Will McIntosh - 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 there.”

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.