CHAPTER 19

                    
Unfairness, and What to Do About It

In the days after the hateful words had been scrawled on the wall, Doon went to work grudgingly. He didn’t want to work with people who did such awful things. He had to remind himself that they weren’t all ignorant brutes, and that they were still giving the Emberites shelter and food—even though they were no longer allowing them to eat with their lunchtime families, and even though they were planning to send them out to fend for themselves in the winter. But the people who had written those words—no one was trying to find out who they were, no one was punishing them. Who was the one getting the evil looks and being called bad names? He was, he who had done nothing! He couldn’t stand the wrongness of it. He felt it physically, as if he were wearing clothes that were too tight, a shirt that pinched him under the arms, pants that were too short and too snug. Unfair, unfair, he kept thinking. He couldn’t bear unfairness.

One day he was assigned to clean the fountain in the center of the plaza. Chugger handed him his tools for the job: a bucket, a long stick with a metal scraper on one end, and a pile of rags.

Chugger lifted up one of the bricks in the pavement near the fountain. Under it was a round handle. “You turn this off first,” he said. “It shuts off the water coming in from the river.” He gave it several turns, and the spouting water in the middle of the fountain dipped and vanished. “Now the water in the basin will drain through the outflow pipe,” Chugger said. “It goes back into the river. When the basin is empty, you climb in there and scrub. I want this thing clean as a drinking glass when you’re through.”

Chugger left, and Doon watched the water level slowly going down. The lower it got, the more green scum was revealed. It coated the inside of the fountain like slimy fur.

He plunged his stick into the water, scraped it along the fountain’s inner wall, and pulled it out again. Wet green strings swung from the end of it, and he shook them off into the bucket. He thrust the stick in again, scraped again, brought up more muck. Into the bucket it went. For the next ten minutes, he scraped the bottom and sides of the fountain with his stick and filled the bucket with slippery strands of scum, along with a few apricot pits, dead bugs, and rotting leaves.

The water was about half gone now, but it seemed to be draining very slowly. Probably, Doon reasoned, this was because the outflow pipe was getting blocked up with all the loosened scum being drawn toward it. But because the water was so murky, he couldn’t see where the outflow pipe was.

At that moment, Chugger came up behind him. “What the heck is taking you so long?” he said. “If you had any sense, you’d have figured out the drain is clogging up.” He grabbed the stick out of Doon’s hands and began probing in the water.

“I did figure that out,” Doon said, “but I couldn’t see where it was because—”

“There!” said Chugger, who wasn’t listening. He’d pried loose a clump of soggy crud, and the water level was once more going down. He thrust the stick toward Doon again. “Now get busy. And try using your brain once in a while, if you have one.” He stalked off.

Doon clamped his teeth together to hold in the rage that boiled up in him. He glared at the retreating back of Chugger and imagined throwing his stick so that it hit him right between the shoulder blades.

I hate being talked to that way, he thought. As if I’m a moron. Why does he get to talk to me like that?

When the water had all drained out of the fountain, Doon took his shoes off, grabbed a handful of rags, and climbed in. On his knees in the green slime that covered the bottom, he wiped and scrubbed. Now and then people came by and peered in at him. “Ugh,” they’d say as they passed, or “Yuck.” It felt as if they were saying ugh and yuck about him—not surprising, since he was now just about as filthy as the rags he was using. No one said, “Good job!” or said they were pleased the fountain was getting cleaned.

When he finally finished, he opened the inflow valve and plugged the outflow valve, and once again the water leapt from the central pipe and the fountain began to fill. Doon sat down on the rim and put his bare feet in the water to rinse them off. He stayed there for a minute, resting. The cool, clean water felt good.

Chugger came around the corner. “What are you doing?” he yelled. He strode toward Doon. “I don’t know how you do it where you’re from,” he said, “but here when we work, we work. We don’t sit around gazing at the sky.”

