"Michael Marshall - The Straw Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (Marshall Michael)

to time. For some there were petitions and town meetings, bumper stickers and fundraisers; for others
the change came quietly, numbly accepted as part of history's entropic progress in some other direction.
Were the town a little bigger and more boisterous, the overgrown track might make a good place to buy
drugs or get mugged. In Palmerston it's used mainly by earnest parents to trek children down at
weekends, for pointing at birds and trees; and equally earnestly, a few years down the line, for those
same kids to get each other pregnant in order to exchange one style of confinement for another.
The town is built around a T junction, the shape of the letter obscured by side streets that seem
unsure of their purpose. The upright is littered with gas stations, a car wash, a video store, two small
motels and a minimart with a rack of cheap CDs of the Marshall Tucker Band's Greatest Hits. An old
wooden church stands at the intersection with the cross stroke, paint peeling now, but still picturesque
against a cold blue sky. The right fork takes you up into the hills towards New York State and the Great
Lakes.
If you take a left, as you would if you were heading west on Route 6 to go look at the Allegheny
reservoir тАФ and. that's pretty much the only reason that you'd be passing through тАФ you get onto Main
Street. Here you find a few banks and stores, the windows of the former mirrored and anonymous; those
of the latter in need of cleaning, and framing antiques of limited worth. Something about the desultory
arrangement of the displays suggests that the objects will have plenty more time to accrue value in situ.
There are two small movie houses, one of which tried to show art movies ten years ago and was
rewarded by attendances so low that it closed in a fit of pique and never reopened; the other still
steadfastly toeing the party line of popular culture, hawking unrealizable dreams to popcorn junkies. On
the southern side of the street, in a large plot all by itself, sits a beautiful Victorian house. It has lain empty
for some years, and though most of the windows are intact, it's peeling a good deal worse than the
church and some of the boards are beginning to slip.
If you're hungry, chances are you'll find yourself in the McDonald's a little further up the street, just
along from the Railway Museum. Most people do. Palmerston isn't a bad place. It's peaceful, and the
people are friendly. It's a pleasant part of the world, low on crime and close by the Susquehannock State
Forest. You could be born, raise kids, and die there, without feeling you'd been especially short-changed
by fate.
There just isn't much to do in between.


тАФ┬л┬╗тАФ┬л┬╗тАФ┬л┬╗тАФ

At lunchtime on Wednesday, 30th October 1991, the McD's was crowded. Most of the tables were
already occupied, and four lines straggled out from the counter. Two little girls, four and six years old and
out for a treat with their mother, clamoured vehemently for Chicken McNuggets. Everyone else gazed at
the menu boards with the reverence they deserved.
There were three non-locals present, a red-letter day for Palmerston's tourist industry. One was a
middle-aged man wearing a suit, sitting by himself at a table in the corner. His name was Pete Harris, and
he was driving back to Chicago after a long sales trip that had been largely disappointing. The Victorian
house's Italianate tower was just visible from his seat and he was considering the house as he chewed,
finding it astounding that no one had bothered to reclaim the property and fix it up.
The other two were a couple of English tourists, by coincidence sitting at the next table. Mark and
Suzy Campbell had skipped breakfast to do a couple hundred miles in the morning and were more than
ready for some food. They'd been hoping for a picturesque diner, but after a slow trawl through town
they'd settled on the burger den by default. Munching their sandwiches in a defensive huddle, they were
at first alarmed and then mildly pleased to find that they had sat next to a local who talked. His name was
Trent, and he was tall, in his forties, and had a good deal of copper-coloured hair. On hearing that they
were a few days into a coast-to-coast drive, he nodded with distant approval тАФ as if being told of a
practice he could understand but had no desire to undertake himself, like collecting matchbooks, or