"Вуди Гасри. Bound for glory (engl)" - читать интересную книгу автора

down his neck and dried there in long strings. He said it again: "Will de
rain wreck dat rackit box?"
I stood up and looked ahead at the black smoke rolling out of the
engine. The air was cool and heavy and held the big coil of smoke low to the
ground along the side of the train. It boiled and turned, mixed in with the
patches of heavy fog, and spun into all kinds of shapes. The picture in the
weeds and bushes alongside the tracks was like ten thousand drunkards
rolling in the weeds with the bellyache. When the first three or four splats
of rain hit me in the face I said to the kids, "This water won't exactly do
this guitar any good!"
"Take dis ole sweater," the smallest kid yelled at me, " 'S all I got!
Wrap it aroun' yer music! Help a little!" I blinked the water out of my eyes
and waited a jiffy for him to pull the sweater from around his neck where he
had tied the sleeves. His face looked like a quick little picture, blackish
tobacco brown colors, that somebody was wiping from a window glass with a
dirty rag.
"Yeah," I told him, "much oblige! Keep out a few drops, won't it?" I
slipped the sweater over the guitar like a man putting clothes on a dummy in
a window. Then I skint out of my new khaki shirt and put it on the guitar,
and buttoned the buttons up, and tied the sleeves around the neck. Everybody
laughed. Then we all squatted down in a little half circle with our backs to
the rain and wind. "I don't give a dam how drippin' I git, boys, but I gotta
keep my meal ticket dry!"
The wind struck against our boxcar and the rain beat itself to pieces
and blew over our heads like a spray from a fire hose shooting sixty miles
an hour. Every drop that blew against my skin stung and burned.
The colored rider was laughing and saying, "Man! Man! When th' good
Lord was workin' makin' Minnesoty, He couldn' make up His mind whethah ta
make anothah ocean or some mo' land, so He just got 'bout half done an' then
He quit an' went home! Wowie!" He ducked his head and shook it and kept
laughing, and at the same time, almost without me noticing what he was
doing, he had slipped his blue work shirt off and jammed it over into my
hands."One mo' shirt might keep yo' meal ticket a little bettah!"
"Don't you need a shirt to keep dry?"
I don't know why I asked him that. I was already dressing the guitar up
in the shirt. He squared his shoulders back into the wind and rubbed the
palms of his hands across his chest and shoulders, still laughing and
talking, "You think dat little ole two-bit shirt's gonna keep out this
cloudbu'st?"
When I looked back around at my guitar on my lap, I seen one more
little filthy shirt piled up on top of it. I don't know exactly how I felt
when my hands come down and touched this shirt. I looked around at the
little tough guys and saw them humped up with their naked backs splitting
the wind and the rain glancing six feet in the air off their shoulders. I
didn't say a word. The little kid pooched his lips out so the water would
run down into his mouth like a trough, and every little bit he'd save up a
mouthful and spit it out in a long thin spray between his teeth. When he saw
that I was keeping my eyes nailed on him, he spit the last of his rainwater
out and said, "I ain't t'oisty."
'I'll wrap this one around the handle an' the strings will keep dry