Read Online Annie by Thomas Meehan - Free Book Online Page B

graciously, “one for you and one for your large dog, compliments of the management.”
    â€œGee, thanks, mister!” Annie quickly fed one of the apples to Sandy, who wolfed it down in three bites, and gobbled up the other herself.
    A little bit of her hunger gone, Annie looked outside—she saw that the rain had stopped. But the evening had grown sharply cooler; it was going to be a cold night. “We gotta find ourselves someplace to stay tonight,” Annie told Sandy. And then she had an idea. She lingered with Sandy near the Lexington Avenue entrance for the next two hours, watching the apple seller trying unsuccessfully to sell his apples to commuters hurrying to catch trains that would take them to their homes in the suburbs. By seven thirty, few people were coming into the station, and now, Annie saw, the apple seller gave up and started off into the cool May night. “Come on, Sandy, we’re gonna follow him,” said Annie.
    As Annie and Sandy trailed in the shadows, the apple seller trudged up Lexington Avenue to East 59th Street and then headed eastward toward the East River. There he disappeared over the edge of an embankment next to the 59th Street Bridge, seemingly headed straight into the river. Annie and Sandy ran to the embankment and looked down. Below them, under the bridge at the river’s edge, they saw a makeshift little camp—there were maybe a dozen shanties. In the middle of the camp, shadowy figures were huddled around fires that blazed up fitfully from ash cans. At the largest of the fires, a woman appeared to be cooking something in a huge cauldron that hung on a spit. Their friend the apple seller, Annie saw, was warming himself by one of the fires. “Gee, Sandy, I wonder what this place is?” Annie whispered.
    In New York, in the Depression, thousands of homeless people, many of whom had once lived in elegant Park Avenue and Riverside Drive apartments, banded together to live in shantytowns that were known as Hoovervilles—mockingly named after President Hoover, on whom many blamed the Depression. The floorless shanties were slapped together from scrap wood, cardboard, and pieces of iron, with sheets of corrugated tin for roofs. Dirty, ugly, without heat or ventilation, the shanties had no virtues other than that they provided a roof over one’s head. The rich of New York, who still numbered in the thousands in 1933, looked upon the Hoovervilles as an eyesore and a disgrace to the city, and they were constantly after the mayor to have them torn down. But, argued the mayor, it was better to have the homeless living in Hoovervilles than sleeping in doorways, like Bowery bums, and so the Hoovervilles were tolerated—or ignored—by the city authorities, including the police. It was such a Hooverville that Annie and Sandy had come upon.
    â€œLet’s go, Sandy. I don’t know what this place is, but at least they’ve got fires to keep warm by,” said Annie, leading her dog down the steep embankment toward the Hooverville below. “And, hey, maybe we can find us somethin’ to eat. Come on!” The men and women gathered in the shadows around the flickering fires were thin, shabbily dressed, and sad-looking, but they didn’t appear to be at all mean or unfriendly. They looked, in fact, like the dazed survivors of some terrible catastrophe, which, of course, they were. “Pardon me, folks,” said Annie, nervously clearing her throat as she neared the group around one of the fires, “but did anybody here leave a redheaded kid named Annie at an orphanage eleven years ago?” A few of the people huddled around the fire said, “No” or “Uh-uh, kid,” but most of them simply ignored her question. Figuring that no one would mind, Annie stepped up close to the fire and held her hands over the flames.
    The woman who’d been cooking now banged an iron spoon against the side of the cauldron and