Checker and the Derailleurs. Lionel Shriver

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СКАЧАТЬ helped him up. Together they began to throw the glass back in the barrel.

      “Sh-sh!” said Checker, still laughing, when Rahim tossed a piece in the can and it smashed loudly hitting bottom. It was hard to see, and grasping for hunks in the dark Check exclaimed, “Jesus!” and pulled back. Rahim didn’t have a chance to ask what had happened before he looked up to find a molten glob pointed menacingly at him on the end of a metal pole.

      “Move and you’re fried,” said a voice. “A minute ago this lump was twenty-four hundred degrees. It may be cooling fast, but it’s still hot enough to turn your face into a pork chop.”

      Rahim froze, crouching; Checker, despite the warning, stood up.

      The woman pointed a flashlight at Checker like a second weapon.

      “What is that?” asked Checker, not sounding very frightened. “It’s fantastic!”

      All three of them turned to the glob, changing quickly from a rich yellow to a duller, more smoldering red. As Checker reached toward it, the woman jerked it away.

      “Hot glass, toddler. And what have you done to your hand?”

      In the beam of the flashlight was a second red glob, on the end of Checker’s arm. There was a quiet, regular patter-patter; the woman trained the light on the ground, where Checker’s blood was spattering onto the chunks of clear glass. The glass sparkled, and the red drops bounced and drizzled over its crystals like expensive rain. Strange. It was beautiful.

      “Sheckair!” Quickly Rahim shed his jacket and tore off his shirt, and began to wrap Check’s hand.

      “Don’t use your dirty shirt,” she said sharply. “I have medical supplies inside. I suppose you can come in.” She led them reluctantly in the door and smashed the rod against the cement floor. The glass, now black, cracked off; she tossed the rod in a barrel and went to get first aid. “Christ,” Check heard her mutter on the way, “I start to run off hoodlums and end up playing Sara Barton.”

      “That’s Clara Barton,” he shouted after her. Unexpectedly, she laughed.

      Checker didn’t seem very concerned with his hand, more delighted to have weaseled his way in here. He and Rahim approached the furnace. Inside, the roar was deeper, striking a broader range of tones. Checker couldn’t take his eyes off the fire though at a certain point he stood back from the heat. In fact, the whole room was sweltering, and recalled the febrile interior of Plato’s Bar.

      When she returned she switched on a light, to Rahim’s disappointment—it ruined the satanic religiosity of the scene. As she rinsed out Checker’s cut in warm water over her sink, they both stared at the glassblower, not quite as mysterious without the glow of the furnace, but no less intimidating.

      Everything about her was long: her neck, her waist, her face. Her cheeks were hollow and drawn; her expressions were conducted in the narrow range between amusement and irritation. As she tended his hand, her face sharpened in an intentness that seemed usual. Her oversized green shirt billowed under her apron with accidental style. Her jeans shone with dirt. The musty smell wafting from them suggested she’d been in these clothes for a while.

      “You’re filthy,” Check observed joyously as his blood ran in diluted swirls down the drain.

      “You’re stupid,” she shot back. “Why were you and your friend crawling around in a pile of broken glass at four in the morning?”

      “Watching you,” said Check. As she went for the antiseptic, he followed her hands. They looked older than the rest of her—fiftyish, sixtyish even—scarred and craggy, with abused nails. Her fingers were long like Caldwell’s, but ancient and knuckly. They tended his cut with care but authority, like a good mechanic’s.

      “What are all these little scars?” she asked about his own hand, which was covered in small white lumps.

      “From drumming.”

      A look. “Violent.”

      “Passionate.”

      She laughed.

      “Why is that funny?”

      “Well, how old are you?”

      “What does that have to do with passion?”

      “Maybe nothing,” she admitted.

      Her motions were jagged, like her hair. When she turned to find the gauze, a peak of hair touched his face; Checker reached up as if to brush it away, but really to feel it—a little coarse; he noticed a few strands of gray.

      “How old are you?”

      “Why?”

      “Cause I can usually tell. You, I can’t place within ten years.”

      “Twenty-nine.”

      “I’d have guessed older.”

      “Real diplomatic.”

      “You’re not insulted.”

      She stopped wrapping his hand and looked at Check as if seeing him for the first time. She seemed surprised by what she saw. “No?”

      “It doesn’t matter to you, looking young,” Check explained. “Just now—I think you were flattered.”

      The woman sucked in her cheeks and shot him a sour, bemused little smile. “Maybe.”

      “You must finish wrap.”

      This whole time Rahim had been following the medical process suspiciously, examining the label on the antiseptic; when she stopped working on the bandage Rahim couldn’t contain himself.

      “What?”

      “Wrap,” said Rahim staunchly.

      “You spy on my work and knock over a whole barrel of cullet and I still take you in to patch up your bloody bungling and I don’t do it fast enough. So sorry.”

      “’Sokay,” said Rahim, who had no sense of American sarcasm. “Just finish quickly, please. Sheckair vedy tired. I take him home now.”

      “Well, I’m a little tired myself,” she said with genuine annoyance. Disappointed, Checker watched her tie up his hand summarily and stand, hands on her hips. She was taller than both of them.

      “Come.” Rahim took Checker’s good hand and began to pull him toward the door. The Iraqi had his proprietary side, like a severe, overly protective secretary.

      Check dragged. “Can I come back?”

      “What for?”

      “The glass. I want to watch.”

      “You’ve been watching.”

      “Tomorrow!” At last Rahim succeeded in hauling Checker out the door, but not before he’d gotten one last glimpse of the glassblower, who was looking at him, he thought, terrifically hard. She had the same drastic features as Caldwell Sweets, and she certainly did СКАЧАТЬ