"Alex Irvine - Intimations of Immortality" - читать интересную книгу автора (Irvine Alexander C)

INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY
Alex Irvine




1

NORMAN CAMPBELL STOOD on a saddle of land between two mountain peaks on the Continental
Divide and recited part of a poem.
But there's a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
Norman had once killed a man to avoid doing the very thing that he was going to do that morning It was
his son Sasha's eighteenth birthday. Nobody understood Wordsworth who hadn't read him aloud from
the top of a mountain.

I must make the right decision, he said to himself.

"Dad," Sasha said when Norman came back to the camp they'd set up three days before. A stream,
swollen with snowmelt, rushed past them on its way down what the maps still called Herman Gulch. Two
miles downstream, Interstate 70 still split the Rocky Mountains; Norman's stomach rolled over at being
so close to civilization. Sixteen years, he thought.

"Son." Norman sat by the campfire and spooned himself a bowl of stew. "Happy birthday."

Sasha squatted by the stream to rinse his own bowl. Norman could see the kid wanting to ask a
question. He ate stew and waited for Sasha to work himself up to it.

"Are we going down the mountain today?"

The right decision, Norman thought again. "Yes," he said.

Sasha didn't look at him. "Will they arrest you when we get there.?"

"I'd be real surprised if they didn't."

2

A little less than nineteen years before that morning, Norman Campbell had been, if not the happiest man
in the world, certainly the most immediately content. It was Friday night. Norm's account was swollen
with his week's wages, his head was perfectly fogged with Coors, and the balls on the scuffed and
chalk-smeared pool table obeyed his every command. He was twenty-four years old, and there was no
place in the world he would rather have been than the Valverde Country Club on West Alameda in
Denver, Colorado.