"Howard Waldrop - DisRxT" - читать интересную книгу автора (Waldrop Howard)

The fourth kid's real name was Osbert Sitwell Forbes but everybody knew him as Sticks. He'd had polio
when he was five, and had been retrained to walk with braces and two aluminum crutches like some kind
of clattering metal spider, and he could do it faster than most kids could run. He didn't have a pedal-car;
he rode on the back of Croupie's Big Dump Truck and helped by bringing his crutches down in a sort of
two-point lever action, rowing, as it were, against the pavement. They could make some real speed even
though there were two of them. Sticks had turned himself into a human gorilla from the waist up in the five
years since they'd told his parents he would never walk again, even with braces and crutches.

The Garton Mercury Wagon belonged to Dave, the leader of the G.M.H.-M.R.C. He had built the
treehouse. He was always dressed in a flight jacket and an aviator's brown leather helmet, a tee-shirt,
blue jeans, and boots. The Mercury woodie was his everyday car; he'd saved his quarter weekly
allowance for four months to buy it from a kid across town. His real car, which he only took out for
races, wasn't a car at allтАФit was a 1941 Steelcraft Pursuit Plane painted dark green, held back by an
uncle from a 1942 scrap-metal drive. It had three wheelsтАФtwo at the front and one at the rear, and a
four-foot wingspan. When you pedaled it, which Dave did with such ferocity that he was the fastest kid in
town, the silver-painted propeller on the nose spun.




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There were two girls in the neighborhood.

Sally was one of the boys, but she couldn't go into the regular clubhouse. "What good is it being one of
the boys," she'd asked, "if I can't go in there?"

"Because biology is destiny," said Sticks, who'd read his share of thinkers, somewhat apologetically.
"Sorry."

She was their mascot, and an honorary member, and a swell mechanic. She dressed in a pair of
cut-down overalls and wore one of those stupid hats with the buttons all over it like Jughead in Archie's
Pals and Gals, or the Bowery Boys. She kept all the cars in good repair except Dave's Pursuit Plane.
He was the only one who worked on it. He kept it in a packing-crate hangar back at his parent's house.

And then there was Therese.




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She was the nine-year-old equivalent of a society dame. Whereas Sally's hair was mousey brown, that of
Therese was wheat-blond, almost white. What eyebrows she had were so light that she had to draw
others above them. (She already used makeup.) Her eyes were as blue as the paint on a real DeSoto
convertible. She was really something.