Рэй Дуглас Брэдбери – Dandelion Wine / Вино из одуванчиков (страница 4)

“Don’t you see?” said Douglas. “I just can’t use last year’s pair.”

For last year’s pair were dead inside. They had been fine last year when he had started to wear them. But by the end of summer, every year, you always knew, you couldn’t really jump over rivers and trees and houses in them, and they were dead. But this was a new summer, and he felt that with this new pair of shoes, he could do anything, anything at all.

“Save your money,” said Dad. “In five or six weeks —”

“Summer’ll be over!”

That night Douglas lay watching his feet in the moonlight, free of the heavy winter shoes, the big lumps of winter fallen away from them.

“Reasons. I’ve got to think of reasons for the shoes.”

Well, first of all, the hills around town were full of friends. They were frightening away cows, playing barometer to the atmospheric changes, taking sun from dawn to sunset. To catch those friends, you must run much faster than foxes or squirrels. As for the town, it was full of enemies who got irritable with heat and remembered every winter argument and insult. Find friends, dump enemies! That was the Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot motto. Does the world run too fast? Want to catch up? Want to be agile, stay agile? Litefoot, then! Litefoot!”

He shook his coin bank and heard the faint small tinkling, the light weight of money there.

Whatever you want, he thought, you got to make your own way. During the night now, let’s find that path through the forest…

Downtown, the store lights went out. In his dreams he heard a rabbit running in the deep warm grass.

Old Mr. Sanderson moved through his shoe store as the owner of a pet shop must move through his shop touching each animal in passing. Mr. Sanderson brushed his hands over the shoes in the window, and some of them were like cats to him and some were like dogs; he touched each pair with care, adjusting laces, fixing tongues. Then he stopped in the center of the carpet and looked around, nodding.

There was a sound of growing thunder.

One moment, the door to Sanderson’s Shoe Emporium was empty. The next, Douglas Spaulding stood there, staring down at his leather shoes as if these heavy things could not be pulled up out of the cement. The thunder had stopped when his shoes stopped. Then, looking only at the money in his cupped hand, Douglas moved out of the bright sunlight of Saturday noon. He started to put nickels, dimes, and quarters on the counter and worried if the next move carried him out into sun or deep into shadow. “Don’t say a word!” said Mr. Sanderson.

Douglas froze.

“First, I know just what you want to buy,” said Mr. Sanderson. “Second, I see you every afternoon at my window; you think I don’t see? You’re wrong. Third, to give it its full name, you want the Royal Crown Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Tennis Shoes: ‘LIKE MENTHOL ON YOUR FEET!’ Fourth, you want credit.”

“No!” cried Douglas. He was breathing hard, as if he’d run all night in his dreams. “I got something better than credit to offer!” Then he asked Mr. Sanderson when he himself had worn a pair of Litefoot sneakers.

Mr. Sanderson’s face darkened. “Oh, ten, twenty, say, thirty years ago. Why..?”

“Mr. Sanderson, don’t you think you owe it to your customers, sir, to at least try the tennis shoes you sell, for just one minute, so you know how they feel? People forget if they don’t keep testing things. United Cigar Store man smokes cigars, doesn’t he? Candy-store man tastes his own stuff, I think. So…”

“You can see,” said the old man, “I’m wearing shoes.”

“But not sneakers, sir! How are you going to sell sneakers if you cannot praise them and how are you going to praise them if you don’t know them?”

“Well…,” said Mr. Sanderson.

“Mr. Sanderson,” said Douglas, “you sell me something and I’ll sell you something just as valuable.”

The old man sighed but agreed to put on a pair of the sneakers.

“How do they feel?” asked the boy when Mr. Sanderson stood up.

“They feel fine.” He started to sit down.

“Please!” Douglas held out his hand. “Mr. Sanderson, now could you kind of rock back and forth a little, bounce kind of, while I tell you the rest? It’s this: I give you my money, you give me the shoes, I owe you a dollar. But, Mr. Sanderson, as soon as I get those shoes on, you know what happens?”

“What?”

“Bang! I deliver your packages, pick up packages, bring you coffee, dump your trash, run to the post office, telegraph office, library! You’ll see me in and out, in and out, every minute. Feel those shoes, Mr. Sanderson, feel how fast they’d take me? Feel all the running inside? Feel how they don’t like you just standing there? Feel how quickly I’ll be doing all those things for you? You stay in the nice cool store while I’m jumping all around town! But it’s not me really, it’s the shoes. They’re going like mad down alleys, cutting corners, and back!”

