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“This stuff doesn’t taste too bad,” Sol said, “if you can forget what real coffee tastes like. Or Virginia ham, or roast beef, or turkey. Boy, could I tell you about turkey. It was during the war and I was stationed at the ass-end of Texas and all the food was sent out of St. Louis and we were right on the end of the supply line. What reached us was so bad I saw mess sergeants shudder when they opened the GI cans the stuff was shipped in. But once, just once it worked the other way around. These Texans raise billions of turkeys down there on ranches, then ship them north for Christmas and Thanksgiving, you know.” She nodded, but she didn’t know. “Well, the war was on and there was no way to ship all these turkeys out, so the Air Corps bought them for next to nothing and that’s what we had to eat for about a month. I tell you! We had roast turkey, fried turkey, turkey soup, turkey burgers, turkey hash, turkey croquettes…”
There was the sound of ru
“Sol, are you there?” Andy called from the hall, shaking the handle again. “Open up.”
Sol threw the cleaver onto the table and hurried over to unlock the door. Andy pushed in, sweating and breathing hard, closing the door behind him and talking in a low voice despite his urgency.
“Listen, fill the water tanks and all the jerry cans. And fill whatever else we have that will hold water. Maybe you can plug the sink, then you can put water in that too. Fill as many jerry cans as you can at our water point, but if they begin to notice you coming back too often, go to the other one on Twenty-eighth Street. But get going. Sol — Shirl will help you.”
“What’s it all about?”
“Christ, don’t ask questions, just do it! I shouldn’t be telling you this much — and don’t let on I did or we’ll all be in trouble. I have to get back before they find me missing.” He went out as fast as he came in, the slammed door an echo to his receding footsteps.
“What was all that about?” Shirl asked.
“We’ll find out later,” Sol said, kicking into his sandals. “Right now we get moving. This is the first time Andy has ever pulled anything like this and I’m an old man — I scare easy. There’s another jerry can in your room.”
They were the only ones who appeared concerned in any way and Shirl wondered what Andy could have possibly meant. There were only two women waiting in line at the corner water point, and one of them only wanted to fill a quart bottle. Sol helped to carry the filled jerry cans, but Shirl insisted on taking them up the stairs. “Work some of the fat off my hips,” she said. “I’ll bring down the empties and you can get back in line while I pour out the others.”
The line was a little longer now, but there was nothing unusual about it, this was the time when most people started to show up to make sure they had their water before the point dosed at noon.
“You must be thirsty, Pop,” the patrolman on duty said when they reached the head of the line again. “Ain’t you been around before?”
“So what’s your trouble?” Sol snapped, pointing his beard at the cop. “All of a sudden you’re being paid to count the house? Maybe I like to take a bath once in a while so I don’t stink like some people I could mention, but I won’t…”
“Take it easy, grandpa.”
“…I’m not your grandpa, shmok, since I haven’t committed suicide yet, which I would if I was. All of a sudden cops got to count how much water people need?”
The policeman retreated a yard and half turned his back. Sol filled the containers, still grumbling, and Shirl helped carry them to one side to screw the lids back on. They had just finished when a police sergeant pulled up on a sputtering motorbike.
“Lock this point up,” he said. “It’s closed for the day.”
The women who were waiting to fill their containers screamed at him and pushed forward around the spigot, getting in each other’s way and trying to get some water before it was closed down. The patrolman fought his way through the shouting crowd to turn the valve handle. Even before he touched it the water hiccoughed, died to a thin trickle, then stopped. He glanced at the sergeant.
“Yeah, that’s the trouble,” the sergeant said. “There’s a… broken pipe, they had to shut down. It’ll be all right tomorrow. Now break this up.”
Sol looked wordlessly at Shirl as they picked up the jerry cans, then turned away. Neither of them had missed the hesitancy in the sergeant’s voice. This was something more than a broken pipe. They carried the containers slowly up the stairs, careful not to spill a drop.
14
Even though the cops knew who he was and were after him, luck was on his side, that’s what Billy Chung kept telling himself. Sometimes he would forget it for a while and the shakes would come back and he would have to start thinking all about the luck again. Hadn’t the cops come when he was out of the apartment — wasn’t that luck? And he had gotten away without being seen, that was luck too. What if he had to leave everything behind? He had put his shorts on, and just the day before he had sewed all his money into them because he was afraid of losing it out of his shoe. So he had the loot, and loot was all you really needed. He had run, but he had run smart, going to the flea market in Madison Square first and waking up one of the guys who slept under his stall and buying sandals. Then he headed downtown, out of the district, keeping moving. When the water points opened he had washed up, then bought an old shirt from another stall, and some weedcrackers, and ate them while he walked. It was still early when he got to Chinatown, but the streets were already filling up, and all he had to do was find a clear spot against the wall, curl up and go to sleep.
When he woke up he knew that he couldn’t stay here, this would be the first place that the cops would try, he had to move on. Some of the locals who lived in the street were already begi
It was the rainstorm that made him decide that he had to find a place to hole up. He had been caught in it and got soaked and at first it wasn’t bad at all, but just at first. Along with thousands more of the homeless he had sought shelter under the high, soaring roadways of the Williamsburg Bridge, and even here it wasn’t very dry with every change in the wind blowing in sheets of rain. He was wet and cold the whole night, he didn’t sleep at all, and in the morning he climbed the stairway to the bridge to get into the sun. Ahead of him the walkway stretched out over the river and he walked along it to keep warm, into the face of the rising sun. He had never been this high before and it was completely new, looking down on the river and the city like this. A gray nuclear freighter was moving slowly upstream and all the rush of sail and rowboat traffic scurried away before it. When he looked down he had to hold tight to the railing.