The figure towering over Siddie Harper was a perfectly huge man, six feet eight at least, with shoulders as broad as a barn, enormous arms, hands like sledgehammers, thick-fingered, short-thumbed. He was bareheaded and dressed in assorted filthy rags leaving half of his vast expanse of chest bare. He was just standing there, staring down at her for a long while, and then he crouched down, reaching for her with those massive hands. “Hurt?” he said.
Siddie shrank away as he came for her until she saw the docile eyes and smooth, unlined baby face of the never-bright. He touched her scraped face with a thick finger, looked at the streak of blood. “Hurt?” he said again.
“No, not bad. Just a scrape.” She edged back, still unsure. “Who’re you?”
“Joey.” He stared at her stupidly. “Not hurt?”
“No, no, but look, can you get me that chair?”
“Chair?”
“Over there.” She pointed to the overturned wheelchair on the sidewalk. “Bring it over.”
“Wheels!” The huge man walked over, picked up the chair like a toy. He spun one wheel and grinned, then tried the other, which jammed. “Won’t go round.”
“It’s bent. Try to unbend it.”
“Unbend?”
“Twist it straight, Joey, so it’ll go around.”
He turned the heavy chair over in his hands, grabbed the bent wheel and pressed it against his knee. It bent back straight like a cold licorice whip. “Goes around now.”
She could see that the axle was bent too, but maybe that didn’t matter. “Joey, put me in the chair. I can’t get into it. My legs don’t work.”
He blinked at her. “Don’t work? Hurt?”
“Yes, they’re hurt. Just lift me up and put me in it.”
“Lift up.” He grinned. He knelt, picked her up like a rag doll, lifted her with surprising gentleness.
“In the chair, Joey.”
“Yeah. In the chair.” He got her into it, watched as she inspected the wheels, turned them, rolled the chair ahead a few feet and then rolled it back. Something went clank-clank underneath it as it rolled, but at least it went. “Well, thanks, Joey. Thanks a lot. Listen, do you know … ” She paused, saw the big man wasn’t tracking her, just watching her. “That store in the next block — you know?”
“Back there?”
“That’s right. Is it still open?”
“Open?”
“Is the man still there?”
He shook his head. “All broke up. Nothin’ there.”
She looked at him, an idea formulating. She had to find food somewhere, get back home. There was still Tessie in a crumpled heap in the blankets in the other room. “Let’s go see the store. You come along.”
Joey followed her as she maneuvered the chair along the sidewalk. It was like one of the old Frankenstein movies she’d seen on the late show, with the monster following Igor like a huge, dangerous puppy. Maybe nobody’d bother her if Joey came along. Joey didn’t seem to mind. Joey didn’t seem to have anything to do. She questioned him, probing a little. Like probing a vast, soggy sponge. Joey didn’t know where he lived except somewhere near the El. Joey didn’t know how he’d gotten here or what he was doing here. Just wandering, eating garbage out of cans in alleys when he could find it. Too big for anybody to argue with or fight with. She couldn’t tell if he’d always been dim or if something terrible had just recently happened to his mind — he couldn’t tell her. He said he was forty-one, but he looked ageless as cast iron. He said he hadn’t been sick, but he couldn’t really remember. He couldn’t put sentences together too well, and it was slow getting through, but there was something up there, not too capable but willing enough, and childlike and needing —
Joey was right about one thing — the little grocery store was a wreck, window smashed, door hanging open — but it hadn’t been completely emptied. Some canned goods still sat here and there on the shelves — a few soups, canned vegetables and fruit, tomato juice — things nobody had wanted. “And cocoa!” Siddie cried, tossing one-pound cans to Joey. “Man once lived for a week on just cocoa, somewhere out west. I read about it somewhere. How much can you carry, Joey?”
“Carry?”
“Bags. Food.” She got him to stacking cans of food and cocoa into grocery bags. “What about out back?” She pointed and Joey emerged from the rear with a fifty-pound bag of flour on his shoulder. Meanwhile Siddie found a pencil and began scribbling a list of things taken on a grocery bag, every item accounted for. “There’s nobody here to make a deal with, but we don’t steal. Maybe somebody’ll come back.” Before they packed out, with Joey laden like a pack pule, she made him drag some moldy wallboard from the back to block up the broken window and to get the door carefully closed. “Maybe nobody’ll bother with it, and we can come back. Now let’s get out of here.”
Joey followed her, wonderingly, as she wheeled the banged-up chair back down the street. It was already getting dark and bitter cold, and she could hear the child crying again as they approached the building. At the stoop she made Joey set down the food. “Now you’ve got to help me upstairs again, somehow, I don’t know how — ”
“Upstairs?”
