JК
Bag of Bones :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 114 из 425Crowshit, I reckoned; only crows crap in such long and exuberant splatters. One thing seemed absolutely sure: Mattie Devore was roughly nine miles up Shit Creek with no paddle.
I’m not the cynic I was at twenty—is anyone? — but I wasn’t naive enough or idealistic enough to believe the law would protect Ms. Doublewide against Mr. Computer… not if Mr. Computer decided to play dirty. As a boy he’d taken the sled he wanted and gone sliding by himself at midnight, bleeding hands not a concern. And as a man? An old man who had been getting every sled he wanted for the last forty years or so? “What’s the story with Mattie, Bill? Tell me.”
It didn’t take him long. Country stories are, by and large, simple stories. Which isn’t to say they’re not often interesting. Mattie Devore had started life as Mattie Stanchfield, not quite from the TR but from just over the line in Motton. Her father had been a logger, her mother a home beautician (which made it, in a ghastly way, the perfect country marriage). There were three kids. When Dave Stanch-field missed a curve over in Lovell and drove a fully loaded pulptruck into Kewadin Pond, his widow “kinda lost heart,” as they say. She died soon after. There had been no insurance, other than what Stanchfield had been obliged to carry on his Jimmy and his skidder. Talk about your Brothers Grimm, huh?
Subtract the Fisher-Price toys behind the house, the two pole hairdryers in the basement beauty salon, the old rustbucket Toyota in the driveway, and you were right there: Once upon a time there lived a poor widow and her three children. Mattie is the princess of the piece—poor but beautiful (that she was beautiful I could personally testify). Now enter the prince. In this case he’s a gangly stuttering redhead named Lance Devore. The child of Max Devore’s sunset years. When Lance met Mattie, he was twenty-one. She had just turned seventeen. The meeting took place at Warrington’s, where Mattie had landed a summer job as a waitress.
Lance Devore was staying across the lake on the Upper Bay, but on Tuesday nights there were pickup softball games at Warrington’s, the townies against the summer folks, and he usually canoed across to play.
Softball is a great thing for the Lance Devores of the world; when you’re standing at the plate with a bat in your hands, it doesn’t matter if you’re gangly. And it sure doesn’t matter if you stutter. “He confused em quite considerable over to Warrington’s,” Bill said. “They didn’t know which team he belonged on—the Locals or the Aways. Lance didn’t care; either side was fine with him.
I’m not the cynic I was at twenty—is anyone? — but I wasn’t naive enough or idealistic enough to believe the law would protect Ms. Doublewide against Mr. Computer… not if Mr. Computer decided to play dirty. As a boy he’d taken the sled he wanted and gone sliding by himself at midnight, bleeding hands not a concern. And as a man? An old man who had been getting every sled he wanted for the last forty years or so? “What’s the story with Mattie, Bill? Tell me.”
It didn’t take him long. Country stories are, by and large, simple stories. Which isn’t to say they’re not often interesting. Mattie Devore had started life as Mattie Stanchfield, not quite from the TR but from just over the line in Motton. Her father had been a logger, her mother a home beautician (which made it, in a ghastly way, the perfect country marriage). There were three kids. When Dave Stanch-field missed a curve over in Lovell and drove a fully loaded pulptruck into Kewadin Pond, his widow “kinda lost heart,” as they say. She died soon after. There had been no insurance, other than what Stanchfield had been obliged to carry on his Jimmy and his skidder. Talk about your Brothers Grimm, huh?
Subtract the Fisher-Price toys behind the house, the two pole hairdryers in the basement beauty salon, the old rustbucket Toyota in the driveway, and you were right there: Once upon a time there lived a poor widow and her three children. Mattie is the princess of the piece—poor but beautiful (that she was beautiful I could personally testify). Now enter the prince. In this case he’s a gangly stuttering redhead named Lance Devore. The child of Max Devore’s sunset years. When Lance met Mattie, he was twenty-one. She had just turned seventeen. The meeting took place at Warrington’s, where Mattie had landed a summer job as a waitress.
Lance Devore was staying across the lake on the Upper Bay, but on Tuesday nights there were pickup softball games at Warrington’s, the townies against the summer folks, and he usually canoed across to play.
Softball is a great thing for the Lance Devores of the world; when you’re standing at the plate with a bat in your hands, it doesn’t matter if you’re gangly. And it sure doesn’t matter if you stutter. “He confused em quite considerable over to Warrington’s,” Bill said. “They didn’t know which team he belonged on—the Locals or the Aways. Lance didn’t care; either side was fine with him.