"Gene Wolfe - The Ziggurat" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

There were bears around here, that was true enough. Small black bears, for the
most part. But not Yogi Bears, not funny but potentially dangerous park bears who
had lost all fear of Man and roamed and rummaged as they pleased. These bears were
hunted every year, hunted through the golden days of autumn as they fattened for
hibernation. Silver winter had arrived, and these bears slept in caves and hollow logs,
in thickets and thick brush, slept like their dead, though slowly and softly breathing
like the snow -- motionless, dreaming bear-dreams of the last-men years, when the
trees would have filled in the old logging roads again and shouldered aside the
cracked asphalt of the county road, and all the guns had rusted to dust.
Yet he had been afraid.
He returned to the front of the cabin, picked up the chair he had carried onto the
porch, and noticed a black spot on its worn back he could not recall having seen
before. It marked his finger, and was scraped away readily by the blade of his
pocketknife.
Shrugging, he brought the chair back inside. There was plenty of Irish stew; he
would have Irish stew tonight, soak a slice of bread in gravy for the coyote, and leave
it in the same spot on the back porch. You could not (as people always said) move the
bowl a little every day. That would have been frightening, too fast for any wild thing.
You moved the bowl once, perhaps, in a week; and the coyote's bowl had walked by
those halting steps from the creek bank where he had glimpsed the coyote in summer
to the back porch.
Jan and Brook and the twins might -- would be sure to -- frighten it. That was
unfortunate, but could not be helped; it might be best not to try to feed the coyote at
all until Jan and the twins had gone. As inexplicably as he had known that he was
being watched, and by no animal, he felt certain that Jan would reach him somehow,
bending reality to her desires.
He got out the broom and swept the cabin. When he had expected her, he had not
cared how it looked or what she might think of it. Now that her arrival had become
problematic, he found that he cared a great deal.
She would have the other lower bunk, the twins could sleep together feet-to-feet in
an upper (no doubt with much squealing and giggling and kicking), and Brook in the
other upper -- in the bunk over his own.
Thus would the family achieve its final and irrevocable separation for the first
time; the Sibberlings (who had been and would again be) on one side of the cabin, the
Bainbridges on the other: boys here, girls over there. The law would take years, and
demand tens of thousands of dollars, to accomplish no more.
Boys here.
Girls over there, farther and farther all the time. When he had rocked and kissed
Aileen and Alayna, when he had bought Christmas and birthday presents and sat
through solemn, silly conferences with their pleased teachers, he had never felt that he
was actually the twins' father. Now he did. Al Sibberling had given them his swarthy
good looks and flung them away. He, Emery Bainbridge, had picked them up like
discarded dolls after Jan had run the family deep in debt. Had called himself their
father, and thought he lied.
There would be no sleeping with Jan, no matter how long she stayed. It was why
she was bringing the twins, as he had known from the moment she said they would be
with her.
He put clean sheets on the bunk that would be hers, with three thick wool blankets
and a quilt.
Bringing her back from plays and country-club dances, he had learned to listen for