"Howard Waldrop - The Sawing Boys" - читать интересную книгу автора (Waldrop Howard)

started up.
They had rarely seen so many men in white shirts, even on Sunday, and women
and kids in their finest clothes, even if they were only patched and faded coveralls,
they were starched and clean.
Then a bunch of city flatlanders came by—the men all had on hats and bright
suits and ties, and the woman—a goddess—was the first flapper they had ever
seen—the eyes of the flatlanders were moving everywhere. Heads turned to watch
them all along their route. They were moving toward the general mercantile, and they
looked tired and dusty for all their fancy duds.
"Well, boys," said Luke. "That were a right smart breakfast. I reckon us all better
be gettin' on down towards the musical place and see what the others look like."
They gathered up their saws and ladders and walked toward the sweetest sounds
this side of Big Bone Lick.


"So," says Little Willie to a citizen, "tell us where we can score a couple of
motorman's gloves?"
The man is looking at him like he has just stepped off one of the outermost colder
planets. This is fitting, for the citizen looks to us vice versa.
"What my friend of limited vocabulary means," says Chris the Shoemaker to the
astounding and astounded individual, "is where might we purchase a mess of fried
pork chops?"
The man keeps looking at us with his wide eyes the size of doorknobs.
"Eats?" I volunteers.
Nothing is happening.
Large Jake makes eating motions with his mitt and goozle.
Still nothing.
"Say, fellers," says this other resident, "you won't be gettin' nothing useful out'n
him. He's one of the simpler folks hereabouts, what them Victorian painter fellers
used to call 'naturals.' What you want's Ma Gooser's place, straight down this yere
street."
"Much obliged," says Chris.
"It's about time, too," says Miss Millie Dee Chant-pie. "I'm so hungry I could eat
the ass off a pigeon through a park bench!"
I am still staring at the individual who has given us directions, who is knocking the
ashes out of his corncob pipe against a rain barrel.
"Such a collection of spungs and feebs I personally have never seen," says Chris
the Shoemaker, who is all the time looking at the wire that comes down the hill into
town.
 "I must admit you are right," says Little Willie. And indeed it seems every living
thing for three counties is here—there are nags and wagons, preggo dolls with
stair-step children born nine months and fifteen minutes apart, guys wearing only a
hat and one blue garment, a couple of men with what's left of Great War uniforms
with the dago dazzlers still pinned to the chests—yes indeedy, a motley and
hilarity-making group.
The streets are being full of wagons with melons and the lesser legumes and
things which for a fact I know grow in the ground. The indigenous peoples are
selling everything what moves. And from far away you can hear the beginnings of
music.
"I spy," says Chris the Shoemaker.