Make Room! Make Room! (4 page)

He turned into the Chelsea branch of Western Union on Ninth Avenue. The pasty-faced girl behind the high counter looked up and her glance slid away from him and out the wide front window to the surging, sunlit traffic beyond. She dabbed at the sweat droplets on her lip with a crumpled handkerchief, then wiped the creases under her chin. The operators, bent over their work, didn’t look up. It was quiet here with just the distant hum of the city through the open door, the sudden lurching motion as a teletype clattered loudly. On a bench against the rear wall six boys sat looking at him suspiciously, their searching eyes ready to fill with hatred. As he went toward the dispatcher he could hear their feet shifting on the floor and the squeak of the bench. He had to force himself not to turn and look as he waited, imitating patience, for the man to notice him.

“What do you want, kid?” the dispatcher said, finally looking up, speaking through tight, pursed lips reluctant to give anything away, even words. A man in his fifties, tired and hot, angry at a world that had promised him more.

“Could you use a messenger boy, mister?”

“Beat it. We got too many kids already.”

“I could use the work, mister, I’d work any time you say. I got the board money.” He took out one of the ten-dollar bills and smoothed it on the counter. The man’s eyes glared at it quickly, then jerked away again. “We got too many kids.”

The bench creaked and footsteps came up behind Billy and a boy spoke, his voice thick with restrained anger.

“Is this Chink bothering you, Mr. Burgger?” Billy thrust the money back into his pocket and held tightly to it.

“Sit down, Roles,” the man said. “You know my rule about trouble or fighting.”

He glared at the two boys and Billy could guess what the rule
was and knew that he wouldn’t be working here unless he did something quickly.

“Thank you for letting me talk to you, Mr. Burgger,” he said, innocently, as he felt back with his heel and jammed his weight down on the boy’s toes as he turned. “I won’t bother you any more—”

The boy shouted and pain burst in Billy’s ear as the fist lashed out and caught him. He staggered and looked shocked but made no attempt to defend himself.

“All right, Roles,” Mr. Burgger said distastefully. “You’re through here, get lost.”

“But—Mr. Burgger …” he howled unhappily. “You don’t know this Chink….”

“Get out!” Mr. Burgger half rose and pointed angrily at the gaping boy. “Out!”

Billy moved to one side, unnoticed and forgotten for the moment, and knew enough not to smile. It finally penetrated to the boy that there was nothing he could do and he left—after hurling a look of burning malice at Billy—while Mr. Burgger scratched on one of the message boards.

“All right, kid, it looks like you maybe got a job. What’s your name?”

“Billy Chung.”

“We pay fifty cents every telegram you deliver.” He stood and walked to the counter holding the board. “You take a telegram out you leave a ten-buck board deposit. When you bring the board back you get ten-fifty. That clear?”

He laid the board down on the counter between them and his eyes glanced down to it. Billy looked and read the chalked words:
fifteen cent kickback
.

“That’s fine with me, Mr. Burgger.”

“All right.” The heel of his hand removed the message. “Get on the bench and shut up. Any fighting, any trouble, any noise, and you get what Roles got.”

“Yes, Mr. Burgger.”

When he sat down the other boys stared at him suspiciously but said nothing. After a few minutes a dark little boy, even smaller than he, leaned over and mumbled, “How much kickback he ask?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t be a chunkhead. You kick back or you don’t work here.”

“Fifteen.”

“I told you he would do it,” another boy whispered fiercely.

“I told you he wouldn’t keep it at ten….” He shut up abruptly when the dispatcher glared in their direction.

After this the day rolled by with hot evenness and Billy was glad to sit and do nothing. Some of the boys took telegrams out, but he was never called. The soylent steaks were sitting like lead in his stomach and twice he had to go back to the dark and miserable toilet in the rear of the building. The shadows were longer in the street outside but the air still held the same breathless heat that it had for the past ten days. Soon after six o’clock three more boys trickled in and found places on the crowded bench. Mr. Burgger looked at the group with his angry expression, it seemed to be the only one he had.

