Sleep No More. Greg Iles

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СКАЧАТЬ Under-the-Hill Saloon, and upon the dead.

      In 1822, the old town burial ground had been moved from the shadow of St. Mary’s Cathedral Church to a hundred acres of hilly ground on the high bluff north of town. Over the next century, this became one of the most beautiful and unique cemeteries in the South, and it was through its gates that John Waters finally pulled his Land Cruiser and slowed to a near idle. Some of the stones he passed looked new, others as though they’d been cut centuries before, and probably were. Remains from the old cemetery had been disinterred and transferred here, so tombstones dating to the 1700s were not uncommon. Waters parked the Land Cruiser on the crest of Jewish Hill, climbed out, and stared down four breathtaking miles of river.

      In Natchez, the dead have long had a better view than the living. The view from Jewish Hill always stirred something deep within him. The river affected everyone who lived near it; he had heard uneducated roughnecks speak with halting eloquence of its mythic pull. Yet he saw the muddy river differently from most. The Mississippi was an ancient river, but it had not spent its life cutting its way into the continent like the Colorado. The Mississippi had built the very land that now tried in vain to hem it in. Two hundred and fifty million years ago this part of America – from the Gulf Coast to St. Louis – was an ocean called the Mississippi Embayment, but somewhere north of Memphis the nameless proto-Mississippi River was already dumping millions of tons of sediment into that ocean, creating a massive delta system. That process went inexorably on until the ocean was filled, and 35,000 feet of soil covered the bedrock. It was from the upper layers of those deposits that Waters took his family’s living, from the oil-bearing strata just a few thousand feet down. Tonight, thirty miles downriver, he would pull up core samples that would tell a tiny part of what had been happening here 60 million years ago. Compared with these notions of time, the vaunted “history” of his hometown – going back a respectable three hundred years in human terms – was as nothing.

      Yet even in geological terms, Natchez was unique. The bluff that supported the antebellum city had not been built by the river but by the wind; aeolian deposition, it was called, or loess, according to the Germans. The city shared this rare phenomenon with parts of China and Austria, and drew scientists from around the world to study it. Sometimes, after saturating rains, whole sections of the bluff would slide like earthen avalanches to the river, and over the past few years the Army Corps of Engineers had fought a massive holding action to stabilize it. The citizens who lived along the kudzu-faced precipice clung tenaciously to their homes like bystanders to a war, human metaphors for the faith that had kept the town alive through good times and bad.

      Waters turned away from the river and surveyed a gently rolling city of white obelisks, mausoleums, statuary, and gravestones you could spend a week exploring without beginning to fathom the stories beneath them. The surnames on the stones were still common in the town, some going back seven generations. Natchez was the oldest settlement on the Mississippi River, and while she had witnessed many changes, the names had remained constant. Standing in the midst of the monuments, each a touchstone of memory, Waters was suffused with hot awareness of the essentially incestuous nature of small towns, and of Natchez in particular.

      As gooseflesh rose on his shoulders, he started down Jewish Hill toward the Protestant section of the cemetery, scanning the gravestones as he walked. He edged down a steep hill and through a line of gnarled oaks. Almost immediately his eyes settled on what he sought. Her stone was easy to spot. Black Alabama marble veined with grayish white, it rose three feet higher than the surrounding stones, its mirror-like face deeply graven with large roman letters that could have been there a thousand years.

      MALLORY GRAY CANDLER

       Miss Mississippi 1982

      As Waters neared the stone, smaller letters came into clear relief.

      Born, Natchez, Mississippi

      February 5, 1960

      Died, New Orleans, Louisiana

      August 8, 1992

       “The flame that burns twice as bright

       burns half as long.”

      He stopped and stood silent before the black slab. He visited the cemetery often enough, but he had never visited this grave. Nor had he attended the funeral. He was not wanted by the family, and he had no desire to go. He’d said his good-byes to Mallory Candler long before then, and the process had almost killed him. For this reason, the inscription surprised him. The quote was from Blade Runner, a film Mallory had seen with Waters. She had liked the line of dialogue so much that she’d written it down in her diary.

      The family must have discovered it there after her death and decided it captured her spirit – which it did. That Mallory Candler had sought out provocative films like Blade Runner while her peers numbed out to Endless Love or imitated Flashdance spoke volumes about her, and it was one of those traits few had known. Mallory played the Southern belle so well that only Waters, so far as he knew, had gotten to know the complex woman beneath. He was almost certain her husband had not.

      The year Mallory reigned as Miss Mississippi, she told Waters she sometimes felt like the beautiful android woman in Blade Runner – so well trained, practiced, and seemingly flawless that her own sense of reality fled her, leaving an automaton going through the motions of life, feeling nothing, wondering if even her memories were invented. A few duties of her office had actually lightened her heart – the hospitals, the camps for retarded kids, the real things – but ceremonies for the opening of factories and car dealerships had left her cold and depressed.

      Waters knelt at the border of the grave and laid his right hand flat on the St. Augustine grass. Six feet beneath his palm lay a body with which he had coupled hundreds of times, sometimes gently, other times thrashing in the dark with desperate passion that would not be quenched. How could it lie cold and utterly still now? Waters was forty-one; Mallory would have been forty-two. Her body was forty-two, he realized, but the passage of time meant only decay to her now. Morbid thoughts, but how else could he think of her, here, under the blank and pitiless stare of this stone? Twenty years ago, they had made love in this cemetery. They chased each other through tunnels in the tall grass, trackless paths cut by an army of old black men with push mowers, then fell into each other’s arms in the bright sun and the buzz of grasshoppers, affirming life in the midst of death.

      “Ten years gone,” he murmured. “Jesus.”

      In the emotional trough left by this unexpected wave of grief, myriad images bubbled up from his subconscious. The first few made him shiver, for they were the old vivid ones, shot through with violence and blood. Waters usually steeled himself against these and pressed down all other remembrance. But today he did not resist. Because here, in the shadow of this stone, reality was absolute: Mallory Candler was gone. Here he could let the fearful memories go, the ones he’d always kept close to remind him of the danger. That she had twice tried to kill him and might do so again. Or worse, hurt his wife, as she had threatened to do.

      In this silent place, less sanguinary memories rose into his mind. Now he could see Mallory as he had known her in the beginning. What he most recalled was her beauty. That and her life force, for the two were inextricably bound. The first thing you noticed was her hair: a glorious mane of mahogany, full of body, a little wild, and highlighted with a shining streak of copper from the crown of her head to the backs of her shoulders. Anyone who saw that streak thought it had been added by a stylist, but it had come in her genes, a God-given sign of the unpredictability in her nature. You couldn’t miss Mallory in a crowd. She could be surrounded by a hundred sorority girls in the Grove at Ole Miss, and the sun would pick out that flaming streak of hair, the cream skin, rose lips, and Nile-green eyes, and mark her like a spotlight picking the prima ballerina from a chorus. СКАЧАТЬ