Nightwork - Страница 3

Доступ к книге ограничен фрагменом по требованию правообладателя.

* * *

The bar was decorated like an English pub, dark wood and pewter tankards on the walls. I ordered a whiskey. There was a thin old man in a khaki mackinaw and a hunter's red cap leaning against the bar with a glass of beer in front of him. "They're polluting the whole lake,' the old man was saying in a dry Vermont accent. 'The paper mill. In five years it'll be as dead as Lake Erie. And they keep putting salt on the roads so those idiots from New York can go eighty miles an hour up to Stowe and Mad River and Sugarbush, and, when the snow melts off the salt goes into all the ponds and rivers. By the time I die there won't be a fish left anywhere in the whole state. And nobody does a goddamn thing about it. I tell you, I'm glad I won't be around to see it.'

I ordered another whiskey. The first one hadn't seemed to do anything for me. Nor did the second. I paid and went out to my car. The thought that Lake Champlain, in which I had swum every summer and on which I had spent so many great days sailing and fishing, was going to die, somehow seemed sadder than anything that had happened to me for a long time.

* * *

When I got to the office I could tell by the look on Cunningham's rough old face that Dr Ryan had already called him. Cunningham was the president and sole owner of the little airline and was a World War II vintage fighter pilot, and I guess he knew how I felt that afternoon.

'I'm ch... checking out, Freddy,' I said. 'You know wh.,. why.'

'Yes,' he said. 'I'm sorry.' He fiddled uncomfortably with a pencil on his desk. 'You know, we can always find something for you here. In the office, maybe ... maintenance...' His voice trailed off. He stared at the pencil in his big hand.

'Thanks,' I said. 'It's nice of you, but forget it.' If there was one thing I knew it was that I couldn't hang around like a crippled bird, watching all my friends take off into the sky. And I didn't want to get used to the look of pity I saw on Freddy Cunningham's honest face, or on any other face.

'Well, anyway Doug, think it over,' Cunningham said.

'No n ... need,' I said.

'What do you plan to do?'

'First,' I said, 'leave town.'

'For where?'

"Anywhere,' I said.

'Then what?'

Then try to figure out what I'm going to do with the rest of my life.' I stuttered twice on the word life.

He nodded, avoiding looking at me, deeply interested in the pencil. 'How're you fixed for dough?'

'Sufficient,' I said. 'For the time being.'

'Well,' he said, 'if you ever ... I mean you know where to come, don't you?'

'I'll keep that in mind.' I looked at my watch. 'I have a date.'

'Shit,' he said loudly. Then stood up and shook my hand. I didn't say good-bye to anyone else.

* * *

I parked the car and got out and waited. There was a peculiar muted hum coming from the big, red-brick building with the Latin inscription on the facade and the flag flying above it. The hum of learning, I thought, a small, decent music that made me remember my childhood.

Pat would be in her classroom, lecturing the boys and girls on the origins of the Civil War or the succession of the kings of England. She took her history seriously. 'It is the most relevant of subjects,' she had told me once, using the word that cropped up in every conversation about education in those days. 'Every move we make today is the result of what men and women have been doing with each other and to each other since before recorded time.' As I remembered this, I grinned sourly. Had I been born to stutter or lived to be a discarded airman because Meade had repulsed Lee at Gettysburg, or because Cromwell had had Charles beheaded? It would be an interesting point to discuss when we had an idle moment to spare.

Inside the building a bell clanged. The hum of education swelled to a roar of freedom, and a few minutes later the students began to pour out of the doors in a confused sea of brightly colored parkas and brilliant wool hats.

As usual. Pat was late. She was the most conscientious of ' teachers, and there were always two or three students who clustered around her desk after class, asking her questions that she patiently answered. When I finally saw her, the lawn was deserted, the hundreds of children vanished as if melted away by the pale Vermont sun.

She didn't see me at first. She was nearsighted, but out of vanity didn't wear her glasses except when she was working or reading or going to the movies. It had been a little joke of mine that she wouldn't find a grand piano in a ballroom.

