Beggars and Choosers

In a week, all out stockpiled food had gotten eaten up. One lousy week.

No more came, by rail or air or gravsled, from Albany. People tore into the cafe, them, to the kitchen where A

I walked farther upstream. When I was a young boy, me, I used to love being in the woods in winter. But then I wasn’t scared out of my skull. Then I wasn’t an old fool with a back that hurts and who can’t see nothing in his mind but Lizzie’s big dark eyes looking hungry. I can’t stand that, me. Never.

Lizzie. Hungry…

When I left town, the rifle under my coat, people were hurrying to the cafe. Something was going on, I didn’t know what. I didn’t want to know. I just wanted, me, to keep Lizzie from going hungry.

I could only think, me, of two ways to do that. One was to hunt for food in the woods. The other was to take Lizzie and A

Those were the scariest words, me, I ever heard.

Ready for us for what?

But I’d bring Lizzie and A

I came to a place where dogtooth violets used to grow, them, back in June. I dropped to my knees. They sang out in pain, them, but I didn’t care. I dug up all the dogtooth violet bulbs I could find and stuffed them into my pockets. You can roast them. My jacks already held acorns, to pound into flour — wearying work, it — and some hickory twigs to boil for salt.

Then I settled down, me, on a rock, to wait. I held as quiet as I could. My knees hurt like hell. I waited, me.

A snowshoe rabbit came out of the brush, him, on the opposite bank, like he was right at home. Casual, easy. A rabbit ain’t much food to use up a bullet. But I was cold enough, me, so I knew I’d start shivering soon, and then I wouldn’t never be able to hit nothing.

Bullet or rabbit? Old fool, make up your mind.

I saw Lizzie’s hungry eyes.

Slowly, slowly, I raised the gun, me, and squeezed off the shot. The rabbit never heard it. He flew up in the air and come down again, clean. I waded across the creek and got him.

One good thing — he fit under my coat, him. A deer wouldn’t of fit. I didn’t want nobody hungry to see my rabbit, and I didn’t want to stay around, me, near where the gun fired. An old man is just too easy to take things away from.

But nobody tried, until Dr. Turner.

“You’re going to skin it?” she said, her voice going up at the end. I could of laughed, me, at the look on her face, if anything could of been fu

“You want to eat it, you, with the skin on?”

She didn’t say nothing, her. A

A

“I’ll cook it. Tonight, by the river. I can make an almost smokeless fire, me. And I’ll roast the violet bulbs in the coals.” It made me feel good to see how A

Lizzie said, “But if you — where are you going, Vicki?”

“To the cafe.”

I looked up. Blood smeared my hands. It felt good. “Why you going there, Doctor? It ain’t safe for you.” The stomps still gather at the cafe, them. The foodbelt’s empty but the HT works.

She laughed. “Oh, don’t worry about me, Billy. Nobody both-* ers me. But there’s something going on down there, and I want to know what.”

“Hunger’s what,” A

“I’m one of those ‘poor people,’ as you put it,” Dr. Turner said, still smiling without nothing being fu

“Huh,” A

I finished ski

Only I didn’t go to the river.

More and more people were walking to the cafe. Not just stomps, but regular people. In the winter dark they hurried, them, hunched over but fast, like something was chasing every last one of them. Well, something was chasing me, too. I sniffed hard to make sure nobody really couldn’t smell the fresh rabbit meat, and then I walked into the cafe.

Everybody was watching the Lucid Dreamer concert, “The Warrior.”

I had the feeling that people’d been watching all day, them. More and more, coming and going but even the goers coming back for more. I guess, me, that if your belly’s empty, it helps to have your mind feel good. The concert was just ending when I come in, and people were rubbing their eyes and crying and looking dazed, like you do after lucid dreaming. But I saw right away that Dr. Turner was right, her. Something else was going on here. Jack Sawicki stepped in front of the holoterminal and turned it off. The Lucid Dreamer, in his powerchair, with that smile that always feels like warm sunlight, disappeared.

“People of East Oleanta,” Jack said, and stopped. He must of realized, him, that he sounded like some donkey politician. “Listen, everybody. We’re in a river of shit here. But can do things, us, to help ourselves!”

“Like what?” somebody said, but it wasn’t nasty. He really wanted to know. I tried to see, me, who it was, but the crowd was too packed in.

“The food’s gone,” Jack said. “The gravrail don’t work. Nobody in Albany answers, them, on the official terminal. But we got us. It’s what — eight miles? — to Coganville. Maybe they got food, them. They’re on a spur of the gravrail franchise, plus they’re a state line, so they got two chances for trains to be ru

“Eight miles over mountains in winter?” Celie Kane yelled. “You’re as crazy as I always thought, Jack Sawicki! We got a crazy man, us, for a mayor!”

But nobody yelled along with Celie. I stepped up onto a chair, me, along the back wall, just to see this more clearly. The feeling you get after a Lucid Dreamer concert still filled them. Or maybe not. Maybe the concert had got down inside them, from watching it so much. Anyway, they weren’t raging, them, about the donkey politicians that got them into this mess, except for Celie and a few like her. There’s always them people. But most of the faces I could see, me, looked thoughtful, and people talked in low voices. Something moved inside my belly that I didn’t never know was there.

“I’ll go, me,” Jack said. “We can follow the gravrail line.”

“It’ll be drifted in bad,” Paulie Cenverno said. “No trains for two weeks to blast the snow loose.”

“Take a Y-unit,” a woman’s voice said suddenly. “Turn it on high, it, and melt what you can!”