City Read online

  “Ain’t it the truth,” agreed Gramp.

  The car exploded into life, coughing and choking. A cloud of dense blue smoke rolled out from under it. With a jerk it stirred to life and lumbered down the street.

  Gramp clumped back to his chair and found it dripping wet. The automatic mower, having finished its cutting job, had rolled out the hose, was sprinkling the lawn.

  Muttering venom, Gramp stalked around the corner of the house and sat down on the bench beside the back porch. He didn’t like to sit there, but it was the only place he was safe from the hunk of machinery out in front.

  For one thing, the view from the bench was slightly depressing, fronting as it did on street after street of vacant, deserted houses and weed-grown, unkempt yards.

  It had one advantage, however. From the bench he could pretend he was slightly deaf and not hear the twitch music the radio was blaring out.

  A voice called from the front yard.

  “Bill! Bill, where be you?”

  Gramp twisted around.

  “Here I am, Mark. Back of the house. Hiding from that dadburned mower.”

  Mark Bailey limped around the corner of the house, cigarette threatening to set fire to his bushy whiskers.

  “Bit early for the game, ain’t you?” asked Gramp.

  “Can’t play no game today,” said Mark.

  He hobbled over and sat down beside Gramp on the bench.

  “We’re leaving,” he said.

  Gramp whirled on him. “You’re leaving!”

  “Yeah. Moving out into the country. Lucinda finally talked Herb into it. Never gave him a minute’s peace, I guess. Said everyone was moving away to one of them nice country estates and she didn’t see no reason why we couldn’t.”

  Gramp gulped. “Where to?”

  “Don’t rightly know,” said Mark. “Ain’t been there myself. Up north some place. Up on one of the lakes. Got ten acres of land. Lucinda wanted a hundred, but Herb put down his foot and said ten was enough. After all, one city lot was enough for all these years.”

  “Betty was pestering Johnny, too,” said Gramp, “but he’s holding out against her. Says he simply can’t do it. Says it wouldn’t look right, him the secretary of the Chamber of Commerce and all, if he went moving away from the city.”

  “Folks are crazy,” Mark declared. “Plumb crazy.”

  “That’s a fact,” Gramp agreed. “Country crazy, that’s what they are. Look across there.”

  He waved his hand at the streets of vacant houses. “Can remember the time when those places were as pretty a bunch of homes as you ever laid your eyes on. Good neighbors, they were. Women ran across from one back door to another to trade recipes. And the men folks would go out to cut the grass and pretty soon the mowers would all be sitting idle and the men would be ganged up, chewing the fat. Friendly people, Mark. But look at it now.”

  Mark stirred uneasily. “Got to be getting back, Bill. Just sneaked over to let you know we were lighting out. Lucinda’s got me packing. She’d be sore if she knew I’d run out.”

  Gramp rose stiffly and held out his hand. “I’ll be seeing you again? You be over for one last game?”

  Mark shook his head. “Afraid not, Bill.”

  They shook hands awkwardly, abashed. “Sure will miss them games,” said Mark.

  “Me, too,” said Gramp. “I won’t have nobody once you’re gone.”

  “So long, Bill,” said Mark.

  “So long,” said Gramp.

  He stood and watched his friend hobble around the house, felt the cold claw of loneliness reach out and touch him with icy fingers. A terrible loneliness. The loneliness of age—of age and the outdated. Fiercely, Gramp admitted it. He was outdated. He belonged to another age. He had outstripped his time, lived beyond his years.

  Eyes misty, he fumbled for the cane that lay against the bench, slowly made his way toward the sagging gate that opened onto the deserted street back of the house.

  The years had moved too fast. Years that had brought the family plane and helicopter, leaving the auto to rust in some forgotten place, the unused roads to fall into disrepair. Years that had virtually wiped out the tilling of the soil with the rise of hydroponics. Years that had brought cheap land with the disappearance of the farm as an economic unit, had sent city people scurrying out into the country where each man, for less than the price of a city lot, might own broad acres. Years that had revolutionized the construction of homes to a point where families simply walked away from their old homes to the new ones that could be bought, custom-made, for less than half the price of a prewar structure and could be changed at small cost, to accommodate need of additional space or just a passing whim.

  Gramp sniffed. Houses that could be changed each year, just like one would shift around the furniture. What kind of living was that?

  He plodded slowly down the dusty path that was all that remained of what a few years before had been a busy residential street. A street of ghosts, Gramp told himself—of furtive, little ghosts that whispered in the night. Ghosts of playing children, ghosts of upset tricycles and canted coaster wagons. Ghosts of gossiping housewives. Ghosts of shouted greetings. Ghosts of flaming fireplaces and chimneys smoking of a winter night.

  Little puffs of dust rose around his feet and whitened the cuffs of his trousers.

  There was the old Adams place across the way. Adams had been mighty proud of it, he remembered. Gray field stone front and picture windows. Now the stone was green with creeping moss and the broken windows gaped with ghastly leer. Weeds choked the lawn and blotted out the stoop. An elm tree was pushing its branches against the gable. Gramp could remember the day Adams had planted that elm tree.

