Annie (5 page)

Suddenly, spring came to New York City, and the leaves on a forlorn, stunted ginkgo tree outside the Beanery miraculously began to come into bud. The days grew warm, and the coal furnace in the cellar of the Beanery, which Annie had had to stoke several times a day, was turned off. And now she slept without blankets in her dark little cellar room. Shortly before noon, on a gray, drizzly day in early May, Gert ordered her to carry a can of garbage out to the back alley behind the Beanery. As Annie came out the door, she spied a pair of teenage toughs throwing paving stones at a small boy who was cowering behind a row of garbage cans at the far end of the alley. Putting down the garbage can she was toting, Annie called out to them, “Hey, you two bullies, stop throwin' them stones at the poor kid!”

“What kid, you dumb little twerp?” said the bigger of the two toughs, a burly redhead of about fourteen. “It ain't no kid, it's a dog.”

“A dog, that's even worse,” said Annie, advancing toward the two boys. “I said, stop throwin' them stones!”

“Oh, yeah, you and who else is gonna make us?” said the other boy, who was dark-haired, sallow-faced, and perhaps three inches taller than Annie. He flung another stone at the dog.

“Me and nobody else,” said Annie, walking up to the dark-haired boy, whom the other boy called Augie, and giving him a shove in the chest.

“Oh, so you wanna fight, huh?” said Augie.

“Yeah, I wanna fight.” Annie stood still.

Augie swung a roundhouse punch that Annie ducked in one quick movement. Coming up, she hit Augie in the face with a hard overhand right that sent him sprawling to the ground. A bit of blood trickled from his nose.

“You little bully, look what ya done—my nose is bleedin',” whined Augie as Annie stood above him with clenched fists.

“Yeah, and you'll get worse than a bloody nose if you don't leave that poor dog alone and get outta here—scram!” ordered Annie.

“Okay, I'm goin',” said Augie, getting warily to his feet and shouting to the bigger, redheaded boy, who'd crept behind Annie, “Get her, Eddie! Beat her brains out!”

“I got her!” snarled Eddie, but Annie whirled around just in time to block a punch and land a left uppercut to the jaw that knocked Eddie off his feet. Upon seeing that Eddie, too, was getting the worst of it from Annie, Augie ran off, whimpering, “I'm gettin' outta here.”

Eddie got groggily to his feet, but Annie quickly knocked him down again with a whirlwind of right and left hooks. “Okay,” she said, standing over him, “you had enough?”

“Yeah, okay, I had enough,” Eddie muttered, and he quickly scrambled up and ran off, calling back over his shoulder, “But I woulda beat ya if you'da fought fair, you sissy little girl.”

“Get goin'!” Annie shouted after him. “But anytime you want more, come on back!” Annie rubbed her knuckles, heaved a sigh, and turned to the dog, who was still cowering behind the garbage cans. Annie got down on her knees, patted the ground in front of her, and called gently to the frightened dog. “Here, boy, come on, boy, there's nothing to be afraid of now.” For a moment, the dog didn't move, but then, reassured by the kindness in Annie's voice, he crept out from behind the garbage can and came tentatively up to her. He was a large, shaggy, coffee-colored mongrel with huge sad and soulful eyes. “Aw, poor boy, did they hurt you?” Annie murmured softly, stroking the dog. Annie noticed that he had a short piece of rope strung around his neck that looked as though it had been gnawed through by the dog. “I'll bet you're a runaway, like me, from folks that treated you bad,” said Annie to the dog as he nuzzled against her. “Well, nobody's gonna hurt you no more, ever, because you're gonna be
my
dog.”

“Annie, Annie, where the hell are you?” screamed Gert, coming angrily out the back door into the alley. “How long does it take to put out one garbage can?”

“Look, Mrs. Bixby, a stray dog—I found him out here in the alley,” said Annie. “Can I keep him?”

Gert looked down in disgust at Annie and the dog. “Can you keep him?” said Gert sarcastically. “Of course you can keep him. And for his food, three times a day, maybe he'd like a nice juicy sirloin steak? And a place to sleep? Why, he can have my bed.”

“Please, Mrs. Bixby, please,” begged Annie. “He can have half of my food and he can sleep down in the furnace room with me. So he wouldn't cost you nothin' and he wouldn't be no bother, I promise.”

“Yeah, that's all we need around the Beanery, a big dumb mutt like that,” Gert said scornfully. “I know what I'm doin'. I'm going inside right now and callin' the dog pound. Have 'em come and take this mangy mongrel away. They'll take care of him. Good care. Whatta ya call it? Oh, yeah. Put him to sleep.”

“Oh, please, Mrs. Bixby, you wouldn't do that, please, please,” pleaded Annie.

