"Somtow Sucharitkul - The Fallen Country" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sucharitkul Somtom)

"What do you mean, you promised?"

"The Snow Dragon."

"Tell me about him."

"I knew it!" he cried. Now he was exultant, taunting. I
wasn't prepared for the change in mood; I started most
unprofessionally. "You're supposed to be trying to help
me or something, but all you want to do is listen to me lie!"

Shirting gears to accommodate his outburst "Is that
why he hits you?"
"Yes! Yes! But I won't stop!"

"It's all right," I said. "You can He if you want You can
tell all the lies you want in this room. Nothing will ever
escape from here . . ."

"Like a confessional? Like a black hole?"
"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. Strad-
dling 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 1 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