Sideslip

by Ted White

  A sudden pain struck me from behind in the kidneys. I started to swing around, a snarl on my lips. A small old lady was standing behind me, glaring. In her hand was an umbrella, still aimed at me. Light from the dim bulb over our heads glinted off white hair tinted green. “You get along there, mister!” she said, in a voice about as sweet as vinegar. “Whaddya think you are, huh? Causing decent folks more trouble!” A man behind her was staring indignantly at me over her shoulder. I smiled sheepishly, apologized for getting in the way of her umbrella, and turned back toward the station. The people hadn’t changed much, anyway.

  My mind kept right on churning. The future ... I couldn’t have been thrown too far into it. The subway cars looked about like those introduced in the 1950’s and 60’s, the language hadn’t changed at all. Except for that second language that kept popping up. It didn’t seem to be a popular language though. I’d only heard it twice, so far. Ten years? Twenty? Sooner or later I’d find out, I knew. Later I could try a library, check the back papers, find out what had happened. Right now that would be too risky.

  But knowing I was in New York helped. I knew where I wanted to go.

  Once in the station proper again, I headed for a pillar with a subway map on it. There were two maps, one above the other. The top one was in the other language, and I ignored it. The lower was identical to it, except for the English, and unfortunately, from my point of view, an even more stylized map than those of my day. There were no referents except for the outlines of the boroughs themselves, and part of New Jersey; no landmarks were shown at all. For all I could tell, they’d covered Central Park with skyscrapers and built two-mile-high buildings in the East River.

  Much of the map was familiar though. Most of the lines were exactly as I’d remembered them. But there were several new ones: a continuation of the IRT Flushing line along 41st Street, and west under the Hudson River to Hoboken in New Jersey; a branch of the IND that crossed the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey and turned north; and a new subway on Third Avenue, apparently finally replacing the old Third Avenue El, torn down back in the early ’50s.

  I climbed the stairs to the concourse, crossed it, and took another set of stairs down to the opposite side of the station, this platform for southbound trains.

  Soon a D train pulled in. I was so used to it by now that I wasn’t even surprised by the alien ideograph which preceded the big “D” on the front of the train. Across the way I could see passengers from the stalled train still emerging onto the opposite platform. They hadn’t yet finished their search of the train. I found a seat and allowed myself a soft grunt of satisfaction, as we pulled away from the station without any alarm being raised.

  Two stops later, I got off at 34th Street, and rode the new escalators up a couple levels, transferring to the uptown BMT. One stop north put me in the Times Square station, where I zipped back down a level or two to the Flushing IRT line, which had been indicated on the subway map as having a free transfer, three stops east, with the Third Avenue line.

  Once off at the Second-Third Avenue stop, I was in new territory. This station hadn’t existed in my time. I looked around for signs directing me to the other line. I took the only stairway up a short flight, and looked for stairs that would lead me back down to the connecting station. There were none. A sign—“Third Avenue El, Downtown”—pointed to another flickering escalator, leading up.

  I thought about that one for a moment. The original el had been torn down in the early 1950’s. It had been an eyesore, a relic of the past. It was the last el left in Manhattan, and its presence had fostered the original skid row, the Bowery, over which it ran from Cooper Square, where Third and Fourth Avenues merged, down to and beyond the Manhattan Bridge. They’d torn it down and let light into a street which hadn’t seen light or fresh air in fifty years. They aired it out, and began building big new apartment houses and office buildings, slowly shoving the slums back against the East River, where once the slaughterhouses had stood, and now the housing projects were catching hold, strangling the crowded, anthill slums and their unfortunate inhabitants with the inexorable grip of so-called Urban Renewal.

  It was unthinkable that they’d build another el again.

  This escalator was a much longer one. I stared up it, at the small, dim oblong of light which perched at its top.

