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

enough for drinking water, a shower, and maybe washing a dish or two,
and there certainly weren't any hookups here at the zoo, but he was
swilling water onto the front bumper and even over the tires as if he had
more than enough.
I took a few shots of the RV standing in the huge expanse of parking lot
and then hit the longshot to full for a picture of the old man working on
the bumper. He had large reddish-brown freckles on his arms and the top
of his bald head, and he scrubbed away at the bumper with a vengeance.
After a minute he stopped and stepped back, and then called to his wife.
He looked worried or maybe just crabby. I was too far away to tell if he
had snapped out her name impatiently or simply called her to come and
look, and I couldn't see his face. She opened the metal side door, with its
narrow louvered window, and stepped down onto the metal step.
The old man asked her something, and she, still standing on the step,
looked out toward the multiway and shook her head, and then came
around to the front, wiping her hands on a dishtowel, and they both stood
there looking at his handiwork.
They were One Hundred Percent Authentic, even if the Winnebago
wasn't, down to her flowered blouse and polyester slacks, probably also
one hundred percent, and the cross-stitched rooster on the dishtowel. She
had on brown leather slip-ons like I remembered my grandmother
wearing, and I was willing to bet she had set her thinning white hair on
bobby pins. Their bio said they were in their eighties, but I would have put
them in their nineties, although I wondered if they were too perfect and
therefore fake, like the Winnebago. But she went on wiping her hands on
the dishtowel the way my grandmother had when she was upset, even
though I couldn't see if her face was showing any emotion, and that action
at least was authentic.
She apparently told him the bumper looked fine because he dropped the
dripping sponge into the bucket and went around behind the Winnebago.
She went back inside, shutting the metal door behind her even though it
had to be already at least a hundred and ten out, and they hadn't even
bothered to park under what scanty shade the palms provided.
I put the longshot back in the car. The old man came around the front
with a big plywood sign. He propped it against the vehicle's side. "The
Last of the Winnebagos," the sign read in somebody's idea of what Indian
writing should look like. "See a vanishing breed.
AdmissionтАФAdultsтАФ$8.00, Children under twelveтАФ$5.00 Open 9 A.M. to
Sunset." He strung up a row of red and yellow flags, and then picked up
the bucket and started toward the door, but halfway there he stopped and
took a few steps down the parking lot to where I thought he probably had
a good view of the road, and then went back, walking like an old man, and
took another swipe at the bumper with the sponge.
"Are you done with the RV yet, McCombe?" Ramirez said on the car
phone.
I slung the camera into the back. "I just got here. Every tanker in
Arizona was on Van Buren this morning. Why the hell don't you have me
do a piece on abuses of the multiway system by water-haulers?"
"Because I want you to get to Tempe alive. The governor's press
conference has been moved to one, so you're okay. Have you used the