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

From this, the girl backs off.

Furlong longs to ask her more questions but decides against it, she looks so frightened. He calls after her, "Tell your father and mother Eddy Furlong says hello, will you?" and she nods yes, she will.

He stands, hands on his hips, right hand resting lightly on the polished wooden grip of his pistol, and watches the girl hurry away to catch up with her friends. If they are her friends. As she climbs to the road she stumbles... or maybe she's overcome with a sudden spell of faint-headedness... but she recovers almost at once and keeps on. And doesn't look back.

By late morning the waterfront area at the foot of Pitt Street is deserted. Police have cordoned off a thirty-foot stretch of shore: DO NOT CROsS. I"t ORDER OF HAMMOND POLICE DEPT.

There are scattered fishermen on the far side of the river, most of them Negroes, sitting on their customary rocks, girders, slabs of concrete. But none on this side, within the range of all that's visible from the foot of Pitt Street.

The wide-winged gulls have returned, circling in the gusty air, dipping, dropping, picking in the debris, emitting their highpitched bugle cries. Out in the ship channel a barge with the smudged white letters UNION PACIFIC ORE moves slowly from east to west. The morning shifts to midday, and the ridge-rippled sky turns opaque, the color of lard. Against the pilings and the crumbling abutment and the ravaged shore the waves slap, slap, slap...

like the pulse of a dream that belongs to no one, no consciousness, thus can never yield its secrets.

Please, miss? Ma'am, help me."

Persia Courtney hasn't seen the woman cowering in the drugstore doorway at the corner of East Avenue and Holland until with no warning the woman steps out blindly into her path and there's the shock of a collision. And Persia is the one to cry, "Oh-I'm sorry!" and the one to feel, in her confusion, a moment's teethjarring pain.

But the woman hardly notices. She has her fingers closed tight around Persia's wrist. A hand like a chicken claw, or that's the way it feels; Persia stares and sees it's a normal hand, or nearly: a thin film of dirt, a scattering of scabs and sores, but a worn-smooth gold wedding band on the proper finger and bright crimson nail polish just beginning to chip. The woman's hair is stiff broom sage and she is wearing a soiled cotton housedress. "Please, miss, don't scorn me please help me," she begs. Her voice is a low hoarse scraping sound like steel wool scouring a pan, but Persia can recognize the accent: hillbilly.

It is Vernon Garlock's wife. Persia can't think of her name for a moment, then remembers: Vesta. "Vesta Garlock?"

"There's one of them following me, miss. I can't get home."

"What?"

'A nigra. Following me. I can't get home."

'A what?"

"Nigra."

The word is an exasperated half scream in Persia's ear.

Vesta Garlock is in her mid or late thirties so far as Persia knows, but the poor woman looks twenty years older. Her skin is tallow-colored, bruised and blotched. There's a fang-sized gap where one of her front teeth is missing from a blow as neighborhood rumor has it, of her hot-tempered husband's. And her eyes.

Those eyes. Wild as a horse's eyes that's snorting and pawing in his stall so that the groom is obliged to bring out the blindfold. I was scared to look into those eyes! Persia will say.

The woman is pleading, whining. "You're so beautiful, miss you go first. Please. You walk with me, huh? Then they won't pay no attention to me. Won't go after me, then."

"I don't see any 'nigra' that's following you," Persia says, looking up and down the street. "Maybe you're imagining things."

"Ma'am, just don't leave me!"

"I see some Negroes... who are not looking at us. I see that brown-skinned lady up ahead, with the baby stroller... she surely isn't looking at us." Persia speaks sharply, impatiently; she isn't the kind of person to suffer fools gladly. Nor is she the kind of person who feels much sympathy for crazy folk like Vernon Garlock's wife, whose people shouldn't let her wander around loose; Persia thinks maybe these crazy folk bring it all on themselves, their hard luck, even the way they look, blotched skin and missing teeth.

She'd walk oif, polite but stiif, but the woman's damp wild eyes are showing a rim of white above the iris, and she's gripping Persia's arm.

"Please, ma'am, for Jesus' sake, then don't leave me to the nigras."