“I wouldn't, huh—just you wait and see,” Gert replied. “Now, you leave that damn dog here and get back inside to work—there's customers to be waited on.”

“Yes, Mrs. Bixby, I'll be there in just a minute,” said Annie as Gert went stomping back into the Beanery. But Annie wasn't going to abandon the dog. “Don't worry, boy, I'm not gonna let them get you,” said Annie, and at once she made up her mind. She and the dog were going to run away. Far away. Where neither the men from the dog pound nor Fred Bixby would ever find them. And right now. Quickly, telling the dog that she'd be right back, Annie tied him to the handle of a garbage can and raced downstairs to the furnace room, where she got hurriedly out of her waitress uniform and into the dress and sweater she'd been wearing when she'd arrived at the Beanery in January. Once again, she packed her few belongings in her wicker basket, and in less than a minute she was back in the alley. She untied the dog and the two of them were on their way. “Come on, boy, we gotta hurry, run!” called Annie, and the little girl and the dog fled from the alley and ran eastward along West 45th Street, away from the river and toward midtown Manhattan. As they ran, Annie felt herself suddenly filled with joy. For it dawned on her that she'd said good-bye forever to Fred, Gert, and Bixby's Beanery. She was homeless again, of course, adrift in the vast city without a penny. But the drizzly May morning was at least warm, and this time she wasn't running away alone. She had a dog. A dog of her own!

A
nn
ie and the dog had gone only three blocks when they were stopped by a harsh voice calling out, “Hey, you, little girl, come here!” Oh, no, thought Annie, her heart sinking, the Bixbys have already got the police after me. Turning, she saw that the man who'd shouted at her was indeed a policeman, tall and burly and menacingly swinging his nightstick. “Yes, Officer?” said Annie sweetly, trying to act very innocent as she dropped the dog's rope and strolled up to him.

“That dog over there,” said the policeman, “ain't I seen him runnin' around the neighborhood? Ain't he a stray?”

Annie gulped. “A stray?” she managed to get out. “Oh, no, Officer. He's . . . he's my dog.”

“Your dog, huh?” said the policeman skeptically. “So what's his name?”

“His name?” said Annie, looking first at the policeman and then over at the dog, stalling for time, trying to think as fast as she could. “His name is . . . Sandy. Right, that's it, Sandy. I call him Sandy, you see, because of his nice sandy color.”

“Sandy color, huh?” repeated the policeman, still not believing her. “Okay, let's see him answer to his name.”

“Answer?” said Annie, gulping again. “You mean . . . when I call him?”

“Right,” said the policeman. “When you call him. By his name. Sandy.”

“Well, you see, Officer,” said Annie, “I just got him and sometimes he doesn't answer when—”

“Call him!” snapped the policeman.

“Okay,” said Annie with a sigh, turning to the dog and patting her knees. “Here, Sandy. Here, boy. Come on, Sandy.”

For what seemed to Annie like forever, the dog stood motionless, staring at her with his huge woebegone eyes. But then his eyes suddenly brightened, and he trotted over to Annie and jumped up to put his paws on her shoulders.

“Good Sandy,” said Annie, smiling from ear to ear. “Good old Sandy.”

“Hmm,” said the policeman. “Well, maybe he is your dog. But next time you take him out I wanna see him on a leash and with a license. Or else he goes to the dog pound and that'll be the end of him. You understand?”

“Yes, sir, I understand,” said Annie. “On a leash and with a license.”

“Now, get along home with you, you and your dog,” said the policeman, turning and walking off down the sidewalk.

“Yes, Officer,” said Annie. As soon as the policeman was out of sight around a corner, Annie and the dog took off running again, hurrying to get as far as they could from Bixby's Beanery. Sandy, thought Annie as they ran, that's the perfect name for my beautiful new dog. And from that moment on he was Sandy, forever.

At last, out of breath from having run without stopping for nearly half an hour, Annie pulled Sandy into an alley and they sat down to rest. “Good Sandy,” said Annie, gently patting the dog. Sandy, she saw, still looked sad and frightened. “Don't worry, Sandy, I'll take care of you, good care,” said Annie. “And everything's gonna be fine. For the both of us. If not today, well . . .” Annie looked up at the leaden sky. “The sun'll come out tomorrow,” said Annie quietly. “Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there'll be sun.” Sandy's large brown eyes seemed suddenly to become more trusting, and he licked her face with his big red tongue. She smiled. He likes me, Annie happily realized, as much as I like him. It began to rain harder. Annie shook her head, gazed at the sky, and said wryly to herself, “I love you, tomorrow, 'cause you're always a day away.”

