Читать книгу The Coffins of Little Hope - Timothy Schaffert - Страница 13

Before Lenore vanished, Daisy worked at our printing factory, though none of us really knew her. She biked to the press in the early mornings and biked away in the early afternoons. She ate her lunch on a bench in the yard in the summer, and in the winter she ate on the floor in the hallway. She wasn’t beloved for her eccentricity, but she wasn’t hated for it either.

A man who Daisy called Elvis, because of his Vegas-style pompadour and sexy drawl, came to the door of her farmhouse the summer that the pages of the final Miranda-and-Desiree rolled secretly through the tumblers and cylinders of our press.

He stood at her door on a night in June with his denim shirt all unsnapped down the front, offering to help her clear the farm of the branches that a tornado had ripped from the trees and tossed asunder. He stayed in Daisy’s house, and he was so good with Lenore, she claimed, so good that it broke her heart to think how long Lenore had been without a father figure. He waited for Daisy every evening in the parking lot of the printing press, and they would ride back to her farm, the two of them on her bike, wobbling along. He would ask her to describe the work she did, and she’d tell him how important it was, with this particular book, to manage the flow of the ink to the inking rollers. “It’s a special ink, I guess,” she said; “not a drop should be wasted”—an ink concocted of blueberries and carrots and kelp.

“You’ll be guilty of theft,” Elvis said one midnight, flipping over the next card in a stack of tarot. He and Daisy sat on her bed, a week or so before he left with Lenore, and Elvis told her fortune. The moon cast enough light against the bed to see by. Playful, he predicted for her a shellfish allergy, braces on her teeth, and a tawdry affair with a bearded lady.

It was sweltering in the house—a sultry, humid July night—and Elvis had stripped down to his boxers, and Daisy had put on a ratty, threadbare baby doll. They sucked on chips of ice.

“Theft,” Daisy said, surprising Elvis with a page of the final book, taking it from where she’d stashed it between the mattress and the box spring. The book would not be in bookstores, would not be read, until winter, months away. Back at the factory, the page had gotten caught and torn and mangled in the feed. All the ink smeared. They could barely read any of the words, and the words they could read didn’t make any sense because they all just bled into a molasses of black. At the factory, Daisy had stuck the folded paper into the front of her jeans, against the skin of her stomach, where she wouldn’t get pawed and patted by security. Daisy and Elvis studied the paper marked with letters stretched and colliding, words running on top of each other, tangling, losing shape and meaning.