Free Sundance by David Fuller Page B

were finished here, dismissed as obsolete. Motorcars and cruelty crowded them out.
    He watched locals in their stop-start dance crossing streets, never following a straight line, never getting too far without a compensating step back. The streets had rhyme and meter.
    He was surrounded by true skyscrapers, sharp-edged monsters jutting through the ground to thrust into sky, and he cricked his neck in appreciation. Over time he would learn their names, Flatiron, Metropolitan Life, Park Row, Singer, and the fact of their being named spoke of their peculiar hold on men’s imaginations. Yet it was a building in the distance, glimpsed while crossing a street, that grabbed his ownattention. It was unfinished. He was drawn to the visible guts of the skyscraper. The base was finished, a stone façade ran up dozens of stories to a rectangular extension, maybe half the size of the bottom, partially covered with the same façade. Above that was an unfinished skeleton of naked steel beams. Yet another, smaller rectangular skeleton crowned that, the penultimate step to the sky before reaching a framework spire.
    The bones of the beast beckoned and he went, knowing it was a long walk, but at least it was in the same southerly direction as her boardinghouse.
    As he walked, he learned to mimic the city’s beat. He saw men dressed in coats and waistcoats, in top hats or bowlers or skimmers. He saw other men, young, proud, and muscular, in overalls and black slouch hats. He saw women in the sort of clothing that was more revealing than he expected and knew he had been away a long time.
    Reaching the building’s base, he encountered a sign that named it Woolworth. A foreman waved him off. “Back away, buddy, men working here.”
    Longbaugh looked at him and didn’t move.
    The foreman gave it right back. “Nice hat, ‘dude.’” Longbaugh didn’t react to the insult but he felt the challenge. The foreman turned away.
    He angled his head to see the top. Something caught his eye that he initially identified as a swooping bird, but it was falling in too straight a line, coming directly down, and he watched it drop all the way to the sidewalk. It landed a few feet from him, a newsboy cap. He stepped over to it, and looked up to the top of the building, from where it had come. He thought of Etta’s jubilant hat dropping. He picked up the cap, turned it over in his hands and felt himself smiling. He looked at the foreman, who was checking a ledger, then he looked to the outside wall where a freight elevator waited for a final stone slab to be secured. Men smoked there, sitting or leaning on the stone pile in the elevator, waiting to ride. He went behind a stack of concrete sacks by the wall and stowed his cowboy hat and gear there. He tugged the newsboy cap onto his head,lifted a sack of concrete to his shoulder to block the foreman’s view of his face, and followed another worker in his own newsboy cap onto the elevator.
    He was lifted off the ground, knees bending at the force, watching the foreman’s outraged face vanish below, whisked up into unfenced air, a short step off the edge into nothing. He was high quickly, dizzy with the rise, now above the shorter buildings, now passing the taller. He looked across a full city that carpeted an island and spilled out over land that stretched beyond the rivers. A rush of wind snatched his breath and his chest went hollow so that he inhaled hard and filled up suddenly, and the massive city itself came into his lungs. In a matter of hours his idea of what was real and possible had changed. He now understood what the city could do for him. He looked at the bay, then at the rivers that girded the island. He saw the bridges men had made to conquer them. Dozens of ships lay in the miles of docks that fringed the shore and many more ships traveled the rivers, giant ocean liners with multiple smokestacks, old wooden ships with sails and rigging, ferries,