“Come on, Sandy,” urged Annie, “we gotta find ourselves someplace to stay tonight, in out of this darn rain, and we gotta find some way to get ourselves somethin' to eat.” Staying close to the buildings so as not to get drenched in the rain, the small girl and her outsize dog hurried eastward along the wet New York sidewalks. They looked up in awe as they passed through a part of the city that, Annie later found out, was called Times Square—it was a dazzle of movie theaters and enormous, brightly colored neon signs that flashed on and off in the dark, rainy afternoon. No one seemed even to notice Annie and Sandy in the crowds of people hurrying in all directions. Before long, they came upon a large, gray granite building—it was Grand Central Terminal. “Good, we can get in out of the rain here,” Annie told Sandy, and she led him through a doorway and down a flight of marble stairs to the main concourse of the station, the biggest room that Annie had ever seen. “Wow, Sandy, look at this place. How'd you like to live here?” said Annie, her eyes bright with wonder at the huge hall and its ceiling of painted stars. For a time, happy to be in out of the rain, Annie and Sandy wandered about the station, jostled by the crowds hustling to and from trains. “Someday, I'll find my father and mother and they'll take us on a train trip, maybe to the seashore or the mountains,” Annie promised Sandy.

As the rainy afternoon passed into evening, Annie felt herself growing hungrier and hungrier. And she suspected that Sandy was hungry, too. “We gotta find ourselves some way to make some money, so's we can buy somethin' to eat,” explained Annie to Sandy, and then she spied an apple seller standing by the Lexington Avenue entrance with a tray of apples strung about his neck. “Apples, apples, two for ten! Get your nice rosy-red apples!” the man cried over and over again, but no one stopped to buy apples from him. He was a haggard, unshaven man in a threadbare brown suit that must have seen better days before the Depression, but he had friendly eyes, and Annie decided to take a chance on speaking to him. “Excuse me, mister,” she said, “but where do you get the apples to sell?”

“Thinking of going into business, little lady?” asked the man cheerfully.

“Well, I don't know. Maybe.”

“I get them at a wholesale fruit market over by the East River,” the man told her. “They sell for a penny apiece, a hundred for a dollar, and I sell them for a nickel apiece, thus making a handsome profit of four cents per apple. That, my little lady, is what we Americans call capitalism. Buy low and sell high. A few years ago, I was doing it with stocks and bonds, and now I'm in the retail apple game. But I can't complain. You sell yourself a thousand apples a day and you make yourself forty dollars.”

“Wow!” Annie exclaimed. “How many have you sold today?”

“Three,” said the man with a rueful laugh, “for a net profit of twelve cents. But things are looking up. Yesterday I only sold two.”

“Oh,” said Annie. She tried to sound enthusiastic.

“Tell me, little lady,” asked the apple seller, “are you hungry?”

“Well, I . . .”

“Of course you are. Everybody is.” And he handed her a pair of apples. “Here you go, my dear,” he said graciously, “one for you and one for your large dog, compliments of the management.”

“Gee, thanks, mister!” Annie quickly fed one of the apples to Sandy, who wolfed it down in three bites, and gobbled up the other herself.

A little bit of her hunger gone, Annie looked outside—she saw that the rain had stopped. But the evening had grown sharply cooler; it was going to be a cold night. “We gotta find ourselves someplace to stay tonight,” Annie told Sandy. And then she had an idea. She lingered with Sandy near the Lexington Avenue entrance for the next two hours, watching the apple seller trying unsuccessfully to sell his apples to commuters hurrying to catch trains that would take them to their homes in the suburbs. By seven thirty, few people were coming into the station, and now, Annie saw, the apple seller gave up and started off into the cool May night. “Come on, Sandy, we're gonna follow him,” said Annie.

As Annie and Sandy trailed in the shadows, the apple seller trudged up Lexington Avenue to East 59th Street and then headed eastward toward the East River. There he disappeared over the edge of an embankment next to the 59th Street Bridge, seemingly headed straight into the river. Annie and Sandy ran to the embankment and looked down. Below them, under the bridge at the river's edge, they saw a makeshift little camp—there were maybe a dozen shanties. In the middle of the camp, shadowy figures were huddled around fires that blazed up fitfully from ash cans. At the largest of the fires, a woman appeared to be cooking something in a huge cauldron that hung on a spit. Their friend the apple seller, Annie saw, was warming himself by one of the fires. “Gee, Sandy, I wonder what this place is?” Annie whispered.

