"Вуди Гасри. Bound for glory (engl)" - читать интересную книгу автора

that way. If they get wet, you know, they rust out." I wound the last shirt
around and around the neck of the guitar handle. Then I pulled the guitar
over to where I was laying down. I tied the leather strap around a plank in
the boardwalk, ducked my head down behind the guitar and tapped the runty
kid on the shoulder.
"Hey, squirt!"
"Whaddaya want?"
"Not much of a windbreak, but it at least knocks a little of th'
blister out of that rain! Roll yer head over here an' keep it ducked down
behind this music box!"
"Yeeehh." He flipped over like a little frog and smiled all over his
face and said, "Music's good fer somethin', ain't it?"
Both of us stretched out full length. I was laying on my back looking
straight up into the sky all gray and tormented and blowing with low clouds
that whined when they got sucked under the wheels. The wind whistled funeral
songs for the railroad riders. Lightning struck and crackled in the air and
sparks of electricity done little dances for us on the iron beams and
fixtures. The flash of the lightning knocked the clouds full of holes and
the rain hit down on us harder than before. "On th' desert, I use this here
guitar fer a sun shade! Now I'm usin' the' dam thing fer a umbreller!"
'"Pink I could eva' play one uv dem?" The little kid was shaking and
trembling all over, and I could hear his lips and nose blow the rain away,
and his teeth chatter like a jack-hammer. He scooted his body closer to me,
and I laid an arm down so he could rest his head. I asked him, "How's that
fer a pillow?"
"Dat's betta." He trembled all over and moved a time or two. Then he
got still and I didn't hear him say anything else. Both of us were soaked to
the skin a hundred times. The wind and the rain was running a race to see
which could whip us the hardest. I felt the roof of the car pounding me in
the back of the head. I could stand a little of it, but not long at a time.
The guitar hit against the raindrops and sounded like a nest of machine guns
spitting out lead.
The force of the wind pushed the sound box against the tops of our
heads, and the car jerked and buckled through the clouds like a coffin over
a cliff.
I looked at the runt's head resting on my arm, and thought to myself,
"Yeah, that's a little better."
My own head ached and pained inside. My brain felt like a crazy cloud
of grasshoppers jumping over one another across a field. I held my neck
stiff so my head was about two inches clear of the roof; but that didn't
work. I got cold and cramped and a dozen kinks tied my whole body in a knot.
The only way I could rest was to let my head and neck go limp; and when I
did this, the jolt of the roof pounded the back of my head. The cloudbursts
got madder and splashed through all of the lakes, laughing and singing, and
then a wail in the wind would get a low start and cry in the timber like the
cry for freedom of a conquered people.
Through the roof, down inside the car, I heard the voices of the
sixty-six hoboes. There had been sixty-nine, the old man said, if he counted
right. One threw his own self into the lake. He pushed two more out the door
with him, but they lit easy and caught onto the ladder again. Then the two