“That lousy kike called me a thief!” Hanlin bellowed. He fought to get away from Gabe, but he couldn’t twist enough strength out of his old lemon peel body.
“What’s the matter?” Gabe asked, trying to bring some measure of calm to the affair.
“He stole my straws. The Goddamn mamza pig stole—”
“Hold it, Brookie. What straws?”
Brookman got a strange look on his face then, somewhat like a child caught at a dirty game. He was no longer the fighter, every inch the old man. “Man’s gotta have somethin’. Somethin’ his own, God.”
“What straws?” Gabe asked again, uncomprehendingly.
“Been savin’ my milk straws. You can make all kinds of things with them. I made a doll. Just sorta a doll like the one Adele and me gave to our Sarah when she was a baby.” There were little crystal droplets at the edges of his dark eyes. Several of us turned away not wanting to see; but the words still came. “Just like little Sarah had. Move its legs and everything, make it jump and swim and everything. And if you pretend, God if you pretend, those paper pipes is anything. They can be people that you talk to and move around; they can be money, each straw a five, a ten, even a thousand dollar bill. They’re anything. They’re most of all being free and having Adele and Sarah and—”
I had to look back at him, because what he said made me feel funny inside. He had his old, brown-spotted hands drawn up in front of his face, the veins standing out in bas-relief. He was shaking.
“You take his straws?” Gabe demanded of Hanlin.
“I—”
“You take them!” That was a scream; Gabe’s face was twisted up something awful, his lips drawn back and his teeth bared. He looked like some frantic, wild, hungry animal.
“He hoarded them!” Hanlin barked.
“You took them?”
“Damn kike just hoarding and hoarding—”
Gabe dropped him to the floor, but not easily like he did Brookman. Then he picked him up and dropped him again. “You give them back, you hear?”
“He should share—”
“You give them back or I’ll peel your skin off and give him your bones!”
Hanlin gave them back. Gabe spent the better part of that week with Brookman. He saved all his straws for the old man and played games with him. Hanlin died that week; Gabe never even joined in the prayer we said as they carted him out. Not many of the rest of us had our hearts in it, I suspect.
But lest anyone think it was all sad times with Gabe here, let me set the record straight. I said he was unhappy. He was. But he had this special way about him, this special talent to make other people laugh. He always had some trick planned, always something to pull on the robots.
When the clanking, whirring nurses came in to serve breakfast, Gabe would always be up and around. He would follow the humming metal nannies, and when he saw the chance, he would stick a leg out and let them trip over it when they turned around.
They were those robots that roll on one leg, and they were easily upset. He would tumble one, then dash away from the scene so fast that a lightning bolt couldn’t have caught him. Then the other robots would come skittering to the aid of their fallen comrade, pick him up, and cluck (every damn time, mind you) what they had been programmed to cluck in such a case: “Nasty, nasty fall. Poor Bruce, poor Bruce.”
Then everyone would roar. Gabe had done it again.
We never did know why they called the robots “Bruce”— all of them. But it could have been the quirk of some egotistical design engineer of the same name. Anyhow we would roar.
“Good one, Gabe!”
“You’re great, boy!”
“That’ll show em, Gabie!”
And he would grin that silly grin of his, and everything was all right, and the ward was not a ward for a while.
But the ward was always a ward for him.
He was never happy, not even when he clowned for us.