“Some of you kids get lost.”

Billy had had enough for the first day so he left. His knees were stiff from sitting and the steaks had descended far enough so he began to think about dinner. Hell, he grimaced sourly, he knew what they would have for dinner. The same as every other night and every other year. On the waterfront there was a little breeze from the river and he walked slowly along Twelfth Avenue and felt it cool upon his arms. Behind the sheds here, with no one in sight for the moment, he pried open one of the wire clips that held on the tire sole of his sandal and slipped the two bills into the crack. They were his and his only. He tightened the clip and climbed the steps that led to the
Waverly Brown
which was moored to Pier 62.

The river was invisible. Secured together by frayed ropes and encrusted chains the rows of ancient Victory and Liberty ships made up an alien and rusty landscape of odd-shaped superstructures, laundry-hung rigging, supports, pipes, aerials and chimneys. Beyond them was the single pier of the never-completed Wagner Bridge. This view did not seem strange to Billy because he had been born here after his family and the other Formosa refugees had settled into these temporary quarters, hastily constructed on the ships that had been rotting, unwanted, at their mooring up the river at Stony Point ever since the Second World War. There had been no other place to house the flood of
newcomers and the ships had seemed a brilliant inspiration at the time; they would certainly do until something better was found. But it had been hard to find other quarters and more ships had been gradually added until the rusty, weed-hung fleet was such a part of the city that everyone felt it had been there forever.

Bridges and gangways connected the ships, and occasionally there would be a glimpse of foul, garbage-filled water between them. Billy worked his way over to the
Columbia Victory
, his home, and down the gangway to apartment 107.

“About time you got in,” his sister Anna said. “Everyone’s through eating and you’re lucky I saved you anything.” She took his plate from a high shelf and put it on the table. She was only thirty-seven yet her hair was almost gray, her back bent into a permanent stoop, her hope of leaving the family and Shiptown was long since gone. She was the only one of the Chung children who had been born in Formosa, though she had been so young when they left that her memories of the island were just vague and muted echoes of a pleasant dream.

Billy looked down at the damp slices of oatmeal and the brown crackers and felt his throat close up: the steaks were still clear in his memory, spoiling him for this. I’m not hungry,” he said, pushing it away.

His mother had caught the motion and turned from the TV set, the first time she had bothered to notice him since he had come in.

“What is the matter with the food? Why are you not eating the food? That is good food.” Her voice was thin and high-pitched with a rasping whine made more obvious because she spoke in intonated Cantonese. She had never bothered to learn more than a few words of English and the family never spoke it at home.

“I’m not hungry.” He groped for a lie that would satisfy her. “It’s too hot. Here, you eat it.”

“I would never take food from my children’s mouths. If you won’t eat it the twins will.” While she talked she kept looking at the TV screen and the thunder of its amplified voices almost drowned out hers, throbbing against the shriller screeches of the seven-year-old boys who were fighting over a toy in the corner. “Here, give it to me. I’ll have just a bite myself first, I give most of my food to the children.” She put a cracker to her mouth and
began to chew it with quick, rodentlike motions. There was little chance that the twins would see any of it since she was a specialist in consuming crumbs, leftover scraps, odds and ends; the pudgy roundness of her figure showed that. She took a second cracker from the dish without moving her eyes from the screen.

The heat and the nausea he was still feeling choked at Billy’s throat. He was suddenly aware of the closeness of the steel-walled compartment, his brothers’ whining voices, the scratchy roar of the TV, his sister rattling the plates as she cleared up. He went into the other room, the only other room they had, and pulled the heavy metal door shut after him. It had been a locker of some kind, it was only six foot square and was almost completely filled by the bed on which his mother and sister slept. A window had been made in the hull, just a rectangular opening with the ragged thirty-year-old marks of the cutting torch still clear around the edge. In the winter they bolted a cover over it, but now he could lean his arms on the opening and look across the crowded ships to the distant lights on the New Jersey shore. It was almost dark, yet the air on his face felt just as hot as it had all day.

