Читать книгу Twentynine Palms - Daniel Pyne - Страница 10

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Square-shouldered, blue-skinned, box-bellied Marine Sergeant John Symes sits, hunched, in a lawn chair beside the pool, staring intently up at the second-floor doors of the Rancho Del Dorotea motel. Two-oh-one through two-sixteen. Every door the same sun-blanched yellow. Between his teeth, he’s expertly cracking the pistachio nuts he picks singly from the bag cradled in one fat fist.

Opposite him, in the shadow of the lone palm on the far side of the pool, Rachel is curled up on a chaise, her Hello Kitty backpack proving to be a lumpish pillow.

Probably a runaway, Symes thinks. Somebody should call somebody. Maybe there’s a picture, maybe there’s an Amber Alert, maybe there’s a parent waiting and worrying in a crappy walk-up Riverside duplex from which the little twist fled. Maybe there’s an asshole who beats her or molests her or allows the same while cooking strawberry-flavored meth in the garage. In his multiple tours of the Cradle of Civilization, Symes has seen too much to believe that insinuating himself into the landscape of other people can lead to anything other than chaos. It wasn’t heroic, but most of the heroes Symes has known are either dead and buried, or prowling the streets in a permanent state of unravel.

It’s just how things work.

Which is why, on balance, Symes knows he should be home sleeping instead of out here spitting husks into the darkness. “Heroes,” Symes’ friend Corporal Evan “Fast-Pass” Mulvey observed, not very long before they picked up the pieces of him from a roadside ditch in Helmand Province, “are just cowards with balls.”

Jaw set, stubborn, angular, only Symes’ sad brown eyes betray the feelings that skitter through his fretful guts as he holds vigil.