Страница 4 из 82
Ink-circled names populated the map. Cozumel, an island off the coast of Yucatan, where, so he had read in a men's magazine, you could "shed your clothes, put on a relaxed grin, live like a Rajah, and have all the women you want for $50-a-month!" From the same article he had memorized other appealing statements: "Cozumel is a hold-out against social, economic, and political pressure. No official pushes any private person around on this island," and "Every year flights of parrots come over from the mainland to lay their eggs." Acapulco co
I see them fly, I hear them high,
Singing parrots bringing April spring...
(Dick, on first hearing this song, had commented, "Parrots don't sing. Talk, maybe. Holler. But they sure as hell don't sing." Of course, Dick was very literal-minded, very - he had no understanding of music, poetry - and yet when you got right down toot, Dick's literalness, his pragmatic approach to every subject, was the primary reason Perry had been attracted to him, for it made Dick seem, compared to himself, so authentically tough, invulnerable, "totally masculine.")
Nevertheless, pleasant as this Las Vegas reverie was, it paled beside another of his visions. Since childhood, for more than half his thirty-one years, he had been sending off for literature ("fortunes in diving! Train at Home in Your Spare Time. Make Big Money Fast in Skin and Lung Diving. free booklets...") answering advertisements ("sunken treasure! Fifty Genuine Maps! Amazing Offer...") that stoked a longing to realize an adventure his imagination swiftly and over and over enabled him to experience: the dream of drifting downward through strange waters, of plunging toward a green sea-dusk, sliding past the scaly, savage-eyed protectors of a ship's hulk that loomed ahead, a Spanish galleon - a drowned cargo of diamonds and pearls, heaping caskets of gold. A car horn honked. At last - Dick.
"Good grief, Kenyon! I hear you."
As usual, the devil was in Kenyon. His shouts kept coming up the stairs: "Nancy! Telephone!"
Barefoot, pajama-clad, Nancy scampered down the stairs. There were two telephones in the house - one in the room her father used as an office, another in the kitchen. She picked up the kitchen extension: "Hello? Oh, yes, good morning, Mrs. Katz."
And Mrs. Clarence Katz, the wife of a farmer who lived on the highway, said, "I told your daddy not to wake you up. I said Nancy must be tired after all that wonderful acting she did last night. You were lovely, dear. Those white ribbons in your hair! And that part when you thought Tom Sawyer was dead - you had real tears in your eyes. Good as anything on TV. But your daddy said it was time you got up; well, it is going on for nine. Now, what I wanted, dear - my little girl, my little Jolene, she's just dying to bake a cherry pie, and seeing how you're a champion' cherry-pie maker, always wi
Normally, Nancy would willingly have taught Jolene to prepare an entire turkey di