"Thomas_M._Disch_-_After_Pottsville" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

"Oh, we were against more money for your football teams and uniforms and the computers and hockey rink. You wrang all that out of us. Then, once the Mexicans were here in force–Vloosh! the school budget soared into outer space like a rocketship. There was no stopping the progress of Education then."

"And who brought the Mexicans to Postville? Whose slaughterhouse gave them jobs? Who built their trailer camps?"

The rebbe shrugged. "Who else? But who else, my little Eagle Scout, would do the work? The jobs were there, but no one who grew up in Postville was hungry enough to stoop so low. Eight dollars an hour wouldn’t do for a white man. But Mexicans are very hungry, and there are millions of them. Do you think your goyish meat-packers pay better wages?"

"You enjoyed it. You enjoyed turning Postville into a third-world barrio."

"Is that a question? Then the answer is yes. Poetic justice is always enjoyable–for those not on the receiving end. Have the good citizens of Postville merited a kinder fate by their love and charity, by the splendor of their civilization, by the beauty and dignity of their public buildings? When your ancestors took these lands from the Winnebagos or whatever tribe of savages first lived here, was there a solemn pact to guarantee that their children would hold these acreages forever and ever?"

"Like Israel’s pact with Jehovah?"

"Precisely! You begin to understand. There is a time for everything, my junior-league Hermes. A time to live and a time to die; a time to invest, and a time to die; a time to welcome your neighbors from the South, and a time to die. For Postville it is the time to die. But from its ashes Nuevo Pueblo will arise, with its new people, its new customs and cooking, its madder music and more powerful recreational drugs."

"And my people–will they have any place in this brave new mundo?"

"Oh yes!" said Rabbi Rosen, giving a lupine inflection to his Disabilities Awareness grin. "There!" He pointed to the little cemetery abutting St. Jacobi’s Lutheran Church. "In your graves. Like us."

He spoke with no sense of resignation but rather a kind of glee, a cheer that transcended mere Schadenfreude to become something sweet and philosophic. That glee was the reason, for all his dyspepsia and open ill will, that Terry liked the old fellow. Despite the difference in their ages and backgrounds, they really had a lot in common.

"Let me ask you a question," said Rabbi Rosen. "Why are you here, a Boy Scout, with all this grown-up responsibility?"

Terry was not compelled to answer, but like most of us he was pleased when someone else was curious. "I’m not a Boy Scout anymore," he said quietly.

The rebbe chuckled. "You could fool me."

"I do still wear the uniform. It meant a lot to me. I had nearly all the merit badges I needed to be an Eagle Scout."

"And then–what? So young, it must have been a highway accident. Or some one-in-a-million kind of cancer?"

"I committed suicide," said Terry, "when I realized that I was gay."

Rabbi Rosen nodded and stroked his beard. Slowly his feeling of incipient sympathy for this dead goy became a feeling of revulsion–and of horror at his own situation, adrift in an afterlife for which he lacked any map or compass, a Jew with no homeland but this Iowa cow pasture, no comforter but a queer.



"Do you want to hear something completely crazy?" said Deborah Carr as she plunked down a cup of coffee and a slice of pie on the counter in front of George Scully.

He didn’t, but that was part of the deal when you ate at the Corner Cafe. You listened to what Deborah had to say.

"What," said George.

"You will never guess who I thought I just saw, standing out in front of here."

"Who."

"Terry Goren."

George swallowed the wrong way, choked, brought up the bolus of chewed apple pie and let it lodge inside his cheek, tobacco-like–while he scalded his throat with too-hot black coffee.