The Christmas Kid полностью

“But lookit this stuff.” He tapped the newspaper. “Nicaragua. El Salvador. We’re mining harbors in a country we ain’t at war with, Harry. We pay all these el creepos — the contras — to fight for us. These people kill nuns, Harry. I don’t get it anymore, Harry.”

Drum smiled. “It’s no concern of ours anymore, Charlie.”

“Yeah? Well, we didn’t pull crap like this when I was a kid, when you was a kid.”

Drum leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “That woman in the dungarees. With the yellow blouse. Remind you of Helen, doesn’t she?”

Keegan looked at Drum. “I thought you weren’t gonna talk about her anymore.”

“I’m not talkin’ about her. I’m just sayin’, that woman looks like her. A statement of fact. Look at me. You see a tear? You see me upset?”

“No, but I don’t want to, neither. Every time you talk about Helen, you get weepy.”

“I was married to her for thirty-two years, Charlie.”

Keegan opened the newspaper. “Hey, lookit this! Forty years! The anniversary. Forty years since D-day. Can you believe it?”

“Yeah.”

“Jeez, I forgot, Harry. You was there, right?”

Drum shrugged and stood up. “Let’s take a walk.”

They loaded us on the LCVs in the dark, thirteen miles out, the waves rising and falling, bazookas and TNT piled on the deck, and all of us with full field packs, knowing everything came to this moment, this night, this day in the English Channel; all the training, the convoy across the Atlantic, the boredom and pubs and women of England. I wrote Helen 121 letters from England alone, crazy letters, mad nutty kid letters, the words just pouring out of me, nothing about the war, nothing about Nazis or democracy or freedom or any of that; just me crazy for her, crazy to be with her, crazy to come back alive, crazy to have kids with her, a house with her, crazy to live a life. With her. And in the LCV, jammed in with Smitty and Ralph and Cappy and Max, that’s all I thought about. If I could think about Helen, her face, her hair, the way she laughed, the smell of her in the park in summer, then I wouldn’t have to think about what was on the other side of the Channel. I dozed and thought about her. I squatted there, and thought about her, I even thought of her as we rose and fell and moved through the waves, and the big guns pounded the shore.

They came over a rise and looked down at the broad green sward of the meadow. The parks department had erected metal fences for ballplayers, and Drum hated them. Drum wanted the world to stay the same for all of his life.

“I see those fences,” he said, “I want to blow them up.”

“They put you in the can for that,” Keegan said, laughing in his wheezy way. “And I’m too old to come visit you.”

“But do you blame me?”

“Everything’s changed, Harry. You can stand here and pray for a week, you ain’t gonna see a trolley car, you ain’t gonna go to Ebbets Field, you ain’t gonna go to Luna Park.”

“I know.”