Metropolis (16 page)

The baby, may it rest in peace, was not just any baby. She was a Why Not—or would have been, could have been, when she’d grown up. Her mother was none other than Maggie the Dove, the very same pickpocket, panel thief and hit woman who’d so recently been hawking corn and spying on Harris.

Maggie had always been a maverick, even before she fell in with Dandy Johnny and joined the Why Nots. She’d tended bar, turned a few tricks when she needed the money, drunk whiskey moderately, danced with whom she pleased. She met Johnny shortly after he took over from Googy Corcoran, and she was perfect for him: just as pretty, just as tough, both of them with wet red lips and shiny black hair. But what drew her to him were the rumors she’d heard that the gang he ran with had some kind of reformist bent—suffragist, communist, something like that—meaning that they treated their girls as equals. She hadn’t imagined quite how different the Whyos were, though. She’d hardly known how to take it when, after a wild night of theft and drink and sex and finally the bliss of an opium pipe, Johnny told her he wanted her to meet his mother.

“Your mother?” she’d howled. “I thought you were tough.”

But he just smiled and said, “My mother’s everything to me, Maggie. I introduce all the girls to her. That doesn’t mean I ain’t a killer.”

Maggie went to see her, but she wasn’t happy about it. Johnny’s mother had looked Maggie over as if she were a horse and strangely enough asked her if she could sing, then sent the two of them on their way. It was a peculiar interview, to say the least. Their next disagreement was over his refusal to put her out to work the streets. “Why not, then?” she asked, incredulous. “You want to control my every move, Johnny? You worried I’ll enjoy myself? You jealous?”

He’d shrugged her questions off. “No, Maggie, do it if you want, but I won’t encourage it. You and I can make better money better ways.”

When she’d formally joined the gang, she learned what the vocal test had been about. And then his mother gave her a talking-to, the same talk she gave to all the new girls, and the peculiar rationale behind the Whyos and their oddities emerged.

“You only hook if you want to in the Why Nots. No man, no Whyo, not even Johnny is your boss—not in that sense. If you choose to do it, you turn in a share of your take, just the same as everyone, just the same as if you’d stole the money or forged it, no difference. And you won’t need a pimp to protect you. You’ve got Piker and Johnny and all the rest of us watching out for you at all times. The whole gang watches out for its own, and you’re expected to do the same.”

She’d been issued an eye-gouger, a nicer one than the average, since Johnny was so fond of her—it was brass with silver filigree—and with the aid of that device she’d come out on top of every battle she’d fought since. Maggie never hooked while she was with Dandy Johnny. She was too excited by his lean body to waste herself on sex with others, too busy working various peculiar schemes with him to find the time, too flush, thanks to their nightly hauls, to need the comparatively small change it would have brought. But Maggie was a practical woman, and after her affair with Johnny abruptly ended, she went back to the streets from time to time. At first, allowing some cad from Poughkeepsie to rough her up a little had soothed the sting of Johnny’s dropping her the way he did, without explanation, when she had thought they were happy.

The baby of the culvert clog was sired by one of her johns—quite intentionally on her part. She’d wanted a boy in particular and spent a busy fortnight cruising the city for the handsomest prospects she could find. She tended to go for Johnny look-alikes with pale, smooth faces and glistening hair.

Her cohort was fairly shocked when they eventually noticed her stomach ballooning—it was well within the resources and repertoire of any Why Not to terminate a pregnancy, should the usual prophylactic measures fail. And notwithstanding the example of Johnny’s sainted mother, parenthood was not considered to be the ideal condition for a Why Not. When Maggie announced she wanted to keep the thing, people whispered
syphilis,
assumed she’d lost her mind, though really she was far too young for that symptom. Actually, those months were happy ones for her. She was alone when labor came on, as she’d wanted to be. Later that night, she told the circle of Why Nots gathered around her in her flat, where she lay in bed recuperating, of the stillbirth, with dry if stinging eyes: “It came fast and sudden in the privy. I couldn’t go for help.” (She never mentioned how hard she fought to suppress her cries and keep silent, to keep her options open to the last.) “Landed on the filthy floor there. He was perfect, only kind of blue, and he never kicked at all, never cried. Never breathed.” She looked away, to the wall. “There I was, and the baby was just dead. I was holding him, and I kissed his little eyes shut, and then I just . . .” She made a gesture of letting go, and the women blinked and looked away, each imagining a small, pale body falling down the hole and sinking in the putrid mire.

