The Running Man

MINUS 090 AND COUNTING

The group Richards had come in with was now reduced to four. The new waiting room was much smaller, and the whole group had been reduced roughly by the same figure of sixty percent. The last of the Y’s and Z’s straggled in at four-thirty. At four, an orderly had circulated with a tray of tasteless sandwiches. Richards got two of them and sat munching, listening to a pal named Rettenmund as he regaled Richards and a few others with a seemingly inexhaustible fund of dirty stories.

When the whole group was together, they were shunted into an elevator and lifted to the fifth floor. Their quarters were made up of a large common room, a communal lavatory, and the inevitable sleep-factory with its rows of cots. They were informed that a cafeteria down the hall would serve a hot meal at seven o’clock.

Richards sat still for a few minutes, then got up and walked over to the cop stationed by the door they had come in through. “Is there a telephone, pal?” He didn’t expect they would be allowed to phone out, but the cop merely jerked his thumb toward the hall.

Richards pushed the door open a crack and peered out. Sure enough, there it was. Pay phone.

He looked at the cop again. “Listen, if you loan me fifty cents for the phone, I’ll-”

“Screw off, Jack.”

Richards held his temper. “I want to call my wife. Our kid is sick. Put yourself in my place, for Christ’s sake.”

The cop laughed: a short, chopping, ugly sound. “You types are all the same. A story for every day of the year. Technicolor and 3-D on Christmas and Mother’s Day.”

“You bastard,” Richards said, and something in his eyes, the stance of his shoulders suddenly made the cop shift his gaze to the wall. “Aren’t you married yourself? Didn’t you ever find yourself strapped and have to borrow, even if it tasted like shit in your mouth?”

The cop suddenly jammed a hand into his jumper pocket and came up with a fistful of plastic coins. He thrust two New Quarters at Richards, stuffed the rest of the money back in his pocket, and grabbed a handful of Richards’s tunic. “If you send anybody else over here because Charlie Grady is a soft touch, I’ll beat your sonofabitching brains out, maggot.”

“Thank you,” Richards said steadily. “For the loan.”

Charlie Grady laughed and let him go. Richards went out into the hall, picked up the phone, and dropped his money into the horn. It banged hollowly and for a moment nothing happened-oh, Jesus, all for nothing-but then the dial tone came. He punched the number of the fifth floor hall phone slowly, hoping the Jenner bitch down the hall wouldn’t answer. She’d just as soon yell wrong number when she recognized his voice and he would lose his money.

It rang six times, and then an unfamiliar voice said: “Hello?”

“I want to talk to Sheila Richards in SC.”

“I think she went out,” the voice said. It grew insinuating. “She walks up and down the block, you know. They got a sick kid. The man there is shiftless.”

“Just knock on the door,” he said, cotton mouthed.

“Hold on.”

The phone on the other end crashed against the wall as the unfamiliar voice let it dangle. Far away, dim, as if in a dream, he heard the unfamiliar voice knocking and yelling: “Phone! Phone for ya, Missus Richards!”

Half a minute later the unfamiliar voice was back on the line. “She ain’t there. I can hear the kid yellin, but she ain’t there. Like I say, she keeps an eye out when the fleet’s in.” The voice giggled.

Richards wished he could teleport himself through the phone line and pop out on the other end, like an evil genie from a black bottle, and choke the unfamiliar voice until his eyeballs popped out and rolled on the floor.

“Take a message,” he said. “Write it on the wall if you have to.”

“Ain’t got no pencil. I’m hangin up. G’bye.”

“Wait!” Richards yelled, panic in his voice.

“I’m… just a second.” Grudgingly the voice said, “She comin up the stairs now.”

Richards collapsed sweatily against the wall. A moment later Sheila’s voice was in his ear, quizzical, wary, a little frightened: “Hello?”

“Sheila.” He closed his eyes, letting the wall support him.

“Ben. Ben, is that you? Are you all right?”

“Yeah. Fine. Cathy. Is she-”

“The same. The fever isn’t so bad but she sounds so croupy. Ben, I think there’s water in her lungs. What if she has pneumonia?”

“It’ll be all right. It’ll be all right.”

“I-” She paused, a long pause. “I hate to leave her, but I had to. Ben, I turned two tricks this morning. I’m sorry. But I got her some medicine at the drug. Some good medicine.” Her voice had taken on a zealous, evangelical lilt.

“That stuff is shit,” he said. “Listen: No more, Sheila. Please. I think I’m in hems. Really. They can’t cut many more guys because there’s too many shows. There’s got to be enough cannon fodder to go around. And they give advances, I think. Mrs. Upshaw-”

“She looked awful in black,” Sheila broke in tonelessly.

“Never mind that. You stay with Cathy, Sheila. No more tricks.”

“All right. I won’t go out again.” But he didn’t believe her voice. Fingers crossed, Sheila? “I love you, Ben.”

“And I lo-”

“Three minutes are up,” the operator broke in. “If you wish to continue, please deposit one New Quarter or three old quarters.”

“Wait a second!” Richards yelled. “Get off the goddam line, bitch. You-”

The empty hum of a broken connection.

He threw the receiver. It flew the length of its silver cord, then rebounded, striking the wall and then penduluming slowly back and forth like some strange snake that had bitten once and then died.

Somebody has to pay, Richards thought numbly as he walked back. Somebody has to.