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Brad Watson: The Heaven of Mercury

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Brad Watson The Heaven of Mercury

The Heaven of Mercury: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Brad Watson's first novel has been eagerly awaited since his breathtaking, award-winning debut collection of short stories, Last Days of the Dog-Men. Here, he fulfills that literary promise with a humorous and jaundiced eye. Finus Bates has loved Birdie Wells since the day he saw her do a naked cartwheel in the woods in 1916. Later he won her at poker, lost her, then nearly won her again after the mysterious poisoning of her womanizing husband. Does Vish, the old medicine woman down in the ravine, hold the key to Birdie's elusive character? Or does Parnell, the town undertaker, whose unspeakable desires bring lust for life and death together? Or does the secret lie with some other colorful old-timer in Mercury, Mississippi, not such a small town anymore? With "graceful, patient, insightful and hilarious" prose (USA Today), Brad Watson chronicles Finus's steadfast devotion and Mercury's evolution from a sleepy backwater to a small city. With this "tragicomic story of missed opportunities and unjust necessities" (Fred Chappell), "Southern storytelling is alive and well in Watson's capable hands" ( starred review). "His work may remind readers of William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, or Flannery O'Connor, but has a power — and a charm — all its own, more pellucid than the first, gentler than the second, and kinder than the third" ( ).

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— You’re speaking to me again now? Birdie said, teasing him.

He said nothing, gave a grim smile. They danced, and Finus said, — So you are going to marry Earl for certain. And she said, looking at him with that gap-toothed lighthearted frankness she had, — Well I reckon — it’s all set. I wish they could do it all without me, though.

Finus said, — Are you sure you don’t just want to run off with me?

She stood still and stared at him, astonished. It wasn’t all astonishment, though. He thought he could see in her eyes that she might really consider doing such a thing if he was serious. He’d caught hold, for the moment, of some loose line in her that would attach itself to stray wildness. And then, he couldn’t explain this at all, something in him had panicked at the whole idea, of how much his life would change if he did that. Some current of reticence went down through his hands and into her bare shoulders. And Birdie sensed it, he could tell in an instant that she did, and before he could quell it as the momentary rationality of a sensible man that would always, of course, buck away from the acquiescence of love, it was over, she was knocking him on the arm and turning away.

— Here’s your sweetheart, she said, and Finus saw Avis Crossweatherly headed his way across the floor, her eyes pinning him to the spot. She came up and stood before him in a pale blue skirt and navy cashmere sweater.

— Dance with a girl? she said.

He smiled weakly, and took her hand.

A MONTH LATER, the night before Earl was set to marry Birdie, Finus got drunk at a card game in Earl’s honor at Marie Suskin’s whorehouse on 9th Street. The drunker he got, the less he felt like honoring Earl, so when he got Earl down a hundred dollars at stud he demanded that Earl go double or nothing and put up his fiancée as collateral. Earl, who never drank but had a temper, didn’t really like to gamble, knew Finus had long been sweet on Birdie, accepted and lost — three kings to Finus’s full house. Earl threw his cards down and they fought. Finus was bigger, knocked Earl down with a roundhouse and went outside, climbed into his old Model T. He meant to go out to Earl’s house, where Birdie was staying with her mother until the wedding there the next day. He would get her out onto the porch, and tell her that he loved her and there wasn’t anything he could do about it, and ask her to marry him, instead. They could move to some other town, if she wished, even to the Gulf coast, live in his father’s beach house, he’d work out of Mobile. He would tell her he was serious even though he was drunk. He would tell her he’d call on her later in the week, and then he would leave.

He carried a pearl-handled.32 revolver in his pocket, his father’s pistol, with which he meant to shoot Earl’s father, old Junius Urquhart, if he stood in the way. The Urquharts lived out past southside, beyond the highway, out the Junction Road. Finus roared across the highway hardly checking for traffic, fishtailed in the gravel on the other side, and then while trying to light a cigarette on down the road he slipped a wheel into the ditch, ramped into a thicket of sapling pines, and flew from the car through the old fabric roof like a circus performer on a vault. His head banged hard on the ground and he lay insensible for a while with a broad knot swelling up through the gash in his forehead.

