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

why they would even want to make such a detour for the privilege of
driving up a tree-lined street for all of three blocks, before turning
around and heading back to the interstate. Such towns were pretty,
green graves, they knew, and so the impulse to take a second look died
unarticulated and the cars flew by the North Bath exit without slowing
down.

Perhaps they were wise, for what attracted them most about the
three-block stretch of Upper Main, the long arch of giant elms, was
largely a deceit, as those who lived beneath them could testify. For a
long time the trees had been the pride of the neighborhood, having
miraculously escaped the blight of Dutch elm disease. Only recently,
without warning, the elms had turned sinister.

The winter of 1979 brought a terrible ice storm, and the following
summer the leaves on almost half of the elms strangled on their
branches, turning sickly yellow and falling during the dog days of
August instead of mid-October.

Experts were summoned, and they arrived in three separate vans, each of
which sported a happy tree logo, and the young men who climbed out of
these vans wore white coats, as if they imagined themselves doctors.

They sauntered in circles around each tree, picked at its bark, tapped
its trunk with hammers as if the trees were suspected of harboring
secret chambers, picked up swatches of decomposing leaves from the
gutters and held them up to the fading afternoon light. One
white-coated man drilled a hole into the elm on Beryl Peoples' front
terrace, stuck his gloved index finger into the tree, then tasted,
making a face. Mrs. Peoples, a retired eighth-grade teacher who had
been watching the man from behind the blinds other front room since the
vans arrived, snorted.

"What did he expect it to taste like?" she said out loud.

"Strawberry shortcake?"

Beryl Peoples, "Miss Beryl" as she was known to nearly everyone in
North Bath, had been living alone long enough to have grown accustomed

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to the sound of her own voice and did not always distinguish between
the voice she heard in her ears when she spoke and the one she heard in
her mind when she thought. It was the same person, to her way of
thinking, and she was no more embarrassed to talk to herself than she
was to think to herself. She was pretty sure she couldn't stifle one
voice without stifling the other, something she had no intention of
doing while she still had so much to say, even if she was the only one