"Alice Hoffman - Second Nature" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Alice)

his plate while the Wolf Man calmly continued with his dinner. Now, the
raven watched as the attendants strapped the Wolf Man into a metal chair
and held his head back. The barber wanted no chances taken, a human
bite was the most dangerous of all. In the interest of speed, he used a
razor rather than scissors, and while he worked he quickly recited a
blessing.

The following morning, two attendants helped the Wolf Man into a black
overcoat, which would be taken away once he settled into the State
Hospital, since he'd never need it again and another patient could make
use of it. The cook who had baked the angel food cake for his birthday
wept. She insisted he had smiled when she lit the candles on the cake,
but no one believed her, except the guard stationed at his door, who had
been made so anxious by this bit of news that he took to biting his
fingernails, close enough to the skin to draw blood.

The cook had discovered that the Wolf Man would not eat meat unless it
was raw. He liked his potatoes unbaked as well, and would not touch a
salad or a pudding. For his last meal, an early breakfast, she had
simply passed a hamburger patty over a flame for a moment. So what if
uncooked meat was bad for you, and most of the patients liked cereal and
toast, she wanted him to have what he liked. She had an impulse to hide
a knife or a screwdriver inside the folded napkin, because she knew that
as soon as he'd eaten his breakfast, he would be handcuffed, then
released into the custody of a social worker from the State Hospital for
the ride along the Hudson. By afternoon he would be signed into a ward
from which no one was ever released. But she didn't follow her impulse,
and after the Wolf Man had his meal, the attendants dressed him and
helped him into the black overcoat, then clasped the handcuffs on him,
quickly, from behind, before he could fight back.

Outside the door, the guard turned his Walkman up to the highest volume,
and he slipped his sunglasses on, though the April sky threatened to
storm. His friends liked to hear stories about the Wolf Man--how he
crouched and circled three times before he curled up to sleep with his
back against the wall, that five strong men were needed to hold him down
each time they drew blood or inoculated him against measles and
tetanus--and the guard was always happy to oblige. But what he never
mentioned, as he drank cold beer with his friends, was that on nights
when there was thunder he often heard a whimpering behind the door, a
sound so pitiful it turned his bones cold and his heart inside out.

That was the sound the trappers had heard on the last day of December,
when the snow was ten feet deep and deer stuck in the drifts and froze
solid. There, at the edge of northern Michigan, much of the land had
never been charted and trees were so dense they blocked out the sun.

Beneath the ice, streams were filled with green water. Bears in these
mountains grew to seven feet, and their hides were so thick a whole hive
of bees couldn't sting them. It was dark as night on winter afternoons,