Time and Chance Page 2

  At the Lower East Side's Mary McCardle Shelter, each new gust puffed open the double steel and glass doors, causing the string of bells that hung from one of the pull bars to tinkle. Each time, Sarah Rainmaker looked up to see if someone new was coming in. And each time there was a newcomer, he or she was met by a blast of hot air. The shelter's furnace was on the fritz—it was either on or off, but the thermostat had broken and there was no controlling the temperature. It was too cold outside to leave it off, so the most arctic night of the year outside had become a steam bath inside.

  It would be fixed when there was money to fix it. No telling when that might be.

  The shelter, Sarah knew, had been named for Mary McCardle, a woman whose attempt to persuade the city's government to finance shelters for the poor and needy had been a dismal failure. Rather than giving up, though, Mary—a widowed mother who had fought her own way up from poverty through hard work and frugal living— had put on her one decent dress and gone knocking on the doors of business leaders and corporate fat cats, without appointments or introductions, admonishing each in turn to give to those who had nothing.

  Within a month, she'd built the shelter.

  This had been in 1930, the height of the Great Depression. The center had been in continuous use since then, even though Mrs. McCardle had died in 1949. It wasn't until after her death that her name had been added to the operation.

  Sarah considered Mary McCardle a hero. She was proud to help carry on the tradition, in whatever limited way her schedule allowed. She worked three nights a week, on a volunteer basis—there were only two paid staffers. Most nights, like this one, she dished up warm food for the homeless who wandered in off the streets, or who came regularly for their one daily square. To others, she served as a counselor, mostly for the young teens or the women trying to escape from abusive relationships.

  Tonight, the evening's chill seemed to be sending people inside in droves. The available beds were long since taken. They'd serve as many hot meals as they could, but some people would be sent back into the streets after they'd eaten, to look for some other place to escape the night.

  Sarah Rainmaker wished she could do more.

  She was a superhero, but sometimes she felt completely powerless.

  This was one of those times.

  Bobby Lane had taken to coming down to the shelter with Sarah once in a while. Helping people was cool—that's kind of what Gen13 had turned out to be about, once it stopped just being about running from the government's agents and having fun goofing on their new-found super powers. Plus, it was a chance to spend quality time with Sarah. Okay, not exactly the kind of quality time that involved lots of close physical contact, or anything. But Bobby knew that if he was going to get there with Sarah, the emotional and spiritual contact had to be in place first.

  And doing this stuff, feeding chow to old folks and the homeless and all, was way spiritual as far as she was concerned.

  And they got to ride down on the subway together from their hotel suite uptown.

  Plenty of face time.

  The joint was really busy tonight. Bobby had been hoping for a slow evening, maybe leaving early, talking Sarah into a movie on the way home. But instead, the door kept opening and people kept filing in, looking for food. Bobby was on kitchen duty, and it was apparent that the demand for dinner was going to outstrip the supply very soon.

  Unless he could help somehow.

  Bobby was cooking with another volunteer, Jose Arango. They had a kettle of soup going, but it had just been emptied and a fresh pot started. There were chicken legs over a grill, but again, a fresh supply had just come out of the freezer to replenish a batch that had run out. Vegetables boiled in a big cast iron pot, and rolls baked in one of the ovens.

  None of it was going to be ready in time. There were people out in the main hall waiting for their food already. By the time this food was cooked, there would be a new batch of folks, and the kitchen would get even more backed up. You could only cook as fast as you could cook, but on the other hand, there were a lot of mouths to feed, and Sarah had told Bobby that people would be looking for beds tonight. The sooner they got fed and got out, the better their chances would be.

  "Jose," Bobby said. "Go out front and see how the chicken's doing."

  "Man, they're already out," Jose said. "Sarah told you that."

  "I thought she said they were low," Bobby argued. "Just check, okay?"

  "I ain't got time to check that," Jose replied. "I'm tryin' to get this stuff cooked up."

