Authors: David Seltzer
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plant that had somehow managed, against all odds, to crack through the asphalt directly in the middle of the street and survive the traffic. She would pause there and give it an encouraging word or two, leading passers-by to believe she was dafiy. She was not daffy. She was Maggie. And Rob loved her now, as then, more than anyone he had ever known.
But the intimacy they experienced during their years in New York was gone. The move to Washington had been like stepping out of a field of flowers into a raging river that swept them apart. Maggie had become first cellist with the Washington Symphony, occupied with rehearsals by day and performances by night; Rob was swallowed up in the never-ending battle that he now seemed to be losing. In recent months, he was often asleep when Maggie came home from her concerts, and gone before she awakened. No longer did they spend time drinking wine and talking about their feelings; no longer were there the long nights and late mornings when they dismissed the problems of the world and made love. Their contact was fragmented and shallow, their conversation had become practical, their lovemaking perfunctory and infrequent. It was disturbing to both, but neither spoke of it. It was a cycle they couldn’t seem to break.
Maggie was putting in extra hours now, rehearsing for the opening of subscription season; Rob was beleaguered by a heavier-than-usual flood of emergency calls. For the last three days they had communicated mostly by telephone, and through notes left on bed and refrigerator. The message was simple, somehow sad. The note always said, “I love you.”
As Rob sat now in the passenger seat of a speeding ambulance, responding to an emergency call from the tenements, he forced his thoughts away from Maggie. The distressing distance between them was something he felt helpless to control. He turned his mind back to the problems of urban decay, and came up with a thesis that somehow consoled him. Even though
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the tenements were being squeezed by the influx of nonmarried working people, perhaps the collapse of the institution of marriage would have one positive effect. With fewer marriages there would be fewer children. Fewer innocent victims caught in the unstoppable whirlpool.
But the thought of children brought him back to Maggie. It was the most difficult subject between them; the mere mention of it made them see each other as adversaries. Maggie was thirty years old and becoming anxious. Rob had seen enough starving infants to realize that overpopulation was the earth’s most urgent problem; he believed it was unfair to bring a child into such a difficult world.
He closed his eyes now, trying to find some peace. The ambulance slowed; the driver beside him sighed with frustration.
“I should’ve taken A Street.”
Rob followed the driver’s gaze up Pennsylvania Avenue, where a demonstration in front of the White House was blocking traffic.
“Back up.”
But it was too late. They were hemmed in.
“Turn on the siren,” Rob ordered. “Push right through.”
As they inched forward, Rob gazed at the demonstrators. They were American Indians, a hundred or so of them, their faces made up with garish war paint, some carrying bows and arrows, their voices raised in shrill, murderous cries. Seeking any target as an outlet for their anger, a group of them charged the ambulance, banging on its hood. One young militant danced around it with a spear in his hand.
“Jesus Christ,” muttered the ambulance driver.
Rob kept his eyes forward. He knew the syndrome. The rage born of helplessness. He’d seen it in the tenements, too. Any white man, no matter what his motives, represented the Establishment. It was always those who came to help who bore the full brunt of anger. Firemen were shot at by snipers, social workers
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were threatened with their lives. The good guys had the same skin color as the bad guys, and the bad guys were beyond reach.
“What the hell are they trying to prove?” asked the driver.
Rob didn’t answer. He suddenly remembered he’d promised Victor Shusette that he would attend the hearing on Indian Affairs. He checked his watch. It was too late. He wouldn’t make it back in time. An emergency call from the tenements usually meant that a life was hanging in the balance. Now, with the traffic jam, he didn’t know if he’d make it there in time either.
“I showed it to the man, he say it was chicken pox!”
The black woman who shouted at Rob was enraged, and rightly so. Her six-month-old infant, whom Rob was examining in its crib, was covered with festering rat bites. Crowded around them hi the one-room tenement dwelling were the woman’s five other children, no more than a year apart in age, and a mob of people from the street, drawn by the sound of the ambulance. The room was filled to capacity; the heat was unbearable.
