Salvors were taking the treasures of the world out of that city.
That was the year Salvage Team Victor, Inc., took out seventeen hundred pounds of gold, all assayed and ready to go, from the vault of the Republic National Bank. So when people saw that our paper said One Chase Manhattan Plaza on it, they just said, “When you’re on your way back, remember who gave you a free bed.”
I stayed in my rad suit the whole time. I was scared to death.
Those people were all nuts in New York. There were people on the streets with the radiation trembles. People doing heaves right in the middle of everything. But they were staying put. There were actually only about a quarter of a million who stayed. But that’s still a lot of people. They were the total New Yorkers, the ones who just couldn’t imagine themselves anywhere else.
You still had the tail end of the long fires then, so the whole place was full of smoke all the time. Smelled sort of like a mattress fire, or burning hair, when the wind came across the East River.
And you wondered, am I gonna inhale a particle or two? Maybe a little cesium is gonna get in my mask, or a little strontium 90.
Well, when we got to Forty-second Street, there was this barrier made of plywood, with skulls and crossbones stenciled on it. It went right down the middle of the street. You crossed it and there was nobody. They were living in the northern half of Manhattan and in the Bronx. The hits in Queens and Brooklyn had dusted lower Manhattan with the dirty stuff. I remember we went through the barrier. We tried to laugh it off. Nowadays the problem is more uptown, from the chemical spills to the north. But back then it was radiation. Every step we took, the geiger burped some more.
By Thirty-fourth Street it was going continuously.
We were all set to walk to Wall Street when up comes the god-damnedest thing—a city bus all covered with black tarp. Comes right up the middle of Fifth Avenue, picking its way around the abandoned cars. They’ve been pulled here and there to make a path. It’s slow going, but the bus is making it. The side streets were solid cars in those days, and so were all the avenues except Fifth and part of Sixth, and Broadway below Canal.
Anyway, it’s an ancient jalopy of a bus and the sign says “Special.” So we get in. The driver’s in one of those ancient city-issue rad suits, the olive drab ones from the civil defense stores that were put aside in the fifties. They weighed about a hundred pounds. He’s slumped over the goddamn wheel. So what happens?
We get on the bus and he says, “Hey, don’t you guys know you’re supposed to pay a fare?” The guy is at the end of the world and he wants a fare. It’s a buck seventy-five each. Nobody had thought about deflation yet. We don’t have the money, but before we can give him the bad news this jerk says, real rude, “You gotta have exact change. I’m not allowed to make change.”
We kind of displaced him by force and drove the damn bus ourselves. By the time we got to Broadway and Wall, where the cleared path stopped, we had a cop on our tail. Here comes this traffic cop, drags himself out of his car in his ridiculous heavy suit and writes us up a summons for “unauthorized commandeering” of the goddamn bus! Not stealing. It was crazy. I never did anything about the ticket and I never heard about it again. The people who used those old rad suits in New York were all dead by the end of ’89 anyway, so I guess the ticket got forgotten.
Now I’m starting to think about Warday. Three million people died in New York on that day, and the bombs damn well missed!
Crap. Lemme tell you, we’ve been pullin’ wire out of the World Trade Center for three months. Makin’ a fortune!
You know, this was a grand place years ago. The Consumer Electronics Show was held at the new Convention Center in July of ’86. We had a suite at the Waldorf. High times. Fat times.
“Never think about Warday.” That’s my motto, and talking into your machine is making me violate it. I have a tough life. I don’t wanta cry in my beer, but I’ve lost a hell of a lot. My wife. I had a boy—
Oh, hell.
Listen, this has gotta be the end of this thing. I can’t stand this.
I work. I don’t look back. I’ll tell you about the salvage of One Chase Plaza some other damn time.
PART FIVE
Returning Home
You cross with ease at 80 the state line and the state you are entering always treated you well.
The Children’s Train
Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia was an astonishing sight as we walked in, weary from the long bus ride that had brought us here from White Plains. We were planning to catch the Southern Crescent to Meridian, and from there take the bus to Dallas.
There must have been a thousand children in the station. We had just been to Independence Park and put our hands on the Liberty Bell, which you can do now, and stood before Independence Hall, seeking to renew our hope. There were hundreds of people there, including a doubled family, where a man had taken on his neighbor’s children when the parents died. Such mixing is much more common in this part of the country than in Texas, where we tend to focus down on the unit rather than look to our neighbors.
The spirit of the frontier, perhaps, still influences our habits.
There is at Independence Hall a daily schedule of recitations of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Gettysburg Address. This is a program developed by the Philadelphia school system, and the speakers are children.
We listened with the rest of the crowd to the hasty voice of a girl reciting the Bill of Rights. Her eyes darted as she spoke. She was as frail as a bird, and her tone was high and thin, but something in her delivery came from deep within her, and set the breathless, mumbled words to ringing.
I had been thinking long thoughts of children as we walked through Philadelphia’s quiet streets.
Now, here in the station, I was surrounded by children who had not gotten the chance to double up. Quiet children, sitting in rows on the floor. Here and there, one slept in another’s lap. Older kids attended babies. The cries of babies echoed in the huge waiting room. A supervisor moved among the rows.
There was none of the hubbub of childhood among these kids.
Their situation was serious, and they knew it.
They were all dressed identically, in white T-shirts and jeans, girls and boys alike. On the back of their shirts were stenciled their names, years of birth, blood types, TB susceptibilities, and Pennsylvania ID numbers. I began noting down a sampling of their names, but stopped when I saw the way Jim was leaning against the wall. We’d both dreaded getting sick on our journey. We were exhausted from too many nights in trains and too much third-rate food. Stepping between the rows of kids, I went to him.
“I’m sorry. I’m nauseated. I’ve got to lie down.”
“No—let’s go outside. You’ll be better.”
I did not say it, but I knew what had happened to him. The over-powering odor of unwashed people was stifling in that station. Out on the street he began to feel better.
“Jim—”
He stared off into the darkness. We both understood the stakes here. This scene was being repeated commonly all over the country. How many orphans are there? What are the support programs like? What are we doing to protect the future?
We did not speak, not until long afterward, when we were on the train. The children were jammed into eight passenger cars behind us. We were in the through-car. Ahead of us were three “state cars” for people planning to leave the train in resident-only states, such as Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia.