Pontypool Changes Everything полностью

As they pull out of Green River, father and son are dissolving the blue halves of a Dilaudid under their tongues. As they sail through Greenwood, some minutes later, Dad thinks to himself: Well really, if the baby gets half, maybe I should take one and a half. He twirls off the lid and pops another into his mouth. Beside him his son is quiet. This is what it takes. Les flops a hand across the comfort of the steering wheel. I’m stoned. He feels the tiny fractures in his elbow melt over and strengthen. I have been conscripted into an army. Les smiles to himself. That kid at the pharmacy knows a little more now. The world has revealed the gun it points at him. Along the stretch of road between Brooklyn and Manchester, Les has his first fantasy about life with his son. A son he names Ernie.

The church in Pontypool is one of those rural teeth that have turned slightly toward the back of the throat, missed by the toothbrush. It appears as a space, sometimes dark with dirt, sometimes cast in shadow. A round black-orange structure that sits off the back, under the trees, hides a tiny cemetery from the road. Two black Labradors are running between white-skinned headstones. One dog moves with a dip and find gait, and the other follows, not trusting its own navigation because of the chopstick deformity in its jaw which causes its lower teeth to slap eastward when it goes south. The dogs stop in the woods just beyond the back row of headstones and they circle a contraption made of metal tubing and the flesh of old tires. The lead dog takes a hunk of this rubber in its mouth and growl whines at the other while it blinks its intelligent eye from side to side. The contraption is a large cartoon of a bear trap made out of a bike rack. Around the playing dogs are trees cut to their stumps.

This is the theatre of Les Reardon. The sculpture, now being dragged to the back door of the church by one of the Labs, is the skeletal form of a stage prop that was to have been central in his first production, The Harrowing of Hell. Les had spent many afternoons sitting on a stump here, blowing cigarette smoke at the bugs in his face — a new habit — picturing the children of Pontypool emerging through hinged jaws to climb up onto a sunlit bed of moss and lie spent and ancient at the feet of their proud parents. The Harrowing of Hell was not to be. The drama coach of Pontypool, Les Reardon suffered a massive relapse of a painful mental illness. He was treated; however, that treatment forced him to eventually stagger off home from school, under the draining influence of strong medication. His wife, Helen, and their son, Ernie, spent the last couple of months walking as light as prayer around Les as he lay on the couch under an orange throw. He clutched the remote in two fingers that he poked through the loose crochet of the blanket. The medication eventually worked, and the drama of his psychosis quieted; still, he was so weighted with the drug’s wisdom that he was unable to coach, unable to lead the children from hell to their parents’ feet.

The priest who had donated an area around the cemetery to the teacher’s project took pity on the man who lost his mind in the woods behind his church. When Les returned some weeks later, altered but less wild, to wander with stiff limbs across his stage, the priest offered him a job. The job that the holy man concocted for Les already existed in larger city parishes. He applied for the funding and was immediately granted the means to hire the first rural Custodian of Dogs. Les managed to walk and feed the dogs for one week only — the brief spell after his energy rose from under the medication and before that energy was wasted against a chaotic range of depressions. As his desire to live met with the life he would have to live, Les slipped on his own weight, down a rope that dropped him under a crocheted blanket on the couch, where he sits, once again, with two fingers poking through the loose weave to direct a remote control. This summer, Ernie experiences his first vacation from school as an adolescent. The priest, who still needed an employee, gave the son the father’s job and Ernie inherited the title Custodian of Dogs.