City Living Read online

  City Living

  Will McIntosh

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  City Living

  “Hey.” Willard grabbed my shirtsleeve. “Would you look at that.” He pointed at a white truck parked down the street. It had a big, square back end with Good Humor Ice Cream on it, along with a picture of an ice cream on a stick, dipped in chocolate. The truck was surrounded by kids with cute little dirty knees, their eyes round. “Ice cream on a stick! I seen that in Life magazine. I want to get me one.”

  Willard pulled me through the crowd toward the truck. “Ice cream on a stick. I guess you gotta eat it fast before it melts off.”

  We each bought one for ten cents. In Siloam you can get a cup of hand-scooped ice cream for a nickel, but I reckoned it was worth an extra nickel to tell folks we had ice cream on a stick in New York City. We stood on the sidewalk, happily gnawing the chocolate off to get at the ice cream. Willard kept holding his up, showing it to others who’d bought one, like we were part of a special club or something.

  I took the opportunity to soak the people in—what they were wearing, what they did with their hands while they stood, how they talked. My neck had been bent back looking at the giant buildings when we first came through the gates, but now I was fine-tuned on the littler things.

  I was eyeing a perfect New York City woman (small and stylish; her hair short so her earlobes poked out underneath dark curls) when a loud honk startled me out of my boots. It sounded like a giant goose. A second one followed, then a third, calling back and forth to each other, coming from the tops of the buildings.

  All around us people sat down in the street. Every one of them, right down on the pavement.

  “Sit down,” an old geezer near me said. He reached up and tugged my shirtsleeve so hard he partway untucked my shirt.

  “What for?” I asked.

  “The city’s about to move.”

  I nearly dropped my ice cream. “What do you mean it’s about to move? It ain’t supposed to leave for two days!” Willard said, taking the words right out of my wide-open mouth.

  “It’s the emergency signal,” a yellow-haired woman said, sounding a mite impatient with having to fill us yokels in. “It was installed during the war.”

  I could just picture it: soldiers pouring out of the buildings carrying rifles, Berlin barreling toward New York with its big guns booming. Hard to believe that was only four years ago. Seemed like a lifetime.

  I took a seat on the sidewalk, shifted when I came down on some man’s ankle and he bellyached about it. “How long until we start moving?” I was excited as all get-out.

  There was a commotion down the street, all the people talking at once to the people around them. A man poking his head out of a phone booth seemed to be at the center of it.

  “Chicago attacked Boston,” I heard a man in a brown fedora say to the woman sitting next to him.

  “No way,” I said to Willard. “Not possible.” Someone down the line must have gotten it wrong, like happens in a game of telephone. “An American city attacking another American city?” Some of these cities were rumbling that they weren’t quite part of the United States no more, being as they could mosey down to Mexico whenever they felt like it, but no way Americans would spill the blood of other Americans. The war was over, Hitler and Tojo was dead, but, no way.

  The honking stopped. The last honk echoed across the skyscrapers, then that got drowned out by a downright deafening rumble. It reminded me of boulders coming down in a rockslide.

  The street jerked underneath me. It jerked again, and I was thrown backward, like I was on a train that was pulling out of the station full-steam. I almost fell on the people behind me—it didn’t help that Willard grabbed hold of my collar to keep from falling back himself. The pulling went on for a few seconds, then everything seemed to get still again.

  A stiff wind was blowing down Madison, but besides that and the rumbling, you’d never know you were on something that was moving. People were standing, brushing off their behinds, and going back to heading wherever they were heading. The only difference was that instead of wearing their hats everyone was carrying them, on account of the stiff breeze. New York City was on the move, and I was on it. I let out a whoop of pure pleasure.

  Willard looked at me like I was nuts. “How are we gonna get back home if New York is leaving?” he asked. He looked downright scared.

  “Relax. We’ll hitch back. Give us a chance to see more of the country.” I started walking, not sure where I was going but liking the feel of city pavement under my country shoes. Even if Chicago had attacked Boston (which they hadn’t) there was nothing for me to do about it, so why not do a little sightseeing?

  Willard huffed. “That’s easy for you to say. All you’ll miss is a few medical classes.”

  “If I end up being your doctor you might wish I hadn’t missed those classes,” I joked.

  “I don’t show up for work, I don’t get paid.” Willard stopped. “Where are we headed, anyway? I thought we was going to see the Yankee game.”

  What I really wanted to see was the engine under the city. They didn’t give tours, but I figured there must be some way down there.

  A fetching young woman hurried by. “Excuse me.” I trotted to catch up with her.

  “Now where are you going?” Willard shouted at my back.

  The woman glanced at the steel bracelet on my wrist, which they put on you at the entry gate when you pay your two dollars. She kept walking.

  “Pardon me, but can you tell me how a curious country boy might get down to see the glorious engine that runs this fair city?”

  “He can’t,” she said. She was walking darned fast. Her high heels clicking on the sidewalk made it sound like a tiny horse was running alongside me.

  “Not for just a minute or two?”

  “I’ve never seen the navigation center. No one gets down there.”

  “Oh.” I tried not to sound disappointed.

