短篇小说：无家可归的人(5)

　　"Let me speak to your father," she said.

　　"He's gone to get a peach."

　　"One peach?"

　　"One with people."

　　"You haven't been with your father two days and already you sound like him."

　　"There are peaches with people in them. I know. I saw one of them come out."

　　"A bug?"

　　"Not a bug. Gaston."

　　"Who?"

　　"Gaston the grand something."

　　"Somebody get a peach with a bug in it, and throws it away, but not him. He makes up a lot of foolishness about it."

　　"It's not foolishness."

　　"All right, all right, don't get angry at me about a horrible peach bug of some kind."

　　"Gaston is right here, just outside his broken house, and I'm not angry at you."

　　"You'll have a lot of fun at the party."

　　"OK."

　　"We'll have fun flying back to New York, too."

　　"OK."

　　"Are you glad you saw your father?"

　　"Of course I am."

　　"Is he funny?"

　　"Yes."

　　"Is he crazy?"

　　"Yes. I mean, no. He just doesn't holler when he sees a bug crawling out of a peach seed or anything. He just looks at it carefully. But it is just a bug, isn't it, really?"

　　"That's all it is."

　　"And we have to squash it?"

　　"That's right. I can't wait to see you, darling. These two days have been like two years to me. Good-bye."

　　The girl watched Gaston on the plate, and she actually didn't like him. He was all ugh, as he had been in the first place. He didn't have a home anymore and he was wandering around on the white plate and he was silly and wrong and ridiculous and useless and all sorts of other things. She cried a little, but only inside, because long ago she had decided she didn't like crying because if you ever started to cry it seemed as if there was so much to cry about you almost couldn't stop, and she didn't like that at all. The open halves of the peach seed were wrong, too. They were ugly or something. They weren't clean.