"Whitley - Strieber - The Wild" - читать интересную книгу автора (Strieber Whitley)

The Wild
By Whitley Strieber
Part One
City Life
Life along the vertebrae of the earth,
brown and slow, concentrates in the cracks,
boiling down to harder forms,
skin to stone, finger to claw.
- Robert Duke, "Silent Transformation" (1987)

Chapter One
Cindy and Robert Duke were in the fifteenth year of a good marriage when something unusual
happened.

They had a twelve-year-old boy named Kevin Thomas for his paternal grandfather; they had an
apartment in New York City; Bob had sold stock, brokered insurance, sold bonds, was now a computer
consultant. He had never been much good at making money, but until now he had managed.

Argument was past, anger was past, the sweated skin of Cindy's girlhood was past, and they were really
learning one another, growing close in ways so deep that they spent a lot of time infected with secret
laughter.

Cindy was heavier than she had been when they used to traverse Manhattan on roller skates, two
cheerful Village types, a young poet and his wife. The need for money had ended those days; Bob was a
poet now at night only.

Recently Cindy had made a private decision that she would allow herself to widen out a little, to find in
the long curves of a bigger body a comfort she had suspected but never dared try.

Bob liked scallops and steak, he liked game and on occasion hunted grouse in the Catskills, where they
were members of a hunt club. Cindy cooked the game intricately, her recipes running to Italy and garlic,
and much invented, all good, the birds properly brown, the skin crisp and salty, the flesh tender and
sweet, and her quail were delicious in steaming piles. They both liked to dig into homemade ice cream
with the ice-cream paddle in the middle of the night. Young Kevin had read all of Jack London and Mark
Twain. Recently he had turnedтАФor been drivenтАФto Kafka.

Kevin smelled often of oil paint and his art teacher fluttered when speaking about him. Cindy disliked the
man, but the school administration loved him. She was tortured with thoughts of kidnapping or more
subtle predation, the caress, the boy gladdened by the attention and then the hands against his naked
skin, and the parted cracks, the cries, the awful memories for her little son.

She was a heavy sleeper, and did not know how difficult it was for her husband at night. He would read,
he would lie looking at her, he would make a deer's soft whistle when the shadows from the street
trembled on the bedroom ceiling. Drawing down the sheets, he would see her golden body, and touch
the down on her thigh, and listen to her weighty breathing. He loved her, he understood that, to
distraction and to the exclusion of all others. Once he knew her, other women had come to seem
ciphers.

Now he sat beside her on a bench at the Central Park Zoo while Kevin sketched a tapir. Bob detested
zoos; Cindy and Kevin loved them. When he was much younger, Bob had spent time in the wilderness.