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

Though Little Red had quit school on the day he'd turned sixteen.

The newspaper photographer continues to clamber about taking pictures.

In the next edition half the front page will be given over to the local murder: sixteen-year-old boy, corpse in the water between six and nine hours, probable cause of death multiple blows to the head by a blunt instrument or a rock. A photograph of the stricken Garlocks and a photograph of the crowd of spectators.

like clumsy mourners at a funeral, not knowing exactly who is being mourned or why they are there.

By the time the body is borne away in one of the official vehicles, the Negroes watching up in the railroad yard have vanished.

There remains nothing to be seen. But people stand around, vague and waiting. For as the wind picks up, and the sunshine is chill and veiled and gritty-tasting, there is a slow realization that this will be an ordinary day after all... an ordinary weekday.

Tuesday. A long long stretch ahead.

There's Officer Furlong, Eddy Furlong, from upper Pitt Street himself, talking with some neighborhood men. Haugen, Lukacs, McDermott...

they all know Vernon Garlock, he's the kind of guy you shake your head over, a hard drinker, hot-tempered, always in some sort of trouble or other... and his kids, his older boys especially, everyone knows what they're like.

("White trash," some Hammond residents might say, but not these: these are neighborhood people whose judgments are more subtly calibrated.) "Better not speak ill of the dead."

"Yah. Any damn dead."

They're working their way toward mirthful grimaces. But they keep their voices low, lowered.

Furlong clears his throat, tries not to sound official, merely curious.

'Any of you guys know anything? I mean this... that happened..

. any idea what's behind it? Who?"

The men shake their heads.

Somberly, not quickly, they shake their heads.

There's a smell here like rotting fish. A shiver walks over them.

When they leave here, the waterfront at the foot of Pitt Street, when they go off to work, and later back home, how will they be able to explain what it's like to someone not here?

Haugen shudders. "Hell of a thing. Some people.

the most shitty luck."

"Poor Vernon."

"Poor her."

"Who's gonna tell her? The police find the right people for that?"

And a shiver walks over them another time.