The Ambidextrist. Peter Rock
on Kelly Drive. Scott follows—cars honk and swerve around him—into the park, onto a small side road, under the trees. And it’s not long before the old man leaves the road altogether and heads straight into the woods.
Scott crashes down the path, after him, unable to see him any longer, and finally slows—no reason to rush if he gets headed in the wrong direction, and he doesn’t want to overtake Ray, either. He keeps moving along the path, his skin gone from slick to cool, leaves slipping along his arms, his ribs. He’d slept out here once, built a lean-to of a couple pallets; he’d still felt exposed.
Out in the west, he’d seen spraypaint on trees and been told it was the mark of loggers, choosing which ones they’d take. Here it serves no purpose, but blue and yellow lines, initials mark the trunks. The bicycle’s trail is one line in the dirt, sometimes splitting in two and then coming back together where the rear tire followed the front. Ray’s pushing it, now, his footprints on the left.
And here the old man has left the path—leaves are overturned, showing their colors, not their burnt-out, dusty sides. Here, the bicycle’s pedal has scored the bark from a tree trunk Scott follows. The sun clips by, through the leaves of trees. A spot off to the left shimmers for an instant, in the corner of his eye—behind him, down in the bushes. For a moment, he fears the old man has crashed; leaning down, he sees it’s only that the bicycle has been stashed there, back under the foliage. He smells the dirt, the dry leaves, a hint of cinders in the back of his throat. Twenty feet away, he sees a gap in the brush. That’s where the old man has gone. He’s close.
Their branches growing together, up high, the bushes form a kind of tunnel. Scott pauses; he doesn’t know what he expects Ray to be doing when he finds him, whether he’ll be waiting or setting an ambush. Scott moves slowly, into the tunnel of leaves and twigs. Fishing line, weighed by little round bells, hangs here and there; he slips by without touching them, muffles the bells in his fists. Halfway in, afraid of leaving footprints, he takes off his boots and socks and carries them.
A light shines from the ground. A round pond, water reflecting, the brightness torn only by the shadows of leaves. Scott stands perfectly still, hardly breathing, moving only his eyes. What he sees makes no sense at all, and that intrigues him.
One chair sits at the far end of the pond, and the whole area is only five feet wide, ten feet long, bordered by refrigerator shelving sunk into the ground like a miniature fence. Everything is packed so tightly it’s only possible to walk along the edge.
Close to him, flat stones have faces painted on them, eyes and mouths the colors of fingernail polish. Spoons stand with their handles stuck in the dirt, and photographs of faces have been cut from magazines and affixed to their other ends; actresses and sports stars smile, their colors faded. Plastic flowers rise among the spoons, the tiny faces stuck inside the blossoms, encircled by petals. Across the pond, the limbs of dolls and mannequins jut from the dirt, as if their bodies lie below and are about to surface.
The ground has been pounded, polished, so it is smooth and shiny. Scott balances along the edge, nearer the chair. Broken glass spins colored patterns, twisting with keys and bottlecaps, marbles, pieces of brick, all embedded in the burnished dirt.
The chair’s splayed legs are sunk into the ground; it was clearly once a rocking chair, but now its runners are gone. Scott sits, rests his bare feet in the grooves Ray’s have made. He doesn’t know whether Ray is hidden, watching him, and he’s not certain if that would make him take less pleasure, or more, from the garden.
Light gathers. At his feet lie tiny human-looking skeletons, built from chicken bones. Lizards and lions, carved from wood and plastic, ring the pond, as if coming to get a drink. Horses and monkeys and elephants, inches high. Black plastic garbage bags line the pond’s bottom, weighed down with stones. The old man must lug buckets up here to keep it full. Scott looks over the garden and wonders about Ray. This is hours and hours of work. Days and weeks and months. And for what? The only answer he can think of is this: because it’s beautiful.
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