"Laymon, Richard - Island" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laymon Richard)

Kaboom!
Now he's fish nibbles.
I'm sorry he's dead, but he _was_ a ridiculous, arrogant jerk. He was a grown man; all of thirty, I suppose, but he went around all the time wearing one of those stupid white yachting hats. And you never saw him that he wasn't strutting around the deck with his ivory cigarette-holder hoisting up a Marlboro in front of one eye or the other. Oh yeah, he wore aviator sunglasses, too. And an ascot, more often than not.
Anyway, that was Prince Wesley. He's dead, so I won't spend any more time running him down. His actual name, for the record, was Wesley Duncan Beaverton III. He died today, April 1, 1994, which is not only April Fool's Day, but also happens to be Good Friday. What a day to go.
He is survived by his wife, Thelma. Who ought to consider herself lucky to be rid of him, but instead seems to be terribly upset.
Wesley and Thelma didn't have any children, but they'd only been married for about a year.
Personally, I think he married her for her money.
He sure didn't marry Thelma for her good looks. Her sister got all of them. The sister, Kimberly, is about twenty-five and a knockout. To think I'm marooned on a tropical isle with a babe like Kimberly . . . ! Whoooey!
Not that anything much is likely to come of it. Aside from the fact that I'm a few years her junior and here as the guest of her half-sister, Connie, she's married. Her husband, Keith, is one of those incredibly handsome, bright, sincere and capable guys who makes ordinary jerks (like me) look like we got stalled somewhere low down on the evolutionary ladder. I'd hate him, but he's too nice to hate.
The other male with us here on the island is the sire of all three gals, Andrew (never Andy) Collins. His first wife, mother of Thelma and Kimberly, bit the big one in a snow skiing accident at Lake Tahoe. He subsequently married Billie, and together they had Connie.
This little yacht excursion in the Bahamas was a gift from the children to celebrate the twentieth wedding anniversary of Andrew and Billie. (Wesley came down to Nassau a week ahead of everyone else to set it up -- scout the situation, check up on the hotel reservations, rent the boat, and so forth.) Andrew is probably in his mid-fifties. He's retired Navy, rich because he invested in some sort of oil scheme that paid off huge, and a pretty decent guy. If you're going to get marooned, he's probably a good fellow to have along. A straight arrow, smart, and tough. He treats me okay, sort of, even though I'm sure he suspects I've been "putting it" to Connie.
Connie's mother, Billie, is only a couple of years older than Thelma. In other words, she's young enough that you'd logically take her as one of Andrew's daughters, not his wife. She's a lot better looking than Thelma, though not quite as hot as Kimberly.
She and Connie look more like sisters than like a mother and daughter. They both have dark tans and golden hair, and wear their hair in the same short, pixie style. Connie is slightly taller. Her mother is a lot fuller in the chest and hips, and of course looks older in the face. Actually, Billie is quite a bit more attractive in many ways than her daughter.
(I'd better make sure none of these folks gets a chance to read what I'm writing here. I've only just now started working on this journal, and I've already thrown in some stuff that could get me in trouble.)
My plan, by the way, is to keep a detailed account of things, and use it as the basis for a "true adventure" sort of book. Which won't pan out if we get rescued too soon. I'm hoping we'll have to spend a while here, long enough for there to be a few more dramatic events. For the record, the reason I brought my writing pad when we came to the island is that I've been working on some short stories. I plan to win the Belmore fiction writing contest . . . Man, what an optimist! Maybe none of us will ever get off this island, in which case I might as well forget the writing contest. And a few other things.
Never mind.
Gonna depress myself, if I don't watch out.
Anyway, back to the introductions.
Connie, daughter of Billie and Andrew, is my "girlfriend." We're both freshmen at Belmore University. That's how I got to know her. We kept being forced together by the alphabet: she being a Collins, I a Conway. At a university, you can't remain strangers for long with the person who immediately precedes you in the ABCs. Soon, we began talking to each other. After a while, we started going out. Before I knew it, she was inviting me to spend spring break with her family on a yacht in the Bahamas.
