"The Folk Of The Air" - читать интересную книгу автора (Beagle Peter S)

Chapter 1

Ferrell arrived in Avicenna at four-thirty in the morning, driving a very old Volkswagen bus named Madame Schumann-Heink. The rain had just stopped. Two blocks from the freeway, on Gonzales, he pulled to the curb and leaned his elbows on the steering wheel. His passenger woke up with a sad little cry and grabbed his knee.

“It’s all right,” Farrell said. “We’re here.”

“Here?” his passenger asked, still dazed, peering ahead down the street at railroad tracks and truck bodies. He was nineteen or twenty, brown-haired and pink-cheeked, neat as a new ice-cream cone. Farrell had picked him up in Arizona, near Pima, taking the sight of a V-neck pullover, tobacco-tan loafers and white Exeter windbreaker hitchhiking across the San Carlos Indian Reservation as an unquestionable sign from heaven. After two days and nights of more or less continuous driving, the boy was no whit damper or grubbier than before, and Farrell was no nearer to remembering whether his name was Pierce Harlow or Harlow Pierce. He called Farrell mister with remoreseless courtesy and kept asking him earnestly what it had been like to hear Eleanor Rigby and Day Tripper for the first time.

“Avicenna, California,” Farrell announced, grinning at him. “Museum of my twisted youth, vault of my dearest and most disgusting memories.” He rolled down his window and yawned happily. “That good stink, smell it, that’s the Bay. Must be low tide.”

Pierce/Harlow sniffed as instructed. “Uh-huh. Yes, I see. Really nice.” He ran his hands through his hair, which promptly sprang back into one sculpted piece, polished and seamless. “How long did you say it’s been?”

“Nine years,” Farrell said. “Almost ten. Since I made the mistake of actually graduating. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking of that morning. Just got careless, I guess.”

The boy chuckled politely, turning away to rummage in his Eddie Bauer knapsack. “I’ve got the address of the place I’m supposed to go in here somewhere. It’s right up near the campus. I can just wait.” In the smudgy pre-dawn light, the nape of his neck looked as thin and vulnerable as a child’s.

The sky was the color of mercury, mushy as a bruise. Farrell said, “Usually you can see the whole north campus from here, the bell tower and everything. I don’t remember it getting this foggy.” He stretched until he ached, locking his hands behind his head and feeling stiff muscles crackle and sigh and mumble to themselves. “Well, I can’t go rouse up my buddy yet, it’s way too early. Might find ourselves some breakfast—there used to be an all-night place on Gould.” One bright little sparkle of pain remained when he relaxed, and he glanced down to see Pierce/Harlow smiling diffidently and holding a switchblade knife against his side, just above the belt.

“I’m really sorry, sir,” Pierce/Harlow said. “Please don’t do anything dumb.”

Farrell stared at him so long and so blankly that the boy began to fidget, tensing every time a car hissed by. “Just put your wallet down on the seat and get out. I don’t want any trouble.”

“I guess we can assume you didn’t go to Exeter,” Farrell said at last. Pierce/Harlow shook his head. Farrell said, “No point even asking about the programmer trainee job.”

“Mr. Farrell,” Pierce/Harlow said in a flat, gentle voice, “you think I won’t really hurt you. Please don’t think that.” On the last word the knife dug harder into Farrell’s side, twisting through his shirt.

Farrell sighed and drew in his legs, still resting one arm on the wheel as he reached slowly for his wallet. “Shit, this is embarrassing. You know, I’ve never been held up before. All those years in New York, walking around at night, everywhere, taking the subway, and I never got robbed.” Not in New York, at any rate, and not by an amateur who doesn’t even know where you’re supposed to hold the knife. He made himself breathe as deeply and quietly as he could.

Pierce/Harlow smiled again, beckoning graciously with his free hand. “Well, you were due then, weren’t you? It’s just an occupational hazard, no big deal.”

Farrell had the wallet out now, his upper body turned to face the boy, feeling the knife’s pressure lessen slightly. He said, “You should have pulled this back in Arizona, you realize. I had more money then. Not having had to buy meals for two people up to that point.”

“I hate driving a stick shift,” Pierce/Harlow said cheerfully. “Anyway, come on, I bought gas a couple of times.”

“Seven dollars’ worth in Flagstaff,” Farrell snorted. “Be still, my heart.”

“Hey, don’t, don’t get snotty with me.” Pierce/Harlow was suddenly trembling alarmingly, blushing in the dimness, stuttering wet-lipped, crisp consonants turning mealy. “What about all that gas I bought in Barstow? What about that?”

