Love and Glory
- Автор: Паркер Роберт Браун
- Год: 1983
- Язык: английский
- Год: Delacorte
- ISBN: 978-0-385-29261-0
- Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Электронная книга - «Love and Glory». Краткое содержание книги:
In Dallas I worked a couple of nights washing dishes in the kitchen of a Mexican restaurant on McKinney Street. It was hot and I didn’t show up the third night. Instead I took a six-pack and sat in the gravel slope beneath an underpass off Elm Street and blanked my mind the way I did and felt the beer seep into me. I was on my fourth beer of that six-pack when a man scrambled over the guard rail above and stumbled down the side of the overpass and started to take a leak with his forehead pressed against the cement and his feet backed off and braced to keep himself steady. Even then he swayed and before he was finished urinating he slid down the wall and passed out in the recently created mud. I looked at him. His left arm stretched out toward me was in the small splash of light that spilled from the headlamps of his car parked with the motor running on the road above. He wore a wristwatch. Maybe it was expensive. Maybe the guy was rich. I drank some more beer. I got up and walked over toward him, my feet sliding a little in the gravel. Only that left arm was lighted. Above in the dark the cars swooshed by; the man’s car motor still idled. Faintly I could hear music from his car radio, hillbilly stuff. I stood looking down at him. He wore a suit. I poked him with my toe. He didn’t move. I squatted down and shook his shoulder. “You okay?” I said. He groaned a little and burrowed his head into the wet gravel. I patted his hip pocket and took out his wallet. A flashlight beam hit me with a force that was almost physical. I squinted into it.
A voice said, “Boy, you put both your hands on top of your head and don’t you make another move.”
I let the wallet drop and put my hands on my head. Behind the blinding light was a Dallas cop with his gun out. He made me lie flat while he patted me down, then he let me sit up.
“You rolling this man, boy?”
“No, I was looking in his wallet to see who he was. I was going to call somebody.”
“Mmm.”
The cop was feeling the artery pulse in the man’s neck.
“He came down to take a leak and passed out,” I said.
“And you down here sipping a few cool ones and looking at the dirt. That right?”
“Yeah.”
“Where you live?”
“I don’t live in Dallas. I was just passing through.”
“Got money?”
“I got five bucks,” I said.
The cop holstered his gun. “Boy,” he said. “You was going to roll this man, and we both know that. But I don’t guarantee the night court judge will believe it, and I got a lot to do tonight, including getting this gentleman out of the gully here, and getting his car off the road. So you get up on that highway and start walking west, toward Fort Worth, and if I ever see you in Dallas I’ll slam your ass in jail. On sight.”
I scrambled up the gravel bank and started walking. It tended to fuse after that. A flat-bed truck hauling chickens. A railroad station in Santa Fe where I was two days before they kicked me out. A woman at night in a park telling me to go home and sober up. A drunk tank where some guy kept crying for Betty. Brackish water in a ditch, motionless white-faced cattle, Hershey bars and day-old bread, the taste of Four Roses whiskey from the neck of a quart bottle passed around in a Quonset hut outside Tacoma. I was picking cranberries by hand, not even a scoop, five cents a box. At night on the bare mattress on the folding iron cot the medicinal cheap whiskey was all there was. All of us drank it, men and women. All of us slept in the Quonset and used the latrine out back. The teenage Indian girl next to me slept every night in a man’s workshirt and by morning it was often twisted up around her waist. I looked at her pelvis blankly when I woke up in the morning. She had good thighs and a nice slope to her belly, but I was living so slightly and so deep inside that nothing much got through to the reduced quick of me. That night, though, when the whiskey was burning my throat and warming my stomach, I asked her to go out back and we copulated on the ground near the latrine without any talk at all. She was simply passive except when I was in her; then she humped up and down as if she were trying to buck me off. I had been a long time without sex, and the first time, I ejaculated quickly. She wiped herself between her legs with the bottom of her cotton dress and we went back into the Quonset. Most of the pickers were Indian, with some Negroes and a couple of Chicanos. I was the only white. After that we used to copulate most nights, but I had a lot of trouble ejaculating and usually had to roll off finally because I was exhausted. She would hump steadily until that time and stop the minute I did, and get up and go in without comment. I don’t know how long I was there, stooped over all day, drinking and humping at night. We took turns buying the bottle and passed it around in the fields during the day. It was shared without question and without reservation, and when it was gone, the man whose turn it was would get another one. The women weren’t expected to buy one, though they could drink as much as the men. Usually we’d nurse it, keeping a kind of steady buzz on all day, and not get really washed away until nighttime so we could sleep. Sometimes I would miscalculate and get drunk too soon and have to head back to the Quonset early, reeling as I went, to pass out on my mattress. On nights like that the things I wrote to Jennifer in the journal were barely legible, and very often made no sense.
A fly woke me. It buzzed and hummed as it circled my face, and then was silent when it landed. I could feel it walking along my cheek toward the flare of my right nostril. I brushed it away. The fly buzzed again and hummed as it flew. As I became conscious I could feel how hot I was, and how wet I was with sweat. I opened my eyes stiffly and saw a strange place. My head ached, I was thirsty, and as I shifted slightly, my whole body felt trembly. I rubbed my forehead with the back of my hand. I looked at my hand. The fingernails were dirty and there was a scratch along the back of it that had a ragged scab on it. The fly came back and walked on my face again. I brushed at it and it flew a short distance away, and someone next to me slapped at it. I looked around. I was lying on a cement floor against a cinder block wall in the corner of a room with ten or twelve other men in it. Across the front wall were bars. I was in the drunk tank; I knew what a drunk tank looked like. I’d been in one before. How about this one? Had I been in this one before? No. I had never seen this one before. I didn’t know where I was. Across the room somebody was having the dry heaves in the single seatless hopper. I edged my way upright against the wall. A Mexican-looking guy next to me was smoking. I tapped my two fingers against my lips in a smoking gesture. The Mexican looked at me and looked away. The smell of his smoke made me want a cigarette badly. I felt in my pockets. There were no cigarettes. In fact there was nothing at all in my pockets. After a while a guard came and let us all out. They gave me back the tattered mass of notebooks that I kept, and we trooped down a long corridor and out onto a hot sunny street. It was a street I’d never seen. I didn’t know where I was. I walked down the hill in the heat. At a newsstand I saw the Los Angeles Times for sale, and the Herald Examiner. I was in L.A. and my last memory was a thousand miles north and five days ago. I felt shaky and sick. In a store window I saw my reflection. My hair was stringy and long; my face was half covered with a scruffy beard. One sleeve of my shirt was gone and the zipper on my fly was broken. My pants gaped. There were no laces in my shoes, which made it harder to walk, and as I moved away from the window I shuffled. I needed a drink. I needed cigarettes. I panhandled. By evening I’d gotten nearly a dollar and a half’s worth of change. I bought a pack of Camels and a bottle of port wine, and sat on a bench in a park off Broadway in downtown L.A. and smoked and drank my wine. After half a bottle I felt pretty decent. I studied my pants. I tried to figure out what they had been when I got them. I wasn’t even sure they were mine. They seemed big in the waist. They were so dirty that I couldn’t tell what color they were. The knee was ripped. I looked at my shirt. It might once have been khaki. Maybe an army shirt. I couldn’t tell. I sipped my wine, trying to make it last. The weather got a little cooler after it got dark. Somebody sat next to me on the bench. I gave her a cigarette. She had a bottle of muscatel, full. I gave her a sip of my port. She gave me some muscatel.