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Bullet Park :: Cheever John
Страница: 2 из 131Then you think happily that this is your country-unique, mysterious and vast. One has no such feelings in airplanes, airports and the trains of other nations.
A train arrives, a passenger departs and is met by a real-estate agent named Hazzard, for who else will know the exact age, usefulness, value and well-being of the houses in the town. "Welcome to Bullet Park. We hope you'll like it well enough to join us here." Mr. Hazzard does not happen to live in Bullet Park. His name, like that of every other licensed real-estate dealer, is nailed to the trees in vacant lots, but he transacts his business in a small office in the next village. The stranger has left his wife in the Hotel Plaza, watching television. The search for shelter seems to him to go on at a nearly primordial level. Prices are high these days and nothing is exactly what one wants. The scuffed paint and discarded portables of earlier owners seem as alive and demanding as the clothing and papers one sorts out after a death in the family. The house or the flat that he looks for, he knows, will have had to have appeared at least twice in his dreams. When it is all over, when the gardens are planted and the furniture is settled, the rigors of the journey will have been concealed; but on this evening the blood-memory of travel and migrations courses through his veins. The people of Bullet Park intend not so much to have arrived there as to have been planted and grown there, but this of course was untrue. Disorder, moving vans, bank loans at high interest, tears and desperation had characterized most of their arrivals and departures.
"This is our commercial center," says Hazzard. "We have all sorts of plans for its improvement. There's Powder Hill," says Hazzard, nodding towards a lighted hill on their right. "There's a property there I'd like to show you. The asking price is fifty-seven thousand. Five bedrooms, three baths…" The lights of Powder Hill twinkled, its chimneys smoked and a pink plush toilet-seat cover flew from a clothesline. Seen at an improbable distance by some zealous and vengeful adolescent, ranging over the golf links, the piece of plush would seem to be the imprimatur, the guerdon, the accolade and banner of Powder Hill behind which marched, in tight English shoes, the legions of wife-swapping, Jew-baiting, booze-fighting spiritual bankrupts. Oh damn them all, thought the adolescent.
A train arrives, a passenger departs and is met by a real-estate agent named Hazzard, for who else will know the exact age, usefulness, value and well-being of the houses in the town. "Welcome to Bullet Park. We hope you'll like it well enough to join us here." Mr. Hazzard does not happen to live in Bullet Park. His name, like that of every other licensed real-estate dealer, is nailed to the trees in vacant lots, but he transacts his business in a small office in the next village. The stranger has left his wife in the Hotel Plaza, watching television. The search for shelter seems to him to go on at a nearly primordial level. Prices are high these days and nothing is exactly what one wants. The scuffed paint and discarded portables of earlier owners seem as alive and demanding as the clothing and papers one sorts out after a death in the family. The house or the flat that he looks for, he knows, will have had to have appeared at least twice in his dreams. When it is all over, when the gardens are planted and the furniture is settled, the rigors of the journey will have been concealed; but on this evening the blood-memory of travel and migrations courses through his veins. The people of Bullet Park intend not so much to have arrived there as to have been planted and grown there, but this of course was untrue. Disorder, moving vans, bank loans at high interest, tears and desperation had characterized most of their arrivals and departures.
"This is our commercial center," says Hazzard. "We have all sorts of plans for its improvement. There's Powder Hill," says Hazzard, nodding towards a lighted hill on their right. "There's a property there I'd like to show you. The asking price is fifty-seven thousand. Five bedrooms, three baths…" The lights of Powder Hill twinkled, its chimneys smoked and a pink plush toilet-seat cover flew from a clothesline. Seen at an improbable distance by some zealous and vengeful adolescent, ranging over the golf links, the piece of plush would seem to be the imprimatur, the guerdon, the accolade and banner of Powder Hill behind which marched, in tight English shoes, the legions of wife-swapping, Jew-baiting, booze-fighting spiritual bankrupts. Oh damn them all, thought the adolescent.