Читаем Gould полностью

Night before he’s to come to her house he rides his bike into a pole on a bicycle path. The pole’s there to keep cars off the path. It once had reflectors but someone had smashed them, or what? When he went back with her a few days later to photograph the pole for insurance purposes, the reflector frames were still nailed to the pole but the reflectors were gone. So he doesn’t see the pole in the middle of the path — he’s biking by flashlight, sky’s dark and moon’s not up and path runs through a grove of eucalyptus trees — the smells, he remembers, well, not then, but other times and perhaps especially at night — and bike’s front wheel hits it, he flies over it and breaks his shoulder and cracks his head. Drags the mangled bike about a half-mile to his house and then, when he realizes how hurt he is, calls a friend to take him to a hospital’s emergency room and next day calls her and says he broke his shoulder and has a concussion and he’s sorry but it’s obvious he won’t be able to do any two-handed heavy manual labor or garden work for a while — he doesn’t even see how he can help his friend drive to New York in two weeks — so he guesses their arrangement’s off, and she says “Deal’s a deal. You can still get on your knees and pull up weeds, can’t you? And instruct me with repair work around the house, if you know how, and look after my son while I’m out, and so forth. I can’t be paying for your food now, though — your labor won’t cover it. We can go fifty-fifty, or forty for you, sixty for me, since I have the little boy, but all depending on your appetite. If it’s enormous — you’re not the biggest guy but you might have a high metabolism — it’s back to fifty and maybe even you’re the sixty. Actually, maybe you should be, since I bet I weigh a little more than half what you do and I’m not much of an eater. As for your room, it’s here and costs me naught to keep up. But maybe you can also go in on the laundry detergent, just to be absolutely fair, and help me hang the more delicate wash on the umbrella clothesline outside, something I was also going to have you dig a deeper hole for and reinstall.”

She went to Portugal with another man and her son, by this time he’d left her for the last time and was living in New York. She called from Oporto and said “Why don’t you join us? We always said we wanted to stomp around the Iberian Peninsula, so now we can all do it together. Brett said he wouldn’t mind sharing me with you so long as he gets to stay with me two consecutive nights out of four. We can do it that way, always getting two bedrooms. And the one who doesn’t sleep with me shares his room, and if there’s only one bed in it, then his bed, with Brons,” and he said “But he still wets it sometimes,” and she said “Don’t worry, he’s just a kid with a wee bladder, and I brought a pad.”

He’d left from her house, driven a U-Drive-It car to Indiana, flown from Indianapolis to New York. Called her every day along the way. “I’m in Nevada now, in the middle of a desert, I swear half the cars driving past are going at least a hundred-twenty miles per, but from this phonebooth I can see the mountains I’ll be camping in tonight. I miss you, isn’t that stupid?” and she said “Enjoy yourself, explore the wild, curl up with a coyote or bear.” “I’m on the outskirts of North Platte, Nebraska, and from this rest stop I just saw the most stunning sunset in my life and an hour ago a tornado. To catch what promises to be a glorious sunrise and to save some cash, I think I’ll sleep in the car here. I still miss you, maybe not even out of loneliness on the road, and more than I did yesterday. It’s ridiculous, because when we said good-bye we both never wanted to see the other again,” and she said she missed him too and would love for him to fly back soon as he unloads the car in Indiana. “We wouldn’t work anything out but we’d have a helluva hot and heavy few days. Brons began peeing in his pants day you left. He says he can’t sleep knowing you’ll never come back,” and he said “Tell him I’ll see him at least once a year, though probably twice that. I’ll send for him when he gets a bit older but meanwhile I’ll fly out there just to be with him and starting a few months from now and one to two weeks at a time,” and she said “You tell him because if I do then when you go back on your pledge he’ll blame me.” “Hi, Gould. I miss you, I love you, I want to hold you in my arms forever and ever. When are you driving back? Where are you now? Will you be away long?” “Oh, my little boy,” he said and started sobbing and Brons handed the phone to her: “I think he’s crying. I didn’t do anything bad, did I?”