Victor Pronyakin stood over a giant oval bowl of a quarry. Shadows of clouds went along the earth in a jamb, but not a single one could cover immediately the entire quarry, all the motley, moving crowd of cars and people below. “It can’t be that I don’t get caught here,” Pronyakin thought. But it was necessary. It's time to settle down somewhere. For eight years of a driver’s life, he shook enough - and served in a sapper autorot, and carried a brick in the Urals, and explosives at the construction of the Irkutsk Hydroelectric Station, and was a taxi driver in Orel, and a sanatorium driver in Yalta. And not a stake or a yard. The wife still lives with her parents. And how you want to have your own house, so that there is a refrigerator, a TV, and most importantly - children. He is under thirty, and his wife even more. It's time. Here he settles.
The head of the career Khomyakov, having looked at the documents, asked: “Did you work on diesels?” - "Not". “We can't take it.” “I won’t leave here without work,” Pronyakin rested. “Well look, there is MAZ in the Matsuev team, but this is hellish work.”
The MAZ, which was shown to Victor Matsuev, looked more like scrap metal than a car. “Is it only necessary to repair it? Think and come tomorrow. ” “Why tomorrow?” I’ll start now, ”said Pronyakin. He fiddled with the car for a week from morning till night; he even searched the dumps in search of spare parts. But did it. Finally, he was able to start working on a career. His MAZ, although it had good cross, but in order to fulfill the norm, Victor needed to make seven more rides than everyone else in the brigade, working on powerful YAZ trucks. It was not easy, but the first day of work showed that as a professional, Pronyakin has no rivals in the brigade, or perhaps throughout his career.
“And you, as I look, dashing,” said the foreman Matsuev. “You ride like God, you rip off everyone.” And it was not clear to Pronyakin, it was said with admiration or with condemnation. And after a while the conversation continued: “Hurry,” said the team leader. “First you eat a pound of salt here with us, and then pretend.” Claim what? For good earnings, for leadership - as Pronyakin understood. And I realized that he was mistaken for grabbers and crooks. “No,” Victor decided, “I will not adapt. Let them think what they want. I did not get to go to school. I need to earn money, build my life, arrange it like people do. ” Relations with the brigade did not work out. And then the rains charged. On clay roads quarry cars did not go. The work has stopped. “You are in a dead place, Pronyakin,” Victor thought heavily. Waiting became unbearable.
And the day came when Pronyakin could not stand it. In the morning it was dry and the sun promised a full-time job. Pronyakin made four rides and began to make the fifth, when he suddenly saw large drops of rain falling on the windshield. His heart sank again - the day was gone! And, having dumped the breed, Pronyakin drove his MAZ into a quarry quickly empty in the rain. Unlike the powerful MAZ MAZ, Pronyakina could climb the cornice of the career road. It’s dangerous, of course. But with skill, you can. Leaving the quarry for the first time, he saw the drivers standing gloomily at the curb and heard someone whistle. But he didn’t care. He will work. During lunch in the dining room Fedka from their brigade approached him: “You are brave, of course, but why do we spit in the face? If you can, but we do not, why are you exhibiting? If because of money, then we will give you. ” And left. Pronyakin had a desire right now to pack up and go home. But - nowhere. He had already called his wife to her, she was on the road just now. Pronyakin went down to the empty quarry again. Excavator Anton turned a piece of bluish stone in his hands: “What is this? Is ore really ?! ” The entire construction site has long been waiting with excitement and impatience for the moment when the big ore will finally go. Waited and worried, no matter what the brigade thought of him, and Pronyakin. And here it is - ore. Victor took the pieces of ore to the chief of the quarry. “He was happy early,” Khomyakov cooled him. - Such accidental inclusions in the breed have already been found. And then again there was a waste breed ". Pronyakin left. “Listen,” excavator driver Anton said to him below, “I row and row, and the ore does not end. It seems they’ve really reached. ” So far, only two of them knew what had happened. The whole construction site on the occasion of the rain stood. And Pronyakin, feeling that fate had finally become generous — it was he who chose to transport the first dump truck with ore from one of the greatest quarries — he could not calm down with joy. He drove the overloaded car upstairs: “I will prove it to them all,” he thought, referring to both his brigade, the chief of the quarry, and the whole world. When all four horizons of the quarry were completed and a little bit remained, Pronyakin turned the steering wheel a little sharper than necessary, the wheels slipped and the truck dragged to the side. Victor squeezed the steering wheel, but he couldn’t stop the car anymore - turning over from side to side, the dump truck crawled from one horizon to another, turning over and accelerating the fall. With the last conscious movement, Pronyakin was able to turn off the engine completely from the wrecked car.
On the same day, a team visited him at the hospital. “You don’t have a tooth on us,” they told him guiltyly. - Get well. Who doesn’t happen. And you are a man with a wide bone, from people like you, energy is right there. They don’t die. ” But from the faces of his comrades, Victor realized: it’s a bad thing. Left alone with his pain, Pronyakin tried to remember when he was happy in this life, and it turned out that only in the first days with his wife and today, when he was carrying large ore upstairs.
... On the day when the gray postal all-terrain vehicle took Pronyakin’s body to the morgue of the Belgorod hospital, the ore finally arrived. At four o'clock in the afternoon, a steam train decorated with flowers and maple branches gave a triumphantly long hoot and dragged the first twelve wagons of large ore.