The Why Nots asked Maggie how she felt and she said, “Weakish,” but it wasn’t true. She felt much worse than weak. She’d told them it was a boy, but that was a lie. All of it was, except that the baby had come in the privy. The truth was, she’d gone there on purpose, when the time came, to be sure she’d deliver alone. And after she’d looked between the baby’s legs and seen that there was nothing there—a girl—she’d been quick and deliberate. She stuffed her handkerchief in the gawping mouth before it managed to cry and pinched closed the nose of her perfect, red-faced, writhing girl. That was the only time she’d cried. Maggie’d been around; she knew a girl’s life would never be worth living, much less a woman’s, should the child have made it that far. The disaster of her own life, she felt, was not to have been born a boy. It wasn’t true that she’d dumped the thing in the privy either, though that had been her plan, if the sex were wrong. She feared it might haunt her there, her baby girl, every time she had to go. It was late at night, and no one was about, and so she’d limped out and stuffed it down the gutter at the corner of her block. She’d pictured the baby riding a flood tide out to sea, and swimming with the dolphins, not sinking, not lurking for more than a year.

She wasn’t entirely wrong—it just took a lot longer. No one but McGinty would ever know it, but as he finally dropped his gaff he saw the small collection of bones sweep past him out to the harbor amidst a torrent of other debris. He was more or less an apostate, but McGinty said a small prayer blessing her passage, even as he passed on himself. Out in the harbor, where the daughter of Maggie the Dove came once again to rest, there were no porpoises, just eels and barnacles and piling worms, but it was better than the sewer, where McGinty had now taken the dead baby’s place.

The gust of air from the clog had extinguished his lamp. He’d crawled blindly a few yards away from the gushing culvert, back into the space under the manhole, but he never got a grip on the ladder’s first rung. His head dropped back. His mouth gaped. Hours passed. A pointed, whiskered nose sniffed his collar; a naked tail switched. Six legs landed on his mottled tongue and two of them began to preen feelers. A greasy brown oval a half an inch long ascended the supple thigh of his waders. That was that. McGinty had turned in his boots.

He’d died with his feet dry after all, if down in the hole. When they discovered his gaff hook a few yards away, protruding from the clean flushed bottom of the pipe he’d unclogged, they realized that McGinty had done it again. The sudden resolution of the flooding problem at about midday had not been their doing after all. They weren’t exactly surprised. That was what McGinty always did: entered a manhole no one else thought to, found a vacuum seal no one else believed existed, reamed the pipe, fixed the problem. But they were used to him coming around afterward, cackling and crowing and accusing the other foremen of incompetence. When he hadn’t shown up after the clear-up, they’d figured they’d beaten him to it that time and he was off sulking. But no. He stared at them from under half-closed lids in the shaft of light from the open disk of daylight above, gloating over one last piece of brilliant work.

And so, although normally the boots of a dead sewerman were in great demand, Mrs. Dolan hadn’t even asked if anyone wanted McGinty’s, just filled out a report on the condition of the deceased’s equipment and sent them to the stockroom to await the next new hire whose shoe size matched McGinty’s: twelve.

Harris didn’t know any of that when he first pulled them on, but a strange feeling of luck came over him: The boots were as comfortable as any piece of clothing he’d ever worn. He stroked the soft creases at the knees. He told himself that this job might be better than he’d thought.

The following morning, as soon as he hauled the boots out and began to suit up, there was trouble. McGinty’s boots were easily recognizable. They were older and more worn than anyone else’s, and there were details that marked them: the stitching, frayed threads, creases, a tarry blotch on the knee, the mended left suspender strap. Ever since McGinty’s death, the other men had been waiting with a kind of malicious anticipation to see which plebe would clomp out for roll call wearing the ghost of the gutters’ second skin. It was obvious to all of them that McGinty wouldn’t make a benevolent ghost.

Harris’s first partner was Jaimie Fergus, a lazy bully of a man with little skill or hydraulic insight, despite his five years’ service, and no inclination to teach Frank Harris anything. The first thing he said when they set out together was: “All right, Harris. Here’s the first and only rule: I stay between you and the hole at all times. I don’t want your ghost boots blocking my exit when things go wrong.”