  “Hey, buddy,” said a gravelly voice behind me. “Wassa matter? ’Fraid you’ll lose your balance? You had a little too much Happy?” A short, thick man with beetling brows and heavy grey hair, a dusty red suit with threadbare cuffs and collar, and a look of concern on his face stared up at me. “Hey, you’re a big feller, Mac. You had too much, you don’t wanta stand around here very long. A yellowjacket could come along any minute, and" I’d hate to see them grab a fellow Arkie just for being a little under the influence. C’mon, now—I’ll go up with you.”

  I let him walk me onto the bottom step, and off the top.

  I was standing on a concrete platform. Behind me was the enclosed area of the escalator. Only those details were new. The rest of the structure was old, over half a century old. It was as it’d been many years ago, when I’d lived on East 63rd Street, and taken the el downtown to the law school near City Hall, back when I’d been on the GI Bill, after the war. I’d ridden that el five days a week, for almost half a year, before I’d flunked out of school, and moved over to the West Side. I knew that el.

  It was the same soot-darkened, ancient, anachronistic eyesore they'd torn down more than a decade ago.

  “You sure don’t look so good, friend. You oughta go easy on that stuff. The Angels ain’t made life so bad you gotta kill yourself with their friendly little pills.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m okay.” I shook my head. “It’s all right.” I could feel the hair still bristling on the back of my neck.

  There was a rattling behind me, and then the platform began to vibrate, as a train rolled in. It stopped with a screech and a jerk which took the wholfe structure with it*

  “Not my train,” the man said. “Here.” He thrust his folded newspaper at me. ‘Take it. If you feel the stuff working again, you dan fake it like you’re snoozing into the paper.”

  I nodded, and glanced at the train. Its sides were shiny silver, corrugated stainless steel; inside, it was done in pastel colors. I climbed aboard, and felt the cool blast of air conditioning. “Thanks,” I said again over my shoulder.

  “Anything for a fellow Arkie,” the little man grinned, and then the doors slid shut.

  I sat down as the tfain started to glide out of the station. There w'as no sound in the car but the whine of the fans, and a very muffled clacketing of the rails beneath.

  I unfolded the paper and shook it wide.

  It was the Daily Mirror.

  The headline was “DODQERS TAKE TWO—Brooks Sweep All Four From Boston.”

  The date was July 31, 1968.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The hair lifted on the back of my neck. There was a frozen feeling in the pit of my stomach, and for a long moment I didn’t take a breath.

  I lowered the paper, and stared across the aisle. A man in barber-pole stripes was holding a paper with identical headlines.

  I skimmed through the first few pages of the paper. Some of the stories made sense. “Marilyn To Re-wed Joe? Rumors Not Denied” was understandable, if impossible. But “Northern Constituency Plans New Trade Agreement With Ha’lar: New Missions To Be Established” meant less than nothing. “President Taft Decrees Reconstituted Internal Defense Agency: Bob Sez Too Much Hoodlumism, Anti-Angel Talk.” That meant something.

  I turned to the sports section. Perhaps that would give me steadier footing. The baseball standings showed ten in each league all right—but there were no Mets. The new teams were Tokyo, Mexico City, Toronto, and Havana. None of the older teams had moved. Musial and Williams were still playing, and Roy Campanella was currently hitting .360 for the Dodgers.

  I refolded the paper and stared at its masthead. The New Yor
k Daily Mirror, it said. Volume 45, Issue 109.

  The Mirror had folded in 1963.

  And I was riding the Third Avenue El.

  The cards looked the same, but this was a game I’d never played before—there was no way of knowing what kind of hand I was holding.

  Yet, I had to start somewhere. Okay, the Third Avenue El. This was the same familiar old eyesore I’d known in years past. As I stared out the windows of the train, it was almost like I’d turned the clock back to the late forties. None of the modem apartment houses or office buildings I’d known existed along this Third Avenue; instead there were the same old begrimed tenements and loft buildings. Once in a while I’d see a building I couldn’t place, but that meant nothing. My memory isn’t that reliable anyway.

  So, granted, I was not in the future. I was still in the same hot July present that I’d started out the day in.

  But mixed in with the familiar New York City was a great deal that was not familiar—that had no business existing in 1968.

