"Paul Park - A Man on Crutches" - читать интересную книгу автора (Park Paul)

A Man on Crutches
by Paul Park

I had been to Los Angeles before and hated it. Whenever I had gone to visit, I had
been irritated by the sweat-stained dinginess of the place, its perpetual five-oтАЩclock
shadow. I had been irritated by the lack of seasons. But two years ago when I flew
out for my fatherтАЩs funeral, I thought something was different as soon as I got off
the plane. I rolled down the window in the taxi and the air was cold and sharp. I
could see the mountains. I could smell the salt. It was Saturday morning. A woman
on Wiltshire Boulevard seemed amazingly good looking, amazingly well dressed.
I have a condition which recurs every few years, and youтАЩd think IтАЩd learn to
recognize the signs. Instead IтАЩm always taken by surprise. The problem is the
condition starts with a feeling of optimism and hope, so I donтАЩt mind. That morning
in the cab, I was in a good mood. I was in a mood to be forgiving, to consider for
the first time that my father might have been looking for something when he moved
out here. Always I had thought about him running away, pushed instead of pulled.
People had always said there was more work for him out here. but when I was a
child, тАЬmore workтАЭ seemed like a bad reason to do anything. A bad reason to leave
my mother and the house that he had built. A bad reason to move a continent away
and live in a polluted city where the weather never changed. I was ten years old when
he left, and I believe I had no conscious resentment. Already by that time he was a
stranger. I barely remember him living with us, and itтАЩs not because my memory is
bad. Later, I didnтАЩt miss what I had never known. My mother never spoke of him.
I checked into my hotel. I planned to spend one night, and then take a bus up
the Owens River the next morning. I was too poor to come out just for the
ceremony. so I had taken a few daysтАЩ vacation to go hiking. When I had spoken to
my stepmother on the phone. I had found myself asking her whether I could take
some of my fatherтАЩs ashes to bury up on Darwin Bench - a place of mystical
significance to me, I implied. She seemed delighted, started to cry in fact, which
embarrassed me. ItтАЩs just that having organized my vacation, I thought I had to make
it seem as if it were somehow part of the funeral, a cathartic and necessary
experience, perhaps. In order to get time off at short notice I told my supervisor the
same story, leaving her touched by the impression that my father and I had taken
many trips together up into the mountains.
My life is full of such falsehoods, which doesnтАЩt make them easier to bear. In
my hotel, I laid out my camping gear on the floor of my room. I replaced the
bushings on my stove, and then I washed my hands. I took out my funeral clothes
from the top compartment of my backpack - a gray wool suit. I put it on, knotted
my tie, and stood looking at myself in the mirror on the back of the bathroom door.
I looked good in my suit, a fragile version of my father. In it I exhibited the only gift
my father ever gave me, though even that had come diluted through my mother. I
made faces in front of the mirror and rearranged my hair; always when I had come
out to visit my father I had taken trouble with my looks, suspecting in some obscure
way that this would offer a reproach to him. That it would make him miss my
mother, and miss me. At home I didnтАЩt care. This suit was the only suit I owned,
which made wearing it a kind of ritual.
I washed my face and washed my hands again The air in my hotel room had
depressed me, but when I stepped out into the street I felt more optimistic, clean in
my uniform, mixing effortlessly with Californians on the sidewalk. I found myself in
a neighborhood where all the streets were named after Eastern colleges; my