The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection
- Автор: Датлоу Эллен, Виндлинг Терри
- Год: 1992
- Язык: английский
- Год: St.Martin’s Press
- Жанр: Ужасы
Электронная книга - «The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection». Краткое содержание книги:
Duke waved the newspaper in front of my nose, asking, “West Salem, in Wisconsin—you come from ’round there, no?”
I dried my hands before taking the paper from him. The article under the header “Hands Down Victory” was from the AP; I frowned slightly as I read it, while Duke watched me read with dancing, moist eyes.
When Duke’s eyes were all shiny and jiggling, I knew it was time to get nervous. That old “this-promotion-will-nab-the-tourists” look. Lately of the “Free Friers for Flyers” give away (kids from neighboring towns took to fishing airline tickets out of dumpers to cash in on the offer) and the Mother’s Day corsage debacle. Not that I blamed him for wanting to make it big. Tucked slightly out of the way as his diner was, just out of reach of the tourists heading to or from Taos Ski Valley, Kit Carson Memorial State Park and other draws, Duke missed the really big crowds. And as I read the article, I sensed another promotion in the works.
A Chevrolet dealer and a radio station gave away a car to a man who had stood—not counting short breaks every few hours—with both hands touching a Sprint for more hours than any other contestant. Oh, true, the contestants started out only attached to the car with a rope that got shorter as the contest progressed, but the ending of it all was pure 1930’s “they shoot horses, don’t they?” marathon stuff. No sitting, no leaning on the car, just stand upright next to that car, with both hands laid on it, evangelist-healing-the-dying style. With only five minutes of rest every three hours.
I folded the paper into thirds before tossing it on the faintly damp counter, and snorted dryly through my nose.
“Forget it, Duke. AP’s spread that story all over the country. Old hat. Polesitting’s passe. Even that girl in the midwest gave up after she broke the record her mom set. It won’t draw anyone—”
“A camper. Big one. Lots of people could lean against it, no? Lots of room out back, you could paint the sign. Put it up against the front, next to the door. Real bright, you can paint it. Red, lots of red. And yellow, customers, they like yellow—”
I turned my back to Duke, tried to lose myself in the subtle shift of the top layer of sand in the wind (it reminded me of the way powdery snow would snake across the highways when the Wisconsin winter winds blew, and I silently cussed those people in West Salem), but minutes later something round bumped up against my back.
A paint can. Duke had found a big can of red in the back shed. Plus a huge brush.
Two weeks in the sun and occasionally blowing sand had scoured my freshly painted sign to a deep fuchsia by the day the contest was to begin rolled around. Duke had all but left the running of the diner to me; he scooted around Taos, Talpa, Pilar and Dixon, not to mention La Medera and Santa Fe, with photocopied and hand-colored (thanks to me) fliers advertising the “Put Up Yer Dukes Camper Give-Away.” I had to hand it to Duke; he shook butt and got the word out. Newspaper ads, fliers stapled to telephone poles and thumbtacked to bulletin boards in supermarkets, even a radio spot. And, God help the man, he bought a camper.
Huge thing. White as a cow skull, all banded in gleaming chrome, and the windows sparkled, like old bottles thrown to shatter in a ditch. A massive, insane, beautiful, impossible hulk of a camper. Once, I tried to tell Duke that the Chevy dealer in West Salem only gave away an auto worth less than $7,000 dollars— and the guy went in with a radio station. Duke only gave me a sad, blissful smile, and I said no more.
The camper was a wonderous thing; Duke parked it out back, where there would be plenty of room for the would-be winners of it, and come sunset, the camper was a thing of shell-like purity against the raw intense colors of the hills beyond. It was almost enough to make me want to dig out my box of scrunched and flattened oils and try once more to ... to be what only a sunburned and slat Thin woman already was, for now and forever. No matter how much I painted the mountain, the desert, the stones—even the damned camper—they would never be mine. The box of paint tubes stayed under my cot in the back room.
But nothing could keep me from looking at it, parked under a cloudless and swelling blue sky, like a pebble of white near a still ocean. Others looked at the camper, too, but I don’t think they saw it in the same way I did. O’Keeffe, she might have understood it, but the other people who came to gawk at it, they saw only gas mileage, something to win and then sell, or a thing to impress their friends with the winning of it.
Except for the woman in the faded denim, the one who . . . who claimed it.
Spaces between the bone say the most about the bone, the spaces define what is all around them, accentuate the white purity of line, of sweeping form, and when sunlight or moonlight hit the bone, the spots free of bone complement the clean bareness, in perfect Symmetry . . .
Duke wasn’t quite as crazy as I had thought him. He pulled me aside minutes before we opened the doors of the diner to admit the fifty or so people waiting outside, and whispered, “See the big guy, bandana on his head, mustache?”
“You gonna tell me something I really don’t want to hear?”
“That guy, he’s the winner. From Santa Fe. Trucker. Used to holding it, y’know? Used to going thirsty. Riding in that rig, they get used to things like that. Found him last week. He wins, I get the camper, and it goes back to the dealer. ”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“He'll win. He's a good boy. He don’t want to see Duke lose the diner, no?” Duke’s eyes were doing their soggy jig, and I just shrugged. I still had the Volvo; no rope was tying me to the diner.
Duke was playing Mr. Bountiful before the contest was to begin; every contestant was treated to a free meal. From the way Duke laid on the salt earlier that morning, I knew that more than one entrant would spend more than the limit of two minutes in the porta-potty come the first three-hour break. And naturally, the water jugs were free, and plentiful. And the menu that morning was loaded with fish, salty scrambled eggs and hash browns.
There wasn’t enough room for every contestant to sit and eat, so plates were passed amid the nervous laughter, and most people had to lean against walls or put their plates on the narrow windowsills. As I circulated with a carafe of coffee, I noticed that some folks were wise to Duke; they avoided the sodium rich stuff and stuck to sips of water and nibbles of dry toast.
The woman in the distressed denim (as in bleached naturally by the sun, her shoulders were almost white) forked her fish filet into delicate chevrons of cooked flesh; when I offered her some coffee she slowly shook her head. She was so sun-browned and leathery it was hard to tell if she came by her dark complexion naturally or had worked at it; her cheeks were worthy of O’Keeffe, though. High flaring wings of bone under spare taut skin. Her eyes were dark, almost dry stones set in sullen clouds. Thin, cracked lips (striated, with moist valleys of pink between) moved into a rictus of a smile before I left her for the next entrant.
I hadn’t seen the woman among the crowds who had come in the days before the contest. Her, I would have remembered. She was easily the second most beautiful woman I’d ever seen; Art embodied in worn denim and a work shirt with frayed cuffs. Whether she was twenty or fifty was impossible to tell, her black hair signified nothing. Some reservation women kept black hair, or near enough, into their dotage. But no jewelry, turquoise or otherwise, adorned her neck, wrists, or fingers, and I’m of the opinion that most Indian women are born with silver and blue jewelry on their bodies.