Bad Stacks Story Collection Box Set (24 page)

Nettle thought idly that such a man as Bill, who had narrowly escaped a cruel death by exposure and malnutrition, would be more charitable toward his fellow men, but such was not the case.

Bill, much to Nettle’s unease, seemed to heartily enjoy his position of relative power over the poor, and stared down his soot blackened nose at all who entered, demanding from each their name, age, condition of destitution, and what kind of work they were good for, before searching them all with a rough, hard hand.

In one of his searches he found a ragged pouch of tobacco inside a man’s sock.  Bill proceeded to beat the man with a stick he evidently left by the door for just such a purpose, and probably would have gone on beating him indefinitely, Nettle figured, had he not intervened.

When Nettle tried to berate him for his violence, Bill only scoffed.  “Why, ‘e’s nothin’ but a worthless beggar, ‘e is,” he said, and, with all the sour disposition of a man who kicks the cat because he’s afraid to kick his wife, went to the door, where a wrecked shell of a man stood on the threshold waiting for admittance, and said, “Be gone, you.  Full up!”

“Please, sir,” the human wreck said.  “Please, I ain’t ‘ad food in me belly for five days.”

“Full up!” Bill said.

Nettle’s heart broke to see the pain in the man’s eyes, and before Bill could close the door, he was at Bill’s shoulder and said, “We can take this man in, I think.”

“But, sir,” Bill said, “there’s only room for twenty-five tonight.  We’re full up.”

“And that man,” Nettle said, pointing at the bleeding bag of bones Bill had beaten for the insolence to smoke cheap tobacco, “was to be number twenty-five.  Now, I believe, this man is twenty-five.”

Bill said nothing, but his eyes did.

“Thank ‘e, sir,” said the wreck, and walked inside.

Bill’s other job at the shelter, after the doors were locked and the homeless shuffled inside, was to monitor the bathing room.

Making the homeless take a bath seemed like a good idea to Nettle—that is, until he saw the process in motion.  The overnighters were all lined up, and one by one let down into a dark room with a single tub of warm water and a single threadbare towel hanging from a hook on the wall.  Each man used the same water and towel as the man before him, and by the time the man Nettle had forced Bill to let in got his turn, the water in that tub was a frightful stew.

But the human wreck didn’t notice.  He stripped off his rags and his appearance made Nettle gasp.  His body had no meat on it.  He was all ribs and distended belly, his back a mass of dried and fresh new blood where he’d been attacked by vermin.

He cleaned off several layers of dirt and blood and changed into a shirt and pants from the shelter’s wardrobe.  Then he followed the others to the dining hall for a meal of stale bread and skilly—a sort of oatmeal mixed with tepid water so unclean Nettle doubted a dog would drink it—and he would have received that meal had he not had the misfortune to pass Bill on his way inside.

“You!” Bill said, his eyes turning hard as flints with surprised anger, his tone like that of a man who’s just found the boy who made his daughter pregnant and then made a run for it.

The man stopped in his tracks.

“Look who we ‘ave ‘ere,” Bill said loudly, looking around at the crowd.

Slowly, every head in the place turned to look.

The man kept his eyes on the floor.

“I’ll be damned if it ain’t Barlow the Butcher.  Look ‘ere, we got Barlow the Butcher!”

This meant nothing to Nettle, but it clearly did to the peg house crowd, for in short order they became a riotous mob.  They fell on Barlow and began to beat on him with a savagery that would have made a tribe of cannibals blush.

Nettle waded in and pulled Barlow out of the flurry of fists.  Barlow, though, didn’t wait around to thank him.  As soon as he was clear of the mob, he made for the door and ran off into the night.

Nettle was left with a decision to make.  He was ringed by angry faces, some of them bleeding where they’d been hit by others trying to land blows on Barlow, and he had a feeling he knew what would happen if he stayed there, now that they had the taste of blood.  He wisely went for the door himself, stepping out into the street in time to see Barlow, or, rather, a crowd of homeless at the end of the street, separating for Barlow, as he rounded the corner onto Stepney Green.

Nettle ran after him, and managed to follow him for a good ways before he lost him in the maze of the East End’s soot-stained back alleys.  He became lost in short order, every cross street and alley meeting him with endless vistas of tumbledown misery and bricks.

Walking with his head on a swivel, trying to find something familiar, he eventually stumbled onto the Brown Hay Road, where he stopped in front of an enormous abandoned warehouse.  It was a blackened, eyeless hulk, not a single window down its entire length, and it made him feel strangely uneasy.  There were, Nettle had seen already, very few empty buildings in London’s East End.  Real estate, any real estate, was at a premium, as landlords could pack as many as eight families into a home no bigger than the small, one-story apartment he had shared in New York with his mother and his sister Anna.  One was more likely, he’d been told, to see a giraffe swimming down the Thames than to find an unoccupied building in the East End.

But the moldy warehouse in front of him was most certainly abandoned, and something about it made the skin crawl down his spine.  And then someone was there, staggering toward him from the other side of the street.  A patchwork of shadows played across the man’s face, but the little Nettle could see was ghastly.  The man’s joints had swollen, and his body had withered away to almost nothing.  His skin was black in places, almost mummified, like it had begun to rot, and it wasn’t until he got halfway across the street that Nettle could tell part of the man’s leg had been torn up as if by some sort of animal.

