The Years of the City

by Frederik Pohl

  Or should?

  Bratislaw clicked off the machine, now beginning its third repetition, and started for the infirmary, because he hadn’t liked the thoughts that had crossed his mind. He was early, and he didn’t expect he would be let in, but evidently all the bedpan-cleaning and diaper-changing was over. Lucy was patiently feeding the last of her charges some gummy, gruelly porridge that looked like strained baby food. Probably was; and the old woman was dribbling and drooling it as thoroughly as any three-month-old. Heidi was sitting beside the bed, looking frayed, and Bratislaw thought indignantly that this couldn’t be good for her, in her condition! “Good,” said Lucy approvingly, and mopped off the old woman’s bristly chin. “What dessert?” The old woman glared, so Lucy tried the menu: “Chocat puddin? Ban’a yogurt?” At the second suggestion the old lady glared, puffed, turned purple and managed an “Ess!” The banana yogurt seemed to take forever, but at last it was over, and Lucy was through with her chores for the day—and it was time, ah, blessed time!—for the walk to the taxi to the last boat of the day.

  At the gate Lucy suddenly turned on the other residents who had been following at a distance, the black man in the wheelchair, his white-haired woman companion, Lucy’s friend and roommate. She shooed them like poultry. “Go away, Molly, Dandy, Elise. Go away.” It was the longest speech he had heard from her that day. Lucy’s face was screwed up in concentration as she turned to her sister: “Baby all right?” she asked, as though Heidi hadn’t been telling her all about the baby all day. Heidi nodded, “Oh, yes, honey, it’s coming along fine.” Lucy nodded. “Box?” she demanded, eyes squinting with the effort. “Yes,” said Heidi, as though she understood, “it’s all taken care of.” “Come back?” And that was when Lucy seemed near to weeping. “You bet we’ll be back,” Heidi promised. “As soon as we can—but here’s the taxi, and it’s getting ready to rain!” A couple of farewell kisses—surprisingly warm and pleasant, if you didn’t look at the football helmet or think about what Lucy had once been—

  And at last they were free.

  It did rain. It came down like the cloudbursts of the tropics, with thunder and lightning and gusty winds that made the old excursion steamer shudder. The decks were bare, all the holiday-makers crammed inside; there was no place to sit. The best Bratislaw could find was a corner by a window, where Heidi could at least perch on the sill and not much of the rain came through. He had things on his mind. “Honey,” he began, “it must cost a bundle to keep somebody in that place.”

  The strain lines were deep on Heidi’s face. “We don’t pay it, Jeff. It all comes from the police disability fund.”

  “Well, sure, but there’s a question of social responsibility here, isn’t there? Especially since it’s Lucy. Especially since she’s so strong for good citizenship and all.”

  His wife said steadily, “Jeff, I know what you’re getting at. You want me to take Loose out of the skinner. You want me to get her frozen like some boat person.”

  “For her own good, honey!”

  “Oh, Jeff.” She turned to gaze out the window. The rain began to beat in on her, but she paid it no attention. “Let me explain to you, will you? Freezing’s not so bad for the boat people—they don’t want to go back, they can’t stay, anyway at least they freeze whole families together. And if you’re in desperate pain, sure, get frozen. But there’s a risk…and even if it works, even if a hundred years from now they figure out how to fix up her head, and bring her back, and she’s as good as new—where will I be, Jeff? And she’s my sister.”

  It was a rotten end to an already crummy day.

  But there was still more to come. By the time they got to the Battery the storm was over. The streets were sloshy-clean, and there was a fresh, cool breeze. As they looked for a cab Bratislaw said, “I guess we’ll do what you want about Lucy, honey.”

  She nodded, and then managed a smile. “We just won’t talk about that any more,” she agreed. “We’ve got plenty of better things to think about. Like us,” she added, and put up her face to be kissed.

  V

  The summer wore on, stagnant when it wasn’t stormy. For Jeff Bratislaw, though, it wasn’t bad at all. Heidi did not stop her pilgrimages to the Peekskill Facility, but she didn’t stop the kisses, either. If Ella Jennalec was sometimes tense and abstracted, she was also convincingly annoyed when he asked questions. “You worry too much,” she said. “I told you, we’ve got this indictment thing licked.”

  “Sure, Ella,” he said obligingly. Since everyone was telling him not to worry, he didn’t worry. Not even about the weather. The storminess kept coming. There were hurricanes boiling up out of the South Atlantic every four or five days. None of them hit the track that would take it up the Eastern Seaboard, but Bratislaw couldn’t help wondering what would happen if one did. So he asked Ella.

  “You mean after the dome’s finished? Nothing. They claim it’s safe for up to two hundred miles an hour. Right now, though—Jesus!” She was grinning with pleasure. “There’d be plastic falling in Portugal. That’s why we’re gonna win out, Jeff. I’m getting ready for a strike if they don’t give us hazard pay any time the wind’s over what they call Force Three, with escalations. Oh, and listen. Tomorrow I’m going to take my kid along with us, if you don’t mind. He’ll be home from camp tonight.”

  “Why should I mind?”

