Reading Online Novel

Make Room! Make Room!(43)



Lights. Voices. Below. People. On deck.

“He’s not in the apartment, lieutenant.”

“The bastard got away when he heard you coming.”

“Maybe, sir, but we had men at all the hatchways and stairs. And on the connections to the other ships. He must still be on board. His mother said he went to bed same time as everyone else.”

“We’ll find him. You got half the damned force to catch one kid. So catch him.”

“Yes, sir.”

Catch him. Catch who? Why, catch him, of course. He knew who the people were down there, police, and they wanted him. They had found him the way he knew they would. But he didn’t want to go with them. Not when he was feeling like this. Did the dirt make him feel like this? Wonderful dirt. He would have to get more dirt. He didn’t know a lot of things, he knew a lot of things, one thing he knew the cops didn’t have dirt or give you dirt. No dirt?

The handrail creaked and heavy feet clanged up the stair to the bridge. Billy climbed onto the steel table and out through the side window on the other side, reached up and grabbed and pulled himself up and out. It was easy. And it felt good too.

“What a stink,” a voice said, then louder out of the window below, “He’s not up here, lieutenant.”

“Keep looking. Cover the ship, he has to be here someplace.”

The night air was warm enough and when he ran it felt solid enough to hold him up and he thought of walking over to the next ship, then he came to the funnel and this looked better. Bolted-on, curved steel rods rose up the side of the funnel making a ladder, and he climbed them.

“Did you hear something up there?”

One last rod and there was the top and the shouting black oval mouth of the smokestack black against the blackness beyond. He could go no farther, except inside, and he waved his arm over the nothingness and his foot slipped and for an instant he tottered and began to swim down the long black tunnel, then his hand struck against a bar inside: rough, rusted, coated with crumbling greasy darkness. Up and over he climbed until he half crouched on the bar and held the edge of the metal that formed the smokestack and looked up at the stars. He could notice them now that the voices were only a murmur far away like waves, and he had never seen stars like these before. Were there new stars? They were all different colors, colors he couldn’t remember even having seen before.

His legs were cramped and his fingers stiff where they held the metal and he could no longer hear voices. At first he could not stand and he thought he might drop down the endless dark tunnel below him, and now it didn’t seem as good an idea as it had seemed before. By forcing, he finally straightened his legs and crawled over the metal of the top and found the rungs that climbed the smoothness of the painted metal.

When you are born on the ships and live on the ships, they are as normal a world as streets, or any other. Billy knew that if you climbed out to the tip of the bow and hung and jumped you could land on the stern of the next ship along. And there were other ways of getting from ship to ship that avoided the gangways and walkways and he used them, even in the dark, without conscious thought, working his way toward shore. He was almost there when he became aware of the pain in his bare feet where he had walked along a rusted steel hawser and filled the soles with the sharp, rusty needles of wire ends. He sat and tried to get some of them out by touch. While he was sitting there, leaning against the rail, he began to shiver.

Memory was clear. He knew what he had heard and done, but only now was the true import beginning to penetrate. The police had found him and tracked him down, and it was only an accident that he had been topside and avoided them.

They were looking for him and they knew who he was!

The sky was gray behind the dark silhouette of the city when he reached the waterfront, far uptown toward the end of the row of ships. There seemed to be people near Twenty-third Street, but it was too dark to be sure.

He jumped to the dock and ran toward the row of sheds, a small soot-smeared figure, bare-footed and afraid. The shadows swallowed him up.





12


The heat wave had gripped the city for such a long time that it was not mentioned any more, just endured. When Andy rode up in the elevator the operator, a thin, tired-looking boy, leaned against the wall with his mouth open, sweating into his already sodden uniform. It was just a few minutes past seven in the morning when Andy opened the door of apartment 41-E. When the outer door had closed behind him he knocked on the inner one, then made an exaggerated bow in the direction of the TV pickup. The lock rattled open and Shirl stood in the doorway, her hair still tangled from the bed, wearing only a sheer peignoir.