"Thompson, Jim - South of Heaven" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thompson Jim)

"What kind of a job are we getting, Four Trey?" I asked, because we would have to live in the camp, naturally, and if you lived in camp you had to work. "Are we down for timekeeping again?"
He shook his head, looking a little unhappy for the first time. "I'm afraid not, Tommy. The banks or whoever it is that's backing the job are putting in their own timekeepers."
"Well . . . you mean we're going to have to muck it?"
"Oh, no. We're certainly not going to stoop to mucking. It just wouldn't be worth it, getting our hands all calloused with those long-handled spoons."
I said I could muck it, swing a pick and shovel with any man. But I was just as pleased to be doing something else. Four Trey said that I wouldn't like the job we were going to do.
"But it was the only halfway decent thing open, Tommy. The only job we could possibly hold, and handle our gambling."
"I don't care what it is," I said, "as long as it isn't powder monkey. I don't work with dynamite."
"Dyna's a good girl, Tommy. You can chew her up and spit her out, and she won't say a word."
"You . . ." I stared at him. "You mean, that's the job? Powder monkeyin'? You . . . you . . ." I choked up. "You think I'm goin' to powder monkey after what happened to . . . ?"
"A real good girl, Dyna is," he wheedled. "She wears lousy perfume, and you get by-God hellish headaches from it. But safe? The safest stuff in the world."
"Sure, it is! That's why the job is open, why powder monkeys get wages and a half!"
"You had me fooled, Tommy. You never struck me as being a coward."
"I'm not a coward!" I snapped. "I just don't like dynamite, and you know why I don't!"
"I know," he said softly. "But that's the way it is, kid. I'm down for powder monkey, and you're down as my helper. That's what you do or you don't do anything."
I hesitated. I took another small drink. He caught my eye, nodded slowly.
"That's it, Tommy. Dyna or depart."
"But, dammit, Four Trey . . . !"
"So what's it going to be?"
There was only one thing I could say, and I said it. He grinned approvingly and held out his hand. "That's my boy. Let's shake on it."
We shook. I looked down at my hand and saw that there was a five-dollar bill in it.
"Happy birthday, Tommy," he said.
"Oh, now, look," I said, feeling kind of embarrassed. "You didn't need to do that, Four Trey."
"Why not? A man doesn't get to be twenty-one but once in his life."
"But I'm not even sure that I am twenty-one. I think so, but I'm not sure."
"Well, now you can be sure," he said. "I say so, so you can depend on it."
"Anyway, my birthday was last week," I said. "I forgot all about it until just now."
He yawned and leaned back in the grass, making a waving motion for me to be on my way. "Go scoff, Tommy. Have some fun if you can find anything to have it with."
"Thanks," I said. "Thanks a lot, Four Trey."
"Just be sure you meet me out at the camp in the morning. Better make it around five o'clock. We'll have to hire on, and we'll be working up ahead of the ditchers and draglines. Wherever there's hard rock."
"Right," I said. "I'll be there."
He cocked his hat over his eyes and folded his hands on his stomach. Seemingly, he fell asleep at once. And I went on up the creekbed and into town.

2
They tell me that things haven't changed much in Far West Texas in the last forty years. It was a wild and lonely land to begin with; it had been so since the world was young. And when man had gotten what he could from it, it went back to the wildness and loneliness. Or so I'm told, at least. I can't say, of my own knowledge, having had no reason to go back that way, and maybe a few for not going back. So all I can tell you is what it was like that morning some forty years ago, when I was twenty-one or thereabouts.
The town was named after a place in Russia, as many towns in West and Far West Texas are. The geologists discovered that they were all part of the Permian Basin, which the drillers had first tapped in Russia, so they were given Russian names. Or sometimes Persian--like Iraan--since its underlying rock structure was also Permian Basin.
It, the town, wasn't like any other town you ever saw. There was no pattern to it. The streets, if you could call them streets, ran every whichway. The buildings--wooden, unpainted, wobbly-looking from the unceasing wind--seemed to have been dropped down wherever their builders took a notion. There'd be two or three huddled together in a row, kind of leaning into each other for support. Then, maybe a couple of hundred yards away, there'd be another building and, sitting cater-cornered to it by fifty or sixty feet, a half-dozen more.
All in all, the town probably covered a couple of square miles, with perhaps a hundred buildings--cot-houses, stores, restaurants, barbershops and so on. All but three of the businesses--a general store, a restaurant and a garage--were closed down now. Many of them would go back into operation with the first payday on the pipeline, and for as long as the camp remained close to town. But right now it was as desolate a place as you'd ever see.
The wind was blowing as it always did--soughing and whining like a weary giant. Even early in the morning and with everything dew-wet, dust devils were dancing across the prairie, marching up and down the crazy-quilt streets like long lines of dirty clothes. It was very quiet, so quiet that seemingly you could have heard a sage hen drop an egg in her nest. And then way off to the southeast, coming from the direction of Matacora, the county seat, I heard the sound of a car.
It was coming on fast, and the racket told me what it was-- a T-Ford with a patent gearshift and a high-speed head. You saw quite a few of them in the oilfields in the days before the Model-A and the V-8. By the time I was passing the first empty buildings, it was right behind me.
It roared past, almost hiding me and it in its dust. Then, the brakes slammed on and it skidded, ploughing up still more dust, and it backed up to where I was and stopped.
There was a big star painted on its side. The man who climbed over the door and came toward me was also wearing a star--a deputy sheriff's badge.
He was one of those square-built guys, with practically no neck and not much more forehead. His name was Bud Lassen, and I'd seen him and others like him in quite a few places out here, wherever there was a large influx of transient labor. It may sound melodramatic to call them hired guns, but that's what they were.
The local authorities weren't set up to handle large groups of men. Anyway, the locals were usually pretty nice people, and they didn't want to dirty up their reputations. So men like Bud Lassen were deputized for a few weeks or months, and they did whatever was necessary and a lot more besides. Because they _liked_ giving people a hard time. They liked having the whip hand over men who were usually too overworked and underfed to strike back.
Lassen put himself in front of me, one hand on the butt of his forty-five, the thumb of the other looped through his gun belt. He looked me over, hard-eyed, from head to foot, teetering back and forth on the heels of his boots.
At last, he said, "What's your name, bo?"
"You know my name, Bud," I said, acting a lot braver than I felt. "You sure as heck ought to know it, anyway."
"Don't be smart with me, punk!"
"The Oklahoma Construction Company," I said. "A highline job out of Odessa. You tried to shake me and Four Trey Whitey down. Guess you were too dumb to know that Four Trey wouldn't have operated without talking things over with the sheriff."
He stared at me, the red spreading down his bull neck and up into his thick, pock-marked face. He nodded very slowly, as much as to say he remembered me all right. Which he certainly should have since I'd helped to get him run out of Odessa.
"Tommy Burwell," he said. "You sweatin' the line, Tommy?"