Crossroads
- Автор: Франзен Джонатан
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Жанр: Современная русская и зарубежная проза
Электронная книга - «Crossroads». Краткое содержание книги:
Universally recognized as the leading novelist of his generation, Jonathan Franzen is often described as a teller of family stories. Only now, though, in *Crossroads* , has he given us a novel in which a family, in all the intricacy of its...
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“I don’t care what you think.”
Her eyes were on the table, her expression sullen. Russ wondered what he’d done to make her angry.
“Are you sure you want to do that?”
“Yes I want to do that,” she said crossly.
He guessed she was embarrassed. Embarrassed by her fear for his safety, embarrassed by her need to stay close to him.
Ruth Benally’s truck was barely big enough for him to fit behind the wheel. If the fuel gauge could be trusted, there was half a tank of gas. As he followed the old road along the wash, he told Frances about the first time he’d driven it, the Enemy Way ceremony he’d blundered into. The road had since been widened, but the surface was no better. Negotiating the ruts and stones, he was slow to notice that Frances wasn’t listening. Her eyes were fixed on the windshield, her mouth tight. He asked what she was thinking.
“I’m thinking,” she said, “I’d rather just buy two guitars with my own money.”
“Do you want to go back?”
Not getting an answer, he stopped the truck. “I mean it,” he said. “I can easily take you back.”
She shut her eyes. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Russ, but I’m a fearful person.”
“Someone else could have come with me. It didn’t have to be you.”
“Just drive.”
He reached for her, but she jerked away from him. “Just drive.”
He didn’t understand her. He couldn’t sort out the mixture of confidence and fear, self-love and self-reproach. In her own way, she was as odd as Marion. He wondered if all women were odd or only the ones he was attracted to.
The farther he drove up the valley, the less he recognized it. The land had always been dry, but he didn’t remember it being so utterly denuded. Gone were the sheep and cattle, gone every conceivably edible leaf and shoot, gone even the fence wire. All that remained were rough-hewn fence posts and erosion-scored slopes. Except that the rocks were white, not red, the landscape could have been Martian. Even the sky had a strange yellowish-gray pall. The haze was too pale and diffuse to be from a fire, and it wasn’t a dust storm—there wasn’t any wind. It was more like the pall over Gary, Indiana, on a clear Chicago day.
The alienation deepened when he passed the last of the fallen rocks and saw, in the distance, Keith’s old farmstead. He’d assumed he would find people here, maybe Clyde himself, but there was nothing. No grass, no garden, no animals, only gnarled junipers and dead cottonwoods, their broken limbs barkless and silvery. In his mind, the farmstead had remained unchanged, alive with Keith and his extended family, their chickens and goats. To see what time had done to it was to become aware of how old he was.
“Amazingly enough,” he said, “this is where I spent a summer.”
Frances wasn’t listening. Or was listening but was too tense to speak.
The little house, where he’d had his sexual revelation, had been stripped of its doors and its windows and its roof, leaving only the walls. The sunlight on it was bright but not as bright as it should have been. As Russ proceeded along the road, across the canyon and up the ridge opposite the farmstead, the yellowish pall became more pronounced.
Reaching the top of the ridge, he saw where it was coming from. In the middle of the wide plain below, the earth had been torn open—was being torn open. Dust was billowing from a gash that might have been a mile wide. Industrial trestles and a raw new road extended from the gash to the northern horizon. Russ had a sense of betrayal, born of his loyalty to the primitive mesa of his memories. Keith had mentioned that the tribal council permitted coal mining on the reservation, but Russ hadn’t had any reason to travel in this direction until now. He hadn’t imagined that the mining was so close to the Fallen Rocks land—so close, indeed, to Kitsillie itself—or that the scale of the operation was so immense.
Half a mile down the road, he saw Clyde’s pickup. In a clearing among sparse, stunted pine trees were two unhitched camper trailers, a structure of sticks and tarpaulin, a woodpile, and a larger, rusted truck with a water tank on its bed, everything filmed with road dust. Russ pulled over behind the pickup and cut the engine. A second sticker on its bumper said CRAZY HORSE WASN’T.
“So,” he said to Frances. “Maybe you should stay here.”
She was still staring at the windshield. “What did I ask you.”
“I’m sorry?”
“What was the one thing I asked you to do.”
It was interesting that her fear expressed itself as anger, as if it were his fault that she needed him to include her.
“Okay, then,” he said, opening his door.
As they approached the trailers, the flimsy rear door of one of them banged open. Clyde came out in his bare feet, dressed only in brown jeans and a fleece-lined denim jacket, unbuttoned. His chest was bare and hairless. “Hey, white man.”
“Hello, good morning.”
“That your wife?”
Frances had stopped a step behind Russ.
“No,” he said. “She’s an adviser in our fellowship.”
“Hey, pretty lady.” Again the smiling insolence. “What brings you up here?”
“What do you think?” Russ said.
“I think you didn’t get the message.”
“I got the message, but I didn’t understand it.”
“Get the fuck out of here? Seems pretty clear to me.”
“But why? We’re not bothering you.”
Clyde smiled at the sky, as if his amusement were cosmic. He was handsome in a strong-browed way, handsome and fit. “If I walked into your house in Chicago and you said, ‘Hey, red man, get the fuck out, I don’t like you people’—I’d get the message.”
Russ could have objected that his group wasn’t in Clyde’s house. But the Navajos’ home was in the land, not in structures, and white people had certainly given them reasons to hate them. It was only by chance that Russ, until now, had dealt with Navajos who didn’t hate them. He glanced back at Frances. She seemed entirely occupied with managing her fear.
“You’re right,” he said. “If you don’t want us here, we shouldn’t be here.”
“That’s better.”
“But first I want you to hear me as a person. Not as a white man—as a person. I want to hear you, too. I didn’t come here to argue with you, I came to listen.”
Clyde laughed. “Like hell you did. I know why you’re here.”
“If you’re talking about the guitars, then, yes, we will need those back. We’re not leaving the mesa without them.”
“You people are all the same.”
“No, we’re not.”
“Your possessions, your money. You think you’re different, but you’re all the same.”
“You don’t know me,” Russ said angrily. “I don’t give a damn about possessions. I do care about the two young girls you hurt by stealing from them.”
“How many guitars do you need? I left you three of them.”
“How many do you need?”
“I already gave them to my buddies. That’s the difference between you and me.”
“That’s bullshit. The difference between you and me is you steal from teenaged girls.”
Clyde’s smile became pained. He looked around at the pine trees and then, shaking his head, walked over to the other trailer. From the dirtied sky came a faint sigh of industry, from the trees the chirring of a nutcracker. Frances’s eyes were fastened on Clyde as if she expected him to get a gun.
“We’re safe,” Russ said gently.
Her eyes moved to him without seeming to see him. Clyde emerged from the other trailer with the two guitar cases and set them on the ground. “Now get out of here,” he said.
“No.”
“Seriously, white man. You got what you came for.”
Clyde went inside his own trailer, and Frances gripped Russ’s arm. “We should go.”
“No.”
“Please. For God’s sake.”
Russ’s anger had turned to sorrow. There was beauty in a young man’s righteous anger and no joy in overpowering it—no satisfaction in bringing a white man’s legal rights to bear, asserting white ownership, reclaiming his possessions from a man who had nothing. The moral victory was Clyde’s. Thinking of what it cost him, Russ felt sorry for him.