"Bruce Holland Rogers - Thirteen Ways to Water" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rogers Bruce Holland)

once. The doctors can't do anything for him. The headaches come right
back, and he hates me for doing that, for handing him over like that as if
he'd done something."
"What headaches?"
She tells him, then, about the cluster headaches, a dozen attacks some
days that make Bull Wilson stalk the floor, wail, beat his fists against his
head or his head against the wall. Like fire in his head, like a blade in his
skull boring in, digging and scraping.
Like guilt.
No, not guilt. Bull Wilson would never feel guilty.
Jack says, "Why me?"
"He talks about the war. Not to me. But to menтАФhis friends or even
strangers who find him there by the river. He tells his war stories. And you
were there."
 "A lot of men in town were there."
"But youтАж I just have this feeling about you. About the kind of person
you are. Bull's friends can't help him. They don't know what to do."
"And I will?"
She looks at him long and hard. "Maybe."
Jack nods then. He wonders if she knows what he did in the war, if she
knows that she is asking him to do it again, thirty years later. Although
this won't be the same. This will be altogether different, if he can do it at
all.
He says, "I'll try."



3. Under the Cottonwoods

He finds Bull Wilson just where Diane says he'll be, crouched among the
blackberry brambles along the riverbank, in the shade of black
cottonwoods.
Bull still wears his tie, hasn't even loosened it, but three nights of
sleeping beside the Willamette have left mud stains on his suit. His hair is
a mess. Bull's eyes are red. Veins show on his blistered nose.
Even so, when Jack makes his way through the poison oak, Bull meets
him with a blue gaze so steady that Jack thinks for a moment that this will
be easy, that he'll just say, as if they were old friends, Come on, Bull. Let's
go home, and reclaim him.
But the gaze is more than steady. Bull stares. He stares beyond Jack. If
he knows who Jack is, he gives no sign.
A thin chain is wrapped around Bull's hand like a rosary. A fifty-caliber
shell dangles from the end.
"Hey, Bull," Jack says.
"Ghosts," Bull whispers. Then he says, "They won't leave me." He
pounds his forehead with his fist and shouts, "They won't fucking stop!"
He grimaces, keeps hitting himself.
Jack sits down, not too close, and watches the green churn of the
Willamette, waits for Bull's headache to pass. He waits for Bull to say the
next thing he will say.