Gladiator-At-Law

Chapter Thirteen

"Getting on for noon," Shep said. "Let's find a restaurant."

"A restaurant?" Norvie Bligh giggled. He followed Shep down the littered, filthy street, wondering. In a week he had thought he had learned something about Belly Rave, under Shep's tutelage. But he had seen no neon-guttering, glass-fronted havens.

What Shep led him to was just another Belly Rave house. A wheezing old crone crept around the living room. There was a fire going in the fireplace, and water bubbling in a blackened kettle. Restaurant?

Shep took a couple of rations from his pocket. He never seemed to be without a dozen or so. They were easy enough to get from the R.C.; you could claim you had a dozen dependents and he would apathetically list you for 273 rations a week. If you could lift them, they were yours. There was plenty of food.

And plenty of circuses.

Shep split the two-by-three-by-six plastic box with his thumbnail and Norvell clumsily followed suit. Things tumbled out. Shep tossed one of the "things"—an unappetizing little block of what looked like plastic-wrapped wood—to the crone.

She caught it and gobbled it down with desperate hunger, choking on crumbs.

"Business not so good?" Shep asked casually. In his voice there was an undertone of contempt.

She glared at him wordlessly. She bailed water out of the kettle with a rusted can and slopped it into his plastic ration box. Shep popped open a little envelope and sprinkled a dark powder on the water.

Coffee! The magic smell made Norvell suddenly ravenous. He handed the crone a similar block from his own ration, got his water, made his coffee, and greedily explored the other things that had come out of the box.

Biscuits. A tin of meat-paste. A chewy block of compressed vegetables. Candy. Cigarettes. The combination was one he hadn't encountered before; the meat-paste was highly spiced and salty, but good.

Shep watched as he gobbled. Shep sighed, at last, "When you've eaten each menu ten thousand times—well, I won't discourage you."

Outside, Norvell asked shyly what in the world the old woman thought she was doing for a living.

"It's simple," said Shep. "She gets her rations and trades them for firewood. She uses the wood to heat water—for coffee, or bouillon, or tea, or whatever. She trades the water for rations. She keeps hoping that some day she'll come out ahead on the deal. She never has."

"But why?"

Shep didn't speak for a long minute as they sauntered along in the afternoon sun. At last he said, "No offense. But it's easy to see you're a come-lately, Bligh- Why does she do it? Because it makes her feel like a human being."

"But—"

"But hell. It makes her feel as though she were master of her fate, captain of her soul. It's hard to starve to death in Belly Rave, but in a bad week she comes close to it. She thinks she's a Rockefeller or a Weeks in miniature. Risking her capital in the hope, of gain. Well, she is! What if she always loses? She's doing something—not just sitting and waiting for the ration day to roll around again. You've heard of hell?"

Norvell nodded. Like practically everybody else he was a member of the Reformed Rationalist Church of the Inchoate Principle, but hell had been mentioned in sermons now and then.

"Well, if a man who said that hell is a perpetual holiday was right, then this is it. Belly Rave, mister. Belly Rave."

Norvell nodded again. It made sense; he could see how it would make irresistible, unarguable sense, after the ten-thousandth sampling of each menu. The crone would try—anything. Being a crone; being an old woman with no talents and no hopes. Those who could do anything, anything at all, would try anything. Anything at all.

It gave him a clue to the enigma named Shep. He said comprehendingly, "So she has her restaurant, and you have your art, and—"

The giant turned on him, picked him up by the lapels and shook him like a kitten.

"You little louse," Shep growled shakily between the broken teeth. "You fool! What do you know? Listen to me, little louse! If you ever say, or hint, or think that I'm just piddling around to kill the time, I'll snap you in two!" He slammed Norvell down on the pavement so hard his arches ached, he stood glaring at Norvell, arms akimbo.

Strangely, Norvell was not frightened. In a clear, intuitive flash he realized that he had said the unspeakable, that the offense was terribly his.

He managed to say, very sincerely, "I'm sorry, Shep."

His knees were shaking and his heart was pounding, but it was only adrenalin. With an unclouded mind he knew what torment had driven this placid hulk to rage: Incessant, relentless, nagging self-doubt. Where leisure is compulsory, how do you tell the burning drive to create from its sterile twin, named "puttering?" You can't. Posterity can; but only posterity. And you won't be there to know. And the self-doubt must remain forever unresolved, forever choked down and forever rising again.

And when, unexpectedly, it leaps forth it burns like acid.

