Metropolis by Elizabeth Gaffney Read Free Book Online Page A

shadows flickered. The room was quiet and unfamiliar. Gaslight illuminated the counter, and orange coals glowed through the nearby grate. Something had stirred him. He looked to the far corner and saw the clerk at the desk beckon at him.
    “You. Yeah,
you.
”
    He had been called.
    “Yes, sir.” Hands on thighs, optimism rising, he stood.
    “You been here all day. Didn’t you sign in? Don’t you realize we’re closed?” He looked about and saw that the other benches sat vacant and the hall was empty but for himself and the clerk. The optimism dwindled away. The man was just kicking him out.
    “Sorry. Sorry, I’ll go.”
    “No—wait. Turns out you’re lucky. See, I only let you snore because of the rotten weather, but now it seems
I’m
lucky. You noticed the snow? Well, someone at Street Cleaning only just looked out the window, and they sent a boy over here with an order for an overnight shoveling crew—just in time for closing. So what about it? Shoveling snow for the city. You want the job?”
    It took him a moment to follow. “Snow, a job, shoveling,” he repeated, and then he understood. “
Ja, danke, danke,
” he said.
    “Is that a yes? You better stop speaking Dutch and learn some English.”
    He thought of the pink, tissue-thin, new-grown skin on his hands.
    “Yes. Yes, sir.”
    “All right, good. You can start now and go till the regulars show up at six, see? Anyway, you’ve had your beauty sleep, and I think I can tell from looking that you ain’t got evening plans.”
Beauty sleep?
the stableman wondered.
Evening plans?
He wasn’t sure how he should respond.
    “Or don’t you want a night job? You want I find some other lug?”
    “A lug? No . . . or, yes. I mean, yes, I’ll do it—and no, no one else.”
    “You’ll take the job.”
    “I’ll take it.”
    “Good. The thing of it is, you’re the only man left. You think you’re man enough to shovel the city alone?”
    “The city, alone?” He thought a moment. Perhaps it was a joke. “That would take a long time, sir,” he finally said. His English might have been better if only the few people who talked to him had made more sense.
    “You’re right, it would. So, first thing you do is round up, say, twenty men and take ’em down to the dock at Coffee House Slip, East River off of Wall Street. You’ll get the carts and shovels there and sign up with the fellow at the office. The others get paid for the time they shovel, you get paid foreman’s wages, starting right now.”
    Foreman’s wages.
    “What’s your name?”
    “Geiermeier,” he said, and leaning over the clerk’s ledger, he saw it written out in the beautiful Gothic script he’d learned as a boy and pointed to the entry. “I signed in this morning.”
    “You got to be kidding. Is that how you say that? I must have tried to call you five times today, yesterday, too. I started to think it was Chinese, all that up and down and curlicue around, no way of knowing what letters is meant. Where’d you learn to write like that anyhow? You don’t know how to give yourself a leg up, do you?”
    A leg up
? Americans said much that he didn’t understand. He had listened almost obsessively to the names being called. But then the clerk uttered a strange, vaguely familiar word, and it dawned on him: This was how the clerk had been pronouncing his name, with the
g
misinterpreted as
h,
the vowels collapsed, the
m
transmuted, and the sounds and stresses generally so different from the actual pronunciation that it hadn’t even registered on him. He frowned slightly with frustration—how many opportunities had he missed in the past two days because of this?
    “That’s a
G,
” he said weakly, pointing to the page. “I never realized you were calling me.”
    “What kind of writing is that, Greek? You ain’t Greek, are you?”
    “It’s German.”
    “Aw, jeez. Now, there’s plenty of Germans in New York, and they seem to get along. But where are you going to get with a