  She nodded, acknowledging the justice of the question, then changed the subject. “I hear you were up to the skinner in Peekskill.”

  That was disconcerting. Bratislaw didn’t want to ask her how she knew, but his expression asked it for him. She grinned. “I got a father up there,” she said, “so I keep in touch. He’s a mean old goat, but I kept him around as long as I could. Now, it’s senile aphasia. He forgets things, like his name—he never did know mine real well,” she finished bitterly. “Still, he’s my dad, and I would’ve kept him longer if he hadn’t started peeing the bed. They didn’t skin him worth shit, though. I took him out for a weekend and he wet the bed worse than ever.” She looked at her watch, then ordered, “So go on home to the pregnant wife, boy. I got company coming.”

  Company! Another lover? That would explain why she had cut him off—not that he minded, because the way things were with Heidi these days, who needed Ella Jennalec? But he was wrong about that, he realized as he finished parking her car. He saw a taxi coming in, and it contained Ella’s kid, a mountain of luggage and an escort.

  The escort was wearing a cast and carrying a cane, but Bratislaw had no trouble in recognizing him. It was Tiny Martineau.

  Ella Jennalec didn’t mention Tiny to Bratislaw, and Bratislaw said nothing to his boss. It wasn’t a good idea to bother Ella these days, as the summer went through the hottest spells the city had seen for a decade or more. She was edgy, irritable—just plain mean sometimes. Bratislaw began to wonder if being drafted into the City Patrol Corps would, after all, be so much worse. There were more and more meetings to go to, and neither Bratislaw nor any of the other bodyguards/thugs/administrative assistants were allowed inside. Even the union officials had to pass through metal detectors. They were searched and their briefcases were fluoroscoped, while the muscle men lounged around in hallways and anterooms, sizing each other up speculatively.

  There was a new organization being born, a Metropolitan Trades Action Council, and its birth pangs were private. That all sounded reasonable enough. Doming the city made big problems for the unions, because it involved great physical changes in the way the city worked. Once the dome was up sanitation men wouldn’t use trucks any more: there went one job classification. They would get more deeply involved in recycling on-site, maybe—unless that was turned over to private-sector operations—unless the unions were able to forestall that before it got off the ground, or anyway get a piece of the action if it went private. Organic waste would now go into sewage, and there were big possibilities in the sludge-handling trades, but what about the men who had run the barges? Industrial wastes would be stockpiled and m
aybe mined, perhaps with bioconcentration via algae, etc.—the technology was complicated and Bratislaw wasn’t sure he understood it. But neither did the union leaders, and they needed to know about it so they could mark off their spheres of influence.

  All that made sense, but in the chatter with the other muscles Bratislaw confirmed his opinion that the primary topic in the secret meetings had little to do with any of the above. The big concern was the Grand Jury. Ella wasn’t the only one who had been subpoenaed. Their lawyers were manufacturing delays and postponements with great skill. But that couldn’t last forever. The news broadcasts said so. The trouble with that was that the newscasters gloated over the Hanging Judge of Harlem’s white-hot crusading determination to wipe out organized crime in the unions of the city, and Bratislaw had not forgotten whom he had seen coming out of the secret meeting.

  More than anything else he wished he still had Lucy to serve as his social databank, and maybe a little bit even his conscience. Lucy was the one who had explained to him that with most of the drug laws repealed and all the prostitution statutes, so that cocaine was sniffed even at the Mayor’s fund-raisers and the Yellow Pages had a fifteen-page listing under “Sexual Services,” more than half the revenues of organized crime had gone down the toilet. The unions were about all they had left. There were still a couple of unions in the city that had not become gangster-run but, offhand, Bratislaw couldn’t think of which they were.

  Ella’s kid came back from his camp in the Rockaways tanned and heavier than when he left, and Bratislaw found baby-sitting added to his duties. Not often. Just when Ella Jennalec was going to be tied up all day in one place, whereupon the union car and the union driver, namely Bratislaw, might as well be doing something more useful than just sitting around outside the hall. So Bratislaw got to climb the Statue of Liberty, and point out to Marvin the bridge where his wife worked, and the hold-downs in the harbor where he himself had once toiled. He went to the Bronx Zoo and the American Museum of Natural History and the Planetarium. They even went to prison together, or at least to visit the great Nathanael Greene Institute for Men; and the days wore on toward the end of summer. The boy was a bright spot in Bratislaw’s life. His wife Heidi was another. “I think I’m going to take early maternity leave,” she told him one night as she was just out of the shower and he just about to go in.

  He patted her belly, rounding up nicely now and still dewy from the bath. “Aren’t you kind of rushing the gun?”

  “There’s so much to do,” she apologized; and, indeed, she was looking gaunt in the face, though nowhere else. She was worrying too much about her sister, Bratislaw reflected as he sudsed and rinsed, and he got out of the shower to tell her so, still toweling and dripping water on the rug.

  Heidi was in the bedroom but not in bed. She was bent over something, and when he came in she jumped up, startled. She had his amulet in her hands. “You scared me,” she cried. And when his look told her he had a question, she added, “I was just polishing it up. You sweat so, Jeff.”

  He was touched: she was keeping their love bright. And so, he vowed, would he; and for some time after that he worked at it, and she fully cooperated.