  So: I was in a 1968 New York, but not my 1968 New York.

  You see? It’s easy to work out. Just like in the detective stories: inductive logic. Two and Two equal Four—and if you keep getting Five, well, one of those Two’s is a Three. It just looks like a Two.

  So where in hell was I? I was so scared that I couldn’t think.

  Then the train pulled into the 14th Street station. A block over would be, if I was lucky, Union Square. And in my New York Union Square was a habitual congregating point for the bums and oddballs, and everybody who had a soapbox and wanted to stand on it. It seemed like a good place to try.

  I climbed up onto my feet and went out. Somebody had scrawled “The Midtown Chiefs” in grease pencil on one of the windows of the train.

  Union Square had once been the Times Square of New York City. Located between Fourth and Fifth Avenues above 14th Street, in the sort of anomalous “Square” created by the collision of the wandering Broadway with other avenues and common to Manhattan, Union Square had once been a rallying point of the city, just as 14th Street had once been Manhattan’s 42nd Street, its blocks to the east of the Square the site of many famous theatres and restaurants.

  But the city grew, moved uptown. Fourteenth Street became the lower boundary of the midtown shopping section, and grew tawdry. And Union Square, only a few blocks from the Bowery, became a gathering place for the bums and winos. Some came to sleep on the benches in the sun, others to argue among themselves and with the cracker-barrel philosophers who found them a readymade audience.

  If anything, the Union Square I found now was shabbier than it had been. The buildings surrounding the battered and trampled park were dirtier, more dilapidated and rundown. It looked as if the people hereabouts had just decided, “The hell with it; I’m taking this year off.” There was a fundamental lifelessness.

  I eased my bulk carefully onto one of the old benches. The bench’s only other occupant was an unshaven man in shabby old clothes. His hair was peppered with grey, but his age could’ve been from mid-thirties to late fifties. Once a man starts the trip down, it’s a tobogganing pace.

  I unfolded my paper.

  There was a shuffling noise and the bench shifted loosely on its rusted legs. The reek of wine was close.

  “Eh, Arkie? Got a dime for a feller what could use it?”

  I turned and looked at the man. His skin hung loosely on his thin face, the sallow look of a wino that sunshine couldn’t erase. His hand, outstretched towards me, was shaking slightly. His undershot lower lip echoed the quiver. But his eyes were blue and surprisingly steady.

  “Might. Might have more’n that,” I said slowly, deliberatingly. “Does it get very warm south of 14th Street?”

  “Mmmm?” The man’s eyes narrowed very slightly, then relaxed, got watery. He gave me a bleary stare. “Warm? Warm, hey. What d’y’mean, is there heat from Johnny Yellowjacket?” He shot me another close-eyed, appraising look. “Why, hell, even the Angels cain’t clean up the Bowery! Heh, heh,” he chuckled to himself, the thought apparently amusing him. “And why might y’be asking, Arkie?” he asked, almost in afterthought.

  I let a glum smile slide across my heavy face. “Let’s just say I’ve been working too hard, and I need a vacation. Know what I mean? Away from friends and— people who know a man. . . .”

  Again the sharp look. I was pretty sure I had the right man now. “Well, now,” he said with an expression that simulated a smile, “I reckon we ought to be able to fix you up with somethin’. You looking for a flop, eh?”

  “A nice, quiet one,” I said.

  “You come to the right boy,” he said. “I think you ’n’ me are gonna get along real good, mistuh. I know this whole area, like the back of my hand.” He chuckled. “Better.” He held up his hand. “I don’t reckon I’d pick it outa fifty others. . . .”

  “There may be a slight problem,” I said.

  A cloud passed over his face.

  “I, umm, had to leave home in a hurry.”

  “Yeah?” He could see it coming.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Left without my wallet.”

  The man’s face seemed to go vacant. “Sorry ’bout that, mistuh.” He made as if to pull away.

  “I took care of my mistake, of course,” I said, watching his attention return to me. “I lifted a wallet.” I pulled my wallet from my pocket. “My kinda luck,” I said. “All he had was this.” I pulled out the folding money.

