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

was a reason that John Reddy Heart came to live in Willowsville, couldn't have been just accident. Every guy in Willowsville of a certain age, twelve through twenty, and many unacknowledged others besides, liked it that John Reddy Heart who was our classmate had killed a man, an actual man, an actual adult man like our fathers (except you could argue, like Hewson, that Melvin Riggs was more like our fathers than any of truly were), but we didn't like it that he was caught. Tracked by bloodhounds in the Adirondacks when we'd come to believe he'd escaped to Canada, we'd wanted to believe he'd escaped to Canada. Beaten by York State troopers and hauled off in handcuffs like a captured wild animal.

And that picture of John Reddy in the papers--his face bloodied, swollen shut but there he was standing straight between cops with his head high, defiant, unshaven and battered but that cool Fuck you look his face we loved and tried to emulate without much success. Arrested, stand trial and winding up in this crummy place in the Niagara River, Tomahawk Island Youth Camp. "The first boy ever from the Village of Willowsville to be incarcerated at any state youth facility." It hurt us that John Reddy disappeared from our school for a year and a half. So many months! This kid that, as a sophomore, already his basketball and track letters. He'd come close to breaking the dating back to 1941, for points scored in a single season in basketball, and would've broken it his junior year if he hadn't killed Mr..

Riggs instead.

If he'd kept on scoring the way he was, through senior year, as expected, John Reddy would've had his pick of basketball scholarships to Syracuse, Cornell, Ohio State, Indiana. We just knew.

"It's a tragic fate. Like a Greek goddam tragedy like--Sophocles, Homer.

My heart is broken for that boy." This was the statement our coach McKeever made every time he was asked about John Reddy, and he was asked about John Reddy a lot.

We felt the same way, mostly. Guys at WHS who were John Reddy's classmates, or a little older or younger than he was. Not that we went around saving so. My heart is broken. Hell, no.

Still, our hearts were broken. It was like a death. Such tragic goddam bad luck, like Coach said.

The girls. The girls were all crazy for John Reddy, it got sort embarrassing sometimes. Not that we were jealous. Maybe we were jealous, a few of us, like Ken Rscher who'd been crazy for Verrie Myers since kindergarten, like Dougie Siefried who'd had a crush on all the girls of the Circle, especially Ginger McCord and Shelby Connor, like Art Lutz who'd had a on Mary Louise Schultz since seventh grade and confessed of dreaming of her, every goddam night of his life--"And she doesn't know I exist!

doesn't care." Dwayne Hewson who was Pattianne Groves's steady understood that, deep in her "secret girl heart, that I or nobody is gonna penetrate," Pattianne Groves was in love with John Reddy Heart, and so Millie Leroux, and little Trish Elders. And others. How many others! We were jealous but we could comprehend the logic. Like the song said, Reddy came out of the West, and not one of us would've remained if we could have changed into John Reddy Heart so how in all could we blame our girl classmates.7--"They're only human, too. Still, we didn't talk about it like the girls did--the arrest, detention, the trials and the Tomahawk Island incarceration. We brooded.

our wives, these strange, somehow accidental females we'd end up marrying, having kids with, would accuse us of "refusing to share"--"refusing to communicate"--"bottling up everything inside"--"passive-aggressive manipulation"--and we'd protest, Jesus Christ what do you want me to say? what do you want me to say? but deep inside we'd understand, yes was so.

Some of us would remain married--like Bert Fox said (though maybe wasn't a good example, he'd finally kill himself), it was like taking a deep breath and diving back down into the very water you'd almost drowned in because what the hell else are you going to do? where the hel else are you going to go? and some of us, the more reckless, the more desperate, more luckless, and a few "problem drinkers," bankrupts and crazed adulterers would get divorced, not invariably of our own volition, we'd never become hysterical, never displayed our emotions in public like girls do, or did back in Willowsville in the time of John Reddy Heart, wearing red sequin hearts on their sleeves, for instance, or scattered in their hair, during John Reddy's trials. And bursting into tears when nobody expected it.

distanced ourselves from such behavior, knowing that John Reddy, never a guy to complain (say he'd pulled a muscle running track or got hit hard in the ribs on the basketball court, or even fouled to the groin--you'd see his face go white, and beads of sweat pop out, but that was all), would've been embarrassed as hell by such excess. Eyes averted, with a little frown he'd ignore the special cheers for him the varsity cheerleaders had worked up-,?

"S John Reddy we're ready!

John Reddy we're rea-dy Mmmmm JOHN REDDY WE'RE REA-DDYY YAYYYY!

And the crowd in the gym went wild cheering, clapping, whistling, their feet till the floor rocked, the overhead lights vibrated.

Dougie Siefried sighed and laughed sadly, saying in some dreams of his such a aimed at him, and his heart bathe in a feeling of such happiness he knew it was heaven, or as close to heaven as he'd be likely to get, but John Reddy scowled and wiped his face on his jersey in that way he had, like he didn't care if hundreds of people were watching, or wasn't even aware.