“What could go wrong?”

“
What could go wrong?
You are a fresh body, ain’t you? How about flood, cave-in, gator, poison gas, explosion, mad dog, pack of rats, dead body? And they say vicious criminals hide out down here from time to time and kill whoever they comes upon—to silence ’em . . . not to mention McGinty.” He smiled. “All right then, so long as we’re clear. You first. Down the hatch.”

Harris was worried, but only for one of the reasons Fergus had listed. He was worried Fergus could be right that some other gang was working down there, having beaten the Whyos to the idea. Beatrice wouldn’t like that news, and he wanted to make her happy. It was also true that failure to bring back positive results might be bad for his long-term survival.

“All right,” said Fergus. “Go on—put your weight into opening that hole.”

The cover opened with some difficulty and a low, sonorous scraping noise. Harris looked for direction to the other man.

“Yeah, just as I thought,” said Fergus after a quick glance below. “This hole’s too narrow for me, so you’re going down alone.”

Fergus was indeed a large man, and Harris, assuming that a man had to fit in the sewers to hold a job as a sewerman, had been eager to watch how Fergus did it. But instead of seeing the behemoth fold himself up into a cricket as he’d imagined, Frank Harris now saw Fergus expand himself, rather like the blowfish on exhibit in the natural-history museum in Hamburg, all puffed up with hostility.

“What are you waiting for, your pal McGinty?”

Harris put a match to the wick of his miner’s lantern and strapped it to his head, then backed down the ladder, gaff and bucket clanking against the rungs. Down below, he applied his knowledge of shoveling snow to the problem of the silt and muck that had accumulated in the pipe. Despite the lantern, it was very dark. He had to kneel to work in the pipe, which was only four feet high, but he didn’t mind the tight quarters. A calm descended upon him. He’d seen plenty of nastiness on the farm, and in fact the wastewater here hardly smelled at all. It wasn’t very deep, really, and it ran slow and steady and cool. It pressed the legs of his boots against his skin, seeming to support him. He filled his pail, moved deeper into the tunnel and made trip after trip back to the manhole with bucket after bucket full of sludge, which Fergus hauled out, until finally he’d cleared half the distance to the next manhole. He tied the bucket one last time to the rope Fergus dangled and called up, “That’s halfway.”

“Come on up, and we’ll walk to the next hole.”

But Harris had begun to feel oddly safe in the dark. He was pleased with how his labor had already improved the flow. His ability to take pleasure in a job well done, any job, was one of his saving graces. He wasn’t going to mind being a sewerman, he realized. To Fergus he said, “I’ll meet you there.”

There was a brief silence as Fergus digested this; then he slid the manhole shut with a grinding sound. It was infinitely darker in the hole than before—the way the night was out on the Atlantic when the moon was new. Frank Harris thought about McGinty as he went. Soon, the bottom was once again thick with silt and debris. He filled his bucket and slogged it to the next hole. He saw the rusty ladder on the wall, but there was no shaft of light pouring down from the street above. Fergus should have gotten there much more quickly than he had. Could this be the wrong manhole? Could he have missed a turn in the short space of fifty feet?

The idea of being stuck down there was awful. What a fool he was, to think he knew his way, to think himself above the company of such a man as Fergus, to prefer a pair of haunted boots to a man, no matter what an ass. But he wasn’t afraid. He had his gaff and his lamp. The boots held him tight. He climbed up the ladder without much hope, unhooked his gaff from his belt and rapped on the bottom of the manhole cover. He could hear the rattle of carriages rolling along the street above, but there was no response. The weak beam of his headlamp shone on the round metal lid, and he thought of how hard it had been to pry the other manhole cover open, even from above. Still, he stayed calm. He was thinking that the Whyos’ idea of using the sewers as a getaway sounded better than it really was. This matter of not being able to get out from below would pose a fundamental problem. Then he tried to imagine Dandy Johnny’s reaction to the depth of the water, the lack of headroom, the sludge. He was thinking that the sewers didn’t have half the romantic cachet of the old brewery. If he told them the truth of it, maybe this job would end sooner than expected, and he wondered what the consequences of that would be for him. What should he tell Beatrice, he wondered, the truth or what he thought the Whyos wanted to hear?