情绪别致的疯子1 / 1
28、"Do you want to come for a walk?" I asked her. "We wouldn't need to go far. If you walk just around the point there, you come to a bay where great big reeds grow in the water, and all kinds of fish hang around there. Want to? Come on."
29、She shook her head.
30、"Your dad said I ain't supposed to do no more walking than I got to." I tried another line.
31、"I bet you know a lot about the woods and all that, eh?" I began respectfully.
32、Piquette looked at me from her large dark unsmiling eyes.
33、"I don't know what in hell you're talkin' about," she replied. "You nuts or somethin'? If you mean where my old man, and me, and all them live, you better shut up, by Jesus, you hear?"
34、I was startled and my feelings were hurt, but I had a kind of dogged perseverance. I ignored her rebuff.
35、"You know something, Piquette? There's loons here, on this lake. You can see their nests just up the shore there, behind those logs. At night, you can hear them even from the cottage, but it's better to listen from the beach. My dad says we should listen and try to remember how they sound, because in a few
1 / 1
years when more cottages are built at Diamond Lake and more people come in, the loons will go away."
36、Piquette was picking up stones and snail shells and then dropping them again.
37、"Who gives a good goddamn?" she said.
38、It became increasingly obvious that, as an Indian, Piquette was a dead loss. That evening I went out by myself, scrambling through the bushes that overhung the steep path, my feet slipping on the fallen spruce needles that covered the ground. When I reached the shore, I walked along the firm damp sand to the small pier that my father had built, and sat down there. I heard someone else crashing through the undergrowth and the bracken, and for a moment I thought Piquette had changed her mind, but it turned out to be my father. He sat beside me on the pier and we waited, without speaking.
38、At night the lake was like black glass with a streak of amber which was the path of the moon. All around, the spruce trees grew tall and close-set, branches blackly sharp against the sky, which was lightened by a cold flickering of stars. Then the loons began their calling. They rose like phantom birds from the nests on the shore, and flew out onto the dark still surface of the water.
40、No one can ever describe that ululating sound, the crying of the loons, and no one who has heard it can ever forget it. Plaintive , and yet with a quality
1 / 1
of chilling mockery , those voices belonged to a world separated by aeon from our neat world of summer cottages and the lighted lamps of home.
41、"They must have sounded just like that," my father remarked, "before any person ever set foot here." Then he laughed. "You could say the same, of course, about sparrows or chipmunk, but somehow it only strikes you that way with the loons."
42、"I know," I said.
43、Neither of us suspected that this would be the last time we would ever sit here together on the shore, listening. We stayed for perhaps half an hour, and then we went back to the cottage. My mother was reading beside the fireplace. Piquette was looking at the burning birch log, and not doing anything.
44、"You should have come along," I said, although in fact I was glad she had not.
45、"Not me", Piquette said. "You wouldn’ catch me walkin' way down there jus' for a bunch of squawkin' birds."
46、Piquette and I remained ill at ease with one another. felt I had somehow failed my father, but I did not know what was the matter, nor why she Would not or could not respond when I suggested exploring the woods or Playing house. I thought it was probably her slow and difficult walking that held her back. She
1 / 1
stayed most of the time in the cottage with my mother, helping her with the dishes or with Roddie, but hardly ever talking. Then the Duncans arrived at their cottage, and I spent my days with Mavis, who was my best friend. I could not reach Piquette at all, and I soon lost interest in trying. But all that summer she remained as both a reproach and a mystery to me.
47、That winter my father died of pneumonia, after less than a week's illness. For some time I saw nothing around me, being completely immersed in my own pain and my mother's. When I looked outward once more, I scarcely noticed that Piquette Tonnerre was no longer at school. I do not remember seeing her at all until four years later, one Saturday night when Mavis and I were having Cokes in the Regal Café. The jukebox was booming like tuneful thunder, and beside it, leaning lightly on its chrome and its rainbow glass, was a girl.
48、Piquette must have been seventeen then, although she looked about twenty. I stared at her, astounded that anyone could have changed so much. Her face, so stolidand expressionless before, was animated now with a gaiety that was almost violent. She laughed and talked very loudly with the boys around her. Her lipstick was bright carmine, and her hair was cut Short and frizzily permed . She had not been pretty as a child, and she was not pretty now, for her features were still heavy and blunt. But her dark and slightly slanted eyes were beautiful, and her skin-tight skirt and orange sweater displayed to enviable advantage a soft and slender body.
1 / 1
49、She saw me, and walked over. She teetered a little, but it was not due to her once-tubercular leg, for her limp was almost gone.
50、"Hi, Vanessa," Her voice still had the same hoarseness . "Long time no see, eh?"
51、"Hi," I said "Where've you been keeping yourself, Piquette?"
52、"Oh, I been around," she said. "I been away almost two years now. Been all over the place--Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon. Jesus, what I could tell you! I come back this summer, but I ain't stayin'. You kids go in to the dance?"
53、"No," I said abruptly, for this was a sore point with me. I was fifteen, and thought I was old enough to go to the Saturday-night dances at the Flamingo. My mother, however, thought otherwise.
54、"Y'oughta come," Piquette said. "I never miss one. It's just about the on'y thing in this jerkwater
55、town that's any fun. Boy, you couldn' catch me stayin' here. I don' give
a shit about this place. It stinks."
56、She sat down beside me, and I caught the harsh over-sweetness of her perfume.
1 / 1
