"Connie Willis - The Last of the Winnebagos" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

"Did you move the animal to the side of the road?"
"No."
"Why not?" she said, her tone suddenly sharper, more alert.
Because I thought it was a dog. "I didn't have a shovel," I said, and hung
up.
 I got out to Tempe by eight-thirty, in spite of the fact that every tanker
in the state suddenly decided to take Van Buren. I got pushed out onto the
shoulder and drove on that most of the way.
The Winnebago was set up in the fairgrounds between Phoenix and
Tempe, next to the old zoo. The flyer had said they would be open from
nine to nine, and I had wanted to get most of my pictures before they
opened, but it was already a quarter to nine, and even if there were no
cars in the dusty parking lot, I was probably too late.
It's a tough job being a photographer. The minute most people see a
camera, their real faces close like a shutter in too much light, and all that's
left is their camera face, their public face. It's a smiling face, except in the
case of Saudi terrorists or senators, but, smiling or not, it shows no real
emotion. Actors, politicians, people who have their pictures taken all the
time are the worst. The longer the person's been in the public eye, the
easier it is for me to get great vidcam footage and the harder it is to get
anything approaching a real photograph, and the Amblers had been at
this for nearly twenty years. By a quarter to nine they would already have
their camera faces on.
I parked down at the foot of the hill next to the clump of ocotillas and
yucca where the zoo sign had been, pulled my Nikon longshot out of the
mess in the back seat, and took some shots of the sign they'd set up by the
multiway: "See a Genuine Winnebago. One Hundred Percent Authentic."
The Genuine Winnebago was parked longways against the stone banks
of cacti and palms at the front of the zoo. Ramirez had said it wasn't a real
Winnebago, but it had the identifying W with its extending stripes
running the length of the RV, and it seemed to me to be the right shape,
though I hadn't seen one in at least ten years.
I was probably the wrong person for this story. I had never had any
great love for RV's, and my first thought when Ramirez called with the
assignment was that there are some things that should be extinct, like
mosquitoes and lane dividers, and RVs are right at the top of the list. They
had been everywhere in the mountains when I'd lived in Colorado,
crawling along in the left-hand lane, taking up two lanes even in the days
when a lane was fifteen feet wide, with a train of cursing cars behind
them.
I'd been behind one on Independence Pass that had stopped cold while
a ten-year-old got out to take pictures of the scenery with an Instamatic,
and one of them had tried to take the curve in front of my house and
ended up in my ditch, looking like a beached whale. But that was always a
bad curve.
An old man in an ironed short-sleeved shirt came out the side door and
around to the front end and began washing the Winnebago with a sponge
and a bucket. I wondered where he had gotten the water. According to
Ramirez's advance work, which she'd sent me over the modem about the
Winnebago, it had maybe a fifty-gallon water tank, tops, which is barely