  "I'll watch it," Bobby offered. "Just do it."

  Jose grumbled, wiped his hands on his apron, and pushed through the swinging, windowed door to the vault-ceilinged dining hall, where Sarah and other volunteers stood behind long folding tables, dishing out food from the candle-lit hot plates.

  As soon as he was gone, Bobby went to work.

  His Gen13 code name was Burnout, and his power was absolute command over heat. He could fly by creating a super-heated field around himself, causing the molecules within the field to become lighter than air. He could generate terribly destructive plasma bursts. But he could also more finely control the power, though.

  Which is what he did now.

  He placed his hands on the sides of the big iron soup kettle, and willed them to warm just enough to quickly cook the soup. That done, he held them over the chicken legs and created a small flame that rapidly roasted them to perfection. Then he opened the oven, and held his hands inside it, baking the rolls just right. A short blast from a fingertip got the vegetables boiling rapidly.

  The swinging doors flew open and Jose returned. "Like I said, man. They're out up there."

  "Figures," Bobby said with a shrug. He stroked his blond goatee, as if trying to figure out some great mystery. "Well, dish up some of this and I'll get some more going."

  "It's done already?" Jose asked, a note of incredulity in his voice.

  "Yeah."

  Jose rubbed his eyes. "I guess I need to get more sleep or something," he said. "I'm gettin' all confused around here."

  "Working too hard," Bobby agreed, ladling soup into chipped white china bowls. "Happens."

  Sarah served up the soup and the chicken legs and the boiled vegetables as quickly as it was brought out from the kitchen. On each plate she set a roll and a pat of butter on a small paper square. It was a reasonable meal, more healthy than most what these people would eat during the day, she knew.

  But each one who came up to her with his or her tray made some kind of comment about the temperature inside the building. It was hot, she knew. She had taken off her coat and sweater and was working in a tee-shirt and jeans, and she was sweating, especially the back of her neck underneath its blanket of straight, ink-black hair. Those coming in from the outside, sometimes bundled in all the clothes they owned, couldn't as easily peel away layers. It had to be ninety in the shelter now, and still climbing.

  Sarah wished, not for the first time, that she was back home on the reservation in Arizona. People were poor there too. But it was a different kind of poverty, it seemed to her. Sure, there were problems. The schools weren't great. Many of the men had given up hope. Alcoholism existed there, just as it did here in New York City.

  But most of the poor people back home were working poor. They had extended families whose homes they lived in. They might not have had jobs the way that city dwellers thought of them, but they farmed, or gathered fruit, or made jewelry or clothing or art objects.

  In New York City, the poor seemed to exist all day on the streets doing nothing except begging. It wasn't their fault, she knew. It was just the way of the city. There were too many people in the city, too much glass and steel and cement. There was no place that you could go and not see the work of man.

  She missed the sprawling desert, where you could walk for a day and never see a single man-made object. Where the temperature was determined by the sun and the season and the clouds and the wind.

  In the city, you ha
d to go in search of nature. At home, nature was everywhere. It came to you. And people, even poor ones, felt more at peace.

  "It's so hot," a woman said to Sarah as she set a bowl of soup onto the woman's tray. The woman had been in a couple of times before, but Sarah didn't know her name yet. She was in her mid-fifties, Sarah guessed, although sometimes the street aged them prematurely. She wore three coats, each buttoned over another, each a different size and style and color. From beneath them, dark pants, like a man's work pants, peeked out. Her shoes were worn and scraped, with a hole in one toe through which Sarah could see a filthy white sock.

  "Yes, I know," Sarah said. "I'm sorry. We'll turn the heat off in a bit, and let it cool down some."

  Which they'd been talking about doing for hours, but Jennifer, the paid manager on duty, was afraid that if they shut the furnace down the temperature would drop too quickly or climb too slowly, and those who came in from outside would find no relief from the cold.

  "Can't something be done now?" the woman pressed on. "It's very hot, you know."

