"Chad Oliver - Transformer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oliver Chad)

if you want my opinion, Willy is a low-grade moron, and a sadist to boot.

So my world is on a big plywood table in an attic. My town is background
atmosphere for a lousy electric train. I don't know what I'm supposed to be. A
motherly old soul glimpsed through a house window, I guess. An intimate detail. It
gives me a pain.

If you think it's fun to live in a town on a model railroad, you've got rocks in your
head.

Look at it from our point of view. In the first place, ELM POINT isn't a town at
allтАФit's a collection of weird buildings that Willy Roberts and his old man took a
fancy to and could afford. It isn't even sharp for a model railroad town; the whole
thing is disgustingly middle class.

Try to visualize it: there's a well in the middle of the table, a hole for Willy Roberts to
get into when he works the transformer and the electric switches. The whole
southern end of the table is covered with a sagging mountain made of chicken wire
and wet paper towels. The western side has got a bunch of these sponge rubber
trees I was telling you about, and just beyond them is an empty area called Texas.
There are some real dumb cows there and two objectionable citizens who come to
our town every Saturday night and try to shoot up the place. The Ohio River starts
in the northwestern corner of the table and flows into the southeast, where I guess it
makes a big drop to the floor. (No one has ever gone over to look.) Our town and a
mountain take up the northern end of the table and part of the eastern side. That's
where I live, as a matter of factтАФon the eastern side, between the Ohio River and the
water tower.

Now catch this building inventory, ClydeтАФit'll kill you. We've got a police station
and a firehouse in North Flats, at the edge of the mountain where the tunnel comes
out. There's a big tin railroad station with a red roof. There's a quaint old frame hotel
that was left over from the Chicago Fire, and right behind it there's this diner that
was supposed to look like an old streetcar. There's one gas station with three
pumps, but no cars. There's a big double spotlight on a tin tower right across from
my house; I have to wear dark glasses all the time. There's seven lower-class frame
houses with dirty white curtains in the windows; Humphery and I live in one of them.
HumpheryтАФthat's my husband, or would be if Willy Roberts had thought to put a
preacher in this hole-works in the tin switchman's house up the tracks. Whenever
one of those damned trains comes by he has to goose-step out and wave his stupid
red lantern. Clyde, he hates it. Then there's a cattle pen on a siding, with no wind to
blow the smell away, if you get what I mean.

That's about itтАФa real Paradise.

Willy's got two trains on the table now. One is a flashy passenger job stashed full of
stuck-up aristocratsтАФyou know, the kind who are always reading the Times when
they go through your town. The other is a freight train that doesn't carry anything; it
just grinds around the track like a demented robot, and its only job, as far as I can
tell, is to shuttle itself onto a siding and look respectful when the passenger train full
of city slickers hisses by. As if all this racket weren't enough, Willy's got him a