The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century (21 page)

New York, in 1938, had a population of nearly a million, having grown gradually but steadily since the close of the War of Southron Independence. Together with the half million in the city of Brooklyn this represented by far the greatest concentration of people in the United States, though of course it could not compare with the great Confederate centers of Washington (now including Baltimore and Alexandria), St. Louis, or Leesburg (once Mexico City).

The country boy who had never seen anything more metropolitan than Poughkeepsie was tremendously impressed. Cable-cars whizzed northward as far as 59th Street on the west side and all the way to 87th on the east, while horse-cars furnished convenient crosstown transportation with a line every few blocks. Bicycles, rare around Wappinger Falls, were thick as flies, darting ahead and alongside drayhorses pulling wallowing vans, carts and wagons. Prancing trotters drew private carriages, buggies, broughams, victorias, hansoms, dogcarts or sulkies; neither the cyclists, coachmen nor horses seemed overawed or discommoded by occasional minibiles chuffing their way swiftly and implacably over cobblestones or asphalt.

Incredibly intricate traceries of telegraph wires swarmed overhead, crossing and recrossing at all angles, slanting upward into offices and flats or downward into stores, a reminder that no family with pretensions to gentility would be without the clacking instrument in the parlor and every child learned the Morse code before he could read. Thousands of sparrows considered the wires properly their own; they perched and swung, quarrelled and scolded on them, leaving only to satisfy their voracity upon the steaming mounds of horsedung below.

Buildings of eight or ten storeys were common, and there were many of fourteen or fifteen, serviced by pneumatic English lifts, that same marvelous invention which permitted the erection of veritable skyscrapers in Washington and Leesburg. Above them balloons moved gracefully through the air, guided and controlled as skillfully as an old time sailing vessel.

Most exciting of all was simply the number of people who walked, rode, or merely stood around on the streets. It seemed hardly believable that so many humans could crowd themselves so closely. Beggars pleaded, touts wheedled, peddlers hawked, newsboys shouted, bootblacks chanted. Messengers pushed their way, loafers yawned, ladies stared, drunks staggered. For long moments I paused, standing stock still, not thinking of going anywhere, merely watching the spectacle.

I had hardly begun to fondle the sharp edge of wonder when darkness fell and the gas lamps, lit simultaneously by telegraphic sparks, glowed and shone on nearly every corner. Whatever had been drab and dingy in daylight—and even my eyes had not been blind to the signs of dirt and decay—became in an instant magically enchanting, softened and shadowed into mysterious beauty. I breathed the dusty air with a relish I had never felt for that of the country and knew myself for the first time to be spiritually at home.

But spiritual sustenance is not quite enough for an eighteen year old; I began to feel the need for food and rest. The three dollars in my pocket I was resolved to hoard, not having any notion how to go about replenishing it. I could not do without eating, however, so I stopped in at the first gaslit bakery, buying a penny loaf, and walked slowly through the entrancing streets, munching on it.

Now the fronts of the tinugraph lyceums were lit up by porters with long tapers, so that they glowed yellow and inviting, each heralded with a boldly lettered broadside or dashingly drawn cartoon advertising the amusement to be found within. I was sorely tempted to see for myself this magical entertainment of pictures taken so close together they gave the illusion of motion, but the lowest price of admission was five cents. Some of the more garish theaters, which specialized in the incredible phonotos—tinugraphs which were ingeniously combined with a sound-producing machine operated by compressed air, so that the pictures seemed not only to move, but to talk—actually charged ten or even fifteen cents for an hour’s spectacle.

By now I ached with tiredness; the insignificant bundle of shirt and books had become a burden. I was pressed by the question of where to sleep, but I didn’t connect the glass transparencies behind which gaslight shone through the unpainted letters of BEDS, ROOMS, or HOTEL with my need, for I was looking for the urban version of the inn at Wappinger Falls or the Poughkeepsie Commercial House. I became more and more confused as fatigue blurred impressions of still newer marvels, so that I am not entirely sure whether it was merely one or a succession of enchanting girls who offered delights for a quarter. I know I was solicited by crimps for the Confederate Legion who operated openly in defiance of the laws of the United States and that an incredible number of beggars accosted me.

