"Wilhelm,_Kate_-_The_Hounds(1)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilhelm Kate)
"Okay, Rose. Let's wait until afternoon. See if anyone answers our ad first."
No one called about them, and at one Martin tried to get them into the car. They refused to leave the porch. "I could carry them," he said, doubtfully. They weren't heavy, obviously. Anything as thin as they couldn't be heavy. But when he tried to lift one, it started to shiver, and it struggled and slipped through his arms. When he tried again, the dog growled, a hoarse sound of warning deep in its throat, not so much a threat as a plea not to make it follow through. Its gold eyes were soft and clear and very large. Martin stopped. "Now what?" he asked.
"I'll get them to the car," Rose said. She led the two dogs to the car and opened the door for them. They jumped inside. When she closed the door again, they pressed their noses against the window and looked at her. "See if they'll let you drive," she said.
They wouldn't let Martin get inside the car at all, not until Rose was behind the wheel, and then they paid no attention to him. "I'll drive," she said tightly. Her hands on the wheel were very stiff and the hard feeling in her stomach made it difficult to breathe. Martin nodded. He reached out and put his hand on her knee and squeezed it gently.
He was saying it was all right, but it wasn't, she thought, driving.
The kennel club was run by Colonel Owen Luce, who was a Kentucky colonel, and wanted the title used. "Proud of it, you know," he said genially. "Got mine the hard way, through service. Nowadays you can buy it, but not back when I got mine." He was forty, with blond wavy hair, tall, and too good looking not to know it. He posed and swaggered and preened, and reminded Rose of a peacock that had stolen bread from their picnic table at Sunken Gardens in Florida once.
"They're handsome dogs," Colonel Luce said, walking around the hounds. "Handsome. Deer hounds? No. Not with that silky hair. Hm. Don't tell me. Not wolf hounds. Got it! Salukis!" He looked at Rose, waiting for approval. She shrugged. "I'm not certain," he said, as if by admitting his fallibility, he was letting her in on a closely guarded secret that very few would ever know. He didn't ignore Martin as much as by-pass him, first glancing at him, then addressing himself to Rose. Obviously he thought she was the dog fancier, since the hounds clung to her so closely.
"We don't know what they are," she said. "And they aren't ours. They followed me home. We want to return them to their owner.
"Ah. You should get quite a reward then. There aren't many salukis in this country. Very rare, and very expensive."
"We don't want a reward," Rose said. "We want to get rid of them."
"Why? Are they mean?" It was a ridiculous question. He smiled to show he was joking. "I always heard that salukis were more nervous than these seem to be," he said, studying them once more. "And the eyes are wrong, I think, if memory serves. I wonder if they could be a cross?"
Rose looked at Martin imploringly, but he was looking stubborn. He disliked the colonel very much. "Colonel Luce, can you house these dogs?" Rose asked. "You can claim the reward, and if no one shows up to claim them, then they'd be yours by default, wouldn't they? You could sell them."
"My dear lady, I couldn't possibly. We don't know anything about a medical history for them, now do we? I would have to assume that they've had nothing in the way of shots, obviously not true, but with no records ... " He spread his hands and smiled prettily at Rose. "You do understand. I would have to isolate them for three weeks, to protect my own dogs. And give them the shots, and the examinations, and then have an irate owner show up? No thank you. Owners of valuable dogs tend to get very nasty if you doctor their hounds for them without their approval."
"Christ!" Martin said in disgust. "How much would you charge to board them then?"
"In isolation? Eight dollars a day, each."
Rose stared at him. He smiled again, showing every tooth in his head. She turned away. "Let's go, Martin." She took the dogs to the car and opened the door for them. She got behind the wheel and Martin got in, and only then did the dogs sit down. The dog pound was closed. "They won't get in the car again," Rose said dully. "Can you think of any place else?" He couldn't and she started for home.
The blue grass country that they drove through was very lovely at that time of year. The fields rose and fell gently, delineated by white fences, punctuated in the distance by dark horses. Stands of woods were bouquets in full bloom, brilliant in the late afternoon sunlight. A haze softened the clear blue of the sky, and in the far distance hazy blue hills held the sky and land apart. Rose looked at it all, then said bitterly, "I shouldn't have let you do this."
"Come here. Bring me here."
"Honey, what's wrong? Don't you like the farm?"
"I don't know. I just know I should have told you no. We should have tried to work it out without this."
"Rose, you didn't say anything about not wanting to come here. Not a word."
"You might have known, if you hadn't closed your eyes to what I wanted. You always close your eyes to what I want. It's always what you want. Always."
"That isn't fair. How in God's name was I supposed to know what you were thinking? You didn't say anything. You knew we had to do something. We couldn't keep the house and the boat and everything, we had to do something."
"You didn't even try to get a job!"
She slowed down. "Sorry. But, Martin, it's like that with us. You say you want to do this or that, and we do it. Period. It's always been like that with us. I never had a voice in anything."
"You never spoke out."
"You wouldn't let me! It was always decided first, then you told me. You always just assumed that if you wanted something then I would too. As if I exist only in your shadow, as if I must want what you want without fail, without question."
