Harry Harrison: Make Room! Make Room!

“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 mainland 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.