Читать книгу The Hawkline Monster - Richard Brautigan - Страница 15

· In the Early Winds of Morning ·

Just outside of Gompville a man was hanging from the bridge across the river. There was a look of disbelief on his face as if he still couldn’t believe that he was dead. He just refused to believe that he was dead. He wouldn’t believe · he was dead until they buried him. His body swayed gently in the early winds of morning.

There was a barbed-wire drummer riding in the stagecoach with Greer and Cameron and Magic Child. The drummer looked like a fifty-year-old child ·with long skinny fingers and cold-white nails. He was going to Billy, then onto Brooks to sell barbed wire.

Business was good.

“There’s a lot of that going on around here now,” he said, pointing at the body. “It’s those gunmen from Portland. It’s their work.”

He was the only one talking. Nobody else had anything to say out loud. Greer and Cameron said what they had to say inside their minds.

Magic Child looked so calm you would have thought that she had been raised in a land where bodies hung everywhere like flowers.

The stagecoach drove across the bridge without stopping. It sounded like a minor thunderstorm on the bridge. The wind turned the body, so that it was watching the stagecoach drive up the road along the river and then disappear into a turn of dusty green trees.