"Elgin, Suzette Haden - What The EPA Don't Know Won't Hurt Them" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elgin Suzette Haden)

What the EPA Don't Know Won't Hurt Them
a short story by Suzette Haden Elgin

Foreword

"What the EPA Don't Know Won't Hurt Them" is a prequel to my Ozark Trilogy
(published in a new one-volume edition by the University of Arkansas Press
in March 2000).
For decades I've been writing short stories to answer the questions people
ask me over and over again about Ozarkers and the Ozarks; this story
tackles the perennial questions about Ozark yard-trash, field-trash, and
ditch-trash.

What the EPA Don't Know Won't Hurt Them

While Johnny Beau and Delmer were buying the '61 Chevy pickup from the man
that ran the Stop & Dump junkyard, they were well aware of how funny he
thought it all was, and how stupid he thought they were. Dumb, ignorant
hillbillies, he was thinking, buying a pickup truck that had been worth
maybe fifty bucks before the train hit it broadside and dragged it three
miles! Dumb, ignorant hillbillies, he'd been thinking, and illiterate on
top of that! He'd been fairly jumping up and down, scarcely able to
contain himself, dying to get on downtown and tell everybody the tale of
the two big dumb country boys that'd come by his business that morning and
downright begged him to fleece them.
Johnny Beau and Delmer knew all about that. They were used to it. They
ignored him. They ignored the look on his face - a look you could spread
on toast - with the patience that comes of long practice. And they gave
him the hundred he asked for, and ten bucks more to use his rig to hoist
the mangled metal up onto their flatbed where they could haul it on home,
although by rights he ought to of done that for free. People like him -
they hardly ever learned. And worrying about their foolishness was a waste
of valuable time.
They hauled the truck on home and called Granny Motley outside to take a
look at it. "You see, Granny?" Johnny Beau said. "You see how that lies?"
"It's got an interesting shape to it, Johnny Beau," she answered, and she
gave him a sharp look over the top of her glasses. "You think it's
interesting enough to call me out here in the street to admire it?"
"Granny," Johnny Beau said solemnly, "what if Lee Wommack would just move
one of those junk cars in his yard over a couple of feet - say that red
Rambler that he's got lying up against the garage? If he'd just move that
one over and lay this piece beside it, aimed toward town? You take a good
look now, and see if you don't agree with me!"
The old woman went over to the truck and poked at the pickup with one
crookedy finger, and said hmmmmmmph. She walked around to the other side
and poked it again, and said hmmmph some more. And then she backed way off
and climbed up onto a fence to get a better look at what she'd been
poking, and she began nodding her head.
"Ah yes," she said. "I see, boys. I do see. And I do believe you're
right."