The City Packers

The shoes were the strange thing.  There were just so many of them.  Women’s pumps, men’s flats, little baby booties, glitzy stilettos and pennyloafers mixed haphazardly with old riding boots, steel-toed Timberlands and dainty ballerinas.  They piled high in the pristine City garbage bins, lay strewn through the elegantly cobbled streets and intersections, and were clumped lazily together in huddles and puddles on the neat squares of green grass spaced evenly along the roadsides.

As Norman walked among the wreckage, he noted how quiet the morning was.  No birds sung merrily to greet the dawn, only just now breaking over the perfectly symmetrical hill on the east side of town.  No music strained out through the tightly closed windows of early risers, no joggers were out experimenting with the feel of the air in their lungs.  It would be a cool day, with perhaps a 24% chance of rain.

Norman wondered if the City at large would ever really feel the missing presence of the Packers.  He guessed that by the time anyone looked out their windows, perhaps a little later today than they ever had before, the shoes would be gone.  Vanished.  Banished.

 ******************************

Norman laughed out loud.

“You’re joking!” he finally sputtered, sloshing his drink on the glassy, bruised and battered surface of the pub booth table.

“I ain’t,” Finley muttered defensively.  The man was small enough to start with, but he was practically burying his face into the table, hunched over and muddy cap pulled low over his eyes.

“The Mayor?  Actually meeting the Packers?  Himself?  Why, you tell me, would anybody believe that?  What purpose could that possibly serve?”

“He’s trying to oust ‘em.  He don’t want no low-lifes around the City.”

Norman considered this.  It did sound like something the Mayor would do.  But it was hard to argue with results, and in the 2 years and 4 months since Mr. Ron Goodman had become Mayor, the City had grown in prestige by leaps and bounds.

“Well, maybe it’s a good idea, then.  What did everyone say about the fountain the Square?  Now it’s always busy, and we’ve gotten traders from as far as Northland, with real crystal cups!  Never thought I’d see the day.”

Finley looked up sharply, then down again.  “No, never thought I would, neither.”

Norman reached over and slapped Finley’s shoulder.  “Cheer up now before you bring a storm cloud in here.  What’s so bad about the Packers leaving?  So they clean up the place when no one’s looking.  They’re dirty and probably diseased, vampiric and poor.  I left a hat once, my favorite hat, on a park bench on 3^rd Avenue.  Not two minutes later I came back for it – POOF!  Gone.”  Norman dusted off his hands dismissively before leaning closer to Finley.  “I could have used one fewer Packer that day.”

Finley slid out of the seat, hands deeply disappeared into his front pockets, shoulder hunched up to his ears.  “I just gives you the news.  It’s you decides what’s fit to print.”

  ******************************

Norman stumbled through the iron door, the hand extended to catch the supportive doorframe not quite connecting.  It was good to be outside again, breathing fresh clean air.  He took several appreciate gulps, then let out the last one slowly, clearing his head.

Finley followed him out a few paces behind, assured of his footing and his place.  He stopped a few feet away, hands in his pockets, balancing on his small short spindly legs like a stork.

Norman gasped a final time, shocked again by all he had seen.  “I wouldn’t have thought air could feel so different.  It’s so thick down there, so gray.”

Finley didn’t move.

“And the things!  Why do they keep all of those things?!  Piles of it – mountains of it - higher than you can see!  What’s their purpose?  Why don’t they get rid of them?”

Finley shrugged.  “They fix some ‘n break some others, puttin’ pieces in parts of other things.  Some they sell in other cities, other towns.”

Norman looked up at the sky.  It was overcast, as it always was, but here and there bits of dark, star-streaked heaven was visible.  He felt calmer now.  He remembered how organized it was, even amidst the piles.  Clean countertops, brooms in well-swept corners, children running ragged in spotless, neatly darned clothing.  They hadn’t been overly friendly, but they hadn’t immediately disdained him, either.  Although he wished Finley had warned him that feather caps were not the polite thing to wear inside the Hill, where the Packers…well, lived.  Lived is what they did, and lived pretty well, although in a deep, dark town inside the Hill.

“They seemed…happy enough…down there.”

“It’s a home, see?  Nobody bothers ‘em much.  They can come ‘n go, ‘n have their children ‘n collect their things, ‘n spend the rest of their lives fixin’ and tweakin’.  Or could.”

Norman nodded.  Or could.

  ******************************

The sun peaked at last over the Hill where the Packers once lived, and Norman thought he could even make out the barest hint of the iron door, left open and hanging, abandoned, on the hillside before he heard the noise.

It began as a grumbling, rumbling, croak of a roar, gradually getting louder until a strange contraption turned a corner and came into Norman’s line of sight.  It was an ugly thing, a conglomeration of whirlybobs and metal tongs and wheels.  But that would change.  This was just a prototype, a first crank at the replacement.  The tongs came down and began picking up the shoes, the movement quick and fast, shoes disappearing into a vast shiny steel center.  It worked for a few minutes, and Norman watched it, curious what would happen.  The machine’s center was only the size of a large beer keg, and the shoes stretched on in every direction, large and small, work shoes and summer shoes, flats and wedges and boots, down every street of the City, he was certain.  It would take a lot of trips to the Hill before the work was done, and before too long the town, already sleepier than normal, would have to get up and begin the day.  How many of these machines were there?

As the machine piled shoes inside, its mechanical whirling grew louder.  Then, suddenly, a lid slid across the central vat, the machine stood up straight, and Normal heard sound like a vacuum before a small pop.  The lid opened, and a trail of smoke emerged.  Without a pause, the machine began placing shoes inside the cavity once more.

Norman watched it.  Behind it, occasionally, he could see similar contraptions on the other streets, picking up shoes and vaporizing them.  He had been right – the City citizens would never so much as trip on a single shoe this morning.  How did they know to stay inside, curtains drawn, windows closed?

“Ain’t it pretty?” Finley asked, behind him.  “A whole swarm of ‘em machines can clean the city, and get rid of the garbage for good.  None of it hidin’ inside a mountain.  Nice change.  No dirty, diseased people around, neither.”

“Yeah,” Norman responded.  They stood in silence, watching.

“Why shoes?” Norman asked.

Finley shrugged.  “Dunno.  Reckon they’re heavy, that many shoes.  But here,” he pulled a squashed gray rag out of his pocket and handed it to Norman.  “This is for you.”

As Finley slouched away, Norman looked at the thing in his hands.  It was a hat.  A hat he had lost on a park bench on 3^rd Avenue.