In New York, in the Depression, thousands of homeless people, many of whom had once lived in elegant Park Avenue and Riverside Drive apartments, banded together to live in shantytowns that were known as Hoovervilles—mockingly named after President Hoover, on whom many blamed the Depression. The floorless shanties were slapped together from scrap wood, cardboard, and pieces of iron, with sheets of corrugated tin for roofs. Dirty, ugly, without heat or ventilation, the shanties had no virtues other than that they provided a roof over one's head. The rich of New York, who still numbered in the thousands in 1933, looked upon the Hoovervilles as an eyesore and a disgrace to the city, and they were constantly after the mayor to have them torn down. But, argued the mayor, it was better to have the homeless living in Hoovervilles than sleeping in doorways, like Bowery bums, and so the Hoovervilles were tolerated—or ignored—by the city authorities, including the police. It was such a Hooverville that Annie and Sandy had come upon.

“Let's go, Sandy. I don't know what this place is, but at least they've got fires to keep warm by,” said Annie, leading her dog down the steep embankment toward the Hooverville below. “And, hey, maybe we can find us somethin' to eat. Come on!” The men and women gathered in the shadows around the flickering fires were thin, shabbily dressed, and sad-looking, but they didn't appear to be at all mean or unfriendly. They looked, in fact, like the dazed survivors of some terrible catastrophe, which, of course, they were. “Pardon me, folks,” said Annie, nervously clearing her throat as she neared the group around one of the fires, “but did anybody here leave a redheaded kid named Annie at an orphanage eleven years ago?” A few of the people huddled around the fire said, “No” or “Uh-uh, kid,” but most of them simply ignored her question. Figuring that no one would mind, Annie stepped up close to the fire and held her hands over the flames.

The woman who'd been cooking now banged an iron spoon against the side of the cauldron and hoarsely called out, “Ladies and gents, put on a smile, dinner served! The stew is on!” At once, everyone scurried about, got spoons and tin cans, and lined up to be served. The people in the Hooverville lived communally, each chipping in a few pennies a day to the cook, Sophie, who bought vegetables, potatoes, and cheap cuts of meat to make a hot stew every night. Her stew wasn't very good, but at least it was hot food on a cold night. As she was ladling out the stew, Sophie glanced at Annie and Sandy, who were standing off in the shadows. “Hey, kid, you hungry?” asked Sophie.

“Naw,” said Annie. She was too proud to admit that she was starving. “But my dog is.”

“Come on then, kid,” said Sophie, beckoning to Annie and handing her a spoon and an empty Campbell's soup can, “and bring your dog, too.”

“Gee, thanks, lady,” said Annie, as Sophie filled up her soup can with a steaming ladleful of stew.

“Call me Sophie, everybody else does,” said Sophie, flashing a toothless smile. She was a short, plump woman with a round and friendly face. She wore the shabbiest getup that Annie had ever seen on anyone—a dress of faded tan and yellow patches that looked to be made out of leftover pieces of canvas, and fraying strips of burlap around her feet in place of shoes. But Sophie certainly seemed to be cheerful.

“I'm Annie, and this is Sandy.” Annie made a polite little bow.

“Pleased to meet ya, Annie,” said Sophie. “Eat your fill, you and your Sandy. And there's plenty more where that came from.”

In the orange light from the ash-can fires, everyone sat in a circle on the ground and ate. With great appetite, Annie took a huge spoonful of the stew. “Yecccchh,” she said to herself. She'd never tasted anything so terrible in her life, and that included Miss Hannigan's mush. Still, it was food. She ate half of the canful and passed the rest along to Sandy. He clearly didn't like it very much, either. But he ate it. If nothing else, Sophie's stew was filling, and to survive, many ate anything they could get in those dark Depression days.

The apple seller whom Annie and Sandy had followed to the Hooverville from Grand Central Terminal came up to the group. “Say, kid, haven't I seen you somewhere before?” he asked, introducing himself to Annie as G. Randall Whitworth Jr., or Randy to his friends.

“Well, I . . .” said Annie.

“Of course,” said Randy, “you're the little girl who was hanging around the station all afternoon. What'd you do, follow me here?”

“Well, yes, I guess so,” admitted Annie, a little ashamed of what she had done.

“Aw, that's all right, kid. At the bottom of life's ladder, there's always room for one more,” Randy assured her. “So, little lady, what are you doing out alone at this time of night?”

“I'm looking for my mom and dad,” Annie explained. “They're lost.”

“Lost, huh?” said Randy. “How long have you been looking for them?”

“Eleven years,” said Annie.

“Now, that's
lost
,” Randy agreed.

“Don't worry, Annie, you'll find them,” Sophie assured her.

“You're darned right I'll find them,” said Annie with confidence.

“Well, well, there's something I haven't heard since 1928,” drawled Randy.

“What?” asked Sophie.

“Optimism,” explained Randy with a loud laugh.

“What have we got to be optimistic about?” asked a gloomy-faced man named Lou as he held out his tin can for more stew. “Look at us. Look at this dump. Life's a nightmare.”