"Richard Paul Russo - Nobodys Fool" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russo Richard Paul)

" You hear me, star of my firmament " Miss Beryl prodded. When Clive
Sr. had nothing to offer on this score. Miss Beryl frowned at him. "
I might as well talk to Ed," she told her husband. " Go ahead, then,"
Clive Sr.

seemed to say, safe behind his glass.

"What do you think, Ed?" Miss Beryl asked.

"Is this my year?" Driver Ed, Miss Beryl's Zamble mask, stared down at
her from his perch on the wall. Ed had a dour human face modified by
antelope horns and a toothed beak, all of which added up, to Miss
Beryl's way of thinking, to a mortified expression. He looked. Miss
Beryl had insisted when she purchased Ed over twenty years ago, like
Clive Sr. had looked when he discovered he was going to be required to
teach driver education at the high school. Clive Sr.

had been the football coach, and his later years had not gone the way
he'd planned. First, when the football team had begun to lose, he'd
been required to teach civics, and when it continued to lose, he'd been
required to teach driver education. Eventually, football had been
dropped, a victim of declining postwar enrollments, demographic shifts,

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and continued humiliation at the hands of archrival Schuyler Springs,
leaving Miss Beryl's husband bewildered and adrift. Driver ed turned
out to be the death of him when a girl named Audrey Peach, without
warning or reason, braked Clive Sr. through the front windshield of a
brand-new driver ed car early one morning before he was entirely
awake.

Clive Sr. never wore a seat belt. He made sure his student drivers
and passengers wore them, but he himself disliked the sensation of
restraint.

The way Clive Sr. looked at it, once he got wedged into a compact car,
there was no place for him to go. A big man, he required a big car,
and he suspected that the little piece of shit driver ed car the school
board had purchased was a punishment for the losing seasons he was now
suffering in basketball, a sport he didn't even like. Once inside the
compact car, he felt so claustrophobic it was hard to concentrate on
his teaching. The low roof required him to hunch forward to see where
young Audrey Peach was pointed. When she hit the new brakes, the
little car stopped impressively, but Clive Sr. kept going, his
bullet-shaped skull punching right through the windshield, where he
lodged, briefly, like a sinner in the stocks, until the car rocked and
flung him back into his seat, neck broken, a bloody object lesson and
the only driver ed teacher in upstate New York ever to be killed in the