Lowland Rider (23 page)

He clasped his hands at the back of his neck and pulled down, as if he wanted to tear off his head. "I
musta
hurt her, she was so little. But she didn't cry, not at all. After she went to sleep I thought about what I'd done. And I thought about
killin
' myself, but I was scared to.
Y'see
, I never knew that I felt that way, I'd never had the chance before, and it scared me somethin' awful, like lookin' in the mirror and
seein
' a monster
starin
' back at you. And I worried the little girl might say somethin' to somebody, my wife might find out and other
people'd
know too, and it wouldn't mean just not
bein
' a preacher anymore, but
goin
' to jail if I didn't get hung first. But then I wondered what if she
didn't
say
nothin
', and maybe she wouldn't. And I thought about my little baby
comin
' along, and I thought about what if it was a little girl. And I couldn't bear that thought, 'cause I had to think about what I might do to
her
, and when I thought about that I went outside and I threw up, hard. And I knew I had to go away, go somewhere where I wouldn't be tempted never again. But I couldn't
jes
' go away and leave my wife there in the hospital, not
knowin
' what might happen to her. So I waited through that night, not
sleepin
' at all. Next morning I called up the hospital."

Rags broke off, cleared his throat, wiped his eyes with a dirty sleeve. "She was dead, Jesse. My wife was dead. Died toward morning. I knew it was my fault, knew it was God's punishment on me, knew how he couldn't let me have a daughter of my own, so he took her, and took my wife too, so as to punish me.

"Now there was
nothin
' to keep me there,
nothin
' at all. I took enough money to get me here, and got on the bus to New York City. I come down here, and here I been ever since."

Jesse looked at him without expression. "And the rags…"

"Just wanted to wrap this poor body up, keep it covered away. Keep it
always
covered away.”

“God, Rags. God, I'm sorry."

"No more than me. Now you know, Jesse. You know why I ain't ready to die yet. 'Cause when I do, I go to hell."

"No, Rags.
This
is hell. When you die, you leave it.”

“I can't believe that, Jesse. That goes against everything I ever believed."

"You believe good works save souls, Rags?”

“I … I don't know. Maybe they can."

"I'm doing good works, Rags. I'm taking away bad money from a bad man. You help me, who knows? Maybe God will smile on you, maybe forgive you."

"I don't know life works that way, Jesse."

"I don't know either, Rags. I'm just making this up as I go along. But it's worked so far. You wouldn't be doing harm, Rags. You'd be doing good. We can give it to people who need it. And I'll tell you one thing I do know. When you finally do die, Rags, you won't go to hell. That I know for a fact. Just believe in me. And help me. You'll feel better. Maybe you can even take off those rags."

The train shook them both. Rags looked at Jesse, tears cutting trails through the dirt on his face. "I won't take off my rags, Jesse. But I'll help you. Maybe I been scared of
goin
' to hell for too long. Been scared of too many things too long. But you tell me what to do. I'll help you now."

Jesse gave Rags forty dollars, which Rags took to a hardware store on Eighth Avenue. There he bought a cold chisel, a hammer, and a pair of compound leverage shears, which he brought back to Jesse, along with the change, in a shopping bag. He didn't ask Jesse where he had gotten forty dollars, although he wondered about it. Forty dollars was a huge amount of money to Rags,
weeks
worth of watching the concrete, of accumulating nickels and pennies and dimes. But Jesse had simply handed him two twenty dollar bills and told him what to buy, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and Rags did what he was asked. He gave Jesse the bag, and stood awkwardly while Jesse examined the contents.

"You really gonna do this, Jesse?"

"
We
are, Rags."

"What if he catches us?"

"We run. We're both very good at that. But he won't catch us. Now we've got to wait for a while. Meet me back here at four o'clock tomorrow morning. We'll do it then."

Rags rode and tried to sleep, but couldn't. It was as though he needed to practice watchfulness in preparation for what the morning would hold. He found himself thinking about Jesse Gordon, about what made him tick, what drove him. Jesse had changed so much from the wary, frightened man he had first met months before. He had come down into these tunnels to escape what had happened up above, to get away from the death of his family and the killing he had done himself. But instead he had come down here and begun to do more killing. Rags tried to sort it out in his mind, to get it to where it made sense to him.

Jesse was obsessed, that was the word. He was obsessed with Montcalm, and obsessed with Enoch. Obsessed, like that sea captain, named after King Ahab in the Bible, was obsessed with that whale, Moby Dick. Rags had found that book on a train and read it, though he skipped a lot of it. He guessed it was pretty much the same thing. That captain had lost his leg, and Jesse had lost his family. But where Ahab had the whale to go after, Jesse could only go after bad folks in general. It made sense, he supposed—as much sense as anything like that could.

Rags sighed and tried to stop thinking about it, then closed his eyes and tried to go to sleep. But the thought of Jesse kept coming back to him, and the lump on his neck started to hurt again. It had been hurting on and off for a couple of weeks now, and though Rags knew that he should follow Jesse's advice and see a doctor at a free clinic, he was afraid to, afraid that the doctor would tell him that it was a cancer and that it couldn't be cured. Rags had once heard that when tumors started to hurt, then it was too late to do anything about them. He didn't want to know that it was a cancer. He didn't want to hear that he was going to die, despite what Jesse had told him about not going to hell. The pain, and the fear of the pain, did not let him sleep.

At four o'clock, when he rounded the corner where he had last seen Jesse, Jesse was still there, standing as though he had never moved from the spot, holding the shopping bag in his right hand. He led Rags through a maze of tunnels and rooms into an alcove where a wall of lockers stood at the far end. "I've watched security," Jesse told him. "They come around every twenty-five minutes. It's more than enough time to get in and get the money."

