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

As they break up to leave, Eddy Furlong feels a shy touch at his wrist, so light, so tentative, he'd almost not need to notice.

It's one of the high school girls. Or maybe she's younger.

About fourteen years old, with a delicately boned face, large eyes, a squinty slitted look to them like minnows darting in shallow water.

Furlong almost recognizes her... almost has the name. He could not say is she pretty, that fair pale lightly freckled skin with a waxy sheen, a look cold and stricken as if, so close to death, she's lost her creaturely warmth.

A scared little girl. Telling him something so faint and rushed Furlong can hardly hear.

"Hon? Speak up, please." Furlong is twenty-nine years old, not tall but broad in the shoulders, sandy wavy hair, married, a father, thinks well of himself... he knows this girl, or knows the parents, just can't say the name.

The girl's hair is whipping in the wind. She glances over her shoulder to where, up on the access road, her girlfriend is talking with some boys, dawdling, lighting cigarettes and tossing the matches in the air... it's a school morning and aren't those kids almost late for school? Or don't they give a damn? This being a special event, seeing some poor bastard hauled from the river, his face mashed like raw meat and bloody sockets where there'd been eyes. Furlong is waiting for those kids to laugh and clown around so he can tell them get on away from here, and fast.

He's prepared. He's a quick, angry man when it's needed.

'About what happened... I think I know... I mean, I have an idea.

.. how it might have.

"Yah? What? Speak up, lion."

He stares at her and sees those deep shadow crescents under her eyes.

A look that's adult and sad.

Anyone who can't sleep has time for a lot of thinking.

Officer Furlong is observed talking at the edge of the cordoned-off area with a girl who hugs her schoolbooks to her flat chest as if they're giving her warmth. She's telling him something earnest he has to stoop to hear, though he isn't writing anything down just listening.

The girl has a head of bushy frizzy hair her best feature, the women say that's so fair a brown it looks silver, ablaze in the sun, shot with atoms of fiery light. Her eyes are a strange green-gray, pellucid as glass marbles, with a look of transparency; she knows to stand tall and look an adult candidly in the face. As she speaks, her forehead is crisscrossed with tiny lines. She is wearing a thin cloth coat, navy blue, nothing on her head, no gloves, and her shoulders are high and narrow and taut as she hugs her books and a plastic purse against her chest. Furlong leans close, nodding, as she tells him what she knows: that the Garlock boy was in trouble with motorcyclists from out of town... those bikers who race on the dirt track at Oldwick and come into Hammond weekends, drinking, getting into fights in the east end, riding their big HarleyDavidsons up and down the hilly streets...

of course the Hammond police know these troublemakers well, and Furlong is grim and brisk and absorbed, nodding as the girl speaks. "I didn't know him and I don't know anyone in the family, it's just something I heard... he threw a rock at a motorcycle and almost caused an accident and ran off but they found out who he was and came back looking for him," she says. Her voice is shy and halting and comes to a stop altogether. Furlong asks when did this happen and she shakes her head; she doesn't know.

"I... I'd be happy if you didn't tell anyone I was the one who told you this," she says.

Right," says Furlong. "What's your name, miss?"

"Iris."

"Iris what?"

"Courtney."

"You related to Duke Courtney, maybe? Persia?"

"They're... my parents.

At this, Furlong smiles. Deep and wide. A smile so quick, like sun piercing cloud, you feel the force of being that engenders itabsence palpable as any presence.