  For a moment he stood there in the grass-grown street, feet in the dust, both hands clutching the curve of his cane, eyes closed.

  Through the fog of years he heard the cry of playing children, the barking of Conrad’s yapping pooch from down the street. And there was Adams, stripped to the waist, plying the shovel, scooping out the hole, with the elm tree, roots wrapped in burlap, lying on the lawn.

  May, 1946. Forty-four years ago. Just after he and Adams had come home from the war together.

  Footsteps padded in the dust and Gramp, startled, opened his eyes.

  Before him stood a young man. A man of thirty, perhaps. Maybe a bit less.

  “Good morning,” said Gramp.

  “I hope,” said the young man, “that I didn’t startle you.”

  “You saw me standing here,” asked Gramp, “like a danged fool, with my eyes shut?”

  The young man nodded.

  “I was remembering,” said Gramp.

  “You live around here?”

  “Just down the street. The last one in this part of the city.”

  “Perhaps you can help me then.”

  “Try me,” said Gramp.

  The young man stammered. “Well, you see, it’s like this. I’m on a sort of…well, you might call it a sentimental pilgrimage—”

  “I understand,” said Gramp. “So am I.”

  “My name is Adams,” said the young man. “My grandfather used to live around here somewhere. I wonder—”

  “Right over there,” said Gramp.

  Together they stood and stared at the house.

  “It was a nice place once,” Gramp told him. “Your granddaddy planted that tree right after he came home from the war. I was with him all through the war and we came home together. That was a day for you…”

  “It’s a pity,” said young Adams. “A pity…”

  But Gramp didn’t seem to hear him. “Your granddaddy?” he asked. “I seem to have lost track of him.”

  “He’s dead,” said young Adams. “Quite a number of years ago.”

  “He was messed up with atomic power,” said Gramp.

  “That’s right,” said Adams proudly. “Got into it just as soon as it was released to industry. Right after the Moscow agreement.”

  “Right after they decided,”
said Gramp, “they couldn’t fight a war.”

  “That’s right,” said Adams.

  “It’s pretty hard to fight a war,” said Gramp, “when there’s nothing you can aim at.”

  “You mean the cities,” said Adams.

  “Sure,” said Gramp, “and there’s a funny thing about it. Wave all the atom bombs you wanted to and you couldn’t scare them out. But give them cheap land and family planes and they scattered just like so many dadburned rabbits.”

  John J. Webster was striding up the broad stone steps of the city hall when the walking scarecrow carrying a rifle under his arm caught up with him and stopped him.

  “Howdy, Mr. Webster,” said the scarecrow.

  Webster stared, then recognition crinkled his face.

  “It’s Levi,” he said. “How are things going, Levi?”

  Levi Lewis grinned with snagged teeth. “Fair to middling. Gardens are coming along and the young rabbits are getting to be good eating.”

  “You aren’t getting mixed up in any of the hell raising that’s being laid to the houses?” asked Webster.

  “No, sir,” declared Levi. “Ain’t none of us Squatters mixed up in any wrongdoing. We’re law-abiding, God-fearing people, we are. Only reason we’re there is we can’t make a living no place else. And us living in them places other people up and left ain’t harming no one. Police are just blaming us for the thievery and other things that’s going on, knowing we can’t protect ourselves. They’re making us the goats.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” said Webster. “The chief wants to burn the houses.”

  “If he tries that,” said Levi, “he’ll run against something he ain’t counting on. They run us off our farms with this tank farming of theirs but they ain’t going to run us any farther.”

  He spat across the steps.

  “Wouldn’t happen you might have some jingling money on you?” he asked. “I’m fresh out of cartridges and with them rabbits coming up—”

  Webster thrust his fingers into a vest pocket, pulled out a half dollar.

  Levi grinned. “That’s obliging of you, Mr. Webster. I’ll bring a mess of squirrels, come fall.”

  The Squatter touched his hat with two fingers and retreated down the steps, sun glinting on the rifle barrel. Webster turned up the steps again.

  The city council session already was in full swing when he walked into the chamber.

  Police Chief Jim Maxwell was standing by the table and Mayor Paul Carter was talking.

  “Don’t you think you may be acting a bit hastily, Jim in urging such a course of action with the houses?”

  “No, I don’t,” declared the chief. “Except for a couple of dozen or so, none of those houses are occupied by their rightful owners, or rather, their original owners. Every one of them belongs to the city now through tax forfeiture. And they are nothing but an eyesore and a menace. They have no value. Not even salvage value. Wood? We don’t use wood any more. Plastics are better. Stone? We use steel instead of stone. Not a single one of those houses have any material of marketable value.

  “And in the meantime they are becoming the haunts of petty criminals and undesirable elements. Grown up with vegetation as the residential sections are, they make a perfect hideout for all types of criminals. A man commits a crime and heads straight for the houses—once there he’s safe, for I could send a thousand men in there and he could elude them all.

  “They aren’t worth the expense of tearing down. And yet they are, if not a menace, at least a nuisance. We should get rid of them and fire is the cheapest, quickest way. We’d use all precautions.”

  “What about the legal angle?” asked the mayor.