A couple of his friends had followed him some five minutes behind. When they saw the lights of Finus’s car in the stand of pine saplings they went in and found Finus lying a few feet away on the ground, bleeding from the ear and the bump on his head, a burning cigarette stuck to his bottom lip, and so they at first thought him conscious, smoking beside his crashed car, which would have been just like Finus. They sat down in a ragged circle around him for a minute before they realized he was out, and about that time Finus opened his eyes anyway and asked where they all were.

— In a little set of pines just off the ditch, Curly Ammons said.

Finus noted the cigarette still in his mouth, spat it and asked for another. He lit up, pushed himself off the ground, touched the bloody knot on his head, and walked over to look at the car.

— I don’t imagine it’ll start again, not now, he said.

— Not likely, Bill said. -We can tow it in. I got a piece of cable.

— All right, Finus said. -Take it to Papa’s house. And he started walking.

— Better not go on out there, now, Curly called. -Old man Urquhart is waiting on you. One of Earl’s buddies called him on the telephone at Marie’s.

Finus gave a wave and kept on. Shoot him and his goddamn telephone too, he said to himself, righteous in the drunken certainty that Earl and Birdie’s was a marriage illegitimate in the highest moral sense. Contrary to natural law. There was a moon and he could follow the road easy. He smoked the rest of the fresh cigarette, and when he’d finished it he picked up his pace. He kept to one of the well-packed ruts. In the bright moonlight he could see the Urquhart house where it sat low in a grove of old oaks that seemed to guard the sprawling house like hulking gnomes. He walked into their shadows as the dogs started up. Old Junius’s rabbit dogs, beagles. They shot out toward Finus as if unleashed.

Junius stepped onto the porch, a stout man with an egg-shaped head gleaming in the porch light, toting a shotgun at the ready. When he saw Finus approaching at the edge of the grove by the highway, he hollered at the dogs to stop, raised the gun to a level above Finus’s head, and fired. He was a tough old man but he did not shoot to kill, he’d long ago had enough of killing. The gun was shooting dove load. One pellet dipped away from the rest like a dove itself and flew into Finus’s right eye. It felt like a grain of sand flung in a gale.

After Finus stopped screaming and the dogs had been put up, Junius helped him into the house and laid him on the sofa in the parlor.

Junius said, — Son, you’re lucky about that eye. He leaned forward to peer at it, then straightened up. -It don’t look so bad. I could’ve killed you if I’d wanted to. No riffraff is going to presume to win my son’s fiancée in a goddamn poker game.

Finus, though in pain, managed to get out, — Well, sir, what about the fool who would put her up in the kitty?

— Earl loses his temper, don’t think straight, Junius said. He sat in a chair next to the sofa, a stout man with a little tuft of graying hair on the top of his bald head, looking at Finus with small, glassy eyes.

— It’s a bad marriage, Finus said. -She doesn’t know what she’s doing. He knows every one of those whores by name.

— Hear tell it wasn’t just him by himself out there at Marie Suskin’s, speak of your attitudes toward females, Junius said. -My own opinion is every good woman could use a weekend in a whorehouse. And what was he to get if he won?

— Just to keep her. I had him down.

— Boy’s no gambler, Junius said.

Junius left the room and came back in a minute with a cold wet rag for Finus’s eye. He sat down, produced a worn deck of playing cards, and began to shuffle them on the coffee table between them. Finus held the cold rag to his eye, which was throbbing now and still hurt like hell. There was a sound been digging at him, tic tic tic, and when Old Junius pulled his pocket watch from the fob pocket in his vest it got much louder, TIC TIC TIC TIC, and when he put it up it was back to tic tic tic. Finus stared at where the chain disappeared into the folded generosity of the vest around old Junius’s girth.

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