Halfway down the block a young couple came jogging toward them, perfectly matched in their jouncing plumpness, their green sweat suits, and their huffing clockwork pace. Farrell said, “No, you didn’t. Barstow? You sure?” Is this a clever plan? What do we do if this is not a clever plan?

“Damn right, I’m sure,” Pierce/Harlow snapped. He sat up very straight, the knife licking snaky ellipses in the air between them. Farrell stared over his shoulder, hoping to catch the woman’s attention without angering him any further. She did turn her head in passing and actually halted, holding her companion’s arm. Farrell widened his eyes and flared his nostrils discreetly, trying earnestly to look distressed. The couple looked at each other and huffed on past the bus, out of step for only an instant. Pierce/Harlow said, “And it was nine-eighty-three in Flagstaff. Just so we have that clear, Mr. Farrell.” He snapped his fingers for the wallet.

Farrell shrugged resignedly. “Dumb argument, anyway.” Oh lord, here goes baby. He tossed the wallet so that it bounced off Pierce/Harlow’s right knee, falling between the seat and the door. The boy reached for it instinctively, his concentration flickering just for a moment, and in that moment Farrell struck. That was, at least, the verb he preferred to remember, although lunged, clawed, and scrabbled also presented themselves. He had been sighting on the knife wrist, but got the hand instead as Pierce/Harlow pulled away, crushing the boy’s fingers against the switchblade’s rough bone handle. Pierce/Harlow gasped and snarled and kicked Farrell’s shin, yanking his hand free. Farrell let go as soon as he felt the blade sliding moon-cold through his own fingers, then heard it worrying his shirtsleeve far away. There was no pain, no blood, only coldness and Pierce/Harlow’s mouth opening and closing. This was not a clever plan.

Unfortunately, it was the only one he had. His natural gift for fallback positions and emergency exits never showed up for work before seven o’clock; absolutely all he could think of at this hour was to duck away from Pierce/Harlow’s frantically menacing flourish of the knife and throw Madame Schumann-Heink into gear, with some vague vision of driving her into an all-night laundromat on the corner. As an afterthought, he also screamed “Kreegaaahh!” at the top of his lungs, for the first time since he was eleven years old, jumping off his parents’ bed, which was the bank of the Limpopo River, onto his cousin Mary Margaret Louise, who was a crocodile.

The most immediate thing that happened was that his worn sneaker slipped off the clutch pedal. The second was that the rearview mirror fell into his lap, as Madame Schumann-Heink rose up on her back wheels and danced ponderously into the middle of Gonzales Avenue before she came down again with a smash that threw Pierce/Harlow face-first against the dashboard. The switchblade sagged in his fingers.

Farrell had no chance to take advantage of the moment; he was half-stunned himself, and Madame Schumann-Heink was frisking in second gear toward the left-hand curb, heading straight for a parked van with MOBILE IMMENSE GRACE UFO MINISTRY stenciled neatly on its sides. Farrell hauled desperately on the wheel and found himself veering under the nose of a garbage truck that bore down on him like a ferryboat through the fog, glowing and hooting. Madame Schumann-Heink spun in a surprisingly agile U-turn and scurried before the truck, rocking cripplingly on dead shocks, her tail pipe farting in tin-can bursts and something Farrell didn’t want to think about dragging just back of her front axle. He pounded on the horn and kept howling.

Beside him Pierce/Harlow, sand-pale with shock and rage, knuckled blindly at his mouth, sputtering blood. “Bit my tongue,” he mumbled. “Christ, I bit my tongue.”

“I did that once,” Farrell said sympathetically. “It’s a real bear, isn’t it? Try to put your head back a bit.” Without turning, he began walking his hand shyly toward the knife lying forgotten on Pierce/Harlow’s lap. But his peripheral vision was also sleeping in this morning; when he struck a second time, Pierce/Harlow made a sound that was all inhale, snatched up the switchblade, and missed medical immortality by cringing inches, getting the seat cover instead. Farrell swung Madame Schumann-Heink hard to the left, cutting in front of a bellowing semi, and careened down a side street lined with office furniture warehouses and bail bondsmen’s establishments. He heard everything loose in back go booming from one side of the bus to the other and thought oh, sweet Jesus, the lute, sonofabitch. The new worry kept him from noticing for two blocks that such traffic as there was was all coming toward him.

“Well, shit,” Farrell said sadly. “Wouldn’t you know?”

Pierce/Harlow crouched on the seat, elbows flapping absurdly as he tried to brace himself against everything, including Farrell. “Pull over or I’ll cut you. Right here, I’ll do it.” He was almost crying, and color was puddling grotesquely under his cheekbones.