  Some of the bills were early and mid-thirties silver certificates and reserve notes. Some were much newer. I wanted his reaction to it.

  The wino pulled the bills from my hand, shuffled through them. “Wonder where you, ah, he found this stuff. Didn’t know any was still floating around. ... You might get a good price from a collector; I dunno. Pawn it, ’s my- guess.” He passed the money back to me. “You got no yellowbacks?”

  I shook my head, and he looked wearily disappointed.

  Then, on a hunch, I dug into my pocket and pulled out a handful of silver. “Pulled some coins, too,” I said.

  He picked over the coins in my hand. “Les’ see. These must be yours.” He handed me an old fifty-cent piece and two worn quarters. A third he openly pocketed. “But this dime here—Roose-a-velt? And these halves. New dates; mighty strange.” He handed them back.

  “Thanks,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Umm, Joe. Just call me Joe.”

  “Thanks, Joe. You’re a real gentleman. You can consider that a down payment for your help.” I glowered heavily at him.

  “Listen, you won’t have no trouble with me,” Joe said. “Like you said, I’m a gentleman—Gentleman Joe, that’s me. Look—” He dug into his pocket. “Here’s your quarter—”

  “Keep it,” I said. “You’ll be earning it.”

  “Sure, sure, fella. Say, you know, I used to be in the business myself, onct. I used to pick up real good with jewels. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I’ve cleaned up plenty in my time . . . till the Angels started really clamping down, round 1950, and that was it, you know? I ain’t just got what it takes to buck them babies.”

  I stared at him, and his voice ran down into a slow whine.

  “You’re a strange one, Big Fella,” he said at last. “And I guess you can take care of yourself okay; I dunno why you need me, but I won’t ask no questions.” He leaned forward to accent his declaration, and the rank sweetness of wine washed over me again.

  We got to our feet, it being some sort of race between us to see who was going to be last. I was tired, emotionally drained—just keeping up the tough front for this wino was exhausting—and the surplus of adrenaline that had coursed through my system had left me feeling washed out in its aftermath. I could almost have gone to sleep there on that bench in the sun myself. Gentleman Joe, on the other hand, seemed to have the shakes worse than ever when he struggled onto his feet. He was shorter than I’d thought, too: no more than five-seven at the most. He gave his shoulders a weak shru
g, and his clothes fell into a slouch.

  “How’s about I pick up a l’l pint of sneaky pete?” he asked.

  I was about to answer when there was a sudden flurry of shouts from a crowd on a nearby walk. They were clustered around a short man whose grey hair was barely visible. He was gesticulating and waving his arms in the air. The crowd was an angry one; there were shouts and curses of protest. But what caught my ear was one unison shout that sounded like “Heil Hitler!”

  I started for the group, Joe trailing after me. He clutched at my arm. “Them Nazis,” he whined, “You don’t want nothing to do with them. Come on—let’s—”

  I shook my arm impatiently, and cut across the grass and between two benches. The crowd was moving back from the speaker now, and I elbowed my way to where I could see him, still conscious of Gentleman Joe at my back.

  There were actually two speakers. Both wore black uniforms decorated with silver piping and chests full of medals. Both had red armbands with white circles and black swastikas. The older one was short; he stood on a real box, and still was short. He was addressing the crowd in hysterical German. At every breath he’d pause, and the-other—a thin, ramrod of a man—would translate in a monotone.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the older man. He wore wire spectacles, and he looked more like a clerk than he did a Nazi rabble-rouser. He looked familiar. I kept staring at him until suddenly something clicked, and it all fell into place. Goebbels. It was Joseph Goebbels himself, one of Hitler’s high muckymucks!

  The little man was looking in my direction now; he seemed to sense my stare. His voice mounted in pitch. “The time will come!” the translator shouted. “And the time will come soon.” Goebbels stared directly at me. “At this very moment the Leader, the Fuehrer, has completed his final plans—”