"Martha Soukup - Over the Long Haul" - читать интересную книгу автора (Soukup Martha)

“What the fuck you want an accounting license for anyway?” Avis asked.
“It’s just minimum wage. Your oldest is thirteen next year, so you get out
one way or another.” Trucking’s also a labor option for mothers with just
one preteenager, but I’ve only seen a couple women who chose it when
they didn’t have to. They’d put her on some other workfare labor. Maybe
sidewalk cleaning. That’s what I did, five hours a day, before Cilehe. I used
to hate it, but it’s better than trucking.
Kimberlea took her paper napkin off her lap, folded it neatly, and laid it
on her tray. “I don’t like being on welfare if I can work,” she said. “Not this
workfare joke—a real job. I always worked until they took my job away.
That’s the way I know.”
The boy was screaming so loud now even Avis couldn’t ignore it any
longer. “Shit,” she said. She stuffed the rest of the Snickers into her mouth
and went to get him.
Kimberlea and I talked for a couple minutes until her watch started
beeping. “Back to the road,” she said. She gathered up her two kids, who
had been reading quietly at another table—don’t know how she saves six
bucks a week, if she buys them books—and left.
Avis came back. “Damn kid needed a new diaper,” she said. “Where’s
old Kim Burly?”
“Her break was up.”
“Stuck-up bitch.” She wiggled her fingers in my face. “So do you think
green or blue?”
Tomi tugged my arm and pointed. I was set to ignore him, but the room
had gone quiet. I looked up. There was a man in the dining room.
Maybe if you don’t truck, you don’t know how strange that was. When I
was little, I guess most truckers were guys. Then they came up with the
remote-driving system, one guy in his living room controlling a dozen
trucks. The unions kicked a fuss about that, of course, so everyone yelled
at each other until they came up with a couple solutions: early retirement
with heaps of compensation for the old truckers—lot of younger guys took
that and went into other work— and retraining the truckers that passed
the tests to be controllers at a big fat salary. At the same time, they passed
a law that there had to be a driver in each truck. For manual override in
emergencies, like that was going to happen. But nobody trusts computers
and leastways unions.
Then came the Welfare Labor Act, the workfare act. Bound to happen,
they put us in the trucks. It’s boring. It doesn’t pay shit—the controllers
get the real money. We all know why they put us with two kids in the
trucks. It’s like, you get yourself one kid, they put you cleaning sidewalks
or something and thinking on what happens if you get another one. You
get another one anyway, and bam! into a truck. So now you’re on the road
all the time, only get out at a truck stop and see other drivers and they’re
all women too. A third kid is too many to live in a truck cab, so you’d get
out, but how’re you going to get a third one? Locking you in a convent
couldn’t work any better.
What they say is truck cabs are perfect classrooms, educational TV the
kids (and their moms) can’t get away from. Getting away from bad
influences. Breaking the cycle of poverty.
What it’s about is punishing us, keeping us away from that nasty stuff