"Oates, Joyce Carol - Broke Heart Blues" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oates Joyce Carol)

it matter that John Reddy Heart had killed a man, and a stark-naked man at that, discharging a. 45-caliber bullet into his brain in an instant of passion never to be reversed, erased, or even comprehended? Did it matter that Heart was condemned and feared by our elders, most of all our appalled fathers? Did it matter that though adoring him we were terrified of him? That his touch would have paralyzed us? There seemed nothing to prevent from rushing up the dim-lit stairs of that shabby building on Water Street to pound on John Reddy's door crying

"Killer-Boy! Killer-Boy! Let us in! Help us!" How decent sane good-girl behavior was the thinnest of that might be ripped in an instant the way, in the hope of minimizing pain, you tear a bandage off a small wound you believe has healed.

Next morning and all the mornings to follow for years! the tale told, retold! at our high school with its redbrick opulence and Doric columns that was our unacknowledged church in those heated adolescent years, over the lines connecting individuals as in a massive X ray of a single brain's circuits every household of significance in and surrounding the sacred Village of Willowsville. And through the Village--on the streets, the sidewalks we'd memorized from early childhood. In Nico's, in the Crystal, in Greek Gardens, in the Haven, in La Casa di Napoli Pizzeria 6 Restaurant, at the lunch counter at Muller's Drugs, in the mirrored foyer of the Glen Theatre.

Breathless the tale of that night John Reddy Heart opened his door to those unnamed girls of the Circle who'd come to him in secret. Their pale flowerlike faces, their fevered eyes. Taking these girls one by one by their chill trembling hands and leading them into his bedroom. Laughing at their fearfulness.

shyness. Their luminous-beautiful young-girl bodies stripped of the disguise of their clothes.

John Reddy Heart making love to each of the girls in turn. And than once, in turn. The sexiest boy. The sweetest boy. And the most gentle, because so practiced. Six girls, or seven. In some accounts eight. Ten!

dozen! John Reddy would've been equal to the challenge. John Reddy would've grinned Sure, why not? Kissing the girls each in turn, and at that she was the sole girl of all the world. And afterward he'd keep quiet it. That wild night on Water Street! John Reddy Heart wasn't the type of to boast about girls he made out with, ever. Or women. Not the type to arsthing--if you were John Reddy, what need? You'd trust John your virginity. With your reputation. With your life. A keeper sacred secrets, John Reddy Heart.

It wasn't like that.

Instead, we lost courage.

A cold drizzle was perceived to be falling, blown slantwise by an unfriendly wind. Overhead the bone-bright moon that had to our madness was being blown away like crumpled trash. On Water Street a car's headlights blinded us approaching and passing and we hid our heated in terror of being recognized. Except for Verrie who, in a trance, was rummaging through a filth-stained green plastic garbage can at curb. We whispered, "Verrie, what are you doing? Verrie!" Verrie Myers schoolwide fame the previous spring playing Shakespeare's Portia.

Her presence on stage, unnaturally highlighted, had riveted us all. That moonshaped face like a cameo we hadn't realized was beauty until then.

The way in which, assured, dreamlike, she'd delivered her lines. Who if Veronica Myers could act, and who cared? In awe we'd stared stared. Mr..

Lepage, our sexy drama teacher who devastated us with his witty sarcasm, stared at her in awe. There was Verrie Myers who was our friend, girl like the rest of us since kindergarten at the Academy Street School but up on stage she was transformed, a girl we hardly recognized. Now on Street, shivering beneath John Reddy's window, we stared in at Verrie dipping her hands into trash and sloppily bagged garbage.

was a strong smel of coffee grounds, a stink of rancid meat. Yet Verrie didn't hesitate, plunged to the elbows. Her pink-pearlescent manicured nails! the opal keepsake ring on her right hand her boyfriend since ninth grade Kenny Fischer had given her! The silver I. D. bracelet on her left identical to the bracelets all the girls of the Circle, and other girls in emulation of us, owned. Verrie cried, "I got it! Here!" What had she snatched up? --we pulled her to the car, idling all this while at the curb, to escape.

There were customers at the North China eyeing us curiously. What someone knew us? And cars were passing in the street. John Reddy hear the commotion and look out his window and possibly recognize Myers's yellow convertible. ) Verrie shifted the car into gear violently and drove us away, to safety we thought, we prayed. Swerving on wetted pavement. She was driving too fast for these narrow roads, we could scarcely recognize our surroundings-Beechwood? The bottom of Mill Street? Chalmers?

Taking the back way home, the long way home, careful to avoid Main Street, crossing Glen Creek over a sturdy metal bridge at Garrison, and now past darkened, Tug Hill Park and Battlefield from which all visitors were officially banned at sunset--" The Bloodiest Single-Skirmish Battle of the Revolution, August 2, 1777." What spiritual influence this bloody battle of nearly two before exerted upon our Willowsville generation was never made clear to us, what agitated ripples in consciousness across the decades, what dreams of reckless and even self-destructive heroism, what visionary hunger to locate in the world the origin of our most vivid and powerful dreams.

if the search is futile--even if! The mysterious lightweight object had discovered in the garbage can was being passed among us with excitement, shyness, some initial skepticism and even repugnance.

As Verrie whispered, thrillingly, "His mouth touched this. His actual mouth." Not years after this luminous night there would float across how many hundreds, thousands of movie screens in America the gigantic so-beautiful face of Myers in her film debut and we who gazed upon it with anxious would recall this moment, the demented drama of this moment, Verrie's whispered words which several times she repeated as if in the presence of the deaf--"His mouth. John Reddy Heart's actual mouth." Ginger McCord whispered back, frightened, "Verrie, you're crazy." Was Verrie performing, merely? Or is performing our truest human nature? Less certainly, Louise Schultz whispered, "You're all crazy." Yet by degrees the was sinking in. Even as Verrie's car sped homeward, away from the lower village. Of course. Of course! One of us, it may have been Trish Elders, the least likely among us, touched the can's opening, the mouthlike aperture, with a reverent finger, as we stared, she brought her lips to it, shyly. God! -we felt the visceral charge deep in the pit of Trish's belly. Her soft lips, the sharp-eyed aperture! And in that instant we saw John Reddy carelessly yanking off the pull top, in that quick brisk matter-of-fact way in which boys yanked off pull tops, so very different from the more cautious, timid (for what if the liquid inside fizzes up, spills) way in which girls yanked off pull tops, how many times we'd surreptitiously witnessed such an act, Reddy out back in the school parking lot, at noon, the yanking-off of a pull top, the tossing away, the lifting to the mouth, to drink.

Verrie's can, which was slightly dented, there was a pungently, sweetly smell, if you shook the can gently you could hear a remote, liquidy sound, roaring like the sound of a seashell pressed against the ear. An empty Coke can, towssed away amid smelly trash. "His mouth. His actual mouth!" We began to laugh, to hyperventilate. We were choked, scandalized, incredulous.

"John Reddy Heart's actual mouth touched this." The Coke can would be Verrie Myers's to cherish, forever. She was one of us to have snatched it from oblivion.

John Reddy came out of the west, John Reddy came out of the west.

John Reddy came to us out of the west.

John Reddy, John Reddy Heart.

Does God play dice with the universe? We knew better.

Not because we were rich men's sons. Anyway, not all of us.