"Rose, I never thought that. If I made the decisions it was only because you wouldn't. I don't know how many times I've brought something up for us to talk about and decide on, only to have you too busy, or not interested, or playing helpless."
"Playing helpless? What's that supposed to mean? You mean when you tell me we're moving I should chain myself to a tree and say no? Is that how I could have a voice? What can I do when you say we're doing this and you have the tickets, the plans, the whole thing worked out from beginning to end? When have you ever said how about doing this, before you already had it all arranged?"
He was silent and she realized that she had been speeding again. She slowed down. "I didn't want children right away. But you did. Bang, children. I didn't want to move to Florida, but you had such a great job there. What a great job! Bang, we're in Florida. I might have been a teacher. Or a success in business. Or something. But no, I had to have children and stay home and cook and clean and look pretty for you and your friends."
"Rose." Martin's voice was low. He looked straight ahead. "Rose, please stop now. I didn't realize how much of this you had pent up. But not now. Or let me drive. Pull off the road."
She hit the brakes hard, frightened suddenly. Her hands were shaking. She saw the dogs in the rear view mirror. "They wouldn't let you drive," she said. "Will you light me a cigarette, please?"
He gave it to her wordlessly, staring ahead. She reached for the radio and he said, "Let me do it." He tuned in country music and she reached for it again. He changed the station to a press interview with someone from HEW.
Rose stubbed the cigarette out. "Martin, I'm frightened. We've never done that before. Not in the car anyway, not like that."
"I know," he said. He still didn't look at her.
She drove slowly and carefully the last ten minutes and neither of them spoke again until they were inside the house, the dogs on the porch.
"Why'd you bring them back?" Jeffrey asked disgustedly. He thought that dogs as big as they were should be willing to retrieve, or something.
Martin told them about the colonel and Rose went upstairs to wash her face and hands. Halfway up the stairs, she turned and called, "Martin, will you put some coffee on, please." And he answered cheerfully.
It was the dogs, she told herself in the bathroom. They had made the quarrel happen, somehow. She couldn't really remember what they had quarreled about, only that it had been ugly and dangerous. Once when she had glanced at the speedometer, it had registered eighty-five. She shivered thinking of it. It had been the dogs' fault, she knew, without being able to think how they had done it, or why, or what the argument had been about.
Annamarie had made potato salad, and they had ham with it, and baked apples with heavy cream for dessert. Throughout dinner Rose was aware of Martin's searching gaze on her, and although she smiled at him, he didn't respond with his own wide grin, but remained watchful and quiet.
After the children went to bed, Martin wanted to talk about it, but she wouldn't. "Not now," she said. "I have to think. I don't know what happened, and I have to think."
"Rose, we can't just leave it at that. You said some things I never had thought of before. I had no idea you felt left out of our decisions. I honestly believed you wanted it like that."
She put her hands over her ears. "Not now! Please, Martin, not now. I have to think."
"And then hit me with it again, that I don't talk things over with you?"
"Shut up! Can't you for the love of God just shut up?"
He stared at her and she took a deep breath, but didn't soften it at all. "Sure," he said. "For now."
That night she finally fell asleep breathing in time to the clicking of the dogs' nails on the porch floor. She dreamed. She floated downstairs with a long pale silk negligee drifting around her, like a bride of Dracula. She could see herself, a faint smile on her lips, her hair long and loose. It didn't look very much like her, but that was unimportant. The air was pleasantly cool on her skin, and she glided across the yard, beckoning to her dogs to come. There was a moon that turned everything into white and black and gray and the world now was not the same one that she had known before. Her horse was waiting for her and she floated up to mount it. Then they were flying across the fields, she on the horse, the dogs at one side. They were painfully beautiful running, their silver hair blowing; stretched out they seemed not to touch the ground at all. They looked like silver light flowing above the ground. Her horse ran easily, silently, and there 'was no sound at all in this new world. The field gave way to the forest where the light from the moon came down in silver shafts, aslant and gleaming. The dogs disappeared in the shadows, appeared, dazzling bright in the moonlight, only to vanish again. They ran and ran, without a sound and she had no fear of hitting anything. Her horse knew its way. They reached the end of the motionless woods, and there was a meadow sprinkled with spiderwebs that were like fine lace glistening with dew that caught the moonlight like pearls. They slowed down now. Somewhere ahead was the game that they chased. Now the dogs were fearful to her. The golden eyes gleamed and they became hunting machines. First one, then the other sniffed the still air, and then with a flicker of motion they were off again, her horse following, not able to keep up with them. They were on the trail. She saw the deer then, a magnificent buck with wide spread antlers. It saw the dogs and leaped through the air, twenty feet, thirty feet, an impossible leap executed in slow motion. But the dogs had it, and she knew it, and the buck knew it. It ran from necessity; it was the prey, they the hunters, and the ritual forced it to run for run. She stopped to watch the kill, and this was as silent as the entire hunt had been. The dogs leaped and the deer fell and presently the dogs drew away from it, bloody now, and stood silently watching her.
She woke up. She was shivering as if with fever.
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