  "I understand, ma'am," Sarah said. She was beginning to worry that this woman would turn into one of the occasional problem cases, people who made unreasonable demands of the volunteers, preying on the guilt they felt for having more than their clientele.

  But then, the woman took her tray to a table, and guilt of a different nature struck Sarah. The woman was uncomfortable, and was expressing it. That was all. Sarah had jumped to a conclusion about her—possibly because the oppressive heat was making even her a little cranky.

  And the fact was, something could be done about it. The solution just hadn't occurred to her before.

  Sarah's Gen-Active power was control over weather. She could sometimes affect the weather on a large scale, although that had turned into a problem in the past and she had resolved to be more cautious. But affecting it on a smaller level, she was good at.

  She had been so focused on the problem that she had forgotten to look for a solution. The whole story of homeless shelters, in a nutshell. The problem was that people had no jobs, no hope, no opportunity. The symptom was that they lived in the streets and went hungry. The shelter treated only the symptom.

  Much like Gen13, Sarah thought. We can fight super-villains all day long, but never attack the real problems, the greed and evil and fear that drive people to commit crimes.

  Maybe she couldn't do anything about that by herself. Maybe she shouldn't even try—wasn't it possible that the best place for her was right here at Mary McCardle, doing what she could on an individual, human basis?

  But for now, the problem she faced was one of temperature. And that was within her ability to do something about.

  When no one was looking her way, she wagged her hands in the air. Stirring up a breeze.

  The air in the room began to circulate more quickly. Sarah created a cold spot, twenty-five feet up near the high ceiling, and sent her breeze rushing past it before spreading throughout the shelter.

  Within five minutes, the temperature had dropped three degrees.

  She kept it going. Every now and then she let the breeze waft through the main room so powerfully that people could feel it. They'd just assume it was a gust coming in from outside, she figured.

  Within fifteen minutes, the temperature inside was a much more livable eighty. When it dropped to seventy-five, she drew back the wind, maintained it there.

  The level of conversation in the loud room increased, as people noticed the change in temperature. There were more smiles in evidence. People even began to compliment the cooking.

  Jennifer, the paid manager on duty, came to the serving table, a big smile on her broad face, eyes twinkling behind her thick glasses.

  "Maybe we don't need to get the furnace fixed after all," she said. "Seems to be working fine now."

  "I'd get it checked anyway," Sarah suggested. "Just in case. You never know with stuff like that."

  "I guess you're right, Sarah," Jennifer said. "But it sure feels better in here now."

  "That it does," Sarah agreed.

  Where is he?

  As the shelter filled up, Bobby found himself looking for a familiar face and not seeing it. He had begun having conversations with a man he knew only as "Mr. Joe." Names didn't mean much in a place like this, and many of the "clients," as they were called, were not interested in revealing theirs. They were leaving things behind— failure, tragedy, loss, wasted lives. Names only reinforced who they were, who they had been.

  Mr. Joe was one of the quiet ones, at first. A mumbled "thanks" here when you put dinner in front of him, maybe an "excuse me" there if you crossed paths in the narrow corridor that led to the rest rooms and then beyond them to the barracks-style sleeping area. But during slow times, he'd started talking to Bobby, hesitantly at first, just a few words, and then more and more as time went on.

  And, Bobby thought, he turned out to be a pretty interesting guy.

  He didn't talk about himself, so much. Like others here, his own recent history was not where he wanted to dwell. But he talked about places he'd been, things he'd seen—the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the temples at Angkor Wat, the parade of tall ships in Boston Harbor, sitting on the banks of the River Seine at sunrise, drinking strong French coffee with philosophers and writers. Being arrested in El Salvador and escaping in the dead of night with three nuns.

  Maybe his stories were true, and maybe not. That wasn't what mattered.