A Winnebago the size of a rural airport filled the windshield. Farrell whimpered softly himself, hung a fishtailing right turn on the wet pavement, and bucked Madame Schumann-Heink up a parking-lot driveway. At the top of the ramp, two important things happened: Pierce/Harlow grabbed him around the neck, and Madame Schumann-Heink popped blithely out of gear—her oldest trick, always most judiciously employed—and began to roll back down. Farrell bit Pierce/Harlow’s forearm, somehow contriving while chewing to wrench the Volkswagen into reverse and send her shooting back out into the street, well in the wake of the motor home, but squirting like a marble straight through a sawhorse barricade around a pothole. The lute, oh please, goddamn. A taillight exploded, and Pierce/Harlow and Farrell let go of each other and screamed. Madame Schumann-Heink popped into neutral again. Farrell pushed Pierce/Harlow away, fumbled for second gear, which was never quite where he had left it, and stood on the accelerator.

Madame Schumann-Heink, who normally required a tail wind and two days’ notice to get up to fifty miles an hour, was doing sixty by the time she hit Gonzales. Pierce/Harlow chose that moment to try another frontal assault, which was unfortunate, because Farrell took the corner, and a “Swingers Exchange” vending machine along with it, on the far side of two wheels. Pierce/Harlow ended up on Farrell’s lap, with the knife curiously snuggled into his own armpit.

“I think you should have taken that computer job,” Farrell said. They were tearing back down Gonzales, nearing the freeway. Pierce/Harlow disentangled himself, wiped his bleeding mouth, and got the knife pointed the right way. “I’ll cut you,” he said hopelessly. “I swear to God.”

Farrell slowed down slightly, gesturing toward the approaching overpass. “You see that pillar coming up, with the sign? Yes? Well, I was just wondering, do you think you can throw your knife out the window before I hit it?” He smiled a shut-mouth crescent smile, which he hoped suggested a syphilitic picking up weather reports from Alpha Centauri on his bridgework, and added in a serene singsong, “Her tires are all bald, her brakes suck, and you are about to become sticky stuff on the seat.”

The knife actually bounced off the pillar as Farrell swerved away from it, the wheel slugging and whipping like a game fish in his hands, the back tires keening coldly. With the rearview mirror gone, the old green convertible was a sudden clubbing blow out of nowhere, yawing wildly under the window, fighting for traction, sliding sideways into the bus like an asteroid being slowly raped by the pitiless mass of a larger planet. There was a moment for Farrell in which nothing existed but the underwater languor of the driver’s face, rippling and folding silently with terror beneath his great oil-drum helmet, the heavy golden chains and ornaments cascading down the rather pink body of the woman beside him, the rosette of rust around a door handle, and the broadsword in the hand of the young black man in the back seat, who seemed to be casually fending Madame Schumann-Heink away with it as she hung above him. Then Farrell had sprawled across the wheel and was dragging the bus to the right with all his strength, tucking her into a squealing circle around another pillar, finally slamming to a stop almost behind the convertible as it righted itself and gunned ahead toward the Bay. Farrell saw the black man waving his sword like a conqueror in the mist until the car vanished up a ramp onto the freeway.

Farrell exhaled. He became aware that Pierce/Harlow had been screaming for some time, piled haphazardly on the floor, rocking convulsively. Farrell cut the engine and said, “Knock it off, there’s a cop car.” He was shivering himself and wondered distantly if he were going to throw up.

There was no patrol car coming, but Pierce/Harlow did stop wailing, as abruptly as a child might, with a gulp and a sleeve rubbed across his face. “You’re insane. I mean, you are really insane.” His voice was a snuffly, aggrieved hiccup.

“Keep it in mind,” Farrell said heavily. “You try to get out and find your knife and I’ll run you over.” Pierce/Harlow jerked his hand back from the door and stared at him. Farrell ignored him, letting his vision swim and his body shake itself still. Then he started Madame Schumann-Heink up again and turned her slowly, peering anxiously in every direction. Pierce/Harlow drew breath to protest, but Farrell forestalled him. “Be quiet. I’m tired of you. Just be quiet.”

“Where are you going?” Pierce/Harlow demanded. “If you think you’re taking me to the police—”

“I’m too damn beat,” Farrell said. “My first morning here in ten years, I’m not about to spend it in a station house with you. Just stay cool and I’ll drop you off at a hospital. You can get that tongue looked at.”

Pierce/Harlow hesitated, then sank back, touching his mouth and looking at his fingers. He said accusingly, “I’m probably going to need stitches.”

Farrell was driving in low gear, listening intently to new scraping sounds under the bus. “With any luck. I’m counting on rabies shots, myself.”

