Make Room! Make Room! (26 page)

“I’m sorry,” Shirl said. “I didn’t see you….”

“You’re not blind,” the other woman snapped. “Walking around running into people.” Her eyes widened as she looked at Shirl. “You!”

“I said I was sorry, Mrs. Haggerty. It was an accident.” She started to walk on but the other woman stepped in front of her, blocking her way.

“I knew I’d find you,” Mrs. Haggerty said triumphantly. “I’m going to have the court of law on you, you stole all my brother’s money and he didn’t leave me none, none at all. Not only that but all the bills I had to pay, the water bill, everything. They were so high I had to sell all the furniture to pay them, and it still wasn’t enough and they’re after me for the rest. You’re going to pay!”

Shirl remembered Andy taking the showers and something of her thoughts must have shown on her face because Mary Haggerty’s shout rose to a shrill screech.

“Don’t laugh at me, I’m an honest woman! A thing like you can’t stand in a public street smiling at me. The whole world knows what you are, you….”

Her voice was cut off by a sharp crack as Mrs. Miles slapped her hard across the face. “Just hold on to that dirty tongue, girlie,” Mrs. Miles said. “No one talks to a friend of mine like that.”

“You can’t do that to me!” Mike’s sister shrieked. “I already done it—and you’ll get more if you keep hanging around here.”

The two women faced each other and Shirl was forgotten for the moment. They were alike in years and background, though Mary Haggerty had come up a bit in the world since she had been married. But she had grown up in these streets and she knew the rules. She had to either fight or back down.

“This is none of your business,” she said.

“I’m making it my business,” Mrs. Miles said, balling her fist and cocking back her arm.

“It’s none of your business,” Mike’s sister said, but she scuttled backward a few steps at the same time.

“Blow!” Mrs. Miles said triumphantly.

“You’re going to hear from me again!” Mary Haggerty called over her shoulder as she drew together the shreds of her dignity and stalked away. Mrs. Miles laughed coldly and spat after the receding back.

“I’m sorry to get you involved,” Shirl said.

“My pleasure,” Mrs. Miles said. “I wish she really had started some trouble. I would have slugged her. I know her kind.”

“I really don’t owe her any money….”

“Who cares? It would be better if you did. It would be a pleasure to stiff someone like that.”

Mrs. Miles left her in front of her building and stamped solidly away into the dusk. Suddenly weary, Shirl climbed the long flights to the apartment and pushed through the unlocked door.

“You look bushed,” Sol told her. He was heaped high with blankets and only his face showed; his woolen watch cap was pulled down over his ears. “And turn that thing off, will you. It’s an even chance whether I go blind or deaf first.”

Shirl put down her bag and switched off the blaring TV. “It’s getting cold out,” she said. “It’s even cold in here. I’ll make a fire and heat some soup at the same time.”

“Not more of that
drecky
meat flake stuff,” Sol complained and made a face.

“You shouldn’t talk like that,” Shirl said patiently. “It’s real meat, just what you need.”

“What I need, you can’t get any more. Do you know what meat flakes are? I heard all about it on TV today, not that I wanted to but how could I turn the damn thing off? A big sales pitch program on taming the wilds in Florida. Some wilds, they should hear about that in Miami Beach. They stopped trying to drain all the swamps and are doing all kinds of fancy things with them instead. Snail ranches—how do you like that? Raising the giant West African snail, three-quarters of a pound of meat in every shell. Plucked cut, dehydrated, radiated, packed and sealed and sent to the starving peasants here in the frigid North. Meat flakes. What do you think of that?”

“It sounds very nice,” Shirl said, stirring the brown, woodlike chips of meat into the pot. “I saw a movie once on TV where they were eating snails, in France I think it was. They were supposed to be something very special.”

“For Frenchmen maybe, not for me …” Sol broke into a fit of coughing that left him weak and white faced on the pillow, breathing rapidly.

“Do you want a drink of water?” Shirl asked.

“No—that’s all right.” His anger seemed to have drained away with the coughing. “I’m sorry to take it out on you, kid, you taking care of me and everything. It’s just that I’m not used to lying around. I stayed in shape all my life, regular exercise that’s the answer, looked after myself, never asked anybody for anything. But there’s one thing you can’t stop.” He looked down gloomily at the bed. “Time marches on. The bones get brittle. Fall down and bango, they got you in a cast to your chin.”

