"Severna Park--The Breadfruit Empire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Park Severna)

the stove instead of his voice, thinking that the way the fire sounded was like hot fists beating on black
iron.
There was another sound and he stopped talking. She listened. Engines. Big engines, like trucks
coming up the half-mile driveway. He went to the window and Lisa tried to see around him, hoping hard
for red and blue police lights.
Bob turned around. "Pack up everything you want, Leese."
He hurried out of her room and pounded down the stairs.
She got off the bed and squinted through the dirty glass. Downstairs, she heard a generator start.
Floodlights came on around the house, washing the snow in garish white. At the end of the driveway, a
Winnebago camper lumbered out if the dark without its headlights on, crawled through the yard and
stopped just under her window. A burly man in a parka climbed out and Bob ran over, saluting and
pumping his hand. Another engine rumbled in the trees. Another camper and then a pickup pulling a dull
silver Airstream trailer. People piled out, bundled in Army surplus, saluting and slapping each other on the
back. If there'd been a couple of barbecue grills and a case of beer, it would have been a tailgate party.
"Fuck," Lisa whispered.
He wasn't leaving by himself. He was going with friends.
She unlocked the window, sweating in the heat of the wood stove. The Winnebago was parked just
under the eaves. She could climb across the roof and drop onto it without any trouble. She hauled on the
window, knowing how it stuck in cold, wet weather, hoping Bob hadn't nailed the entire house shut. The
window scraped in its frame, resisted and finally groaned upwards, two inches, four. Snow blew in. The
people in their Army surplus headed for the front porch as Bob beckoned them inside and in a minute
there was just snow and Winnebagos and a huge dog barking from inside the Airstream. Lisa heaved as
hard as she could and shoved the window up in the sash. It slammed the top of the frame, loud as a
gunshot. She stood still, the heat of the stove at her back and the cold air blowing in her face, certain
everyone below had heard, but no one came out to look up.
She put a foot over the familiar sill and clambered sideways onto the roof on her hands and knees,
gloveless in five inches of snow. Without the oak branches the roof was a foreign territory and she had to
search for her old footholds in the copper gutters. Snow brushed the back of her neck in cold feathers as
she found the place where she could put her feet on either side of a downspout. She slid backwards,
digging her fingers around runnels of ice and frozen moss between slate shingles. Her knees slid into the
gutters and she edged over the side of the roof, balanced on her stomach until she snagged the
downspout between her ankles. The Winnebago was like a landing pad, much further away than she'd
thought. She inched down, her coat bunching at her waist, catching in the gutter. She hung by her elbows,
clamped her knees around the downspout and felt it shift under her weight. She let go with her knees,
scrambled for a better hold on the gutter and felt the copper bend. Soft, rotted wood under the eaves
gave way. Two stone shingles slid past her head and the gutter creaked. It broke away from the side of
the house in slow motion and for one suspended moment, Lisa wondered how fragile the top of a
Winnebago might be. The roof bent when she hit it. She lost her balance in the wet skim of snow and fell
again. Her left leg crunched through the top of the camper.
She grabbed her knee where she'd punched through the plastic roof. Light framed her leg from
underneath. Snow fell around her in huge heavy flakes. She tried to pull her leg free and felt the rest of the
roof give. Brittle plastic crumbled under her. Lisa yelped and fell another four feet onto the camper's
kitchen table. She held still, expecting someone to run out with a shotgun, but nothing happened. How
much noise had she made? What could Bob hear through three-quarter-inch plywood? Snow fell steadily
through the jagged opening above her and she could see a dozen metal patches in the ceiling, as though
someone had perforated the roof with bullets, just like Bob.
Lisa sat up. Her knee was bleeding through her jeans and her fingers were purple with cold. Outside
the dog in the Airstream barked on. Bob's generator floodlights shone through the hole in the roof and the
curtained windows with remarkable brilliance, illuminating the crates marked Breadfruit Especiale,
producto de Guatemala. Slatted wooden produce crates. They covered every square foot of floor