Doon started to say he was not gazing at the sky, he was taking a one-minute rest. But when he opened his mouth to speak, the rush of anger that came up through his body was so volcanic that he closed his mouth again and sat there shaking, his face flushed and burning, afraid he would explode if he tried to say a word. Do not get angry, he told himself, remembering the advice his father had given him so many times. When anger is in control, you get unintended consequences.

“You don’t speak when you’re spoken to?” said Chugger. “Maybe you didn’t hear me. Maybe I need to make it clearer.” He took a deep breath. His voice came out in a hoarse bellow: “Get moving, you stupid barbarian! Now!” He seized Doon by the arm and yanked him backward.

That was when Doon felt his rage shooting up like steam, unstoppable.

“Let go of me!” he screamed. “I’m not the barbarian! You are! You are!” He tried to jerk away from Chugger, but Chugger held on. Doon pulled harder, wrenching his whole body sideways and slamming against the bucket, which was next to him on the rim of the fountain. The bucket went flying, spewing its slimy contents over a girl who happened to be passing by. She screamed and slapped at the stinking green sludge running down the front of her shirt. People rushed up to her and shouted angrily at Doon, who gave one more frantic pull and finally freed himself from Chugger’s grasp.

For a second he and Chugger stood glaring at each other. Doon knew how he must look to the people around him: clumsy, filthy, wild-eyed, and, worse than that—a violent boy, the kind of boy who would waste good food, the kind of boy whose ugly, fiery temper could cause real damage.

He turned and stalked away. No one tried to stop him. He realized when he’d gone a short distance that he’d forgotten to pick up his shoes, but he wasn’t going to go back for them. He ran barefoot all the way to the Pioneer.

I’ve done it now, he thought. I’ve made everything worse. And yet none of it is my fault. I was trying hard to do my job, and trying even harder not to get angry. But look what happens.

The unfairness of it, the tremendous injustice, felt like a stone in his heart.

 

“We will do something about this,” Tick said to Doon that night. They were standing by the hotel’s back stairs, where they’d encountered each other on the way in from the outhouses. “You are being abused. We all are. We mustn’t stand for it.”

Doon nodded. He had told Tick about winter, and now Tick was more outraged than ever. The look on his face was hard and determined. Doon admired Tick’s strength, and the way he always seemed to know what to do. He himself was never so absolutely clear. He saw too many sides of things; it confused him.

“What should we do?” he asked.

“Strike back,” said Tick. “They have attacked us, more than once, in many ways. It’s time for them to find out that if they hurt us, they’ll get hurt, too.”

They’ll get hurt. Was this the right thing? But it did seem fair. After all, wrong should be punished. “How do we do it?” said Doon.

“Many possibilities,” said Tick. He leaned against the wall beside the stairs. He had a red patch on his arm, Doon noticed, that he kept scratching at; it was the first time Doon had seen that Tick, too, suffered from the bites and scrapes that plagued the rest of them. He isn’t perfect, Doon reminded himself; he isn’t always right about everything.

“We could refuse to work,” Tick went on. “But everyone would have to refuse, and I’m not sure everyone would. It would be better to take direct action.”

“Action about what?” asked Doon.

“About food. We don’t get enough. This is an injustice all of us feel. So what about this: we storm the storehouse and take what we need by force.”

“Steal food?” said Doon.

“It isn’t stealing. It’s evening things out. It’s getting what should rightfully be ours.” There was not a hint of uncertainty in Tick’s voice.

Doon thought about this. It did make sense. You had to act against injustice, didn’t you? You couldn’t just let it happen.

“I know lots of people who’ll join us,” Tick said. “I’ll call them together. We’ll have a meeting and make a plan.” He started up the stairs and then turned around and looked down on Doon. “But first,” he said, “we have to arm ourselves.”

“We do?”

“Of course. We need to make sure we’ll defeat our enemy.”

“What do we arm ourselves with?”

“I’ll tell you,” Tick said, “when we meet. Tomorrow night, after dinner, out at the head of the road.”