Читать книгу Now and Forever - Рэй Брэдбери, Ray Bradbury Philip K. Dick Isaac Asimov - Страница 17

Mr Culpepper did not immediately respond.

For dead ahead there was afternoon high tea, with apricot and peach tarts and strawberry delight and coffee instead of tea and then port instead of coffee and then there was dinner, a real humdinger, that lasted until well after nine and then the inhabitants of the Egyptian View Arms headed up, one by one, to their most welcome cool summer night beds, and Cardiff sat out on the croquetless and hoopless lawn, watching Mr Culpepper on the porch, smoking several small bonfire pipes, waiting.

At last Cardiff, in full brooding pace, arrived at the bottom of the porch rail and waited.

‘You were asking about no children?’ said Elias Culpepper.

Cardiff nodded.

‘A good reporter wouldn’t allow so much time to pass after asking such an important question.’

‘More time is passing right now,’ said Cardiff, gently, climbing the porch steps.

‘So it is. Here.’

A bottle of wine and two small snifters sat on the railing.

Cardiff drained his at a jolt, and went to sit next to Elias Culpepper.

Culpepper puffed smoke. ‘We have,’ he said, seeming to consider his words with care, ‘sent all the children away to school.’

Cardiff stared. ‘The whole town? Every child?’

‘That’s the sum. It’s a hundred miles to Phoenix in one direction. Two hundred to Tucson. Nothing but sand and petrified forest in between. The children need schools with proper trees. We got proper trees here, yes, but we can’t hire teachers to teach here. We did, at one time, but they got too lonesome. They wouldn’t come, so our children had to go.’

‘If I came back in late June would I meet the kids coming home for the summer?’

Culpepper held still, much like Claude.

‘I said—’

‘I heard.’ Culpepper knocked the sparking ash from his pipe. ‘If I said yes, would you believe me?’

Cardiff shook his head.

‘You implying I’m a mile off from the truth?’

‘I’m only implying,’ Cardiff said, ‘that we are at a taffy pull. I’m waiting to see how far you pull it.’

Culpepper smiled.

‘The children aren’t coming home. They have chosen summer school in Amherst, Providence, and Sag Harbor. One is even in Mystic Seaport. Ain’t that a fine sound? Mystic. I sat there once in a thunderstorm reading every other chapter of Moby-Dick.’

‘The children are not coming home,’ said Cardiff. ‘Can I guess why?’

The older man nodded, pipe in mouth, unlit.

Cardiff took out his notepad and stared at it.

‘The children of this town,’ he said at last, ‘won’t come home. Not one. None. Never.’

He closed the notepad and continued: ‘The reason why the children are never coming home is,’ he swallowed hard, ‘there are no children. Something happened a long time ago, God knows what, but it happened. And this town is a town of no family homecomings. The last child left long ago, or the last child finally grew up. And you’re one of them.’

‘Is that a question?’

‘No,’ said Cardiff. ‘An answer.’

Culpepper leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. ‘You,’ he said, the smoke long gone from his pipe, ‘are an A-1 Four Star Headline News Reporter.’