Pokrewne

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Bernieres Louis de Senior Vivo i krol kokainowy id
Callaghen Louis L'Amour
Clara Bayard [Seduced by Dang Help Me (epub)
Bree Bellucci [Virgin In Heat The Beast's Forced Mating [MF]
Beauty and the Beast (Faerie Ta James, Jenni
Breeds 01 Tempting the Beast
Beau and the Beast Hanna Hart
Complicity Iain Banks
Brodie Richard Wirus umyslu
Bugajski Ryszard Przesluchanie

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.Jug ears and a sun-fissured face and a nonregulation muskrat coat.Major Marvin Marston.“Come join me,” says Marston.Kermit is conscious now of his own panting.He takes a dodgy step forward.Pauses, then finishes the rest of the distance at his own pace.“Nice surprise,” he says, easing himself onto the leather banquette.“Running into you here.”“No surprise at all,” says Marston with his grim smile.“I was hoping to find you.”“Well.I am found.If you like, you can make the rounds with me tonight.I’m supposed to enforce the blackout.”“It would be my pleasure.”A blur of movement at their flanks.Nellie herself: moonfaced, barely as tall as the table.“Hiya, boys! Lemme guess: Dry muscat for Major Roosevelt.Shot of Johnnie Walker Swing for the other major.”“Make it a double,” says Marston.“Special tonight is calves’ liver and bacon.”Kermit’s stomach performs a slow revolution.“Just the cold ham sandwich, Nellie.”“Toast is five cents extra.”“So be it.”“Sirloin,” says Marston.As Nellie strides back to the counter, he calls after her, “Keep it bloody, huh?” With a dreamlike slowness, he folds and refolds the napkin in his lap.“Say now,” he says.“This is some Army we got ourselves mixed up in.”“General Buckner, is it?”“Naw, it’s everyone underneath.Toadies, desk jockeys.A fella comes along with an idea—an honest-to-God idea—they want to drown it in paper.”Kermit is familiar with Major Marston’s idea: the Tundra Army.A guerrilla force to be composed entirely of Eskimos and Indians, patrolling the Alaskan coastline for enemy incursions.The first and last word in homeland defense.“I don’t understand,” says Kermit.“The Army’s given you rifles, haven’t they?”“Springfields and Enfields.Older than my granny.Even that was a struggle.What if they turn around and use ’em on us? Morons.Not one of our bright shining military lights has a clue what these people are like.”Two glasses come sliding across the table.Marston seizes his and drains it.“I’m telling you, Major, my boys need a champion.”“A champion.”“Someone way over Buckner’s head.Someone who can rally public sentiment.”Smiling softly, Kermit begins the slow decanting of wine into throat.Feels the old flush of warmth in his sternum.The warning shot from his belly.“I can’t be sure,” he says.“To which of my cousins are you referring?”“With all due respect, the First Lady’d be just the ticket.Give me two days with Mrs.Roosevelt, my little army would never want for anything again.”The food saves Kermit from replying.Very studiously, he prizes the slab of ham from his sandwich.Pushes it around the plate with his fork and then, on further consideration, leaves it alone.“Well, you see…” He gnaws off a corner of bread.“My standing, you see, within the larger family … I mean, the only reason I’m even here, the reason I’m able to share this delightful meal with you, is that neither the president nor the First Lady particularly wants me to come knocking.Any more than my brothers do.” He stares at the bun and returns it to its plate.“Now, the U.S.Army may be every bit as incompetent as you say, but they have found the one stage in the entire theater of war where I can’t embarrass anyone.All of this by way of explaining—I’m not sure I’m the man to woo Cousin Eleanor for you.As happy as I would be to…”His voice is already flagging.With a grunt of despair, he adds, “How about that governor of yours? Gruening.He’s a presidential appointee, isn’t he? Just the man to make your case in Washington.”“You’re probably right.”Marston has few social graces, but he never sulks.Blocked in one direction, he simply fixes his sights on another.Over, under, through, thinks Kermit, recalling Father’s old directive.But never around.Kermit waits quietly for Marston to finish his steak.Then he tosses down a ten-dollar bill and, steadying himself against the table, rises from the banquette.“Let’s take a stroll, shall we?”* * *TEN O’CLOCK, AND THE sun has only begun to sink.It will be nearly midnight before it disappears altogether, and five hours later it will pop up again, taking with it the last promise of sleep.What a terror summer can be.They walk past Providence Hospital, Marston’s loping stride held in check by Kermit’s shambling.The streets are thinning out, but at the boarded-up entrance to the Federal Building, they come across a young seaman earnestly negotiating with a woman.The sailor’s like something from a Maxfield Parrish print—ginger-bearded, with a gold earring—but it’s the woman who catches Kermit’s eyes.Anywhere from ten to twenty years older than her client.Rawboned, in a green silk dress, her face carved by cosmetics into a mask of scorn.But that same mask, as Kermit passes, dissolves in the lamplight, and a new face flashes out at him.Dusky skin.Hair parted down the middle.Flecked hazel eyes.He stops.“All right?” asks Marston.“Yes…”The woman and her suitor are squinting at him now.“Nothing here for you, sir,” says the sailor.“Apologies.”Kermit staggers away.Marston follows close behind.“Friend of yours?” he asks.“Just a—”Just an old relation, he wants to say.Someone I see now and again.* * *THE LAST TIME WAS in a hospital room in Vancouver.He’d been peeing blood, and a Canadian doctor, not knowing what else to do, had kept him on a soft tide of morphine.It rolled him in and out of consciousness and then woke him for good late in the evening.She was there, standing in the room’s shadows.I want you to take him with you.…And then the room reconfigured itself, and it was Belle standing there.Belle.The mother of his children.Looking tinier than ever in an ermine coat he was fairly certain he’d never bought for her.He almost called her by name, but she put a finger to her lips.A minute later, she was gone.Such a long way to come, he’d thought, for such a brief audience.He can only believe that, before severing the last cord, she had needed to see him in that bare unaccommodated state, without the distractions of the other women—the other Roosevelts, all those voices telling her what to do.(Think of yourself, the children, your reputation.) Here she could look at the man who was her husband, at this lowest of ebbs, could stare into his damp, bleary, blood-drained face and realize there was no reclaiming him.That to be unreclaimed was, in fact, his fondest wish.She came, she saw, she left without a word.And now she is gone—gone for good.And he is here.Here.Where is here?In this exact moment, as he walks with Marston through the streets of Anchorage, nothing seems real.The fat cadences of “Cow Cow Boogie” on an out-of-tune piano.A pickup truck parked halfway up the curb.A hardware-store owner rolling down his blackout screen.(“Many thanks,” calls Kermit.)Or this: The sign posted at the turn for Fort Richardson [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]