At last I thought of asking directions from one of the multitude on the wooden or granite sidewalks. But without realizing it I had wandered from thronged, brightly lit avenues into an unpeopled, darkened area where buildings were low and frowning, where the flicker of a candle or the yellow of a kerosene lamp in windows far apart were unrivalled by any streetlights.

My ears had been deafened all day by the clop of hooves, the rattling of iron tires or the puffing of minibiles; now the empty street seemed unnaturally still. The suddenly looming figure of another walker was the luckiest of chances.

“Excuse me, friend,” I said. “Can you tell me where’s the nearest inn, or anywhere I can get a bed for the night cheap?”

I felt him peering at me. “Rube, huh? Much money you got?”

“Th—Not very much. That’s why I want to find cheap lodging.”

“OK, Reuben—come along.”

“Oh, don’t trouble to show me. Just give me an idea how to get there.”

He grunted. “No trouble, Reuben. No trouble at all.”

Taking my arm just above the elbow in a firm grip he steered me along. For the first time I began to feel alarm. However, before I could even attempt to shrug free, he had shoved me into the mouth of an alley discernible only because its absolute blackness contrasted with the relative darkness of the street.

“Wait—” I began.

“In here, Reuben. Soundest night’s sleep you’ve had in a long time. And cheap—it’s free.”

I started to break loose and was surprised to find he no longer held me. Before I could even begin to think, however, a terrific blow fell on the right side of my head and I traded the blackness of the alley for the blackness of insensibility.

I was recalled to consciousness by a smell. More accurately a cacophony of smells. I opened my eyes and shut them against the unbearable pain of light; I groaned at the equally unbearable pain in my skull bones. Feverishly and against my will I tried to identify the walloping odors around me.

The stink of death and rottenness was thick. I knew there was an outhouse—many outhouses—nearby. The ground I lay upon was damp with the water of endless dishwashings and launderings. The noisomeness of offal suggested that the garbage of many families had never been buried, but left to rot in the alley or near it. In addition there was the smell of death—not the sweetish effluvium of blood, such as any country boy who has helped butcher a bull-calf or hog knows—but the unmistakable stench of corrupt, maggotty flesh. Besides all this there was the spoor of humanity.

A new discomfort at last forced my eyes open for the second time. A hard surface was pressing painful knobs into my exposed skin. I looked and felt around me.

The knobs were the cobbles of a fetid alley; not a foot away was the cadaver of a dog, thoroughly putrescent; beyond him a drunk retched and groaned. A trickle of liquid swill wound its way delicately between the stones. My coat, shirt, and shoes were gone; so was the bundle with my books. There was no use searching my pocket for the three dollars—I knew I was lucky the robber left me my pants and my life.

A middleaged man—at least he looked middleaged to my youthful eye—regarded me speculatively over the head of the drunk. “Pretty well cleaned yuh out, huh, boy?”

I nodded—and then was sorry for the motion.

“Reward of virtue. Assuming you was virtuous, which I assume. Come to the same end as me, stinking drunk. Only I still got my shirt. Couldn’t hock it no matter how thirsty I got.”

I groaned.

“Where yuh from, boy? What rural—see, sober now—precincts miss you?”

“Wappinger Falls, near Poughkeepsie. My name’s Hodge Backmaker.”

“Well now, that’s friendly of you, Hodge. Me, I’m George Pondible. Periodic. Just tapering off.”

I hadn’t an idea what Pondible was talking about. Trying to understand made my head worse.

“Took everything, I suppose? Haven’t a nickel left to help a hangover?”

“My head,” I mumbled, quite superfluously.

He staggered to his feet. “Best thing—souse it in the river. Take more to fix mine.”

“But... can I go through the streets like this?”

“Right,” he said. “Quite right.”

He stooped down and put one hand beneath the drunk. With the other he removed the jacket, a maneuver betraying practice, for it elicited no protest from the victim. He then performed the still more delicate operation of depriving him of his shirt and shoes, tossing them all to me. They were a loathsome collection of rags not fit to clean a manure-spreader. The jacket was torn and greasy, the pockets hanging like the ears of a dog; the shirt was a filthy tatter, the shoes shapeless fragments of leather with great gapes in the soles.

