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

"Who is it?"

"What happened?"

'Jesus-is that a body.a" "Somebody drowned?"

There is a collective sigh as the body is lifted toward the boat but then it snags on something and falls back. Little Red was a husky boy with a heavy head and thighs like hams, and his lips in the rigor of death are stretched in a leering smile. He gives the impression of resisting these many hands without being able to see them.

Then he's in the boat. The body's in the boat.

Then on shore. A dead weight leaking filthy river water.

Then it's being lowered onto a stretcher by three grim-faced uniformed men and covered with a khaki-colored blanket.

To shield it from so many eyes.

A Dixie cup, very white, is blown across a stretch of pebbly ground.

Up on the access road, a car radio is playing a snatch of bright brassy music somebody shouts for it to be turned off. A photographer for the Hammond Chronicle, hair slicked back against the curve of his skull, plastic raincoat flapping around his legs, is taking pictures one after another after another... as if the fact of a body, a body where no body is supposed to be, has made the day special.

Underfoot is coarse large-grained sand that has blotted up all color.

Chips of mica glint in it like millions of tiny eyes.

"Oh, my God who is it?"

There are two Garlocks waiting to make the identification and to ride off sobbing with the corpse.

Not Little Red's mother, who is known to be sickly and erratic 6 in her Ca"'ion not right in her heau"'and not Lrtt'e Reii's father, who isn't living with the family on Gowanda Street though he is known to be in Hammond somewhere. Instead it's Little Red's older brother Morton, married, with small children of his own, and a nineteen-year-old woman named Edith, one of Little Red's young aunts or cousins the Garlock household, or households, contains many relatives.

It's that kind of family: the father, Vernon, brought some of them up from West Virginia to do defense work in Hammond, back in the early forties, and other Garlocks followed. And they've had babies since lots of babies.

Little Red: must have been five feet eleven, one hundred eighty-five pounds, thick neck and thick arms and shoulders, fatty muscle, small glittery slate-colored eyes and a sly moist smile learned from the movies... and his hair wasn't red, not since he'd been a baby. He wasn't retarded, but slow-seeming as if on purpose, to antagonize, to tease and worry.

His real name is Patrick Wesley. This name he'll be identified by, properly, beneath an old photograph of him that will appear on the front page of the next edition of the Chronicle.

Morton Garlock and Edith Garlock are crouched over the dead boy. The crowd is very still, listening to their sounds: the words are impossible to make out, but the sounds are unmistakable.

Out in the ship channel, a freighter passes slowly, immense washes of water behind, rocking and shuddering against the pilings.

The gulls keep their distance.

The night before, Little Red hadn't shown up at the house on Gowanda.

No one reported him missing because no one had thought of him as missing exactly... he stayed out sometimes all night; he was hard to manage... and it's that kind of household, the Garlocks, nine children, different-age children, and other relatives, and their wives or husbands or lovers, spilling over into two or three rented places so no one is ever certain of another's whereabouts unless they are together in the same room. Poor Mrs. Garlock has been beaten so often... the police don't trouble to go down there any more; it's risking your life, to set foot in that door...

she's a vacant-eyed worn-out woman of forty whom neighbors sometimes find sleeping in their cars parked at the curb or, wrapped in a blanket.

know that Little Red was missing, Morton Garlock is telling police, she'd be thinking... if she was thinking... he was in school, this time of day.