Five Quarters of the Orange / Пять четвертинок апельсина - стр. 21
A pause that crawled between us like a racing snail.
“I wonder if it hurts,” I said at last.
He considered it for a moment as if he knew what I meant, then shook his head.
“Dunno.”
“They say the poison gets into your blood and makes you go numb. Just like going to sleep.”
He watched me noncommittally, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.
“C–Cassis sez that Jeannette Gaudin musta seen Old Mother,” he said at last. “You know. That’s why the snake b-bit her. Old Mother’s curse.”
I shook my head. Cassis, the avid storyteller and reader of lurid adventure magazines (with titles like The Mummy’s Curse or Barbarian Swarm), was always saying things like that.
“I don’t think Old Mother even exists,” I said defiantly. “I’ve never seen her, anyway. Besides, there’s no such thing as a curse. Everyone knows that.”
Paul looked at me with sad, indignant eyes.
“Course there is,” he said. “And she’s down there all right. M-my dad saw her once, way back before I was born. B-biggest pike you ever saw. Week later, he broke his leg falling off of his b-bike. Even your dad got-”
He broke off, dropping his eyes in sudden confusion.
“Not my dad,” I said sharply. “My dad was killed in battle.”
I had a sudden, vivid picture of him marching, a single link in an endless line that moved relentlessly toward a gaping horizon.
Paul shook his head.
“She’s there,” he said stubbornly. “Right at the deepest point of the Loire. Might be forty years old, maybe fifty. Pikes live a long time, the old uns. She’s black as the mud she lives in. And she’s clever, crazy-clever. She’d take a bird sitting on the water as easy as she’d gulp a piece of bread. My dad sez she’s not a pike at all but a ghost, a murderess, damned to watch the living forever. That’s why she hates us.”
This was a long speech for Paul, and in spite of myself I listened with interest. The river abounded with stories and old wives’ tales, but the story of Old Mother was the most enduring. The giant pike, her lip pierced and bristling with the hooks of anglers who had tried to catch her. In her eye, an evil intelligence. In her belly, a treasure of unknown origin and inestimable worth.
“My dad sez that if anyone was to catch her, she’d hafta give you a wish,” said Paul. “Sez he’d settle for a million francs and a look at that Greta Garbo’s underwear.”
He grinned sheepishly. That’s grownups for you, his smile seemed to say.
I considered this. I told myself I didn’t believe in curses or wishes for free. But the image of the old pike wouldn’t let go.
“If she’s there, we could catch her,” I told him abruptly. “It’s our river. We could.”
It was suddenly clear to me; not only possible, but an obligation. I thought of the dreams that had plagued me ever since Father died; dreams of drowning, of rolling blind in the black surf of the swollen Loire with the clammy feel of dead flesh all around me, of screaming and feeling my scream forced back into my throat, of drowning in myself. Somehow the pike personified all that, and though my thinking was certainly not as analytical as that, something in me was suddenly certain-certain-that if I were to catch Old Mother, something might happen. What it might be I would not articulate even to myself. But something, I thought in mounting, incomprehensible excitement. Something.