You don't turn down an offer like that.
I don't, anyhow.
I decided to postpone the inevitable -- breaking up with her -- until after the excursion.
Now, there might not _be_ an "after." Yee gads, stuck with her for life. No no no. Won't happen. We'll probably be rescued shortly. There's just no way this can turn into some sort of Robinson Crusoe deal. At most, we might spend a few days here. More likely, we'll be picked up before dark; that's if somebody heard or saw our boat explode.
It was one hell of an explosion.
For a while, crap kept falling out of the sky and plopping into the water. Pieces of the boat -- and undoubtedly Wesley. (I expected to see a foot or a head or a big looping coil of entrails coming down, but nope.) Many of the pieces were on fire. They got snuffed out when they landed in the water. Nothing came down on the beach, luckily.
Then mere wasn't much left but a bunch of junk floating on the water, and a smudge of drifting smoke.
At the time it went up, we couldn't spot any aircraft or boats. We sure did look. Some of us did, anyhow. Not Thelma, of course. That's when Thelma clutched the sides of her head and started shrieking, "No! No! Oh my God, no! Wesley! My poor Wesley! No!" And like that.
After a few seconds, Kimberly put her arms around her. They stood there hugging each other, Kimberly patting her sister's back and murmuring to her. Kimberly was wet. She'd gone in the water for a little swim after our picnic lunch on the beach, and had just waded ashore a minute or two before the explosion. Her black hair was matted against her skull and hung in a sheath down the nape of her neck. Her back was golden and smooth and dripping. She wore a white bikini. The pants of her bikini hung a little crooked, lower on one hip than on the other, showing more of the top of her right buttock than her left. And the middle of the seat had a crease in it . . .
Enough of that.
She looked damn fine, that's all. I couldn't help staring. But I also spent my share of time looking out across the water. The cloud of smoke had moved on and thinned out. I could see a couple of islands, way off in the distance. But not much else except water and sky.
Kimberly led her sister away from the rest of us. They sat shoulder to shoulder on the blanket where we'd had our picnic.
"Poor thing," Billie said, watching them.
"Splendid move on Wesley's part, blowing up our boat."
"Andrew!"
"Fumes in the engine compartment," he went on. "The idiot _knew_ they could blow us to hell and gone. My mistake. Shouldn't have let him stay on board, nobody there to keep an eye on him. Should've known he'd fuck up the works. The bastard. He was too dumb to live."
"Andrew!"
"At least he blew _himself_ up with the boat. That's the silver lining."
"Don't let your daughter hear you say such things. She loved him."
"He sure as shit didn't love her. Anyhow, good riddance. Rest in pieces, Wesley." And he hocked a wad of spit onto the sand at his feet.
After that, Andrew and Keith went out on the dinghy to see what they could find at the scene of the explosion. I offered to go along, but they said it wouldn't be necessary. Typical. Maybe it's because they think of me as a useless kid or because I'm not part of the family. Maybe there's a reason I don't know about. Even though they're generally nice to me, they treat me like an outsider. I get excluded a lot. I'm sort of used to it by now, having spent several days with this bunch.
Anyway, they left me behind with the women while they puttered out and started picking up nearly everything that was still afloat.
Connie stood on one side of me, her mother on the other.
"They won't bring back Wesley, will they?" Connie asked, making a face like the one she'd given me once when we talked about eating beets.
"We should give him a proper burial," Billie said.
"He's probably in chunks," I added.
"They'd better not bring back _chunks_ of him. God! That's just what we'd need."
"If we're stuck here very long," I said, "we might want to eat him."
"Rupert!" Billie gasped.
"God!" Connie snapped. "I can't _believe_ you sometimes. That's disgusting!"
"We'd have to jerk him right away," I said, "so he doesn't go bad on us."