"Chad Oliver - Shadows in the Sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oliver Chad)

the river was Piedras Negras, in Mexico. Everything seemed perfectly ordinary. Indeed, Jefferson Springs
could hardly have been a more average town if it had tried.
On the surface, there was no cause for alarm.
 He finished his beer, and it was as hot and sticky as the rest of the cafe. He briefly considered ordering
another one, but abandoned the idea. Instead, with great deliberation, he dug his pipe out of his back pocket,
where he carried it like a .45, and filled it with tobacco from a cloudy plastic pouch. He lit it with a wood
stick match, broke the match, and dropped it artistically into the beer bottle. Then he aimed a wobbly smoke
ring in the general direction of Judge Roy Bean and watched it battle the current from the air-conditioner.
"The hell with all of you," he said, silently but inclusively.
He was the only customer in the Jefferson Springs Cafe. He had been the only customer, so far as he
could tell, for the past sixty-one days. Cozy.
The first week he had been in Jefferson Springs he had played the jukebox religiously. It had seemed like
sound field technique, and it had helped to fill up the emptiness with a semblance of life. As he was
somewhat selective in his choice of popular music, however, this hadn't proved precisely a sedative to his
nerves. The jukebox in the cafe was typical of those in small Texas towns. There were a number of nasal
cowboy standards, including When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again and San Antonio Rose. There
were several old Bing Crosby records: White Christmas and Don't Fence Me In. There were a number of
year-old blues sides, featuring honking one-note saxes and leering pseudo-sexual lyrics leading up to
inevitable anticlimaxes. There was a haphazard collection of middle-aged hit-parade agonies, notably
Doggie in the Window and Till I Waltz Again With You. And finally, slipped in by mistake, there was an
old Benny Goodman Sextet number, Rose Room. He played that ten times during the first week, and then
gave up.
In a way he could not quite understand, the record had violated an unseen pattern. It was not a simple
and obvious case of the record's being out of place in Jefferson Springs; rather, it was the fact that music
was being played at all, any music. The pattern was a subtle one, but he had been trained to be sensitive to
just such cultural harmonies and configurations.
Paul Ellery had often remarked elsewhere that he would just as soon eat his food without the collective
sobbings of the music industry in the background, to say nothing of an endless babble of human voices
earnestly reciting the current cliches. Now that he found himself faced with total silence, however, he found
the experience unexpectedly unpleasant. The silence cut him off, isolated him. It put him in the middle of a
bright stage, without a script or an orchestra, alone, with the curtain going up.
He sat for what seemed to him to be a long time, smoking his pipe. Somehow, only fifteen slow minutes
crawled by on the greasy electric clock above the doorway. The doorway led to a small alcove, which
faced both the kitchen and the dark, deserted beer bar. He listened closely, but could hear nothing. The
other door led outside, into the town.
He was afraid to go out.
He shoved back his chair and got to his feet, annoyed with himself. He told himself that there was
nothing to fear. He remembered a time many years before, when he was just a kid. He had gone to a
midnight show with another boy to see Son of Frankenstein. Then he had had to walk home, through the
city of Austin. He and the other boy had walked all the way back to back, one walking frontward and the
other backward, in order to keep an eye peeled in both directions at once. It wasn't that they believed in
such things, of course, it wasn't that they were afraid
You know.
It was that way now. What was he afraid of? No one had tried to harm him in Jefferson Springs. After
all, it was just a little Texas town, just like a thousand others drowsing on the highway or tucked away on a
back road, wasn't it? Wasn't it?
He left a dollar bill and two quarters on the damp table and walked out of the cafe. After the gloomy
humidity of the dining room, the dry heat outside was a tonic. It wasn't cool yet by a long shot, and the
sidewalk was still warm under his feet, but the burning sun had gone down. There was even the ghost of a
breeze rustling in from the desert and trying to work its way down the street.