"Michael Thomas - The Time Thief" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thomas Michael)

"Yeah," Mark said. "My dad started at $6 a day and he worked his way up to
almost $10 a day doing tool and die and then they fired him. They just hired him
back and made him start at $6 again."

"Least he got hired back," Joey said. "My old man got laid off and hasn't worked
for six months."

Mark blushed and studied his shoes; he should have been happy that his father
was back to work, but he felt awkward, almost ashamed of the fact around his
friends whose fathers were still jobless and broke. The Mellon family took in
boarders, Joey's mother cleaned houses to make sure they had food. So Mark
should have felt lucky, but actually felt ashamed, a feeling which had become
his natural state.

For as long as he could remember his father had swung on a demented pendulum
between working overtime six days a week and losing his job. With each swing of
the pendulum, Mark's shame grew worse; it always seemed as if his father lost
his job because there was something wrong with him or with the family. The first
time it happened, men from the Ford Sociological Department came to inspect the
house and the family to make sure they were living decently and were deserving
of his father's profit-sharing bonus. No one knew exactly what standards old
Henry Ford thought were befitting a bonus, but whatever they were, the men in
suits who poked and prodded through the dirty laundry and examined the pantry
for liquor bottles found no evidence that Mark's family lived up to their
quality control. Not only did his father lose his profit-sharing bonus, he lost
his job. Now, the Sociological Department was gone, but in the ten years since,
his father had been rehired five times and lost his job four times, always for
some reason that implied it was the man's own fault, or the family's fault, and
each time Mark's shame grew deeper.

"Sounds like things are tough around here," the stranger said.

"Mister, where you been?" Joey laughed, puckering his pudgy face. "It's hard
times. But things is gonna change. There's gonna be a march on the plant and
they say thousands of guys is gonna .... "

Mark jabbed an elbow into Joey's ribs.

"Ow! What's the big idea?"

"You shouldn't go talking to strangers about things," Mark whispered.

Pete Mellon's eyes formed discs beneath his mop of red hair. "Yeah. He might be
a Service Department spy."

"Service Department spy," his brother said.

The stranger chuckled to himself, his lips curling upward, bunching his thin
face into a death's head grin. "Has there ever been a march on the plant?"