"You don't play to the crowd. You play to the basket"--John Reddy once remarked to Dwayne Hewson.

So we liked it O. K. (even Artie Riggs, a nephew of the murdered man, thought it was "kind of cool") what John Reddy'd done, though we better than to say so publicly. But the way John Reddy's life was permanently screwed up afterward--that was something else, that made us think.

That scared us. Like Mr.. Cuthbert our social studies teacher said, at the front of the classroom, pacing excitedly about, his owl and bright behind his glasses--"Students! Consider! How the your lives have been rushing toward you without your comprehension, the Niagara River rushing above the falls, and you can't see the falls, and you make a split-second decision, behaving in a way we might designate as X"-and here Mr.. Cuthbert chalked a swooping X on the blackboard, as if couldn't follow his reasoning otherwise--"and just possibly X is no more and no less than you've been genetically programmed by millennia of and by the fact that you're Texas-born and reared in the West and conditioned by your familial and cultural environment to be and impetuous and prone to acting spontaneously with your fists or whatever's at hand--so in that fatal split second you take up a gun you aren't even certain is loaded, drop to one knee as John Reddy Heart allegedly did and fire off a shot into your oppo, nent's head--into his brain--and both of you pierced by that bullet. Your life forever afterward is changed." Mr.. Cuthbert had a point. A profound point. You do X, your life's X. So changed, you could say it isn't your life any longer.

The first person in all of Willowsville to set eyes on John Reddy was--Ketch Campbell.

The sighting occurred right on Main Street, near Willow, at the heart of our four-block downtown as it's called. Thirty years later, Willowsville's downtown will have spread as far as Haggarty Road to the east and Burlingham Avenue to the west--with a shopping plaza set back on Street, and a medical center on Garrison--but when the Heart family arrived downtown was those four blocks you could stroll in less than ten minutes or ride your bikexrough in three minutes. A succession of glittering stores and storefronts memorized as in a recurring dream of such comfort and assurance it seems not a dream at all but an inviolable and solid as a substratum of granite. Ketch would claim it was precisely 4,08 P. M. by the tower clock at the Metropolitan Life Building. The day was warmmuggy like the inside of, say, a Coke bottle. No air stirring. A July afternoon when John Reddy Heart first appeared in Willowsville, and a half years before he would shoot Melvin Riggs, Jr. , down in an upstairs bedroom in an old Dutch Colonial house in the most neighborhood of Willowsville, less than two miles from Main Street at Willow. Ketch was downtown (with his mom who was taking him to Brown's for new sneakers--but this never figures in the story) when he happened to notice "this weird, wild, bright-salmon-colored pulling a U-Haul trailer with Nevada license plates" moving a little too fast, sort of impatiently, weaving out of the ten-mile-per-hour lady-shopper traffic on Main Street. "You could tell immediately," Ketch said, "before you saw the skinny underage kid who was driving, or noticed the plates, that these were folks from somewhere else. Somewhere far else." Ketch who'd been one of those nervous twitchy fattish kids always running and puffing trying to keep up with the rest of the guys. He'd learned to tell this story in the right way, like every factor in the equation, including of course eleven-yearold Ketch Campbell (he'd never mention his age if he could help it), had to be what it was, absolute and fixed. He'd speak excitedly sometimes, couldn't interrupt but had to let him tell it start to finish. And each time the story got a little longer, more like a movie.

The Caddie was a Bel Air possibly five years old. Painted a Day-Glo pinkishorange, a misconceived repaint job that made your eyes pinch but couldn't look away. (Others on Main Street, including Ketch's mom, must've been staring, too. Willowsville's that kind of place, to intruders, invaders. ) This Caddie, amid the boring beige, buff, matte gray, blackgreen, black-blue, classy black-black of the other cars on Main Street on this typical summer afternoon. Also, the front and rear bumpers of the were stippled with rust. The car was low-slung, dragging its muffler and listing just perceptibly to one side. There was a long wicked dent like a lightmng zlgzag running the full length of the car's left side and the left rear door out of whose rolled-down window a fierce old white-haired and man in a cowboy hat was gazing in Ketch's direction) appeared to be shut. "Yet, Jesus! The car was beautiful." And there was John Reddy Heart behind the wheel. His name unknown.

John Reddy, only eleven years old! Seated on three Las Vegas directones so he could peer over the steering wheel and along the shinyglaring hood of the car. Ketch had to admit he'd never have that the boy driving the Caddie was so young--his own age--later he'd figure, we'd all figure, that, out West, kids grow up faster, with more than those of us in the East--but it was obvious the boy was too young to be Unless he was a midget or a dwarf, and he didn't appear to be either. Ketch said, "He looked maybe thirteen. Kind of olivish-dark. Not foreign-looking exactly--well, possibly a little Indian--I mean, American Indian--I they aren't foreign, but--you know what I mean. Anyway this kid's of--strange. Exotic you might say. Did I mention the sideburns?

Like Elvis.