"Christopher Rowe - The Voluntary State" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rowe Christopher)

good order. I'm bonded by the city and the state. This is all at
taxpayers' expense."
****


Which was a very great relief to Soma, poor as he was.
With friends even poorer, none of them with cars, and so no
one to hail out of the Alley to his rescue, and now this long,
wet trudge back to the city.
Soma and his friends did not live uncomfortable lives, of
course. They had dry spaces to sleep above their studios,
warm or cool in response to the season and even clean if that
was the proclivity of the individual artist, as was the case with
Soma. A clean, warm or cool, dry space to sleep. A good
space to work and a more than ample opportunity to sell his
paintings and drawings, the Alley being one of the other
things the provincials did when they visited Nashville. Before
they went to the great vaulted Opera House or after.
All that and even a car, sure, freedom of the road. Even if
it wasn't so free because the car was not really his, gift of his
family, product of their ranch. Both of them, car and artist,
product of that ranching life Soma did his best to forget.
7
 The Voluntary State
by Christopher Rowe


If he'd been a little closer in time to that ranching youth,
his legs might not have ached so. He might not have been
quite so miserable to be lurching down the gravel road toward
the city, might have been sharp-eyed enough to still see a
city so lost in the fog, maybe sharp-eared enough to have
heard the low hoots and caws that his assailants used to
organize themselves before they sprang from all around
himтАФdown from tree branches, up from ditches, out from the
undergrowth.
And there was a Crow raiding party, the sight stunning
Soma motionless. "This only happens on television," he said.
The caves and hills these Kentuckians haunted unopposed
were a hundred miles and more north and east, across the
shifting skirmish line of a border. Kentuckians couldn't be
here, so far from the frontier stockades at Fort Clarksville and
Barren Green.
But here they definitely were, hopping and calling,
scratching the gravel with their clawed boots, blinking away
the rain when it trickled down behind their masks and into
their eyes.
A Crow clicked his tongue twice and suddenly Soma was
the center of much activity. Muddy hands forced his mouth
open and a paste that first stung then numbed was swabbed