“It’s stealing,” I protested.

“Right. Put them on and let’s get out of here.”

The short walk to the river was through streets lacking the glamour of those of the day before. The tenements were smokestreaked, marked with steps between the parting bricks where mortar had fallen out; great hunks of wall were kept in place only by the support of equally crazy ones abutting. The wretched rags I wore were better suited to this neighborhood than Pondible’s though his would have marked him tramp and vagrant in Wappinger Falls.

The Hudson too was soiled, with an oily scum and debris, so that I hesitated even to dip the purloined shirt, much less my aching head. But urged on by Pondible I climbed down the slimy stones between two docks and pushing the flotsam aside, ducked myself in the unappetizing water.

The sun was hot and the shirt dried on my back as we walked away from the river, the jacket over my arm. Yesterday I had entertained vague plans of presenting myself at Columbia College, begging to exchange work of any kind for tuition. In my present state this was manifestly impossible; for a moment I wished I had waded farther into the Hudson and drowned.

“Fixes your head,” said Pondible with more assurance than accuracy. “Now for mine.”

Now that my mind was clearer my despair grew by the minute. Admitting my plans had been impractical and tenuous, they were yet plans of a kind, something in which I could put—or force—my hopes. Now they were gone, literally knocked out of existence and I had nothing to look forward to, nothing on which to exert my energies and dreams. To go back to Wappinger Falls was out of the question, not simply to dodge the bitterness of admitting defeat so quickly, but because I knew myself to be completely useless to my parents. Yet I had nothing to expect in the city except starvation or a life of petty crime.

Pondible guided me into a saloon, a dark place, gaslit even this early, with a steam piano tinkling away the popular tune “Mormon Girl”:

There’s a girl in the State of Deseret

Whom I love and I’m trying to for-get.

Forget her for tired feet’s sake

Don’t wanna walk miles to Great Salt Lake.

They ever build that railroad toooo the ocean

I’d return my darling Mormon girl’s devotion.

But the tracks stop short in Ioway...

I couldn’t remember the last line.

“Shot,” Pondible ordered the bartender, “and buttermilk for my chum.”

The bartender kept on polishing the wood in front of him with a wet, dirty rag. “Got any jack?”

“Pay you tomorrow, friend.”

The bartender’s uninterrupted industry said clearly, then drink tomorrow.

“Listen,” argued Pondible, “I’m tapering off. You know me. I’ve spent plenty of money here.”

The bartender shrugged. “Why don’t you indent?”

Pondible looked shocked. “At my age? What would a company pay for a wornout old carcass? A hundred dollars maybe. Then a release in a couple of years with a med holdback so I’d have to report every week somewhere. No friend, I’ve come though this long a free man (in a manner of speaking) and I’ll stick it out. Let’s have that shot; you can see for yourself I’m tapering off. You’ll get your jack tomorrow.”

I could see the bartender was weakening; each refusal was less surly and at last, to my astonishment, he set out a glass and bottle for Pondible and an earthenware mug of buttermilk for me. To my astonishment, I say, for credit was rarely extended on either large or small scale. The Inflation, though 60 years in the past, had left indelible impressions; people paid cash or did without. Debt was disgraceful; the notion things could be paid for while, or even after, they were being used was as unthinkable as was the idea of circulation of paper money instead of silver or gold.

I drank my buttermilk slowly, gratefully aware Pondible had ordered the most filling and sustaining liquid in the saloon. For all his unprepossessing appearance and peculiar moral notions, it was evident my new acquaintance had a rude wisdom as well as a rude kindliness.

He swallowed his whiskey in an instant and called upon the bartender for a quart pot of small beer which he now sipped, turning to me and drawing out, not unskillfully, the story not only of my life, but of my hopes, and the despondency I now knew at their shattering.

“Well,” he said at last, “you can always take the advice our friend here offered me and indent. A young healthy lad like you could get yourself $1,000 or $1,200—”

“Yes. And be a slave the rest of my life.”

Pondible wiped specks of froth from his beard with the back of his hand. “Oh, indenting ain’t slavery—it’s better. And worse. For one thing the company that buys you won’t hold you after you aren’t worth your keep. They cancel your indenture without a cent in payment. Of course they’ll take a med holdback so as to get a dollar or two for your corpse, but that’s a long time away for you.”

