"Gene Wolfe - Bea and Her Bird Brother" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

her.

She woke.

Raeburn was getting out of bed and searching for his slippers when she said, "Mama's dead."

He hugged her, and his voice was as gentle as it ever became. "It's Ace, honey." And then, feeling she
did not understand. "It's your dad, Bea. Asa's passed on."
****
"And now," the funeral director intoned, "you may pass the coffin one by one to pay your final respects."

He was short and pudgy, with a bald head that looked like the old paint in the kitchen.

"One at a time, please, and we'll begin with the front row on this side."

She rose.

The thing in the coffin might have been a badly made waxwork of her father. My father, she wanted to
say, was full of life. My father was a fighter, a man even Elsie's carping and dirt could not pull down.

A man who might have been telling the truth, even when Death stood beside his bed and his mind was
clearly gone. A man who might really have been my father, though God knows Elsie was never my
mother.

She turned away to go back to her seat. Somebody sat alone in the last row of the room of repose.
Benjy? He did not look like Benjy, and certainly that big black coat--buttoned up indoors on this mild
autumn day--did not look like something Benjy would wear anyplace.

She walked toward him, Raeburn and Megan momentarily forgotten. He rose at once, and her soft,
"Please?" did nothing to slow his retreat.

He was tall, and clearly vigorous. Though he did not run and she trotted, she was handicapped by
three-inch heels and gained only slowly. She was still ten strides behind, still pleading with him, when he
turned onto a nameless suburban street. By the time she reached it he was gone, though the black
raincoat he had worn lay empty on the sidewalk, half covering a pair of black shoes.

Moved by a premonition akin to dread, she looked up.

A bird of condor size threshed the air with eight-foot wings. When a puff of wind shook the treetops, it
rose like a kite, trailing a swallow tail that might....

That could have been legs.
****
Someone saw Bea fall to her knees, watched her pound the concrete with futile fists as she wept and
screamed, and called the police. Hours afterward, Raeburn was able to explain to a sympathetic sergeant
that her father's funeral had been that day.