Prophecy Read Free

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