When the sharp edges of the metal began to cut into his arms he went and washed up in the basin of murky water behind the door. There wasn’t much of it, but he scrubbed his face and arms and plastered his hair back as well as he could in the tiny mirror fixed to the wall, then turned quickly away and pulled down the corners of his mouth. His face was so round and young and when he relaxed, his mouth always had a slight curve so that he seemed to be smiling, and that was not how he felt. His face lied about him. With the last of the water he rubbed down his bare legs and removed most of the dirt and mud; at least he felt cooler now. He went and lay on the bed and looked at the photograph of his father on the wall, the only decoration in the room. Captain Chung Pei-fu of the Koumintang Army. A career soldier who had dedicated his life to war and who had never fought a battle. Born in 1940, he had grown up on Formosa and had been one of the second-generation soldiers in Chiang Kai-shek’s time-marking, aging army. When the Generalissimo had died suddenly at the age of eighty-four Captain Chung had had no part in the palace revolutions that had finally pushed General Kung to the top. And when the disastrous invasion of the
maintand had finally taken place he had been in the hospital, ill with malaria, and had stayed there during the Seven Deadly Days. He had been one of the very first people airlifted to safety when the island fell—even before his family. In the photograph he looked stern and military, not unhappy the way Billy had always known him. He had committed suicide the day after the twins had been born.

Like a vanishing memory the photograph faded from sight in the darkness, then appeared again, dimly seen, as the small light bulb brightened and dimmed as the current fluctuated. Billy watched as the light faded even more, until just the filament glowed redly, then went out. They were cutting the current earlier tonight, or probably something was wrong again. He lay in the suffocating darkness and felt the bed grow hot and sodden under his back, and the walls of the iron box closed in on him until he could stand it no more. His moist fingers groped along the door until they found the handle and when he went into the other room it was no better, worse if anything. The flickering greenish light of the TV screen played over the shining faces of his mother, his sister, his two brothers, transforming their gape-jawed and wide-eyed faces into those of newly drowned corpses. From the speaker beat the tattoo of galloping hoofs and the sound of endless six-shooter gunfire. His mother squeezed mechanically on the old generator flashlight that had been wired to the set, so that it could be played when the house current was off. She noticed him when he tried to go by and held out the generator to him, still contracting mechanically.

“You will squeeze this, my hand is tired.”

“I’m going out. Let Anna do it.”

“You will do what I say,” she shrilled. “You will obey me. A boy must obey his mother.” She was so angry she forgot to work the generator and the screen went black and the twins began crying at once, while Anna called to them to be quiet and added to the confusion. He did not go out—he fled—and did not stop until he was on deck, breathing hoarsely and covered with sweat.

There was nothing to do, no place to go, the city pressed in around him and every square foot of it was like this, filled with people, children, noise, heat. He gagged over the rail into the darkness but nothing came up.

Automatically, scarcely aware he was doing it, he threaded his way through the black maze to the shore then hurried toward the wide-spread street lights of Twenty-third Street: it was dangerous
to be in the darkness of the city at night. Maybe he should take a look into Western Union, or maybe he better not bother them so soon? He turned into Ninth Avenue and looked at the yellow and blue sign and chewed his lip uncertainly. A boy came out and hurried away with a message board under his arm; that made room for another one. He would go in.

When he turned into the doorway his heart thudded as he saw that the bench was empty. Mr. Burgger looked up from his desk and the anger was as fresh on his face as it had been that afternoon.

“It’s a good thing you made up your mind to come back or you just wouldn’t have had to bother coming back. Everything is moving tonight, I don’t know why. Get this delivered.” He finished scrawling an address on the cover, then slipped the gummed-paper seal through the hole in the hinged boards and licked it and sealed it shut. “Cash on the counter.” He slapped the board down.

The clip wouldn’t unbend and Billy broke a fingernail when he had to work the money out and unroll one of the bills and slide it across the scratched wood. He held tight to the other bill, clutched at the board and hurried out, stopping with his back to the wall as soon as he was out of sight of the office. There was enough light from the illuminated sign to read the address: