travel book or locked-room mystery, or do some quiet entertaining in the small house he owned down on
Raglin Street (near Quentin Avenue, a block and a half south of the town park). Or even betterтАФto find
himself either here in Oxrun or in some other small community rummaging through houses and old shops at
the whims (and the pocketbooks) of his old and new customers.
On the other hand, and truthfully, he would never deny that he enjoyed Connecticut's spring and the
voices it brought back after a long and hard winter, and he took a few moments to identify what he heard.