"Howard Waldrop - Ike At The Mike" - читать интересную книгу автора (Waldrop Howard)

Twenty thousand of the thirty thousand men tried to find some way back home,
out of the
city, back to No Place, U.S.A.
Ten thousand stayed, hoping for something to happen. Anything.
Ike went down to play for them. So did Armstrong. They ran into each
other in town, got their bands and equipment together. They set up a stage in
the middle of the Smithville, now a forlorn-looking bunch of mud-straw shacks.
About five thousand of the jobless men came to hear them play. They were
in a holiday mood. They sat on the ground, in the mud. They didn't much care
anymore.
Armstrong and Ike had begun to play that day. Half the band, including
Wild George, had hangovers. They had drunk with the Bonus Marchers the night
before and well into the morning before the noon concert.
They played great jazz that day anyway. Just before the music began, a
cloud of smoke had risen up from some of the abandoned warehouses the veterans
had been living in. There was some commotion over toward the Potomac. The band
just played louder and wilder.
The marchers clapped along. Wild George smiled a bleary-eyed smile
toward the crowd. They were doing half his job.
Automatic rifle fire rang out, causing heads to turn.
The Army was coming. Sons and nephews of some of the Bonus Marchers
there were coming toward them on orders from Douglas MacArthur, the Chief of
Staff. He had orders to clear them out.

The men came to their feet, picking up rocks and bottles.
Marching lines of soldiers came into view, bayonets fixed. Small two-man
tanks, armed with machine guns, rolled between the soldiers. The lines
stopped. The soldiers put on gas masks.
The Bonus Marchers, who remembered phosgene and the trenches, drew back.
"Keep playing!" said Ike.
"Keep goin'. Let it roll!" said Armstrong.
Tear-gas grenades flew toward the Bonus Marchers. Rocks and bottles
sailed toward the masked soldiers. There was an explosion a block away.
The troops came on.
 The gas rolled toward the marchers. Some who picked up the spewing
canisters to throw them back fell coughing to the ground, overcome.
The tanks and bayonets came forward in a solid line.
The marchers broke and ran.
Their shacks and tents were set afire by Chemical Corpsmen behind the
tanks.
"Let it roll! Let it roll!" said Armstrong, and they played "Didn't He
Ramble?" The gas cloud hit them, and the music died in chokes and vomiting.
That night the Bonus Marchers were loaded on Army trucks, taken fifty
miles due west, and let out on the sides of the roads.
Ike and Louis went up before the Washington magistrate, paid a
ten-dollar fine each, and took a train to New York City.
The last time he had seen Wild George alive was two years ago. Patton had been
found by somebody who'd know him in the old days.