The man raised his hands and flexed his fingers in a weak grab at Nettle, moaning as he stumbled closer.  At first, Nettle thought it was just a moan, meaning nothing beyond the pain it obviously conveyed, but then he recognized the word inside the pain.

“Fooooood,” the man moaned.

Nettle turned on his heel, thinking robbery, and started to walk the other way.

“Fooooood,” the man groaned again.

“See here,” Nettle said, “I don’t have anything for you.”

He was very close to running then, and had already stepped up his pace, when a hansom cab suddenly lurched around the corner at a full sprint and mowed the man down.  The driver of the hansom never slowed, and a moment later, he was gone.

Nettle was frozen with shock.  What was left of the man after he’d been trampled by the horses and his body sliced open and dragged by the hansom’s wheels was in two gory pieces connected by a clotted smear of liquefied meat.

The man’s legs were still in the street, but his torso was near the curb.  Nettle staggered that way, hands over his mouth, and knelt down next to the bent-over-backwards mess that the hansom had made of the man.

He started to pray…and then the man opened his eyes.

Nettle fell backwards onto the wet cobblestones.  The man’s eyes were horrible, like staring into the void.

“Fooooood,” he groaned, and tried to claw his way toward Nettle, his fingers digging so hard into the edges of the cobblestones that the fingernails shattered and tore loose.

Nettle got up and ran and ran and ran.  He ran till he broke down, and then he cried.  He was still crying when, by chance, he stumbled back onto the Mile End Road.

The next morning, still badly shaken by his encounter, Nettle packed his bags and knelt by his bed to pray.  He had fully expected to leave that afternoon, but his prayers had taken him in another direction, and when he rose to his feet he had made the decision to stay, and half convinced himself that what he seen the night before couldn’t have happened.  He was upset, nothing more.

Nettle’s faith had never led him astray, and the next few days, and a chance encounter with the man the mob had chased out of the peg house on his horrible first night there, reinforced the wisdom of the decision he had made during prayer.

Nettle took to wandering up and down the Mile End Road, watching the people as they struggled for existence, and he noticed a curious little thing.  The homeless always seemed to keep one eye on the spittle-flecked sidewalks, and when they’d see a morsel, they’d snatch it up and eat it on the fly.  Most, it seemed, could pluck an orange peel or an apple core from the cobblestones without ever losing a step.

Nettle had been watching people go by late one afternoon, and Barlow had been coming the other way on the same sidewalk.  Barlow had stooped to pick up something nasty, and when he rose, his nose collided with Nettle’s chest, for Nettle was a good six inches the taller of the two.

“Oh, hello,” Nettle said, and had a devil of a time over the next few moments trying to assure the man that he had no intention of braining him to death.

They talked in the eaves of a coffee shop, and gradually the look of a rabbit trying to find an opening through a pack of hounds faded from Barlow’s eyes.  And then a strange thing happened.  Nettle, whose over stimulated humanitarian urges were in danger of melting down if he didn’t find some specific point, some single human face to put on all this misery he had been witnessing, bought a pint of beer for Barlow, who was desperately in need of some kind person to buy him a pint of beer.

It was the first pint of beer Nettle had ever bought, and it was the first full pint of beer Barlow had had in a very long time.  Nettle bought a second round, and by that afternoon, as the windows of the coffee shop sizzled with rain, he had come to a conclusion.  He was not going to be the salvation for all the world’s poor—indeed, there was no way he could be, and it was vain to think so—but he could be the door to
this
man’s salvation.  Nettle had a project now, something he could manage.

And so they sat there in the coffee shop, the rich, well-meaning American and the homeless, nearly starved Londoner, and the American talked about God and goodness and reward, and the Londoner drank his beer and nodded.

They met in the afternoons at the same coffee shop over the next week, and gradually Nettle began to realize that it wasn’t the man’s grotesque, almost troglodyte appearance that had sparked his philanthropy, but rather his cynicism.  The man cared little for his own life, and not at all for anyone else’s, and Nettle found it hard to believe that a creature who so hated life could actually go on living.

“Beer,” Barlow said.  “Beer’s what makes a man feel like a man.  You can take all the rest of it away, but you take away a man’s beer, and there ain’t no reason left for ‘im to go on bein’.”

Nettle squinted at his own almost untouched beer and thought about that as a philosophy of life, and it seemed tragic, empty.

“What about a family?” he asked.  “A home?  A wife and kids?”

Barlow snorted with laughter.  “I saw enough of that growin’ up,” he said.  “I saw what me Ma did for me old man.  That was enough.  Made ‘im mis’rable, she did, always a-bangin’ me brothers and sisters about, makin’ ‘is ‘ome a noisy racket.  ‘e no sooner walk through the door and she’d be a-yellin’ at ‘im, barkin’ at ‘im like a dog.  Take me word for it, mate, and don’t waste yer time on a wife ‘n kids.  Do nothin’ but take yer ‘ard earned money and keep you from drinkin’ a beer when it suits you.”

Nettle was stunned, bewildered.  Such a wasted life!  His mind raced for a response, for something worthwhile to say, and at last, he found it.  “William,” he said, “I want you to pray with me.  Will you do that?”