"Jay Lake - A Mythic Fear of the Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lake Jay)

***

All children visit Granddaddy. Some haunt the slopes below his vast, rumpled
trousers, chasing hares and pheasants through the thinning brush. Others play tag or
hide-and-go-seek among the drifting lint of his sweater, where the stuff has caught on
an aspen forest. There are secret places known only to the fraternity of children
where you can even stand and hear the susurrating echo of the distant, forbidden,
angry sea. It as if the sound travels by secret paths through the folds of
GranddaddyтАЩs skin, or perhaps arrives on his breath that draws and shudders once
every year or so.

We all visit him, and we all avoid him at the same time. Though one eye is lost
where his face is propped within the reach of his upper arm, the other can be seen
below its vasty wrinkled lid, moving slow as the moon in the summer sky with the
rhythm of his dreams.

Jamie Brautigan told me Granddaddy dreamed of the sea, and his dream was
the sea. I thought that was stupidтАФhow could your dream be anything besides a
thought in your head?тАФbut JamieтАЩs words stayed with me.

Approaching the Lower Right Sleeve with Daddy, I began to believe what she
had said. Even among the shadowed forest of lint and dying aspen, which smelled of
nothing so much as wet, old tobacco, I could hear that soft and distant rhythm.

тАЬDaddy...тАЭ

тАЬHmm?тАЭ HeтАЩd stopped to wipe the early sweat from his brow and check our
path. Even though this was my trip, DaddyтАЩs attention was on something far ahead
and far away. Mom always said that was just how he was.

A dreamer, like Granddaddy.

тАЬI can hear the sea.тАЭ I was ashamed of the words as soon as I said them.

тАЬOzzie.тАЭ He looked at me, caught me with those eyes the color of cold water.
Then, to my surprise: тАЬItтАЩs all right, son. Walk, donтАЩt think.тАЭ His voice was kind.

Walk. DonтАЩt think.

I walked without thinking a while.
 ***

The Lower Right Sleeve wasnтАЩt a particular challenge. Jamie and I had
climbed almost all the way to the Crook when we were both ten, before she turned
eleven and became too old to play with me, especially when Mannie Vingh started
paying attention to her. But the Crook itself, there was a challenge.

GranddaddyтАЩs sweater had begun to rot there, and ravel. It was like a wool
mine, source of much of the lint on the lower slopes. Great foetid pits interrupted the