“The soup’s ready—”

“Not right now, I’m not hungry. Maybe you could turn on the TV—no, leave it off. I had enough. On the news they said that it looks like the Emergency Bill is going to pass after only a couple of months of yakking in Congress. I don’t believe it. Too many people don’t know about it or don’t believe it. Too many people don’t know about it or don’t care about it, so there is no real pressure on Congress to do anything about it. We still have women with ten kids who are starving to death, who believe there is something evil about having smaller families. I suppose we can mostly blame the Catholics for that, they’re still not completely convinced that controlling births is a good thing.”

“Sol, please, don’t be anti-Catholic. My mother’s family …”

“I’m not being anti-nothing, and I love your mother’s family. Am I anti-Puritan because I say Cotton Mather was a witch-burning bum who helped to cook old ladies? That’s history. Your Church has gone on record and fought publicly against any public birth control measures. That’s history too. The results—which prove them wrong—are just outside that window. They have forced their beliefs on the rest of us so we’re all going down the drain together.”

“It’s not really that bad. The Church is not really against the idea of birth control, just the way it is done. They have always approved of the rhythm technique….”

“Not good enough. Neither is the Pill, not for everybody. When are they going to say okay to the Loop? This is the one that really works. And do you know how long it has been around and absolutely foolproof and safe and harmless and all the rest? Since 1964, when the bright boys at Johns Hopkins licked all the problems and side effects, that’s how long. For thirty-five years
they’ve had this little piece of plastic that costs maybe a couple of cents. Once inserted it stays in for years, it doesn’t interfere with any of the body processes, it doesn’t fall out, in fact the woman doesn’t even know it is there—but as long as it is she is not going to get pregnant. Remove it and she can have kids again, nothing is changed. And the funny part is that no one is even sure how it works. It’s a mystery. Maybe it should be spelled with a capital
M
, Mystery, so your Church could accept it and say it’s God’s will whether the thing is going to work or not.”

“Sol—you’re being blasphemous.”

“Me? Never! But I got just as much right as the next guy to take a guess as to what God is thinking. Anyway, it really has nothing to do with Him. I’m just trying to find an excuse for the Catholic Church to accept the thing and give the suffering human race a break.”

“They’re considering it now.”

“That’s great. They’re only about thirty-five years too late. Still, it might work out, though I doubt it. It’s the old business of too little and too late. The world’s gone—not going—to hell in a hand basket, and it’s all of us who pushed it there.”

Shirl stirred the soup and smiled at him. “Aren’t you exaggerating maybe a
little
bit? You can’t really blame all our troubles on overpopulation.”

“I damned well can, if you’ll pardon the expression. The coal that was supposed to last for centuries has all been dug up because so many people wanted to keep warm. And the oil too, there’s so little left that they can’t afford to burn it, it’s got to be turned into chemicals and plastics and stuff. And the rivers—who polluted them? The water—who drank it? The topsoil—who wore it out? Everything has been gobbled up, used up, worn out. What we got left—our one natural resource? Old-car lots, that’s what. Everything else has been used up and all we got to show for it is a couple of billion old cars that are rusting away. One time we had the whole world in our hands, but we ate it and burned it and it’s gone now. One time the prairie was black with buffalo, that’s what my schoolbooks said when I was a kid, but I never saw them because they had all been turned into steaks and moth-eaten rugs by that time. Do you think that made any impression on the human race? Or the whales and passenger pigeons and whooping cranes, or any of the hundred other species that we wiped out? In a pig’s eye it did. In the fifties and the sixties there was a lot of talk about building atomic power
plants to purify sea water so the desert would bloom and all that jazz. But it was just talk. Just because some people saw the handwriting on the wall didn’t mean they could get anyone else to read it too. It takes at least five years to build just one atomic plant, so the ones that should have supplied the water and electricity we need
now
should have been built
then
. They weren’t. Simple enough.”

“You make it sound simple, Sol, but isn’t it too late to worry about what people should have done a hundred years ago?”

