"Jay Lake - The Angle of My Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lake Jay)

The Angle of My Dreams
by Jay Lake



My name is Ronnie Marshall and I was eleven the year the space shuttle blew up. I started flying in my
dreams right after those astronauts died.

It's not like being Superman -- you have to find the right kind of hill and run down it like crazy and throw
out your arms like you're going off the high dive and close your eyes and believe. It's not really learning
how to fly. Anybody can to do that.

The trick is forgetting how to fall back down again.

I'd dream these flying dreams, the long grass slick on my legs as leaves spun in the air. There were
always feathers in my dreams, like God had busted His pillow and goose down was snowing on the
world. In dreams my feet pounded down a hill, my teeth clacking with every step, and when it came time
to leave this earth, that's what I'd do.

Mama died one night a couple of years ago, sleeping off the chemo she took for her cancer. This last
Christmas, just a couple of months gone by, Daddy flew too, until his truck landed in the San Marcos
River. Granddaddy says that was punishment for mocking the angels. But I could soar away on God's
feathers and still come back safe. At least in my dreams.

That spring in math class, after we'd all kind of got back to normal about the Challenger blowing up, we
were studying angles. Because I do good in class, Mrs. Doornie gave me a protractor to work with, and
I used it to measure the angle of my dreams. That's when I figured exactly how steep a hill needed to be
for me to fly in real life.

* * *

I swiped two surveyor's stakes from Granddaddy's truck and used my coffee can money on a hundred
feet of clothesline at Laudermilk's Hardware in town. It was old money, from when Daddy had still given
me an allowance, but I didn't have nothing else I wanted anymore, except to see if I could really fly.

There was a big old hill on the Chamberlain place that stuck up all smooth and round like a sand pile,
except it was pale rock under the dirt and grass. One giant live oak tree grew up at the top, that kept
getting hit by lightning but never stopped growing. I'd rode my bike down that hill a hundred times, until I
wiped out on a cow pie and broke my wrist when I was eight and Daddy made me stop. Chamberlain's
hill looked like it might be the right angle.

So I took my stakes and my clothesline and a mallet and a level from the tool shed and headed over
there early one Saturday. I drove one stake into the ground near the top, where the hill kind of rolled
over to the angle it had, and another at the bottom, just before the hill flattened out again. My clothesline
barely stretched between them, and it was real saggy, but I used some sticks from the live oak to prop it
up in the middle. Then I backed off to the fence line, balanced the level on a post with some pebbles
until it was straight, and set the protractor flat edge down on the level and stared through it at the hill and
the clothesline.

I was right. It was exactly the angle of my dreams. I picked up my tools and went home to plan my first