“Yes. A long time away. So I wouldn’t be a slave for life; just 30 or 40 years. Till I wasn’t any good to anyone, including myself.”

He seemed to be enjoying himself as he drank his beer. “You’re a gloomy gus, Hodge. Tain’t as bad as that. Indenting’s pretty strictly regulated. That’s the idea, anyway. You can’t be made to work over 60 hours a week—ten hours a day. With $1,000 or $1,200 you could get all the education you want in your spare time and then turn your learning to account by making enough money to buy yourself free.”

I tried to think about it dispassionately, though goodness knows I’d been over the ground often enough. It was true that the amount, a not inconceivable one for a boy willing to indenture himself, would see me comfortably through college. But Pondible’s notion that I could turn my “learning to account” I knew to be a fantasy despite its currency. Perhaps in the Confederate States or the German Union knowledge was rewarded with wealth, or at least a comfortable living, but any study I pursued—I knew my own “impracticality” well enough by now—was bound to yield few material benefits in the poor, exploited, backward United States, which existed as a nation at all only on the sufferance and unresolved rivalries of the great powers. I would be lucky to struggle through school and eke out some kind of living as a freeman; I could never hope to earn enough to buy back my indenture on what was left of my time after subtracting 60 hours a week.

Pondible listened as I explained all this, nodding and sipping alternately. “Well then,” he said, “there’s the gangs.”

I looked my horror.

He laughed. “Forget your country rearing. If you leave the parsons’ sermons out of it there’s no difference joining the gangs than joining the army—if we had one—or the Confederate Legion. Most of the gangsters never even get shot at. They all live high, high as anybody in the 26 states, and every once in a while there’s a dividend that’s more than a workingman earns in a lifetime.”

I began to be sure my benefactor was a gangster. And yet... if this were so why had he wheedled credit from the barkeep? Was it simply an elaborate blind to recruit me? It seemed hardly worth it. “A fat dividend maybe. Or a rope.”

“Most of the gangsters die of old age. Or competition. Ain’t one been hung I can think of in the last five years. But I can see you’ve no stomach for it. Tell me, Hodge—you a Whig or Populist?”

The sudden change of subject bewildered me. “Why... Populist, I guess. Anyway I don’t think much of the Whigs’ ‘Property, Protection, Permanent Population.’ The anxiety to build up a prosperous employing class artificially ever since the original industrialists were wiped out by the reparations and inflation is one of the things which has kept the country so poor. The rest is nonsense; they’ve never attempted to try protection when they were in power for the very good reason that the Confederacy and the German Union won’t allow any small nation to put up a tariff wall against their exports. As for ‘permanent population,’ it’s unaffected by elections. Those who can’t make a living will continue to emigrate to more prosperous countries where they can—”

My voice trailed off. Pondible cocked an eyebrow over his beer mug, put it down and chewed on a soggy corner of his mustache, still regarding me quizzically.

“I don’t feel like leaving the United States,” I muttered defensively.

“You heard of the Grand Army?” he asked with apparent irrelevance.

“Who hasn’t? Not much difference between them and the regular gangs.”

“I dunno, Hodge. Seems to me they got much the same ideas you have. They’re Populists. They don’t like the United States being a fifth-rate country; they’re against indenting; they think prosperity’s got to come from the poor upward, not from the rich downward. Maybe they get a little rough with Whigs or Confederate agents once in a while, but you can’t make bacon out of a live hog.”

Was it the thought of Grandfather Backmaker that made me ask, “And do they want to give Negroes equality?”

He drew back sharply. “Touch of the tarbrush in you, boy? No, I can see you ain’t. You just don’t understand. We might have won that war if it hadn’t been for the Abolitionists. They’re better off among their own. Better leave those ideas alone, Hodge; there’s enough to be done for our own. Chase the foreigners out; teach their agents a lesson; build up the country again.”

“Are you trying to recruit me for the Grand Army?”

Pondible finished his beer. “No. I want to get you somewheres to sleep, three meals a day, and that education you’re so anxious for. Come along.”