  The hurricanes had started in June. Alfred pooped out on the way to Bermuda, Betsy wandered into the Gulf of Mexico, Curtis creamed Cuba and threatened all of Florida, then madly backtracked and lost itself in the mid-Atlantic. By Labor Day they were up to Michael, tracking stolidly up the coast but more than two hundred miles offshore, and Ella decided it was time to give her son the promised treat. Not the big dome. Not even the little tube-shaped dome that connected the two big ones. But there was Aqueduct racetrack with a dome of its own, and Ella claimed herself entitled to a day off. The boy Marvin wasn’t interested in betting, but he was thrilled by the horses themselves, and by the power of his mighty mother, demonstrated in her obtaining for him a pass and a guide which let them go into the stables and the owners’ enclosure at the paddock. Ella Jennalec stayed with them for a while, but her love of the breed stopped at picking winners. Long before the first race she was up in her box, studying the forms and placing her bets on the daily double.

  Bratislaw and the boy watched the grooms bringing back the horses from the first race. The winner was a roan gelding, three years old. While all the other horses padded quietly enough to their stalls, the gelding was conducted to a shed where a man in a white coat pulled back its lip and dabbed at its teeth with a white pad. “What’s that all about?” the boy asked, and their guide, a twenty-year-old groom whose horse had been scratched, explained:

  “That’s the spitbox, where they take the winners to get a saliva test.”

  “You mean they might be doped?” the boy demanded, thrilled.

  “Who knows? Anyway, it’s the law. That’s a pretty horse,” she added enviously; and, as the boy moved closer, warned, “Don’t touch him now, though.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s not through with his tests, that’s why.” And as the boy followed the handsome, sweat-darkened horse she lagged behind and whispered to Bratislaw: “You sure you want the kid to see this?”

  “See what?” But she didn’t have to answer, because the horse was in its stall, and a man with a shiny metal can on the end of a long pole was chirruping and shuffling his feet through the straw. The boy stared in delight as the horse’s immense sexual organ extended itself. The man quickly slipped the can under the horse’s penis and caught some of the splash of urine.

  “Jesus,” said the boy. “Wonder what ma would say to that?”

  “I think we ought to get back to the clubhouse,” said Bratislaw.

  The boy grinned. “Can’t stand the competition?”

  But he followed obediently enough, and for the next hour or two was content to pick horses for his mother and make trips to the refreshment stands to score sodas, hot dogs, fish and chips. But he wasn’t good at picking winners. Ella, who was having a bad day, was getting more and more irritable. “What do you say, sport?” she asked her son. “Time to go home?”

  “Ma! You promised! You said I could go up on top of the dome—”

  “It’s too windy,” said his mother, “and I’ve got a bad feeling. We’re going.”

  “Too windy” the boy might have argued with; his mother’s bad feeling he did not. He simply sulked. On the drive back to the city Bratislaw tried cheering him up with promises—“Another time, maybe? Maybe tomorrow?”

  But that tomorrow never came.

  By the time Bratislaw finished parking the car the storm had broken. He heard Ella yelling before he got inside the door of the apartment, and when he looked a question at the housekeeper she only shook her head. The boy was in his room, hiding. Ella was screaming and throwing things in the living room. She paused only to scream at Bratislaw: “That son of a bitch! That Jew bastard crook!”

  Her eyes were enormous and the look she gave him was pure hatred. Bratislaw couldn’t help flinching. “Is something wrong?” he managed.

  “Wrong!” she shouted, and the next thing she threw was at him. He dodged a 1939 World’s Fair souvenir ashtray and heard it splinter the mirror on the back of the door. “The son of a bitch froze himself, that’s what’s wrong! Look what I find waiting for me!” She jerked her thumb at the TV console, beeping softly and flashing its red urgent-message light. “Read it for yourself! And stay here until I come back.”

  She disappeared into her office and slammed the door behind her; the faint murmur told Bratislaw that she was on the phone, and no doubt shouting, for the sound to come through those solid doors. He turned to the TV, which was set on one of the datafax channels, and read the news item:

  FEDERAL JUDGE UNDERGOES CRYONIC SUSPENSION

  Justice Horatio Margov was admitted to the Bronx General Suspension Facility at five P.M. this evening. A spokesman for the family issued a statement saying that the justice, who is sixty-one years old, had received a diagnosis of inoperable pancreatic cancer, and had elected to place himself
in cryonic suspension until such time as surgical procedures for his condition, which at present are believed to carry a hazard of more than eighty per cent mortality rate, can be sufficiently improved to permit a cure. Justice Margov, sometimes called “Harlem’s Hanging Judge,” achieved a reputation as a crusading fighter against political corruption.

  However, a source in the District Attorney’s office states that questions have been asked concerning Judge Margov’s role in the current investigation of labor racketeering. “If he had not been frozen he would have been asked some questions,” said the source, adding that the District Attorney’s office has moved to sequester all of the judge’s estate, including all documents. A full investigation is promised. Another spokesman for the District Attorney’s office, however, stated that the legally ambiguous position of a person in cryonic suspension will handicap further investigations.