“Up.” She pointed at the stairs, jabbed at the second-story window with her finger. “Maybe you can just drag it up — oh, Christ.”
He wasn’t tracking, just staring at the stairs and her in the wheelchair. Then suddenly he reached down and picked her up, chair and all, turned around and started up the stairs. She clutched one chair arm and threw her other arm around his heavy neck, felt his muscles strain to lift the chair high enough to clear the steps. He didn’t pause until he reached the second-story landing and he wasn’t even panting.
“Great,” Siddie said. “That was great, I just hope you don’t get mad at me. Now go back down and bring up the food.” She pointed down the stairs again. “Down.”
The man regarded her, utterly crestfallen. “I gotta go?”
“Not away, Joey, just bring the food up. The bags.”
She was afraid he might forget and just wander off when he got down there, and he did get sidetracked for ten minutes watching a big yellow tomcat near the garbage cans in the alley, but finally she heard him plodding back up, thump — thump — thump, coming down the hall and dumping the bags on the kitchen table. He looked around the place like a child in wonderland as Sidonia followed him around in the chair. Then he saw the child’s body in the bedroom corner in the blankets and he began crying. “It’s okay, Joey. She won’t hurt you. Won’t hurt anybody, but she’s got to go out of here, down to the street. I don’t even know if there’s a truck anymore.” She got a wet washcloth, made him bend down and tied it across his mouth. “Keep it on. Take her down across the street. That’s all we can do. Then come back.”
After three repetitions he got it, lifted the body in a blanket like a sack of oats, and headed down. Siddie got a gas flame going on the stove — thank Jesus the supply was back on, at least for a while. When Joey came back she showed him the big copper clothes boiler. “Put water in it and put it on the stove. You’ve got to take a bath.”
“Bath?”
“Wash all over. In the tub. Get the crud off, get Tessie’s bugs off. I’ll boil your clothes while you’re at it.”
It took forever, herding him into a tub with enough hot water poured in to take the chill off the tap water, getting his ragged clothes and Tessie’s blankets into the boiler, digging a set of her biggest brother’s pants and shirts out of a closet for Joey to put on, big enough that Joey only split one seam getting into them, and through it all the sound of the child crying, intermittently. She was exhausted, her body still wracked with the infection, but some ideas were formulating in her mind. Most everybody seemed gone from the building, or not showing, but there were some signs of life she had seen from out on the street. She knew she needed help — she was a prisoner up here without help — but there had to be other people around somewhere who needed help too. Maybe sick or getting sick, maybe dying, but if they could work together, they didn’t have to be sick or dying alone in some icy room somewhere with the windows broken out. There could be safety in numbers — it might be easier to find something to eat together instead of each one grubbing for himself — and some body warmth in numbers too, mattresses and blankets to be pooled — certainly something better than crawling under front doorsteps to sleep and eating out of garbage cans like Joey had been doing. Of course they said it was trouble to be around too many people — one person gave it to another — but if they were all sick already anyway, what difference would it make? She wasn’t sure, but she had a hunch that now that she was recovering she couldn’t catch it again; if she’d been going to die from it, it already would have happened. There must be others who’d recovered, she’d heard about one or two before she got sick. She couldn’t run up and down those stairs, go out and get things, but she and others that had recovered could at least help the sick ones … Somebody’s got to do something, you can’t just sit here and watch everybody die and not try to help —
The crying started again, and she motioned to Joey. “You hear it?” He listened blankly and then nodded as if only now aware. “A baby. Downstairs somewhere, or maybe next door. Maybe all alone. Go look, Joey.”
“Look?”
“Find the baby. Go down and look. Bring it back if nobody’s with it; person can’t leave a baby alone. You go, and I’ll start cooking some — ”
Joey was shaking his head, looking fearfully at the door into the hall. “Don’t wanna go. Dark down there.”
“Nothing’s going to hurt you, Joey. Go look. Here.” She dug under the wheelchair seat and brought out one of her most prized possessions, a little pocket flashlight. “Use this, then it won’t be dark. But you bring it back, you hear?”
It didn’t take him long; in ten minutes he was back carrying a year-old baby boy over his shoulder, bare naked and filthy, blue with cold and wailing, but breathing well and not coughing. Siddie already had some thin oatmeal cooking on the stove with some cocoa mixed in. She held the baby tight against her, got Joey to wrap a robe around her and sat hugging the child until it began to get warm, cooing to it and rocking it and presently feeding it a little of the porridge until it stopped crying and finally went to sleep.
With the baby sleeping on a blanket, Siddie directed Joey to get some boards over the broken window to keep the cold out, and she lit the oven to make some heat and cooked something up for the huge man and herself, opened some cans, made a pan bread and some cocoa. Joey kept eating as long as she kept cooking, he must have been starved, but hungry as she had felt, she didn’t have any appetite after the first few bites; she was almost too tired to swallow. Just as well, for now, but that would change soon enough and she’d be famished like Joey —
There were footfalls on the stairs while they were eating, voices in the hall, and then the door suddenly banged open. Two men came in, not really men, they looked about fourteen, but obviously scavengers, bundled up in brand-new looted sweaters and hats with the tags still hanging on them. They stepped to either side of the door, leaving it open behind them. Sidonia turned her chair to face them. “What you men want?” she said. “We got nothing here.”
“You got eats,” the smaller one said. “Bags full. We seen you come out of the store. Seen the big guy haul ‘em up. We’ll take ‘em.”
“Oh, you think you will?” Siddie laughed as Joey slowly rose to his feet. Face-to-face with the huge man in the confines of the small room, the boys looked at each other and began edging toward the escapeway. Siddie laughed again. “Is that all you big men got to do with yourselves, going around robbing cripples and half-wits? What you gonna do when we say no, cut us up? Well, not from me you don’t steal. Get out of here!”
“You don’t need all them eats,” the smaller one said, almost wheedling. “Bags full of ‘em.”
“We’ll share with civilized folk, not with thieves. Now get out, the two of you, before I tell Joey here to fix you both. You hungry and want to act like civilized folk, you can come back and knock on that door, nice-like, and I’ll cook you some eats.”
The boys departed down the hall, but they didn’t go far; she heard them shuffling and debating, start down the stairs, start back, stop.
She held her breath, looked at Joey, who looked back at her, not tracking at all. It was all bluff, she had no idea in the world that she could get Joey to attack the pair or even defend himself if attacked. Probably not. He’s shivering like a puppy. But then after a long while the smaller boy came back up the hall and peeked in the door. “We’re hungry,” he said. “You cook us some eats?”
They came in and sat down on the floor, as far away from Joey as possible, while Siddie got busy. They were hungry, all right. With the menace gone out of them, they were just hungry kids. The big one didn’t talk much, but the smaller one warmed up as his belly got full. They were brothers, lived just up in the next block; they knew about Siddie and her wheelchair from before. After the first wave hit, they’d teamed up and went “store-jobbin’,” came back one night to find their mother and sisters gone, they didn’t know where, maybe south, a lot of people were trying to go south for a while until too many got sick. For over a week now they’d been wandering, making it pretty much like Joey had, they weren’t really big enough or strong enough to be effective bombers and none of the bigger guys wanted them around.
“You can sleep here if you want,” Siddie told them when they finished eating, “there’s blankets in the other room. But tomorrow you’ve got to do something for me. Go check all of this building and the other buildings on the block. Find out who’s still here, who’s sick, who needs help, and come back and tell me. You got legs and I haven’t, you gotta be my legs tomorrow and my eyes too.” She looked up. “No stealing, either. You go like civilized folk, just find out. Everybody’s got a little food or blankets or clothes tucked away, and a lot don’t need ‘em anymore, and some got more need than others. We can bring the sick ones here, take care of them and maybe get some well, but nobody should have to die alone …”
She went to sleep in her chair that night, too exhausted to shift herself out and not willing to wake Joey up once he went to sleep. She’d slept in her chair a lot, she didn’t care. Tomorrow she’d get Joey to heat water for her and get a bath, boil her own clothes. She got the baby changed when it woke up, fed it a little more, then pulled off her clothes and wrapped up with the robe over her shoulders. She saw Joey was awake, watching her, but he didn’t move.
Later she woke up with cold winter moonlight coming through the good window. Joey was up, moving around in the dark, back and forth, back and forth. “Joey?”
In the dim light he stopped by her chair, knelt down beside her and took her shoulders in his huge paws. It seemed like his face was wet. “Siddie help Joey?” he said, his voice cracking. He touched her body almost delicately.
“I can’t, that way, Joey. I can’t move my legs right. Maybe when I get stronger I can find a way.”
“Siddie get stronger.”
“Can’t get much weaker. Bound to get stronger, with a little time.” She reached out, pulled his head to her breast, cuddled him like the baby. “You can wait a while?”
He nodded. “Wait a while. Sure.” He remained kneeling, hugging her for a long moment, then looked up. “Siddie take care of Joey?”
It was a different question, totally different, the cry of a helpless child. “You bet, Joey,” she said softly. “We’ll manage, one way or another. Cripples got to help each other, don’t they?”