  “If they let people see it, the design secrets could get out. The designers don’t want that.”

  “The designers,” I said.

  “Yes. The dream team.”

  “Tesla, Crowley, Gurdjieff, Bohr, and Jung.” I ticked them off on my fingers.

  She gave me a puzzled look, like she’d just heard a steer sing opera.

  “So is it true that y’all give blood to keep the city moving? It said so in Life magazine.”

  The woman smiled her city smile. “Did it?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” When the war ended, everyone thought they’d just put the cities back where they’d been, the residents who’d been temporarily kicked off would climb back on, and that would be that. Then the mayor of Chicago got his city moving, and of course everyone else had to follow.

  Willard’s cheap old pocket watch was suddenly six inches in front of my nose, blocking my view of the street. It was quarter till one. “Joe DiMaggio is taking batting practice right now. If I’m gonna get stranded in Texas or California or wherever we’re headed, I want to see the New York Yankees while I’m taken t
here.”

  I sighed through my nose. “Fine. We’ll see the Yankees.”

  The subway was lit bright, but smelled cool and damp like a cave. We waited by the tracks until we heard a whistling sound, then wind rushed through the tunnel, bringing a whiff of something dead with it.

  I couldn’t see anything through the train’s windows, which was disappointing. I once read that there were all kinds of tunnels under New York, dug for sewers and electricity and trains, and that people lived in them and ate rats and never came out of them. I would’ve liked to see one of those people.

  When we got aboveground again, Willard rushed us along toward the gates of the stadium. “Come on, I don’t want to miss Joe Di’s first at-bat!”

  “Game’s been canceled!” a newspaper seller shouted at us. He was a fat man, with hair poking out at the neck of his collar.

  “Oh, no,” Willard moaned. He snapped his fingers. “Dang it.”

  “Due to the emergency.” The newspaper seller pointed at the stadium. “They set up a sixteen-point event instead.”

  Willard and me looked at each other and shrugged.

  “What’s a sixteen-point event?” Willard asked.

  The newspaperman frowned at us, then noticed the steel bracelets we were wearing. “Oh. Never mind. City business.”

  “I wouldn’t mind seeing a sixteen-point event,” I said.

  The newspaperman laughed. “Trust me, you don’t. Anyway, they won’t admit you.” He gestured at the bracelet.

  I looked down at the danged bracelet, then at the gate into Yankee Stadium. “I’ll take one of them newspapers, if you don’t mind.” I pulled a nickel out of my pocket. Then I moved Willard out of range of the newspaper seller’s ears. “I’m gonna see what’s going on in there.”

  “Now why would you want to go and do that? The man just said you’d be sorry if you did.”

  “Never mind.” I clapped him on the shoulder. “I’ll be back in no time.”

  I put the newspaper over my hand to hide my wrist and stepped into line. There was no admission, we just waltzed right in, no tickets or nothing. I wanted a seat up high so I could see everything. Even if there wasn’t gonna be a ballgame, I was still at Yankee Stadium.

  It sure seemed like a game was about to get started—boys were climbing up and down the rows selling hot dogs and sodas from steel boxes strapped around their necks, and music was piping from loudspeakers set all around. “You Oughta Be in Pictures” was giving way to “Moonglow” as I grabbed the railing and headed up.

  I picked a row, scooted sideways past people already sitting, my feet crunching peanut shells on the floor. The whole place smelled like old hot dogs. I hiked up my trousers and took a seat, wondering what this was all about.

  There was a commotion twenty rows below. People were standing and pointing, grabbing their friends by the shoulder. I bent left and right, trying to get a look, and then I saw what the commotion was about, and I plopped down in my seat, my mouth hanging wide open.

  There was no mistaking the man making his way up the stairs. It was the old Bambino himself, now the Yankees’ manager. Babe Ruth was dressed in his pinstripes, smiling and waving, a bigger man than I’d’ve guessed from the pictures I’d seen, with skinny legs but a big middle. Two men in dark suits were with him, and as they made their way up to my level one of them gestured for the Babe to sit, just one row in front of me and a mite to my left.

  “I guess this spot is as good as any,” Babe said. “Seems like I shouldn’t have to come to one of these things. I do enough for this city.” The Babe looked uneasy; there was sweat in his eyebrows, and that bulldog face of his was twitching. Now that I thought about it, a good helping of the crowd looked nervous.

  One of his companions leaned his head close to the Babe’s. “If it wasn’t at the stadium I could’ve gotten you out of it, but for something held here, in place of a game, it would’ve looked bad.”

  The music went out and everyone got real quiet. Babe looked at the man beside him and whispered, “I sure hope your hunch about picking a random seat is right.”

  Now I spotted the New York Yankees ballplayers. They were sitting in the front row along the first-base line, all in a neat line in their crisp white uniforms.

  “Here it comes,” someone said.

  “What?” I asked, looking around. Everyone was looking at the field. I squinted; the dirt between the pitcher’s mound and second base was swirling like there was a little tornado on the field. A dark hole opened up, right there in the field. I stood, wanting to see better.

