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

Kessel isn't. A year or two ago back in Michigan he worked
in a logging camp. It's hard work, but he is used to hard
work. And at least he's out of Buffalo.

The truck rumbles and jounces out the river road, that's
going to be the George Washington Memorial Parkway in our
time, once the WPA project that will build it gets started.
The humid air is cool now, but it will be hot again today,
in the 80s. A couple of the guys get into a debate about
whether the feds will ever catch Dillinger. Some others
talk women. They're planning to go into Washington on the
weekend and check out the dance halls. Kessel likes to
dance; he's a good dancer. The fox trot, the lindy hop.
When he gets drunk he likes to sing, and has a ready wit. He
talks a lot more, kids the girls.

When they get to the site the foreman sets most of the
men to work clearing the roadside for a scenic overlook.
Kessel straps on a climbing belt, takes an axe and climbs
his first tree. The first twenty feet are limbless, then
climbing gets trickier. He looks down only enough to
estimate when he's gotten high enough. He sets himself,
cleats biting into the shoulder of a lower limb, and chops
away at the road side of the trunk. There's a trick to
cutting the top so that it falls the right way. When he's
got it ready to go he calls down to warn the men below. Then
a few quick bites of the axe on the opposite side of the
cut, a shove, a crack and the top starts to go. He braces
his legs, ducks his head and grips the trunk. The treetop
skids off and the bole of the pine waves ponderously back
and forth, with Kessel swinging at its end like an ant on a
metronome. After the pine stops swinging he shinnies down
and climbs the next tree.

He's good at this work, efficient, careful. He's not a
particularly strong man--slender, not burly--but even in his
youth he shows the attention to detail that, as a boy, I
remember seeing when he built our house.

The squad works through the morning, then breaks for
lunch from the mess truck. The men are always complaining
about the food, and how there isn't enough of it, but until
recently a lot of them were living in Hoovervilles--shack
cities--and eating nothing at all. As they're eating a
couple of the guys rag Kessel for working too fast. "What
do you expect from a Yankee?" one of the southern boys
says.

"He ain't a Yankee. He's a polack."