“I don’t have any health insurance,” Pierce/Harlow said. Farrell decided that he couldn’t reasonably be expected to reply and turned sharply left on Paige Street, suddenly recalling the clinic somewhere around there and the soft, rainy night much like this one when he had dragged Clawhammer Perry Brown into Emergency, crying with the certainty that he could feel Perry’s body chilling every moment on his shoulder. Skinny old Clawhammer. Car thief, great banjo player, and the first serious pillhead I ever met. And Wendy in the back seat, bitching all the way because he’d gotten into her stash again, telling him the wedding was off. Ah, lord, them days, them days. He reminded himself to tell Ben about Perry Brown when he got where he was going. He got fat later on, somebody said.

By the time he pulled up in front of the clinic, the sky was showing a runny, gray-mustard stain off behind one pewter corner. A stranger would have missed it, but Farrell still knew an Avicenna dawn when he saw one. He turned to Pierce/Harlow, who was slouched against the door, eyes closed, fingers in his mouth, and said, “Well, it’s been real.”

Pierce/Harlow sat up, blinking from Farrell to the clinic and back. His mouth was badly swollen, but his style was already beginning to regenerate itself, spinning pink-and-white self-assurance before Farrell’s eyes, as a lizard grows new limbs. He said, “I’m going to look pretty silly, coming in for a chewed-up tongue, for God’s sake.”

“Tell them you cut yourself shaving,” Farrell said. “Tell them you got French-kissed by the Hound of the Baskervilles. Good-bye.”

Pierce/Harlow nodded meekly. “I’ll just get my gear out of the back.” He rose and squeezed past Farrell, who turned to follow his movements. He picked up his sweater and groped unhurriedly for the authentic Greek fisherman’s cap and the pocket stereo. Farrell, bending to recover his wallet, heard a sudden sweet clunk and straightened up quickly, making a sound like Madame Schumann-Heink’s transmission.

“I’m sorry,” the boy said. “That’s your mandolin thing, isn’t it? I’m really sorry.” Farrell handed him his knapsack, and he opened the slide doors and started to step down, then paused, looking back. “Well, I thank you very much for the ride, I really appreciated it. You have a good day, okay?”

Farrell shook his head, marveling helplessly. “Do you do this a whole lot? I ask out of some concern.”

“Well, I don’t do it for a living, if that’s what you mean.” Pierce/Harlow might have been a college golfer defending his amateur standing. “It’s more like a hobby, actually. You know, some people do underwater photography. I just get a kick out of it.”

“You don’t know how it’s done,” Farrell said. “You don’t even know what to say. Somebody’s going to kill you, you keep this stuff up.”

Pierce/Harlow shrugged. “I get a kick out of it. The look on their faces when it finally starts to sink in. It’s really addictive, just knowing I’m not what they’re so sure I am. Sort of like Zorro or somebody.” He dropped to the curb, turning to give Farrell a reminiscently affectionate smile, as if they had shared an adventure long ago, in another language. He said, “You ought to try it. You’re practically doing it anyway, right now. Take care, Mr. Farrell.”

He slid the doors carefully shut before he sauntered away toward the clinic. Farrell put Madame Schumann-Heink in gear and eased her into the thickening San Francisco commuter traffic that seemed to be starting far earlier than he remembered. What would you know? Back then, everyone in the world lived on Parnell Street and slept till noon. He decided that whatever Madame Schumann-Heink was dragging would keep until he got to Ben’s house, as would thinking about the events of the last half-hour. His skin felt stiff with dried sweat; his head had begun to thump with each heartbeat. The Volkswagen smelled of feet and blankets and cold Chinese food.

Driving north on Gould Avenue—where the hell is the Blind Alley? It couldn’t be gone, everybody played there, I must have missed it—he did allow himself to consider, though with some wariness, the matter of the green convertible. At the time, his mind—having promptly skipped town, leaving no forwarding address but only those weary, cynical old suckers, his nerves and reflexes, to settle his debts and post bail one more time—had registered nothing but the driver’s huge helmet, the black man’s jaunty toy sword—was it a toy?—and the woman dressed entirely in gold chains. But the black guy was wearing something like a mantle, a bearskin? And the back seat had been tossing with velvet cloaks and stiff white ruffs and plumes like firelight in the fog as the old rag-top hurtled by. Doubtless the Avicenna Welcome Wagon. The one with the chains must be from the Native Daughters.