“I say to him, there’s rats in here!” the woman cried out, with tears in her eyes. “He say to me, this is chicken pox. I say to him, there ain’t no chickens in here, there’s rats in here! And them rats bit my baby!”
Rob eased the stethoscope from his ears and felt the infant’s pulse.
“You know what he say to me?” the black woman shouted. “He say the rats got to have room to live, too!” She burst into sobs, her children clinging to her. “That’s what that bastard landlord said to me! The rats got to have room to live, too!”
Rob looked for the two ambulance attendants, their white faces barely visible at the back of the
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crowded room. He gestured to them and they began pushing through.
“What you gonna do?” the woman demanded.
“I’m going to put your baby in a hospital.”
“Then what?”
“He’ll get well.”
“And then he’ll come back here and get bitten up again!”
“Not if I can help it.”
“You can’t help shit!” the woman sneered.
Rob stood firm and took it. She pushed her face close to his.
“You been here before,” she snarled. “You said that before.”
“No,” Rob answered, “I’ve never been here before.”
“Last winter. Upstairs. That lady who died of pneumonia when they turned the heat off. You took a dead body outa here and said we’d have the heat turned back on.”
Rob remembered. “The heat was turned on,” he said quietly.
“For one week! Then it was turned off!”
Her angry eyes locked into his, and Rob’s guts tightened.
“You gonna take my baby away and fatten him up so we can serve him to the rats again?”
“Where do I find your landlord?”
“That’s one goddamn good question!”
“Do you know where he lives?”
“Sure. He lives in Virginia. He lives with you rich rats up there!”
“I’m trying to help you-”
“Bullshit! Bullshit! You makin’ a livin’ here, is all! You don’t care what happens here!”
The room went silent and she buried her face in her hands. Rob touched her shoulder and she angrily pulled away. “Go on, take him!” she cried. “Get him adopted or somethin’! I don’t want him to have to come back here!”
“Will you come with me to court?” Rob asked.
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“No!”
“I can prosecute your landlord if you’ll come and complain.”
“He’ll throw us all out!”
The woman was right. She knew from the experiences of others that the visibility of any individual here was dangerous. That was why, when their frustration reached a breaking point, it was expressed by mobs.
“Get outa here!” she screamed at Rob. “And take my poor, sick baby with you!”
Rob nodded in defeat and signaled the ambulance attendants to head for the door. He followed them but paused, gazing back at the weeping woman surrounded by her children.
“She don’t mean what she says,” a man said from the crowd. “It ain’t your fault that you can’t help us.”
Rob felt a sudden swelling in his throat. He turned and left the room.
Outside the tenement, the streets were filled with bodies stripped to the waist in the unseasonably warm weather. As Rob pushed through them toward the ambulance, he knew that if it got too warm too fast, it would be chaos here by summer. The shower of bricks and bottles that rained down on government vehicles came in direct proportion to the duration of summer heat. By all indications, it would be a deluge by July.
Taking his seat in the back of the ambulance, he paused to wipe his forehead, then turned his attention to the baby. Its eyes were riveted upward; it had suddenly ceased to move. The ambulance siren began to wail and Rob lunged for his bag, pulling out a syringe with trembling hands. Then he stopped, his face white with fear, and lowered his ear to the infant’s unmoving chest. He listened for a moment; then, suddenly, unexpectedly, Rob began to cry. The baby began to cry, too. It was alive. And Robert Vern realized how close he was to cracking.
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2
“The situation in our forest, Mr. Senator, can be likened in the following way …”
In the Senate Subcommittee Hearing room, five Senators sat behind a long table, illuminated in an island of light, listening to the words of a young American Indian who testified with eloquence and passion. He was there to protest the theft of his tribal land, a three-hundred-square-mile wilderness area that was about to be leveled by the lumber industry.
