This City Is Ours by Denis Pitts

Author:Denis Pitts [Pitts, Denis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Media
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

33

The cigar-smoking driver of the twenty-ton snowplow reversed the giant vehicle for the hundredth time that morning, gunned his engine, released the heavy clutch and charged full tilt at a solid bank of snow. There was a bone-jarring, brain-numbing crash and the machine, its eight-foot high wheels screaming and smoking against the snow and road surfaces, moved forward another twelve feet until the impacted snow turned into the density of metal and stopped it.

The driver climbed down from the cabin and another man took his place.

“You can’t take more than ten minutes,” the first driver shouted up at him. “It’s a killer. Knocks your eyeballs forward two inches every time you hit the snow.”

Behind the snowplow, waiting impatiently in a line that stretched halfway across Brooklyn Bridge, stood a bizarre regiment of vehicles; garbage trucks with their snowplows poised; street-cleaners filled with salt solution; municipal and private buses; ambulances; fire engines and, in between them, the inevitable private cars driven by citizens who had chosen to drive to work that morning.

Ben Boyle had left City Hall to watch the operation and was talking to one such citizen, slumped low in the seat of his car.

“Just what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” said Ben. “Didn’t you hear the appeals? Don’t you listen to the radio?”

“I gotta get to work,” the man said.

“What the hell sort of work?”

“I’m an undertaker. They said there was a lot of dead.”

Ben looked at him coldly.

“Pity you couldn’t be digging some of the poor bastards out instead of filling them in,” he said.

The Mayor walked along to the third vehicle in line, a mobile canteen, where the snowplow driver was drinking coffee.

“How’s it going?”

“Hey, Ben Boyle! I mean, Mayor Boyle. How’re you doing, Mr. Mayor?”

“How are you doing?”

The man chewed on his cigar, took it out of his mouth, and spat into the snow.

“I’ll tell you. There I was lying in bed this morning thinking who’s going to clean up all this snow with the sanitation men on strike, and I’m thinking who the hell cares, it’s warm in bed, and there’s Frankie Schenk on the radio telling us to go back to work. Hey, Mr. Mayor, what did you do to Frankie?”

Ben’s answer was drowned by the scream of the lead snowplow.

*

It was just after twelve noon. Ben found the note on his desk.

“Mr. Mayor.

I’ve gone to get you some chow. This is what’s happening.

1. Captain Cusp wants you at a tanker conference at 12:30 in the planning committee room.

2. Van Horn says he’s having trouble with the computer frequency and wants to talk to you about his second plan of attack.

3. Detective Owen says he may have a lead on the money source.

4. Mrs. Stonybridge says she’s managed to raise forty billion, but she isn’t hopeful about the rest.

5. The Governor is on his way from Albany with a retinue of experts. He’s declaring a state of emergency and wants you to call a press conference. For him, that is.

6. Jane Landesmann says that her northern army has reached 42nd Street.

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