  Bobby figured he'd be around for sure on this cold night, and was surprised not to have seen him yet. Bobby's father, Jack Lynch, had been a kind of mentor for Gen13, but had decided that he was directing the group too closely and, with the move to New York, had taken kind of a back seat role. That left him time to do social things with Bobby once in a while, but meant that on a daily basis, Bobby saw much less of the man than he had before. Mr. Joe had, Bobby thought, been filling some of that role—telling Bobby the kinds of tales a father should tell a son, but that Bobby had grown up without hearing. He also seemed remarkably intuitive and insightful as far as Bobby was concerned—able to recognize Bobby's moods and know when he should talk, or listen, and just what to say when Bobby had a problem.

  Finally, when Jennifer passed through the kitchen, Bobby stopped her. "Have you seen Mr. Joe tonight, Jennifer?"

  She thought for a moment, shook her head. "No sign. Maybe he's spending time with his family."

  Bobby was stunned. "He has a family?"

  Jennifer leaned against a stainless steel countertop, crossed her arms. She seemed to know the lowdown on all the clients here, and never minded sharing their stories.

  "He's got a wife and two kids, a teenage girl and a younger boy. They live with relatives, somewhere way uptown."

  "Why doesn't he live with them?"

  "That's hard to say. Apparently he used to have a good job. They had a nice apartment, a car, a housekeeper, the whole bit. But he fell apart, somehow, lost the job, their home. When they hit the streets he felt useless, like he was a total failure. The impression I get now is that he feels like his family is better off without him, and until he gets back on his feet he's having very little contact with them."

  "That bites," Bobby observed. "Big time."

  "Totally," Jennifer agreed. "Personally, I disagree with him—when times are tough, that's when it's most important for families to stick together and support each other. But he's too embarrassed, or something, to be around them."

  "Then why would he be there tonight?"

  "I'm only guessing that he might be," Jennifer said. "Maybe it's cold enough to help him overcome his humiliation."

  "Hope you're right. Maybe if he spends some time with them he'll realize it's for the best. A father should be with his kids." Realizing, even as he said it, just how little of his life Bobby's father had actually spent with him.

  "If I see him come in," Jennifer said, "I'll let you know." She headed for the double doors to resume doing whatever it was she was paid for.

/>   "Thanks," Bobby told her retreating form. Not that I'll have any time tonight to talk to him, busy as it is. Anyway, his shift was over in another twenty minutes, he realized, and he had promised to go to a political rally with Sarah, something about global warming or dolphin-free tuna or the rights of political prisoners… he really couldn't remember which one it was tonight.

  But he was hoping that by the end of it, Sarah would be all charged up with no other outlet.

  "Dude!"

  The double doors swung open and a short, broad-shouldered, muscular Asian-American guy with straight brown hair and a huge smile entered the kitchen. Percival Edmund Chang, better known as Grunge.

  "Grunge! What are you doing here?"

  "Score of the century, Bobby," Grunge said. He held two stiff pieces of cardboard up in one hand. "Backstage passes, dude," he said. The pride was evident in his voice and the gleam in his eyes.

  "To what?"

  "Gargantuan Sweetbread is playing tonight at that little club on 29th. The Trench."

  "No way! That place is like the size of my closet!"

  "Way," Grunge said. "Totally unannounced and unscheduled. I got these through that guy I met who works at the radio station—did him a little favor with his landlord, and he made a couple of calls, got me the passes. This is the musical event of the year, dude. What time you get off?"

  "I'm off in fifteen minutes, Grunge," Bobby said, already feeling the energy. A band that big, in an intimate little club—and backstage, mingling with the band members and the women… the women.

  Sarah.

  "Wait," he said. "I can't."

  "What do you mean, 'can't?' Take that word out of your vocabulary, Bob-man. You must."

  "I sort of promised Sarah I'd go to this rally."

  "Dude, no matter what problem the world has tonight, it'll still be spinnin' tomorrow. But Gargantuan Sweetbread is gonna be playin' stadiums on their next tour. You'll never have a chance like this again."