“If I came to your home, you would likely welcome me. If I needed food and shelter from you, it would likely be given. Indeed, if I demanded my own room within your house, and if you had such a room, you might be kind enough to give it to me.”
The Indian paused, his voice becoming tense.
“But if I claimed that your house and everything in it belonged to me, and I ordered you out, you would no doubt become angry! And that is exactly what is happening to the original people of this land!”
A smattering of applause rose from isolated spots in the darkened viewers section, quieted by the sound of a gavel. Victor Shusette strained to see his watch. It was plain that Robert Vern was not going to be here. Shusette would have rather not been here either. At the age of fifty-six he felt too old and tired to face the pressure of the position that his Agency was being placed in. The Environmental Protection Agency was supposed to be nonpolitical. But it was being forced into a hotbed of politics.
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“I can appreciate your feelings, Mr. Hawks-” a Senator said.
“Can you appreciate the facts, Mr. Senator?”
“That’s what I want to deal in. I want to deal in the facts …”
“Then let us deal in these facts. The purchase of all Indian land in the Northeast Territories was accomplished under the provisions of Treaty Nine …”
The Senator raised his voice. “Will you let me finish, please-?”
“And Treaty Nine was never ratified by Congress!”
“Mr. Hawks-”
“There has never been another treaty in the history of this country that has been implemented without the full approval of Congress. This is your constitution I’m talking about! These are your laws I’m talking about! This is your so-called justice I’m talking about. And I’m asking you a question!”
The Senator had begun to bang his gavel.
“I’m asking you a question! Would this have been done to people whose skin is white?”
Another burst of applause came from the darkened auditorium. The gavel continued banging until there was silence.
“Are you finished, Mr. Hawks?”
“I’m finished with this speech, if that’s what you mean.”
Laughter rang out; the Indian was smiling. He knew just how to leaven the proceedings when it was needed, knew just when to make his attacks and when to retreat. A few of the Senators were smiling, too. They knew they were being manipulated by a master in the craft of verbal combat.
John Hawks was not an easy man to reckon with. He was articulate and poised, and he had righteousness of his side. No one knew exactly where he had come from; his rise in the ranks of militant spokesmen had been meteoric. Three weeks ago no one had heard of him. Today he was the chosen representative of the group calling themselves O.P. It stood for
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Original People. A hastily formed amalgam of Masaquoddy, Ashinabeg, Yurok, Wampanoag, and Cree, tiny tribes along the Maine-Canadian border who were trying to protect their land from a company called the Pitney Paper Mill.
“What I was about to say, Mr. Hawks,” the Senator continued, “is that although I can appreciate your feelings, the blockade you’ve constructed in your forest is against the law.”
“The law will not bring justice,” Hawks declared.
“The blockade will lead to confrontation.”
“Abstinence from confrontation will not bring justice.”
“You’re aware that the Supreme Court has issued a restraining order against this blockade?”
“Which Supreme Court is that, Mr. Senator?”
The Senator looked at him warily. “The Supreme Court of the United States.”
John Hawks sat back and smiled. “That’s not a very high supreme court, Mr. Senator. My supreme court is much higher.”
Whistles and cheers resounded in the darkness; Victor Shusette had heard enough.
Leaving the Senate chambers, he walked out onto the front steps of the old Senate Building and squinted into the sun. The branches of the cherry trees were turning white and their fragrance wafted through the air, but it did not bring him the pleasure that it had in the past. This spring he was facing a problem. After a lifetime of building the Environmental Protection Agency into a respected force, he was now watching it being suddenly placed in jeopardy. In the land dispute between the lumber company and the Indians, the Agency was being used as a pawn. The Pitney Lumber Company was planning to exercise its right to harvest the timber in the Manatee Forest; the Indians were standing in their way. The lumber company had the money with which to win the legal war, but the Indians had gained national sympathy. The result was that the Supreme Court was unwilling
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to make a decision. They had turned to Shusette to provide them with an Environmental Protection report as a means of breaking the deadlock.