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

way about it somehow: throwing tantrums, whining, run-
ning 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 overтАФand it almost
always happened, every nightтАФBilly 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 forc6shield, 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 pur-
pose. 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 . . .)

And then it thinned. He came to a stop, stuck against a
rock or a drift. A dead, sourceless light played over vistas of