"Oates, Joyce Carol - Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oates Joyce Carol)

Joyce Carol Oats - Because I Am So Bitter Because It Is My Heart

little Red" Garlock, sixteen years old, skull smashed soft as a rotted pumpkin and body dumped into the Cassadaga River near the foot of Pitt Street, must not have sunk as he'd been intended to sink, or floated as far. As the morning mist begins to lift from the river a solitary fisherman sights him, or the body he has become, trapped and bobbing frantically in pilings about thirty feet offshore. It's the buglelike cries of gulls that alert the fisherman gulls with wide gunmetal-gray wings, dazzling snowy heads and tail feathers, dangling pink legs like something incompletely hatched. The kind you think might be a beautiful bird until you get up close.

Hammond, New York, Waukesha County, sixty miles south of Lake Ontario, is a city of thirty-five thousand inhabitants, a place of Ice Age terrain, saw-notched ridges, hills steep as attic steps. As it approaches the river valley the land gives a sense of hunching down, 3 preparing for a drop. There are hills in Hammond where drivers are obliged to park their vehicles with the front wheels turned sharp against the curb and the emergency brake on full force and other hills where no one in his right mind would park at all. Fog and mists appear to ooze upward out of the earth, concentrating in the lowlying areas.

This morning, April 3, 1956, 8A.M the mist above the river is chill and clammy as the interior of another's mouth.

The fisherman, elderly, stands with his gear on a six-foot concrete abutment above the choppy water, staring, as the shreds of mist shift and eddy and coil about, teasing the eye.

A bundle of rags, maybe.

Dead dog or sheep carcass. He's seen them before.

A freighter passes out in the ship channel bound for the lakes and there's a damp yeasty-tasting wind from the factories upriver and the chalk-colored chimneys of Diamond Chemicals & Plastics on the farther shore and a part of the fisherman's brain is rehearsing what he will be telling others for the remainder of his life..

. how he'd come out to fish, he hadn't come for trouble. Fishing this stretch of the Cassadaga below the railroad yards and close by the colored section of town, fishing to fill the long hours of the morning, small enough pleasure, God knows. And now this morning this terrible thing. This thing floating in the water amid the river debris and froth with a look delicate as lace, and the goddamned gulls, the garbage birds, flapping and struggling above it. Even before he understands what it is, the head, the human head, the upside-down face, a hand, outstretched fingers, arm caught in a snarl of rusted cables, even before the sight of it is unmistakable, his bowels begin to clench, he feels the first stabs of panic. For like calls out to like, in the extremity of terror.

He snatches up a loose chunk of concrete and pitches it at the gulls.

"Get out of there! Get! Get."' he shouts. "Filthy bastard things."' It could be his own son there, he's thinking. Though his own son is a grown man living five hundred miles away and would bear no resemblance to that body at all.

* * * 4 Ieys Diner the proprietor Al Neeley calls police headquarters 00 rt the body in the river, reading off the emergency numbers a grimy card affixed to the wall and dialing as if this is the sort of ching he does all the time. But his deep voice quivers a little: Hello?

Police? We need some help down here, there's a dead body in the river off Pitt Street." This time of morning, the diner is crowded with customers. All the stools at the counter are taken.

Most of the customers are men in work clothes but some are older men, white-haired, solitary, like the fisherman, time on their hands. Two young nurses from Hammond General are having coffee together. The fisherman is being asked questions: stammering as he tells them what he saw, first time in his life he'd seen a human being in the Cassadaga, he can't seem to catch his breath from hurrying here and there's a roaring in his ears and Neeley's voice rises impatiently: "White, or colored? The dead man.

The fisherman blinks dazedly, as if for an instant he doesn't know the answer. But of course he does.

"White."

By 8:30 A.M. the sky above the river is blue as washed glass, rippled with vertical wisps of cloud. At the foot of Pitt Street a small crowd has gathered to watch a police rescue squad lift the body from the river. It's a delicate procedure, involving a hook; not raw flesh but something neutral like clothing must be snagged. If a body has been in the water for some time the hook sinks into flesh like soft bread dough packed onto bone.

A human body being pried out of a knot of fraying cables and river filth is a powerful sight. All vision is narrowed to a tunnel. You can t look anywhere else.

"This isn't any show!" Patrolmen are warning people off.

In the water, rocked by the waves, are three police officers in an outboard motorboat marked HAMMOND POLICE DEPT. At the end of the concrete abutment another officer stands calling instructions through a bullhorn no one on shore can hear clearly.

There's an ambulance waiting, motor running.

There's a vehicle from the Hammond Fire Department.

A growing crowd, even children. Teenagers on their way to school.

Fifty yards olf, in a weedy lot just below the Northern Pacific railroad yard, a half dozen Negroes stand contemplating the scene but don't come any closer.

A police photographer stands on the abutment, one foot on a post, taking photographs.