Norvell told the big man steadily, "I won't say that again. I won't even think it. Not because you scared me, but because I know it isn't true." He hesitated. "I—I used to think I was a kind of artist myself. I know what you go through."

Shep grumbled, "Bligh, you're just beginning to find out what you go through—but I'm sorry I blew my top."

"Forget it." They walked on.

Shep said at last, "Here's where we get some more supplies." The place was one of the inevitable picture-window, fieldstone-chimney ruins, but with a fenced-in yard. The gate had a lock on it. Shep kicked the gate down, tearing out the hinges and the staples of the hasp.

Norvell said, "Hey!"

"We do this my way. Hey, Stearns!"

Stearns was a grim, gray man. He threaded his way to them around stacks of plastic fittings, guttering, and miscellaneous. "Hello, Shep," he said flatly. "What do you want?"

Shep said, "I don't have my notebook with me, but I guess I'll remember it all. You hijacked repair materials that a couple of friends of mine got through legitimate black-market channels. I want them back. With interest."

"Still on the protection kick, Shep?" the man asked. His voice was ugly. "If you had any sense you'd come in with me."

"I don't work for anybody, Stearns. I do favors for a few friends, they do favors for me. Trot out your team, Titan of Industry."

Shep, so lightning-fast to resent the slur himself, was insensitive enough to use it on others. With the same results.

Stearns's face went pasty with rage and Norvell knew what was coming next—unless he moved fast. "Stearns!" he yelled, and used the moment's delay to draw the pistol that Virginia had ordered him to carry. Stearns's hand stopped at his lapel and slowly, unwillingly, dropped to his side.

Shep gave Norvell a quick, approving glance. "Trot out your team, Stearns," he ordered.

Stearns didn't look away from the gun in Norvell's hand. "Chris! Willie!" he yelled. "Get the truck."

The truck was a two-wheeler stake job with one starved-looking teen-ager pulling between poles and another pushing against a canvas breast-band. Walking Stearns before him, Shep ordered him to pick up this or that article of building material and put it on the track. He filled the truck, topped the load with a rusty pick and shovel from a tool shed, and told Chris and Willie, "Roll it, kids. It won't be far."

Norvell didn't pocket his gun until they had put three blocks between themselves and Stearns's final malevolent glare.

There were two stops before they headed for Norvell's home. At each of them a part of the supplies were unloaded, to the tearful thanks of sober-looking citizens who had thought them gone forever, and with them the months of accumulation, gambling, and wangling that had earned them in the first place.

Norvell, eyeing the heaving, panting teen-agers, suggested uneasily, "Let's give them a hand with the truck."

But Shep shook his head. "We might get jumped. Our job is convoying."

There was no trouble. The kids rolled the cart to the door of Norvell's house and unloaded the firewood and building materials, stacking them neatly on the shredded broadloom that covered the floor of the sunken living room.

Virginia cast an appraising eye over the neat heaps, weighing, planning. "No tar paper, linoleum, anything like that?"

Shep guffawed. "No diamonds, either," he told her. "You think your roof is the only one that leaks? You're lucky— you got two finished floors. Let the top one get soaked. You'll be all right down here."

"Cack," she said. Norvell winced. "If you can't get tar paper, see if you can find something else to make shingles out of. Sheet tin will do."

"So will the roof off a G.M.L," Shep said sourly, but he made a note. He tossed a couple of rations to the waiting kids, who took them and pushed their empty truck away. He said, "Anything else?"

Virginia, suddenly a hostess, said, "Oh, I suppose not. Care for a drink?"

Norvell, for politeness' sake, took a sip of the bottle Virginia produced—"Ration-jack," she called it; got by trading firewood with the evil-eyed octogenarian in the house next door. He didn't like it. The ration-jack tasted like the chewy fruit bars he had enjoyed until then, when he found them in his ration pack; but the taste was overlaid with the bite of forty-proof alcohol. Beer was what he really liked. They didn't seem to have beer in Belly Rave.

Shep and Virginia were talking; Norvell let the conversation drift past him. He sat back, bone-weary. Physical weariness was a new thing to Norvie Bligh. He had never had it as a child, never had it at General Recreations.

Why was it that doing nothing involved physical labor, and doing actual creative, productive work—running a Field Day, for instance—involved only the work of the mind? Norvie admitted it to himself: Already he was taking on the coloration of Belly Rave. Like its other discouraged, hopeless inhabitants, he was living for the day and ignoring the morrow. Rations and a place to sleep. Perhaps it would not be long, he told himself wonderingly, before he would be one of the simians queueing up at Monmouth Stadium.

