"John Kessel - Buffalo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kessel John)

"Are you from Virginia?"

"My family lives in Buffalo. That's in New York."

"Ah--yes. Many years ago I visited Niagara Falls, and
took the train through Buffalo." Wells remembers riding
along a lakefront of factories spewing waste water into the
lake, past heaps of coal, clouds of orange and black smoke
from blast furnaces. In front of dingy rowhouses, ragged
hedges struggled through the smoky air. The landscape of
laissez faire. "I imagine the Depression has hit Buffalo
severely."

"Yes sir."

"What work did you do there?"
 Kessel feels nervous, but he opens up a little. "A lot
of things. I used to be an electrician until I got
blacklisted."

"Blacklisted?"

"I was working on this job where the super told me to set
the wiring wrong. I argued with him but he just told me to
do it his way. So I waited until he went away, then I
sneaked into the construction shack and checked the
blueprints. He didn't think I could read blueprints, but I
could. I found out I was right and he was wrong. So I went
back and did it right. The next day when he found out, he
fired me. The so-and-so went and got me blacklisted."

Though he doesn't know how much credence to put in this
story, Wells's sympathies are aroused. It's the kind of
thing that must happen all the time. He recognizes in
Kessel the immigrant stock that, when Wells visited the U.S.
in 1906, made him skeptical about the future of America.
He'd theorized that these Italians and Slavs, coming from
lands with no democratic tradition, unable to speak English,
would degrade the already corrupt political process. They
could not be made into good citizens; they would not work
well when they could work poorly, and given the way the
economic deal was stacked against them would seldom rise
high enough to do better.

But Kessel is clean, well-spoken despite his accent, and
deferential. Wells realizes that this is one of the men who
was topping trees along the river road.

Meanwhile, Kessel detects a sadness in Wells's manner. He
had not imagined that Wells might be sad, and he feels