The flow of the words carried Mr. Sanderson, and he began to sink deep in the shoes, to flex his toes, test his ankles. He rocked softly, secretly, back and forth in a small breeze from the open door. The tennis shoes silently sank themselves deep in the carpet, as in a jungle grass. Emotions ran over his face as if many colored lights had been switched on and off. Slowly he rocked himself to a halt, and the boy stopped talking, and they stood there looking at each other in a wonderful and natural silence.

“Boy,” said the old man at last, “in five years, how would you like a job selling shoes in this Emporium?”

“Gosh, thanks, Mr. Sanderson, but I don’t know what I’m going to be yet.”

“Anything you want to be, son,” said the old man, “you’ll be. No one will ever stop you.”

The old man walked lightly across the store to the wall of shoe boxes, came back with the tennis shoes for the boy, and wrote up a list on some paper while the boy was lacing the shoes on his feet and then standing there, waiting.

The old man gave him his list. “A dozen things you got to do for me this afternoon. Finish them, we’re even, and you’re fired.”

“Thanks, Mr. Sanderson!” Douglas jumped away.

“Stop!” cried the old man.

Douglas stopped and turned.

“How do they feel?” Mr. Sanderson asked.

The boy looked down at his feet deep in the rivers, in the fields of wheat, in the wind that already was rushing him out of the town. He looked up at the old man.His eyes were burning, but no sound came out of his mouth.

“Antelopes?” said the old man, looking from the boy’s face to his shoes. “Gazelles?”

The boy thought about it and nodded a quick nod. Almost immediately he vanished. The door stood empty. The sound of the tennis shoes faded in the jungle heat.

Mr. Sanderson stood in the sun-lit up door, listening. From a long time ago, when he dreamed as a boy, he remembered the sound. Beautiful creatures leaping under the sky, gone through bushes, under trees, away, and only the soft echo of their running left behind.

“Antelopes,” said Mr. Sanderson. “Gazelles.”

He picked up the boy’s winter shoes, left behind, heavy with forgotten rains and long-melted snows. Moving out of the hot sun, walking softly, lightly, slowly, he turned back toward civilization…

Tom’s statistics gave Douglas a fresh idea. He decided to write down all the things they usually did every summer in one part of his yellow nickel notebook, under the title RITES AND CEREMONIES, and in the other part he was going to register things they did for the first time. The title of that part was DISCOVERIES AND REVELATIONS.

“Like eating olives?” Tom asked.

“More important than that. Like finding out maybe that Grandpa and Dad don’t know everything in the world.”

“They know every dam’ thing there is to know, and don’t you forget it!”

“Tom, don’t argue, I’ve already written it down under Discoveries and Revelations. They don’t know everything. But it’s no crime. That I discovered, too.”

“What other new crazy stuff you got in there?”

“I’m alive.”

“Heck, that’s old!”

“Thinking about it, noticing it, is new. You do things and don’t watch. Then all of a sudden you look and see what you’re doing and it’s the first time, really. In other words, you do an old familiar thing, like bottling dandelion wine, and you put that under RITES AND CEREMONIES. And then you think about it, and what you think, crazy or not, you put under DISCOVERIES AND REVELATIONS. Here’s what I got on the wine: Every time you bottle it, you got a whole lump of 1928 put away, safe. How do you like that, Tom?”

“Can’t say I got it at all.”

“Well, here’s another. Under CEREMONIES I got: First argument and licking of Summer 1928 by Dad, morning of June 24th. Under REVELATIONS I got: The reason why grown-ups and kids fight is because they belong to separate races. Look at them, different from us. Look at us, different from them. Separate races, and never the two shall meet.”

“Doug, you hit it, you hit it! That’s right! That’s exactly why we don’t get along with Mom or Dad. Trouble, trouble, from sunrise to supper! Boy, you’re a genius!”

“So, when you see something done over and over, tell me. Think about it, and tell me that.”

“I got a statistic for you right now. Take your pencil, Doug. There are five billion trees in the world. I looked it up. Under every tree is a shadow, right? So, then, what makes night? I’ll tell you: shadows crawling out from under five billion trees! If only we could find a way to keep those dam five billion shadows under those trees, we could stay up half the night, Doug, because there’d be no night! There you are; something old, something new.”