  “Sit down, you idiot!” someone shouted. “You want to draw its attention this way?”

  I sat. Draw its attention? I shook my head. I was confused as could be, and didn’t want to draw too much attention to my own self. I didn’t know if I could get into trouble for crashing a city folk party, and I didn’t want to find out. I was mighty curious about what was going on, though. Mighty curious.

  Something floated up out of the hole.

  “Jesus Lord,” I whispered.

  I could hear it more than see it. The sound went straight to my guts, not touching my ears at all. It was a scraping sound, only too deep and low to sound like anything anybody might scrape. There was a musical quality to it—the worst, scariest music I ever heard.

  It rose out of the dark hole. I couldn’t quite focus my eyes on it. It was shifting, sliding—an oily mess of tangled black tubes that flapped here and there, and pointed silver teeth that cranked open and snapped closed. As it moved, it left a trail of black bubbles that drifted toward the stands. When the bubbles popped they sprayed the crowd underneath with black goo that made them shout and twist.

  I wasn’t so curious no more. I wanted out. I looked around: No one was moving from their seats. I had a hunch it would be a bad idea to leave mine and draw “its” attention.

  The thing floated around the stadium, getting closer to the seats until it floated right over the low wall and stopped in front of a woman in a flowery dress with a bow on the collar. She covered her face with both arms and screamed. The thing hissed at her; she screamed louder. I leaned forward, trying to see. There were spiny things stuck in the woman’s face, like porcupine quills, only black. She was making no move to pluck them out. Maybe she didn’t want to make the thing angry.

  It moved on. The crowd leaned from side to side, ducking, avoiding, praying. Every so often it stopped in front of someone and hissed, or wagged black tubes at them, scaring the bejesus out of them.

  I kept walking back through how this all began, trying to remember if I’d seen anyone with guns forcing people inside. There hadn’t been no guns, everyone had strolled in like this was some sort of garden party.

  The thing rose into the upper deck.

  “Oh, no. Get outta here, go on,” the Babe said. He shooed at it with four fingers without lifting his hand off the armrest.

  It kept on drifting around the horseshoe of the upper deck until it was in my section. I didn’t look at it; I thought it might be less likely to notice me if I pretended I didn’t notice it.

  “Please, not me. Don’t let it choose me,” a man nearby said. I thought it was the same man who’d told me to sit down.

  What did he mean, choose him? It was gonna choose someone? I was so confused, and I was so scared my hands and knees were trembling. I turned toward the woman sitting a seat away on my left and whispered, “What’s going on?”

  Her eyes opened real wide; she gave me a sidewise glance and she shook her head ever so slightly.

  The thing shifted its direction and moved right toward me. I’d never been so scared. This was no game; I was sure of that now. It changed directions again, and my knotted shoulders relaxed.

  Then it reversed itself and moved right toward me again.

  I thought maybe I should pray, but I was too scared to think of any words. The thing just kept coming until it was right in my face, then it stopped. It was so close I could have touched it. I looked at my shoe
s as its music shook my insides. When I glanced up for just a second I could see that its skin was moving—swirling and crawling and twitching. Tubes snaked out to my left and right. They wrapped around me, curling tighter until I couldn’t exhale or I would touch them. It hissed at me furiously; the stink was horrible, like rotten fish and sewer water. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying hard not to scream because I didn’t want to make it any angrier than it already was.

  Then it was gone. By the time I peeled up one eyelid it was a dozen feet away. My shirt was soaked in black oil, but besides that I was fine. It hadn’t even quilled me.

  “Lucky,” the woman to my left mouthed.

  The thing hovered in front of Babe Ruth. The Babe looked away from it; I guess that was everyone’s instinct, to look away. The thing hissed; the Babe scrunched up his face, balled his fists, and jerked back in his chair, but then it floated past him, to the man in the suit sitting next to him. It wrapped itself around the man the way it did to me. It flattened itself out so the tubes looked more like barbed whips. Or maybe it was a trick of the light. One of the tubes lifted high in the air, real slow, then came down hard. The man screamed. The Babe moaned a curse. Another tube lashed the man. I closed my eyes and stuck my fingers in my ears, but I could still hear him screaming. Around me I heard people gasping and Oh-Lording and that-poor-manning. From the relief in their voices I figured it must only choose one person.

  The thing didn’t kill the man, only whipped him so bad they had to carry him out on a stretcher. Still, I wouldn’t have wanted to be him. As I headed down the steps I got to wondering if maybe these weren’t my kind of folks. I got along with all kinds of folks, and it never occurred to me that there could be somewhere where I felt out of place, but suddenly I wasn’t so sure I belonged in a city.

  The lines to get out were longer and slower than the lines to get in. I wanted out of there as quick as I could. I couldn’t figure out what that thing was. It wasn’t any creature I ever seen or read about. It didn’t even seem like it had been all there, even when it was there. I kept peering toward the front, trying to figure out what was taking so long, and finally I spotted the holdup. People were going behind a curtain, one by one. After a moment they would come out the other end. I waited my turn, wondering what was behind the curtain, hopping from one foot to the other. Willard had been waiting a long time.