Gould was a long street, stretching from one end of Avicenna nearly to the other and effectively dividing student country and the hills beyond from the hot, black flatlands. Farrell drove until the used-car lots gave way to antique shops, those to office buildings and department stores—damn, what happened to that nice old fish market?—and those in turn to one- and two-story frame houses, white and blue and green, with stairs on the outside. They were old, thin houses, most of them, and in the dour morning air they looked like boats abandoned on the beach, unsafe to take to sea. Farrell’s breath tightened, just for a moment, at the southwest corner of Ortega; but the gray, bulging, fish-scaled house was gone, replaced by a Tas-T-Freeze.

They were trying to condemn that place all the time I lived there. As unseaworthy a house as ever I went deepsea sailing in. Ellen. Even after so much time, he touched the name cautiously with his tongue, like a sore tooth, but nothing happened.

Ben had been living on Scotia Street for a little more than four years, almost since his move from New York. It was not territory Farrell had ever known well, and he was flying blind when he turned right arbitrarily on Iris and sweettalked Madame Schumann-Heink up a triple fall of short, steep hills. The houses were changing within a block, becoming larger and darker, with shingly New England angles supporting California sun decks. The higher he drove, the further they drew back from the street, keeping to the shadows of redwood, eucalyptus, and ailanthus, except for a few corner stuccos, parrot-bright. No sidewalks. I can’t imagine Ben in a place without sidewalks.

The sky was still overcast behind him by the time he found the house; but up on Scotia Street the sun was already clambering around in the vines and bushes, purring, rubbing itself against bougainvillaea. Scotia was a shaggy, cranky jungle, winding and crimped as a goat path—a street meant for broughams, post chaises, and ice wagons, where Madame Schumann-Heink and a descending Buick briefly got wedged into a curve like fighting stags. Unlike the tame lawns and gardens of the slopes below, the Scotia shrubbery was voluptuously brazen, spilling across garage roofs and over low stone walls to link properties in defiant wrong-side-of-the-blanket alliances. A long way from Forty-Sixth and Tenth Avenue, boy.

He recognized the house from Ben’s letters. Like most of its neighbors, it was an old, solid, two-story structure with the majestically shabby air of a buffalo shedding its winter coat. What made it unique on Scotia was a porch roof that ran all the way around the house, wide and level enough for two people to walk comfortably abreast. “Nothing at all to do with sea captains’ widows,” Ben had written. “Apparently the guy who built the place in the nineties was trying for a pagoda. They took him away before he got the corners turned up.”

When he parked the bus and scrambled in back to get the lute, he discovered that his cooking kit was missing. Momentarily enraged as he had not been during the entire holdup, he was quickly fascinated, amazed that the boy could have gotten away under his eyes with something that bulky. The electric razor was gone too. Farrell sat down on the floor with his legs straight out in front of him and began to laugh.

After a little while he drew the lute to him from the corner where it had ended up. Afraid to remove the cloth and plastic swaddlings to check for damage, he only said, “Come on, love” to it and got out of the bus, sneezing sharply as the smell of damp jasmine and rosemary tickled his nose. He glanced at the house again—birdhouses, I’ll be damned—then turned and walked slowly across the narrow street to look back down the hills at Avicenna.

The Bay took up half the horizon, rumpled and dingy as a motel bedspread, with a few sails frozen under the bridge and San Francisco beyond, slipping like soap through a dishwater mist. From where Farrell stood in the private sunlight of Scotia Street, treetops and gables broke up his line of sight; but he could make out the university’s red-brick bell tower and the campus plaza where he had first met Ellen hustling chess games with freshmen. And if that’s the corner of Serra and Fox, then that window has to be the Nikolai Bukharin Memorial Pizza Parlor. Two years waiting tables and breaking up fights there, and I still always got him mixed up with that other one, Bakunin. The only movement that he could see anywhere was the green wink of a streetcar sliding down through the flatlands, vanishing between the naked pastel roofs that seemed to overlap one another like lily pads all the way to the freeway. He stood on tiptoe for a moment, looking for the Blue Zoo, the warty indigo frog of a Victorian in which he and Clawhammer Perry Brown and a Korean string trio had shared the top floor rent-free for almost three months, before the party downstairs ended and the owner noticed them. Did I dream all that, that time, those people? What begins now?

Walking up the stump-flagged path to Ben’s house, he unwrapped the lute, his chest aching with gratitude to find it whole. He sat down on the porch steps, marveling as always at the sight of his own hand on the long golden curve of the instrument, as he had once caught his breath to deny the miracle of his hand touching a woman’s bare hip. He hugged the lute gently into his belly and held it there, and the coupled strings sighed into the air, though he had not yet touched them.

“Come on, love,” he said again. He began to play Mounsiers Almaine, too fast, as he often took it, but not trying to slow it down. After that he played a Dowland pavane, and then Mounsiers Almaine again, properly this time. The lute grew warm in the sun and smelled like lemons.