Unless he found something to do. But what was there to do? Work on the house? The essentials were done; the bars were up, the trash was carted out into the street, where by and by it would slump into a featureless heap like all the other middens along the road. The less urgent things to do couldn't be done. You couldn't fix the lesser roof leaks—no shingles. You couldn't fix the stairs—no materials; no tools. And no skill.

He said excitedly, oblivious of the fact that he was interrupting, "Virginia! How about starting a garden? A couple of fruit trees—orange, maybe. A few rows of—"

Virginia laughed and laughed, almost hysterically. Even Shep chuckled. Virginia said, "Orange trees don't grow around here, my dear husband. Nothing else does, either. You start digging out there and first you go through two feet of garbage and trash, then maybe six inches of cinder and fill. Then you hit the real pay-dirt. Sand."

Norvell sighed. "There must be something to do."

Shep offered, "You could paint your dump, if you're feeling ambitious. I know where there's some house paint."

Norvell sat up, interested. He accepted the bottle of ration-jack and took a small swallow. "Paint? Why not? No reason why we can't keep the place looking decent, is there?"

Shep shrugged. "Depends. If you want to start some kind of a business, paint's a good advertisement. If you want to just drift, maybe you don't want to advertise. You make yourself too conspicuous, people get ideas."

Norvell said, dampened, "You mean robbers?"

Virginia reached for the bottle of ration-jack. "Cack," she said dispassionately, taking a long swallow. "We aren't painting."

There was a long pause. In the G.M.L. bubble-house, Norvell reminded himself, Virginia had never let it be in doubt who was boss, but she had seldom demonstrated her power in front of outsiders.

But they weren't in the bubble-house any more.

I want Arnie, Norvell cried to himself, suddenly miserable. It isn't working out right at all, not the way he said it would. He said it would be a chance to express myself, to make something of my marriage, to be on my own. And it's not that at all!

He reclaimed the bottle of ration-jack. It tasted by now quite disgusting; he fleetingly thought that he would never relish those fruit bars again; but he took a long pull.

Shep was saying, "—didn't do so badly today. Stearns gave me a little trouble, and if Norvie hadn't held a gun on him I might not have got the stuff so easy."

Virginia looked at her husband appraisingly. But all she said to Norvie was, "You better keep an eye on that gun. Alexandra tried to sneak out with my kitchen knife today."

"Eh?" said Norvie, jolted.

"That's right. Put on quite a scene," her mother said, almost admiringly. "She's getting in with the Goering Grenadiers and it seems they pack knives and guns. They look down on the Wabbits and their busted bottles."

Norvie took another pull at the ration-jack. He said vaguely, "Does she have to do that?"

Shep said grimly, "If she wants to stay alive she does. Get it straight, Norvie, will you? This is Belly Rave. Not a finishing school. It's a permanent Field Day, only without rules."

Now there was something he knew something about, Norvell thought, brightening. "You ever go in for a Field Day?" he asked eagerly.

"Nope. Just the weeklies."

"Oh, you ought to, Shep. That's where the real money is. And it's not very dangerous, if you play it smart. Take spear-carrying in Spillane's Inferno, for instance. Safe as houses.

And, from the artistic side, let me tell you from experience that—"

"Cack on spear-carrying, Bligh," Shep said, with a wire edge in his voice. "I don't do that any more. I've been there, sticking the poor slobs who fall off the high wire before they reach the blonde. I've been on the wire myself, too. Once." He reached for the ration-jack, his face blank. "She missed me with all eight shots. I fractured her femur with my first. And then I dropped the gun." He took a huge drink. "They booed me. I didn't get the killer's bonus. I didn't get the midriff bonus or the navel superbonus. I didn't want them. All I wanted was some brushes, some canvas, some graphite sticks and some colors. I got them, Bligh, and I found out I couldn't use them. For six god-damned months. Then for six months more I couldn't paint anything except her face when the slug hit her thigh and she fell off the perch."

Norvell said, "Oh." He contemplated the ration-jack bottle with distaste. He got to his feet, weaving slightly. "I—I think I want some air," he said. "Excuse me, folks."

"Certainly," said Virginia, not even looking at him. As Norvell went out the door he heard her ask Shep, "This blonde you shot—was she pretty?"