  “I checked into that. A man has a right to destroy his own property in any way he may see fit so long as it endangers no one else’s. The same law, I suppose, would apply to a municipality.”

  Alderman Thomas Griffin sprang to his feet.

  “You’d alienate a lot of people,” he declared. “You’d be burning down a lot of old homesteads. People still have some sentimental attachments—”

  “If they cared for them,” snapped the chief, “why didn’t they pay the taxes and take care of them? Why did they go running off to the country, just leaving the houses standing. Ask Webster here. He can tell you what success he had trying to interest the people in their ancestral homes.”

  “You’re talking about that Old Home Week farce,” said Griffin. “It failed. Of course, it failed. Webster spread it on so thick that they gagged on it. That’s what a Chamber of Commerce mentality always does.”

  Alderman Forrest King spoke up angrily. “There’s nothing wrong with a Chamber of Commerce, Griffin. Simply because you failed in business is no reason…”

  Griffin ignored him. “The day of high pressure is over, gentlemen. The day of high pressure is gone forever. Ballyhoo is something that is dead and buried.

  “The day when you could have tall-corn days or dollar days or dream up some fake celebration and deck the place up with bunting and pull in big crowds that were ready to spend money is past these many years. Only you fellows don’t seem to know it.

  “The success of such stunts as that was its appeal to mob psychology and civic loyalty. You can’t have civic loyalty with a city dying on its feet. You can’t appeal to mob psychology when there is no mob—when every man, or nearly every man has the solitude of forty acres.”

  “Gentlemen,” pleaded the mayor. “Gentlemen, this is distinctly out of order.”

  King sputtered into life, walloped the table.

  “No, let’s have it out. Webster is over there. Perhaps he can tell us what he thinks.”

  Webster stirred uncomfortably. “I scarcely believe,” he said, “I have anything to say.”

  “Forget it,” snapped Griffin and sat down.

  But King still stood, his face crimson, his mouth trembling with anger.

  “Webster!” he shouted.

  Webster shook his head. “You came here with one of your big ideas,” shouted King. “You were going to lay it before the council. Step up, man, and speak your piece.”

  Webster rose slowly, grim-lipped.

  “Perhaps you’re too thick-skulled,” he told King, “to know why I resent the way you have behaved.”

  King gasped, then exploded. “Thick-skulled! You would say that to me. We’ve worked together and I’ve helped you. You’ve never called me that before…you’ve—”

  “I’ve never called you that before,” said Webster, levelly. “Naturally not. I wanted to keep my job.”

  “Well, you haven’t got a job,” roared King. “From this minute on, you haven’t got a job.”

  “Shut up,” said Webster.

  King stared at him, bewildered, as if someone had slapped him across the face.

  “And sit down,” said Webster, and his voice bit through the room like a sharp-edged knife.

  King’s knees caved beneath him and he sat down abruptly. The silence was brittle.

  “I have something to say,” said Webster. “Something that should have been said long ago. Something all of you should hear. That I should be the one who would tell it to you is the one thing that astounds me. And yet, perhaps, as one who has worked in the interests of this city for almost fifteen years, I am the logical one to speak the truth.

  “Alderman Griffin said the city is dying on its feet and his statement is correct. There is but one fault I would find with it and that is its understatement. The city…this city, any city…already is dead.

  “The city is an anachronism. It has outlived its usefulness. Hydroponics and the helicopter spelled its downfall. In the first instance the city was a tribal place, an area where the tribe banded together for mutual protection. In later years a wall was thrown around it for additional protection. Then the wall finally disappeared but the city lived on because of the conveniences which it offered trade and commerce. It continued into modern times because people were compelled to live close to their jobs and the jobs
were in the city.

  “But today that is no longer true. With the family plane, one hundred miles today is a shorter distance than five miles back in 1930. Men can fly several hundred miles to work and fly home when the day is done. There is no longer any need for them to live cooped up in a city.

  “The automobile started the trend and the family plane finished it. Even in the first part of the century the trend was noticeable—a movement away from the city with its taxes and its stuffiness, a move toward the suburb and close-in acreages. Lack of adequate transportation, lack of finances held many to the city. But now, with tank farming destroying the value of land, a man can buy a huge acreage in the country for less than he could a city lot forty years ago. With planes powered by atomics there is no longer any transportation problem.”

  He paused and the silence held. The mayor wore a shocked look. King’s lips moved, but no words came. Griffin was smiling.

  “So what have we?” asked Webster. “I’ll tell you what we have. Street after street, block after block, of deserted houses, houses that the people just up and walked away from. Why should they have stayed? What could the city offer them? None of the things that it offered the generations before them, for progress had wiped out the need of the city’s benefits. They lost something, some monetary consideration, of course, when they left the houses. But the fact that they could buy a house twice as good for half as much, the fact that they could live as they wished to live, that they could develop what amounts to family estates after the best tradition set them by the wealthy of a generation ago—all these things outweighed the leaving of their homes.

  “And what have we left? A few blocks of business houses. A few acres of industrial plants. A city government geared to take care of a million people without the million people. A budget that has run the taxes so high that eventually even business houses will move to escape those taxes. Tax forfeitures that have left us loaded with worthless property. That’s what we have left.