Dear Old Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

ambulances unload—what the hell went on up here, anyway? It was like one of those war movies he used to like to go to see before the old Majestic Theater closed—and rested his sign down against the side of the building. The sign made only peripheral sense to him. He knew something about the Nazis and the death camps. He’d learned a little about them in school, and he’d seen dozens of movies in which the Nazis were the enemy. He even knew that the Nazis had tried “to kill all the Jews,” as he put it to himself, and that that attempt was what was called “the Holocaust.” He had learned that much at pro-life meetings, where the connection between abortion and the Holocaust was made at least twice in any important speech. Robbie tried not to think too hard about it, because it got him confused. For one thing, he didn’t quite believe that the Nazis really had tried to kill all the Jews. That was like saying you were going to walk to the moon. Robbie knew it wasn’t possible. Maybe they were only trying to kill as many Jews as they could get their hands on. Maybe it had all had something to do with sex. In Robbie’s experience, practically everything had something to do with sex. You saw that in the movies, and on television, too, these days, now that television had gotten more honest and more decadent. Robbie didn’t know. The only thing he was absolutely sure of was that he was doing the right thing to be here with this sign.
    He had his light spring jacket tied around his waist by the arms. He untied it and put it on, looking up as yet another ambulance arrived from uptown and wound its siren down to a blipping moan. The ambulance’s back doors shot open and four men in white jumped down to the pavement. Robbie could see four stretchers crammed into the space that had been meant only for two. He reached into his pocket and found his pack of cigarettes, the only pack of cigarettes he would be able to afford this week. It was half empty already. He took out a cigarette and lit up against the wind. He smoked very high tar and nicotine cigarettes these days. All cigarettes cost the same, whether they were high tar and nicotine or not. When he could only afford a pack a week, he wanted to get as much kick for his dollar as he could.
    One of the white-coated men from one of the earlier ambulances—they were all parked out there together; it looked like an ambulance parking lot—came out of the emergency room and got out a cigarette of his own. He looked at Robbie and Robbie’s sign and seemed to shrug. Robbie could feel himself blush.
    The ambulance man was young and very Brooklyn, as Robbie saw it. He was dark and hip and cool and smart and all the other things Robbie was always imagining himself to be, except that as the years went on Robbie no longer believed he was ever going to achieve any of those things. The ambulance man was looking at Robbie’s sign again and frowning.
    “I don’t get it,” he said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    This was a new one. Robbie almost never ran into people who didn’t understand what his sign was supposed to be getting at.
    “It’s about abortion,” he said. “They do abortions in that place.”
    “In the emergency room?”
    “You go through the emergency-room door to get to the family-planning clinic. I used to picket right in front of the family-planning clinic, but they threw me out. It’s private property.”
    “Are you from those clinic-closer people? Operation Rescue?”
    “Oh, no.” Robbie blushed again. He had tried Operation Rescue once, but he hadn’t liked it. It was too military for him, too organized and controlled. All the people he met always seemed to be talking right over his head. It was just like school. “I come up here on my own,” he told the ambulance man. “I’ve been coming for months. Ever since I got laid off.”
    “From what?”
    “Maintenance. I was a janitor. At the Trade Center. Then that bomb went off down there,