"Howard Waldrop - The Ugly Chickens" - читать интересную книгу автора (Waldrop Howard)

In some places the fenceposts were missing for a few meters. The wire
lay on the ground and in some places disappeared under it for long
stretches.

The only life I saw was a mockingbird raising hell with something
under a thorn bush the barbed wire had been nailed to in place of a
post. To one side now was a grassy field which had gone wild, the way
everywhere will look after we blow ourselves off the face of the planet.
The other was fast becoming woods-pine, oak, some black gum and
wild plum, fruit not out this time of the year.

I began to ask myself what I was doing here. What if Ms. Jimson were
some imaginative old crank who-but no. Wrong, maybe, but even the
wrong was worth checking. But I knew she hadn't lied to me. She had
seem incapable of lies-good ol' girl, backbone of the South, of the
earth. Not a mendacious gland in her being.

I couldn't doubt her, or my judgment, either. Here I was, creeping and
bouncing down a dirt path in Mississippi, after no sleep for a day, out
on the thin ragged edge of a dream. I had to take it on faith.

The back of the car sometimes slid where the dirt had loosened and
gave way to sand. The back tire stuck once, but I rocked out of it.
Getting back out again would be another matter. Didn't anyone ever use
this road?

The woods closed in on both sides like the forest primeval, and the
fence had long since disappeared. My odometer said six miles and it
had been twenty minutes since I'd turned off the highway. In the
rearview mirror, I saw beads of sweat and dirt in the wrinkles of my
neck. A fine patina of dust covered everything inside the car. Clots of it
came through the windows.

The woods reached out and swallowed the road. Branches scraped
against the windows and the top. It was like falling down a long dark

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leafy tunnel. It was dark and green in there. I fought back an atavistic
urge to turn on the headlights. The roadbed must have been made of a
few centuries of leaf mulch. I kept constant pressure on the accelerator
and bulled my way through.

Half a log caught and banged and clanged against the car bottom. I saw
light ahead. Fearing for the oil pan, I punched the pedal and sped out.

I almost ran through a house.