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Drop City

Drop City

Titel: Drop City Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: T. C. Boyle
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Oakland, California, that gave Howard a full, unobstructed, breakfast-lunch-and-dinner view of anything moving along the shore or out on the water, and Howard always kept a good pair of Army surplus 7x42 binoculars ready to hand. Sess was thinking about that as the rain started in and the wind begin to flail his face and hands with cold hard stinging pellets that were less like rain and more like sleet than he'd care to admit. No matter, he thought of Pamela, and kept close to the bank where the wind wouldn't discover him as readily.
    It would be a major embarrassment--life-quenching, horrific--to be caught anywhere within ten miles of Howard's place, the kind of thing he'd never live down, not in a thousand years. If anybody saw him out there--if Howard saw him, or Pamela--he'd have to move out of the country altogether, go find himself a room in the heart of some run-down collapsing urban jungle like Cleveland or Brooklyn or some other godforsaken place where the rumor of it would never reach him. But there was no turning back now, and as the morning rectified itself into afternoon, he slipped past Boynton on the far side of the river in a heavy shroud of weather.
    He didn't know what he was doing, didn't know what he expected, didn't have a plan or hope. He had binoculars of his own though, and he was as good on the river and in the woods as any man in the country, except for some of the old-timers, and the old-timers were too old to be good anymore. When he passed Ogden Stump's fish camp, deserted this time of year, he knew the next bend would take him within sight of Howard Walpole's place, so he trailed his paddle and pulled into shore. He didn't have to hide the canoe, but he did--what if Howard was taking her for a scenic ride upriver or somebody went by collecting driftwood and saw it there?--and then started along the mud bank with his ancient .30-06 Springfield rifle in one hand (for bear discouragement, only that) and his binoculars in the other.
    It was raining hard now, raining as if it were water human beings breathed and not air, and though he was wearing his olive green poncho and a cap under the hood of it, he was wet through to the skin from the waist down. And shivering, shivering already, and there was no way to make a fire anywhere near here without Howard Walpole nosing round to warm his hands and feet, and jaw about the weather and wondering if he couldn't help out with a piece of meat for the spit and inserting the sly observation that Sess was pretty far afield of his cabin, wasn't he? So he shivered and edged closer, keeping to the dense growth along the riverbank, tightroping a game trail through the willows that no human being had traversed in the history of mankind, or at least since breakup. He saw moose track, black bear, wolverine, wolf. Moose droppings, bear scat. The rain was steady, the leaves dripped.
    When he got within a hundred yards of the cabin, he dropped to hands and knees, because there was no sense in putting Howard's dogs on alert. The crawling calmed him--being down like this took him back to the deer stalks he'd made as a boy through grown-over burns in the Sierra foothills, and it gave his elbows a chance to get as wet as his knees. Crawling, he thought about that, about the dairy farm outside Porterville where he'd been raised, where he'd worked beside his father day by day, slowly acquiring the muscle he could have put to use on the football field, but the coach was a jerk of the first degree and he quit that before he'd hardly got started, and he'd quit college too, because he couldn't see boxing himself in behind a desk. His every free moment was spent roaming, hunting, fishing. He was good at it, good at concealment, good at _this.__
    Fifty yards out, he eased into a clot of highbush cranberry and raised the binoculars to his eyes, and he didn't feel low or cheap at all. He didn't feel like a hopeless, sick-at-heart, unmanly, voyeuristic _creep.__ Not him. No, he felt more like a--well, a commando, that was it. A commando on a secret vital mission essential to the well-being of the entire country, not to mention a very specific plot of painstakingly husbanded bush at the mouth of the Thirtymile.
    The only problem was, there was no one home. Or at least that was the way it appeared. From the angle he'd chosen, he could see up and in through the eastern window of the main room, across an inconvenient slice of vacant space, and out the southern windows. All was

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