“Forty, but who’s counting.”

“What can we do today? Isn’t that what we should be thinking about?”

“You think about it, honeybunch, I get gloomy when I do. Run full speed ahead just to stay even, and keep our fingers crossed, that’s what we can do today. Maybe I live in the past, and if I do I got good reasons. Things were a lot better then, and the trouble would always be coming tomorrow, so the hell with it. There was France, a great big modern country, home of culture, ready to lead the world in progress. Only they had a law that made birth control illegal, and it was a crime for even doctors to talk about contraception. Progress! The facts were clear enough if anybody had bothered to look. The conservationists kept telling us to change our ways or our resources would soon be gone. They’re gone. It was almost too late then, but something could have been done. Women in every country in the world were begging for birth control information so they could limit the size of their families to something reasonable. All they got was a lot of talk and damn little action. If there had been five thousand family-planning clinics for every one there was it still wouldn’t have been enough. Babies and love and sex are probably the most emotionally important and the most secret things known to mankind, so open discussion was almost impossible. There should have been free discussion, tons of money for fertility research, world-wide family planning, educational programs on the importance of population control—and most important of all, free speech for free opinion. But there never was, and now it is 1999 and the end of the century. Some century! Well, there’s a new century coming up in a couple of weeks, and maybe it really will be a new century for the knocked-out human race. I doubt it—and I don’t worry about it. I won’t be here to see it.”

“Sol—you shouldn’t talk like that.”

“Why not? I got an incurable disease. Old age.”

He started coughing again, longer this time, and when he was through he just lay on the bed, exhausted. Shirl came over to straighten his blankets and tuck them back in, and her hand touched his. Her eyes opened wide and she gasped.

“You’re warm—hot. Do you have a fever?”

“Fever?” He started to chuckle but it turned to a fit of coughing that left him weaker than before. When he spoke again it was in a low voice. “Look, darling, I’m an old cocker. I’m flat on my back in bed all busted up and I can’t move and it’s cold enough to freeze a brass monkey in here. The least I should get is bedsores, but the chances are a lot better that I get pneumonia.”

“No!”

“Yes. You don’t get anywheres running away from the truth. If I got it, I got it. Now, be a good girl and eat the soup, I’m not hungry, and I’ll take a little nap.” He closed his eyes and settled his head into the pillow.

It was after seven that evening when Andy came home. Shirl recognized his footsteps in the hall and met him with her finger to her lips, then led him quietly toward the other room, pointing to Sol, who was still asleep and breathing rapidly.

“How is he feeling?” Andy asked, unbuttoning his sodden topcoat. “What a night out, rain mixed with sleet and snow.”

“He has a fever,” Shirl said, her fingers twisting together. “He says that it’s pneumonia. Can it be? What can we do?”

Andy stopped, halfway out of his coat. “Does he feel very warm? Has he been coughing?” he asked. Shirl nodded. Andy opened the door and listened to Sol’s breathing, then closed it again silently and put his coat back on.

“They warned me about this at the hospital,” he said. “There’s always a chance with old people who have to stay in bed. I have some antibiotic pills they gave me. We’ll give those to him, then I’ll go to Bellevue to see if I can get some more—and see if they won’t readmit him. He should be in an oxygen tent.”

Sol barely woke up when he swallowed the pills, and his skin felt burning hot to Shirl when she held up his head. He was still asleep when Andy returned, less than an hour later. Andy’s face was empty of expression, unreadable, what she always thought of as his professional face. It could mean only one thing.

“No more antiobiotics,” he whispered. “Because of the flu
epidemic. The same with the oxygen tents and the beds. None available, filled up. I never even saw any of the doctors, just the girl at the desk.”

“They can’t do that. He’s terribly sick. It’s like murder.”

“If you go into Bellevue it looks as though half the city is sick, people everywhere, even in the street outside. There isn’t enough medicine to go around, Shirl. I think just the children are getting it, everyone else has to take their chances.”

“Take their chances!” She leaned her face against his wet coat and began began to sob helplessly. “But there is no chance at all here. It’s murder. An old man like that, he needs some help, he just can’t be left to die.”