I stood, leaning against a tree, without moving or saying anything, watching her walk down the cleared walk toward me, carrying a leather envelope that I knew contained test papers, cradled against her bosom, schoolgirl-fashion. She was wearing a skirt and red wool stockings and brown suede after-ski boots and a short, blue cloth overcoat. Her way of walking was concentrated, straight, uncoquettish, always brisk. Her small head with its dark hair pulled back was almost half obscured by the big, upraised collar of her coat.

When she saw me, she smiled, a non-desultory smile. It was going to be even more difficult than I had feared. We didn't kiss. You never knew who was looking out of a window. 'Right on time,' she said. 'My stuff's in the car.' She waved toward the parking lot. She had a battered old Chevy. A good part of her salary went for Biafra refugees, starving Indian children, political prisoners in various parts of the world. I don't think she owned more than three dresses. 'I hear the skiing's great,' she said, as she started toward the parking lot. 'This ought to be a weekend to remember.'

I put my hand out and held her arm. 'W ... wait a min ... minute, Pat,' I said, trying not to notice the slight strained look that invariably crossed her face when I stuttered. 'I have some ... something to tell you. I ... I'm not going up there th ... this weekend.'

'Oh,' she said, her voice small. I thought you were free this weekend.'

'I am f ... free,' I said. 'But I'm not going skiing. I'm leaving town.'

'For the weekend?'

'For good,' I said.

She squinted at me, as though I had suddenly gone out of focus. 'Has it got something to do with me?'

'N ... nothing.'

'Oh,' she said harshly, 'nothing. Can you tell me where you're going?'

'No,' I said. 'I don't know wh ... where I'm g... going.'

'Do you want to tell me why you're going?'

'You'll hear s ... soon enough.'

'If you're in trouble,' she said, her voice soft now, 'and I could help...'

'I'm in t... trouble,' I said. 'And you can't help.'

'Will you write me?'

‘I’ll try.'

She kissed me then, not worrying who might be at a window. But there were no tears. And she didn't tell me that she loved me. It might have been different if she had, but she didn't. 'I have a lot of work to catch up on over the weekend anyway,' she said, as she stepped back a pace. 'The snow'll last.' She smiled a little crookedly at me. 'Good luck,' she said. 'Wherever.'

I watched her walk toward the old Chevy in the parking lot, small and neat and familiar. Then I got into the Volkswagen and drove off.

* * *

I was out of my small furnished apartment by six o'clock that evening. I had left my skis and boots and the rest of my skiing equipment except a padded parka, which I liked, in a duffel bag to be delivered to Pat's brother, who was just about my size, and had told my landlady that she could have all my books and whatever else I left behind me. Traveling light, I headed south, leaving the town where, I realized now, I bad been happy for more than five years.

I had no destination. I had told Freddy Cunningham that Î was going to try to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life and one place was as good as another for that.

3

Figure out my life. I had plenty of time to do it. As I drove south, down the entire East Coast of America, I was alone, unfettered, free of claims, with no distractions, plunged in that solitude that is supposed to be the essential condition of philosophic speculation. There was Pat Minot's cause and effect to be considered; also not to be overlooked was the maxim I had been taught in English lit courses that your character was your fate, that your rewards and failures were the result of your faults and virtues. In Lord Jim, a book I must have read at least five times since I was a boy, the hero is killed eventually because of a flaw in himself that permitted him to leave a shipload of poor beggars to die. He pays for his cowardice in the end by being killed himself. I had always thought it just, fair, inevitable. At the wheel of the little Volkswagen, speeding down the great highways past Washington and Richmond and Savannah, I remembered Lord Jim. But it no longer convinced me. I certainly was not flawless, but, at least in my opinion, I had been a decent son, an honorable friend, conscientious in my profession, law-abiding, careful to avoid cruelty or spite, inciting no man to be my enemy, indifferent to power, abhorring violence. I had never seduced a woman - or cheated a shopkeeper, had not struck a fellow human being since a fight in the schoolyard at the age of ten. I had definitely never left anyone to die. Yet ... Yet there had been that morning in Dr Ryan's office.

If character was fate. was it the character of thirty million Europeans to die in World War II, was it the character of the inhabitants of Calcutta to drop in the streets of starvation, was it the character of thousands of citizens of Pompeii to be mummified in a flood of lava?