While Mortals Sleep_ Unpublished Short Fiction - Kurt Vonnegut [38]
Again the agonized coughing. Now Ruth caught the stench of the dirty man’s breath, brought to her nostrils by a sudden gust from the door. The cough worsened, tearing the breath from him. The cigarette dropped.
Ruth twisted around on the bench so that her gaze wouldn’t naturally fall on him. A winded fat man, his red face determinedly cheerful beneath a homburg, begged to be let in at the first of the ticket line: salesman … ball bearings or boilers or something like that …
Again the agonized coughing. Irritated that so disagreeable a sight should make demands on her attention, Ruth glanced once more at the old man. He had slumped over the arm of the bench, twisted, quaking.
The fat salesman looked down at the old man, and then straight ahead again, keeping his place in line.
The old lady, still instructing the redcap, raised her voice to be heard above the interruption.
The young soldier and his correct parents weren’t so vulgar as to acknowledge that something unsightly was at hand.
A newsboy burst into the station, started to stride down the aisle between Ruth and the old man, stopped a few feet short, and headed for the other end of the waiting room, shouting news of a tragedy a thousand miles away. “Read all about it!”
Another train rumbled overhead. Everyone was moving toward the ramp now, avoiding the aisle in which the old man lay, giving no sign that it was anything but luck that made them choose another route to the train.
“Buffalo, Harrisburg, Baltimore, and Washington,” said the voice in the loudspeaker.
Ruth realized that it was her train, too. She stood without looking again at the old man. He was no more than disgustingly drunk, she told herself. He deserved to lie there, sleeping it off. She tucked her magazine and purse under her arm. Someone—the police or some charity or whoever’s job it was—would be along to pick him up.
“Board!”
Ruth skirted the man and strode toward the ramp. The hiss and chilling dampness from the track level billowed down the ramp to envelop her. Pale lights, wreathed in steam, stretched away in seeming infinity—unreal, offering nothing to compete with her thoughts.
And her thoughts nagged, making her imagine an annoying, repetitive sound—a man’s cough. Louder and louder it grew in her mind, seeming to echo and amplify in a vast stone vault.
“Board!”
Ruth turned, and ran back down the ramp. In seconds she was leaning over the old man, loosening his collar, rubbing his wrists. She laid his slight frame out at full length, and placed her coat under his head.
“Redcap!” she shouted.
“Yes’m?”
“This man is dying. Call an ambulance!”
“Yes ma’am!”
Horns honked as Ruth walked against the light. She took no notice, busily upbraiding in her mind the insensitive men and women in the railroad station. The ambulance had taken the old man away, and now Ruth, having missed her train, had four more hours to spend in Ted’s hometown.
“Just because he was ugly and dirty, you wouldn’t help him,” she told the imagined crowd. “He was sick and needed help, and you all went your selfish ways rather than touch him. Shame on you.” She looked challengingly at persons coming down the sidewalk toward her, and had her look returned with puzzlement. “You’d pretend there was nothing serious wrong with him,” she murmured.
Ruth killed time in a woman’s way, pretending to be on a shopping errand. She looked critically at window displays, fingered fabrics, priced articles, and promised salesgirls she would be back to buy after looking in one or two more shops. Her activity was almost fully automatic, leaving her thoughts to go their righteous, self-congratulatory way. She was one of the few, she told herself, who did not run away from the untouchables, from unclean, sick strangers.
It was a buoyant thought, and Ruth let herself believe that Ted was sharing it with her. With the thought of Ted