JК
Bag of Bones :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 76 из 425”
She stamped her foot to show she knew as well asanybody what mad as hell was all about. Three or four was my guess. Well-spoken in her fashion and cute as hell, but still no more than three or four. “Well, the beach is a good place to go on the Fourth, all right,” I said, “but—”
“Fourth of July and fireworks too,” she agreed, making “too”
sound exotic and sweet, like a word in Vietnamese. “—but if you try to walk there on the highway, you’re more apt to wind up in Castle Rock Hospital.” I decided I wasn’t going to stand there playing Mister Rogers with her in the middle of Route 68, not with a curve only fifty yards to the south and a car apt to come wheeling around it at sixty miles an hour at any time. I could hear a motor, actually, and it was revving hard. I picked the kid up and carried her over to where my car was idling, and although she seemed perfectly content to be carried and not frightened a bit, I felt like Chester the Molester the second I had my arm locked under her bottom. I was very aware that anyone sitting around in the combined office and waiting room of Brooksie’s Garage could look out and see me. This is one of the strange midlife realities of my generation: we can’t touch a child who isn’t our own without fearing others will see something lecherous in our touching. . or without thinking, way down deep in the sewers of our psyches, that there probably is something lecherous in it. I got her out of the road, though. I did that much. Let the Marching Mothers of Western Maine come after me and do their worst. “You take me beach?” the little girl asked.
She was bright-eyed, smiling. I figured that she’d probably be pregnant by the time she was twelve, especially given the cool way she was wearing her baseball cap. “Got your suitie?”
“Actually I think I left my suitie at home. Don’t you hate that? Honey, where’s your mom?” As if in direct answer to my question, the car I’d heard came busting out of a road on the near side of the curve. It was a Jeep Scout with mud splashed high up on both sides. The motor was growling like something up a tree and pissed off about it. A woman’s head was poked out the side window. Little curie’s mom must have been too scared to sit down; she was driving in a mad crouch, and if a car had been coming around that particular curve in Route 68 when she pulled out, my friend in the red bathing suit would likely have become an orphan on the spot. The Scout fishtailed, the head dropped back down inside the cab, and there was a grinding as the driver upshifted, trying to take her old heap from zero to sixty in maybe nine seconds.
She stamped her foot to show she knew as well asanybody what mad as hell was all about. Three or four was my guess. Well-spoken in her fashion and cute as hell, but still no more than three or four. “Well, the beach is a good place to go on the Fourth, all right,” I said, “but—”
“Fourth of July and fireworks too,” she agreed, making “too”
sound exotic and sweet, like a word in Vietnamese. “—but if you try to walk there on the highway, you’re more apt to wind up in Castle Rock Hospital.” I decided I wasn’t going to stand there playing Mister Rogers with her in the middle of Route 68, not with a curve only fifty yards to the south and a car apt to come wheeling around it at sixty miles an hour at any time. I could hear a motor, actually, and it was revving hard. I picked the kid up and carried her over to where my car was idling, and although she seemed perfectly content to be carried and not frightened a bit, I felt like Chester the Molester the second I had my arm locked under her bottom. I was very aware that anyone sitting around in the combined office and waiting room of Brooksie’s Garage could look out and see me. This is one of the strange midlife realities of my generation: we can’t touch a child who isn’t our own without fearing others will see something lecherous in our touching. . or without thinking, way down deep in the sewers of our psyches, that there probably is something lecherous in it. I got her out of the road, though. I did that much. Let the Marching Mothers of Western Maine come after me and do their worst. “You take me beach?” the little girl asked.
She was bright-eyed, smiling. I figured that she’d probably be pregnant by the time she was twelve, especially given the cool way she was wearing her baseball cap. “Got your suitie?”
“Actually I think I left my suitie at home. Don’t you hate that? Honey, where’s your mom?” As if in direct answer to my question, the car I’d heard came busting out of a road on the near side of the curve. It was a Jeep Scout with mud splashed high up on both sides. The motor was growling like something up a tree and pissed off about it. A woman’s head was poked out the side window. Little curie’s mom must have been too scared to sit down; she was driving in a mad crouch, and if a car had been coming around that particular curve in Route 68 when she pulled out, my friend in the red bathing suit would likely have become an orphan on the spot. The Scout fishtailed, the head dropped back down inside the cab, and there was a grinding as the driver upshifted, trying to take her old heap from zero to sixty in maybe nine seconds.