"You gonna be loud?"

"Just at first. I've got to break through from inside my locker to
Montcalm's
with the chisel. From then on, no noise. Now stand over there, right at the entrance."

"What if somebody comes?"

"Then I throw the tools in my locker, drop in some quarters, shut the door, and walk out. I've got plenty of quarters."`

"How the hell you cut through that steel?"

"These are compound leverage shears. They use them on planes. Once I get a hole made, they'll cut through it like butter. Okay. Start watching."

Rags watched what was happening outside, but he watched Jesse too, as he placed the chisel an inch from the bottom of the inner wall of his locker and struck it with the hammer. A hollow crash came from the unsupported metal, making Rags wince. Another crash followed, and a third. It seemed to Rags that the clamor must echo through the halls and stairs, up into the very office of station security. "Jesse!" he hissed. "Jesus, man!"

A fourth crash sounded, and an instant later a metallic squeal grated on
Rags's
ears. "I'm through," Jesse said. "No more banging."

Rags watched him wiggle the tip of the shears through the hole he had made and begin to cut a circle through the steel. "How long this gonna take?"

"Be patient, Rags. Good things take time."

"Yeah, time. Like ten to twenty years for
breakin
' into that thing."

Jesse's only response was the
snip
snip
snip
of his shears as they made their way through the steel. "Damn," whispered Rags to himself. "Damn, damn,
damn
…"

Finally Rags heard the grinding of wrenched metal, a final, triumphant
snip
, and a clatter as the pie-shaped piece of steel fell to the bottom of Jesse's locker. He saw Jesse's arm disappear into the hole he had made, and heard a clunking sound as Jesse maneuvered whatever was on the other side. In another few seconds, Rags saw the end of a briefcase emerge through the hole, and Jesse angled it around, bringing it out the door of his own locker. He put the case into the shopping bag and dropped the hammer in beside it. Then he put the shears and chisel inside the locker, put more quarters in the slot, closed the door, and threw the locker key into a waste can. "This way we'll be sure," he told Rags, "that Montcalm gets the surprise."

They opened the locked briefcase with the claw of the hammer in an empty car on the downtown Sixth Avenue train. It was full of envelopes stuffed with money—mostly twenty dollar bills. "Damn, Jesse!" Rags hissed. "There must be hundreds here."

"Thousand, Rags. Thousands, at least."

They counted nearly fourteen thousand dollars. "What you gonna do with this?"

"You want some?" Jesse asked him.

Rags licked his lips. "Could buy a good meal for a change. I could go for that."

"Take what you want then. But not more than you can spend in a day. After all, you don't want to be caught with stolen money on you, do you?"

Rags laughed uncomfortably, but took two twenty dollar bills. "What you gonna do with the rest?"

"Give it away," said Jesse. "I don't want to be caught with it either. I'll give it back to the people it came from."

"What? You mean them dopers, the junkies?"

"No. The people the junkies got it from in the first place. Redistribute the wealth, Rags. Do I sound like a communist?"

"I don't know what you sound like, Jesse Gordon. You sound crazy is all."

Jesse smiled, dumped the contents of the briefcase into the shopping bag, and slid the empty briefcase under the seat. "Go get yourself a good meal, Rags. I'd join you, but I've got some money to give away."

~*~

Father Richard
Mulcahy
was returning to his parish in Gramercy from a visit to a parishioner who was dying of cancer in Lenox Hill Hospital. The priest was weary and depressed, and had just closed his eyes to try and steal a brief nap when he became aware of someone standing next to him. He opened his eyes and saw a young man in T-shirt and jeans, carrying a large shopping bag. Father
Mulcahy
tensed as the man reached inside it, then relaxed as he saw that the stranger held nothing more threatening than a thick, white envelope, which he held out to the priest.

"Here, Father. For the church."

Mulcahy
didn't understand. In his fourteen years as a priest, he'd never had anyone come up and give him anything on the subway. "I'm sorry? I . . ."

"Take it, Father. At least I know you're straight." The man dropped the envelope into the priest's lap, and walked into the next car.

Father
Mulcahy
opened the envelope and saw that it was stuffed with twenty dollar bills. The first thing he did was to look about sharply to see who might have noticed the gift; the second was to thank God; the third was to get off at the next stop and take a cab, more expensive but more secure, the rest of the way to his parish house.

~*~

Rennie
Russell was blind and old and poor, and sold pencils out of a coffee can in the 50th Street station. When he heard footsteps coming toward him, he called out "Buy a pencil, fifty cents," and heard the sound of one being lifted from the can. He held out his hand, but instead of two quarters he felt someone press a wad of paper into his palm.

"They're all twenties," a voice said. "Don't let anyone tell you any different."

"Hey, what—" But the footsteps clicked away.
Rennie
fingered the paper. It had the limp,
raggy
feel of money, and was the right size too. He counted it, and found there were twenty-five bills. If the man was telling the truth, that meant there were five hundred dollars here. He'd take it to the bank. They wouldn't cheat him at the bank.

Five hundred dollars, he thought in amazement. For a
pencil
. That man must've had a story he wanted to write down real bad…

~*~

Jeanette Lewis's baby was sick. She was riding home from the doctor's office, holding her son in one arm and the doctor's bill with the other, reading it again and again and wondering where she was going to get the money to pay not only for the office call, but for the treatments that had to follow. She had just begun to cry softly when a man sat next to her, said, "You look like you could use this," and handed her an envelope. Thinking it was a religious tract, she shook her head and looked the other way. But when the man said, "It's money," she looked at the envelope again, then at the man's face.