Edenville Owls
- Автор: Паркер Роберт Браун
- Год: 2007
- Язык: английский
- Год: Sleuth Philomel
- ISBN: 978-0-399-24656-2
- Жанр: Современная русская и зарубежная проза
Электронная книга - «Edenville Owls». Краткое содержание книги:
“Concentration camps,” I said. “What did he say about them?”
“He wouldn’t talk about them,” Joanie said. “Just that they were awful.”
“I think they killed Jews there,” I said.
“That’s what Uncle John says.”
There were a lot of veterans around Edenville. Guys who’d been on ships. Guys who’d been waist gunners in B-17s. Guys who’d been in North Africa. Guys who’d been in Italy and Europe and the Pacific. Some of the guys had been wounded. Some of the guys who’d been in the Pacific were still kind of yellowish from some jungle disease they’d got. Philly DeCosta was deaf in one ear from being an artillery gunner. Most of them wore some part of their old uniforms around. Leather flight jackets, pea coats, and a lot of old field jackets with the insignia still on them. I still knew most of the patches the way I knew all of the airplanes. Screaming Eagle for the 101st Airborne; blue and white stripes for the 3rd Division. Corporal’s stripes. Captain’s bars. I always wanted a field jacket, a real one, worn by a real soldier. But the war was over, and I had missed my chance. Unless there was another one. I felt sort of guilty, and I never said it, but I hoped there’d be another one.
“Do you suppose this man is a Nazi?” Joanie said.
“Hard to figure a Nazi preacher,” I said.
“Maybe he isn’t really a preacher,” Joanie said.
“He says he is. He gave a sermon. People come to listen.”
“Still doesn’t make him a real minister,” she said.
“No.”
“Are you going to go back for the youth meeting?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Are you afraid?”
“No.”
“I would be,” Joanie said. “He sounds awful.”
I shrugged.
“Remember we promised never to lie to each other,” Joanie said.
“Maybe I’m a little scared,” I admitted.
She smiled.
“Maybe,” she said.
“But I don’t know what good it would do me to go,” I said.
“Because you know all you need to know about him?”
“I guess.”
“I agree,” Joanie said. “What we need is to know what’s going on with Miss Delaney.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you have a plan?”
“I’m figuring,” I said.
“If you go to that man’s youth meeting ever,” Joanie said, “I could go with you.”
Wow!
“I think it’s only for boys,” I said.
“Isn’t it always,” Joanie said.
Even the small movie theaters in second-level cities were impressive. All of them had big velvet curtains on either side of the big screen. There were gilt-trimmed loge boxes on either side of the theater, just like real theaters where they put on plays in New York. Usually there were two movies, a newsreel, maybe a cartoon, previews of coming attractions, and sometimes a short subject, Robert Benchley or some other person like that... Every week during the war, on Saturday afternoons, unless we were playing basketball, we went to see double-feature westerns at The Art Theater on Purchase Street in New Bedford. These weren’t westerns like Duel in the Sun with Gregory Peck, or My Darling Clementine with Henry Fonda. They were more grown-up movies in which we had little interest. In fact, often we hadn’t even heard of them. If we did see them, we thought they were kind of slow. Instead we saw Tom Mix and Rocky Lane; Wild Bill Elliott and Bob Steele; Buck Jones, Sunset Carson, Ken Maynard, Johnny Mack Brown, Hoot Gibson, and Randolph Scott... We saw every Tarzan movie starring Johnny Weismuller. We would have died to be Boy. We were saddened as Johnny Weismuller got heavier and heavier. We never doubted that the movies were shot on location. The whole question of sex bothered us a little. If Jane and Tarzan were married, who married them? If they weren’t married, then what were they doing living together out there in the jungle? Someone told me that they had actually gotten married at the end of one of the books, but I never found the place, and for us, Tarzan was a figure of the movies... We also went to any Boston Blackie movie we could find. Blackie was played by Chester Morris, who was also on the radio: “Enemy to those who make him an enemy. Friend to those who have no friend.” We watched Tom Conway as The Falcon and anything Bing Crosby was in: Going My Way, The Bells of St Mary’s, and the Road pictures he made with Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour, which all of us thought were hilarious. Even with these movies we were not at all sure it was not shot in Rio, or Singapore, or wherever. It was years, even after seeing many real cities, before I could imagine a city as looking different than the back lot city of noir films, and B movie detective stories. It was like movies were more real than the life I was actually living.
Chapter 24
I had to find out what was going on between Tupper and Miss Delaney. The only way I could think of was to listen in on them when they were together. And the only way I could think of to do that was to find a place in Miss Delaney’s house where I could get in and hide and listen to them. It had to be a place I could get to easily. I’d have to see him go in and then sneak fast into the listening place.
I spent several winter afternoons looking at the house. Old Lady Coughlin was the town librarian. So when Miss Delaney was in school and Old Lady Coughlin was in the library, there should be nobody at their house. There wasn’t. Except weekends. I had to get in to get the lay of the land in there. I couldn’t do it on a weekend. I would have to skip school. The entrance to the second floor, where Miss Delaney lived, was separate from the entrance to Old Lady Coughlin’s. So the dog wouldn’t be a problem. He might yap, but so what.
I went to school on Tuesday morning, made sure Miss Delaney was there, pretended to go to the boy’s room, and skipped out the side door with my book bag. The library didn’t open until an hour after school started, and Edenville was too small a town for a school-age kid to get away with hanging around on the street. I went up to St. Ignacio’s and hung around there. It was like a branch church, and it was always open. But Father Al was only there on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I figured if I got caught skipping school to sit in the church, how much trouble could I get in?
I liked it in the empty church. The Mass on Sundays was boring. But when it was empty and I was in there alone, I liked the way the sunlight came through the stained-glass windows. I liked the silence, and the hint of incense, and the statues of the Virgin by the altar. I didn’t much like the crucifix above the altar. It seemed kind of gruesome to me. But it was part of the whole church thing.
I was doing bad things... skipping school, breaking into Miss Delaney’s house, spying on people... But I was doing them for a good reason. I was trying to save Miss Delaney... Miss Delaney said she didn’t want me to save her. But she needed to be saved from that guy. Oswald Tupper was creepy. And there was nobody else to help her... Sometimes I wished I hadn’t been looking out the window that day when I saw them for the first time... It was kind of fun, though. I wondered what Father Al would say.
When it was time, I went out of the church and walked down past the library. Being outside, walking around on a school day, I felt like I was naked in public. As I went past the library, I could see Old Lady Coughlin at the desk. I went on to her house and walked straight up to Miss Delaney’s door like I was supposed to be there. I tried the door. It was locked. I looked in the keyhole. I could see the key inside. I took a newspaper page from my book bag and spread it flat and slipped it under the door. Then I took my jackknife and put it in the keyhole and pushed the key from the hole. I heard it land on the floor inside the door. I put my jackknife away and crouched down and carefully pulled the newspaper out from under the door. There was the key, just like it was supposed to be. I’d read about a guy breaking in by doing that trick in Black Mask Magazine. I was thrilled that it worked.