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.What might it say?Would its smile resemble Susan's remembered smile?He shivered and blinked tears out of his eyes.Susan, Susan, he thought, why did you die? Why didyou leave me here? How much of you is in this thing?He began crawling toward the dark hallway arch.Ozzie had never taught him or Diana any prayers,so he whispered the words of religious Christmas carols & until he found himself reciting the lyrics of"Sonny Boy," and he closed his throat.In the hall he stood up, putting his weight on his good leg.Through the open bedroom door he couldsee the gray rectangle that was the broken-out window, past the dark bulk of the bed, and he madehimself walk forward, into the room.The door of the closet was open, and she was in there, crouched on the pile of clothes that had beenyanked off of the hangers."Leaving me to go off with your friends," she whispered.He didn't look at her."You're " he began, then stopped, unable to say "dead." He knelt on the bedand crawled toward the window."You're not her," he said unsteadily."I'm becoming her.Soon I'll be her." The room was suddenly full of the smell of hot coffee."I'll fill thecavity.""I've & got to go," he said, clinging to the ordinariness of the phrase.He carefully swung his cut leg out the window first, then followed it with the other and gripped thesides of the window frame.The night air was cold.There was a quiet but violent thumping and whining in the closet apparently she was having somekind of fit.He boosted himself down to the dry grass and limped away across the dark yard toward thegap in the fence.CHAPTER 11How Did I Kill Myself?Crane squinted against the glitter of the morning sun on the rushing freeway pavement.Rain had been clattering in the roof gutters and hissing in the trees when he and Mavranos hadfurtively left Mavranos's apartment by the back door, a couple of hours before dawn; but after they'deaten breakfast in a coffee shop on the other side of town and had walked back out to the parking lot,Mavranos sucking on a toothpick, the sun had been shining in a cleared blue sky, and only the chill of thedoor handle and the window crank had reminded Crane that it was not yet summer.They were driving in a panel truck Mavranos had bought from some impound yard last fall, a bigboxy 1972 Suburban with a cracked windshield and oversize tires and an old coat of desert-abradedblue paint.The truck shook and squeaked as it barreled along down the Newport Freeway, butMavranos drove it easily with one hand on the big steering wheel and the other holding a can of Coorswrapped in what he called a "deceptor" a rectangle of supple plastic with the Coca-Cola logo printedon it.In the passenger seat, with his knees up because of the litter of books and socket wrench sets and oldclothes on the floorboards, Crane sipped lukewarm coffee from a styrofoam cup and tried to bracehimself against the vehicle's shaking.Mavranos had bandaged his gashed thigh with the easy competenceof an old Boy Scout and had assured Crane that it wouldn't fester, but the leg ached and throbbed, andthe one time Crane had bumped it against a chair arm the world had gone colorless and he had had tolook at the floor and breathe deeply to keep from fainting.He was wearing a pair of Mavranos's old jeans, rolled up at the ankles like a kid's because they weretoo long in the legs.Leaning his hot forehead now against the cold window glass, he realized that it must have been a longtime since he had last traveled on this freeway.He remembered broad, irrigated fields of string beans andstrawberries stretching away on either side, but now there were "Auto Malls," and gigantic buildings ofbronze-colored glass with names like UNISYS and WANG on them, and clusters of shiny new banksand condominiums and hotels around the double-level marble-and-skylights-and-ferns shopping mallcalled South Coast Plaza.It was an Orange County with no orange trees anymore, a region conquered by developers, who hadmade it sterile even as they had made it fabulously valuable, and the moneyed complacency of the areaseemed by definition to exclude people like him and Arky as surely as it had come to exclude thefarmers."Suits," growled Mavranos after a glance away from the traffic ahead.He paused to sip his beer."They & replicate.The freeways are dead stopped half the time, you can't exercise in this air and youcan't eat fish you catch in the bay, and nobody who'd speak to you or me can afford a house even thoughthe suits have terraced all the old hills and canyons with the damn things & and have you noticed thatthese people don't do anything? They're all middlemen they sell stuff or broker stuff or package stuffor advertise stuff or speculate in stuff."Crane grinned weakly against the window glass."Some of 'em must do things, Arky.""I suppose but any such'll soon be crowded out.The suits I'm talking about are growing, replicating,at the expense of everything else, even the plain old goddamn dirt and water."A new BMW passed them at high speed on the right."Susan's dead," Crane said suddenly."My wife."Mavranos turned to stare at him for a moment, and his foot was off the accelerator."When?" hebarked."How? When did you hear this?""It happened thirteen weeks ago.Remember when the paramedics came, and I said she fainted?"Crane finished the coffee and tossed the Styrofoam cup into the back of the truck."Actually she died.Fibrillation.Heart attack.""Bullshit thirteen weeks, I ""That's not her, what you saw and talked to.That's & I don't know what it is, some kind of ghost.I'dhave told you about it before, but it was only last night that I & figured out it must have something to dowith this cards stuff."Mavranos shook his head, frowning fiercely."Are are you sure? That she's dead? You weren'tdrunk, maybe, and she left you or something?""Arky, I " Crane spread his hands helplessly."I'm sure.""Goddammit." Mavranos was staring straight ahead at the traffic, but he was gulping, and his eyeswere bright."You better tell me about this shit, Pogo."Crane took the beer can out of Arky's hand and took a deep sip."She was drinking coffee onemorning," he began.They parked in a big lot just west of the Balboa pier and then walked away from the thunder andspume of the surf to the narrow, tree-shaded lane that was Main Street.Crane's leg ached and throbbed,and several times he called for a pause just to breathe deeply and stand with his weight on his good leg.Balboa was quiet on this spring morning.Cars hissed past on the wet pavement of Balboa Boulevard,but there were empty parking places along the curbs, and the only people on the sidewalks seemed to belocals heading for the bakery, lured by the smell of hot coffee on the chilly breeze."Where'd you used to get these these godonuts?" asked Mavranos, his hands in the pockets of histattered khaki jacket."Bodonuts," Crane said."My kid sister made up the word.It's Balboa doughnuts.Not here.Over onthe island."Over on the island.The phrase upset him somehow, and he didn't like the idea that even now therewas a lot of water nearby the channel ahead of them and the ocean behind." 'Fear death by water,' " said Mavranos.Crane glanced at him sharply."What?""That's from The Waste Land you know, T.S.Eliot.At the beginning of the poem, when MadameSosostris is reading the Tarot cards.'And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,/ Which is blank,is something he carries on his back,/ Which I am forbidden to see.I do not find/ The Hanged Man.Feardeath by water.' "Crane stopped walking again, and stared at him [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]