"S. P. Somtow - The Fallen Country" - читать интересную книгу автора (Somtow S. P)

"Yes." Imaginative imagery, at least. This kid was no dummy. "Like a black hole." He looked me in
the eye for the first time. His eyes were clear as glass; I could read no deceit in them.
"Good," he said firmly. I waited. I think he had begun to trust me.

"So what were you really doing, then, up there. Straddling the steeple, I mean."

"Rescuing a princess."

That's how he started telling me the stories. The stories! They would have been the envy of any
clinical psychiatrist with a pet theory and a deadline and a paper to be churned out in a fury. To me
they were only stories. Of course I did
not believe them; but my job was to listen, not to judge.

Billy had been adopted by one set of parents after another. He couldn't remember the first few.
After the divorcees had played musical chairs for a while he had settled with the third or fourth
mother, Joan, and they'd moved to our town, a spiderweb of brash fast food places that circled the
Eighteenth Century Spanish church that was the town's one attraction. Billy shed pasts like a snake
sloughing its skin or a duck shaking off canal water. The only thing he kept was the name, Billy
Binder. He'd always been adamant about his name. He'd always gotten his way about it somehow:
throwing tantrums, whining, running away. It was the only part of him he'd ever kept successfully.
Days his mother typed accounts in a doctor's office; nights she went to school, dreaming vaguely of
a softer future. As I grew to know Billy I would go over and meet her sometimes at the doctor's. She
was a dark-haired, tired, cowering, rake-thin woman; I never got much of a feel for her. And
somehow I never met Pete. I never went to their house, except once, at the end of my association
with Billy; and I shall never return there.

Pete came on a motorcycle and took over their lives. He and Billy exchanged a single glance and
understood each other to the core: enemy. But Pete was the stronger, physically anyway. He
wielded his leather belt like a lion tamer in a circus. Nights, after it was over тАФ and it almost
always happened, every night тАФ Billy went to his closet of a room and lay down choked with anger.
He never tried to disguise his weals. He flaunted them in school, never offering any explanation for
them. And no one dared ask him for one. They saw him shrouded in anger as in a burning
forceshield, and they were afraid to touch his loneliness.

A night came when the anger burst at last. It was long past midnight and the pain had died down a
little. Billy got out of bed, wriggled into some old cutoffs, pulled on a teeshirt, wincing as it raked
against new welts. He tiptoed out of the house. He found his old bike leaning against the front
door, and then he hiked like a maniac into the burning night. He did not know what drove him. A
quick twisty path rounded some shadowy palms and crossed an empty highway and skirted the
beach for some miles. It was a night without stars, the heat wringing moisture from the blackness.
At first he heard the sea, but the surf-shatter faded quickly. In the distance rose a wall of luxury
hotels, distant giants tombstones. In a while he made a left turn into the town. He was not hiking
with any particular purpose. It began to snow.

He didn't take it in at first. His anger was everything. But it didn't stop. Fragments of cold were
pelting his face, and then great sheets of white, but Billy had never seen snow before, and he was
too busy being angry to realize that this was a blizzard....

(IтАЩll kill him! he was thinking, forcing the pedals against the ever-piling snow ...)