Lowland Rider (6 page)

"What, man?"

"Let me die. Kill me."

He hated them, but it was a weak hate, enervated by despair. He had fallen so far that the desire to strike the darkness at the bottom was far greater than his hatred.

"Kill you? That what you want?"

"Yes."

"Man, what you
wanta
die for? Man, that's sick."

"Spic. Spic asshole. Motherfucker." Jesse said the words dully, to enrage Luis, to make him throw up the gun and fire and send Jesse into that deep, welcoming dark he so craved.

"Nice talk. Listen to this. This guy's, what is it, suicidal. You
wanta
die, huh? You feel pretty bad, right? Okay, you die. But we make it take a while, huh?"

"Luis," the short boy said, "we gotta get out of here. Somebody hear the shots and—"

"We go. But we burn this shit first. Manny, I seen some kerosene in the back. Get it." Luis narrowed his eyes and looked at Carlos. "You got some problems,
chickenshit
?"

"I got no problems."

"Then you get that
chickenshit
look
offa
your face."

They stood in silence until Manny came back with a two-gallon can of kerosene. "Throw it around, man. Get the place nice and wet . . . good, that's good. Hey, careful! Don't get any on our man here. We don't
wanta
grill him, we just
wanta
roast him slow like."

When Manny was done, the smooth surfaces of the room gleamed, the fabrics were darkened, the smell was sharply sweet. "Who got a pack of matches?" One of the boys handed a dog-eared book to Luis, who tossed it back into the boy's face. "A
full
pack, man! Got to be a
full
pack." He accepted another, examined it, and nodded approval. "Good. Okay. Now who got the purse and the wallets?"

"
Yo
." A hand held up the booty.

"All right. Out." They left obediently. Luis stood in the doorway and looked at Jesse. "You
wanta
die, you go ahead."

He struck a match, set fire to the pack, and tossed it into the room. It landed on a kerosene saturated couch, whose upholstery sprang into fiery life. Jesse watched it burn, watched as the yellow-blue flames crawled onto and across the carpet, enveloping more and more of the room. A door slammed, and when he looked back, Luis was gone. Jesse got ready to die.

The heat seared him, and he imagined his flesh was already burning, popping out in big bubbles that splashed blood geyser-like into the air. He saw the couch on which Donna lay burst into flame, and watched as her body glowed and darkened and disappeared in flame. He thought of nothing. His mind was empty of all but death, blasted by what he had seen and heard in what he expected to be the last hour of his life.

The fire had just begun to touch his daughter, and his mind was slowly becoming aware of how much the individual flames looked like fingers gently cradling his little girl, when the front door flew open and a breeze rushed in, making the fire leap up and roar dully. Then someone was at his side, and a knife flashed, and there was new pressure at the places where the ropes held him, and a voice:

"Fuck him, man, can't do this, ain't right, get you out of here, man, get you out…"

Carlos sawed at the ropes haphazardly, so that several times the knife slashed Jesse's wrists and legs, and each sharp pain sparked him, galvanized him into a clearer recognition of what was happening, what had happened, and why, so that by the time the ropes were off him, and he knew that he would not burn, he had become alive again, alive and full of hate.

His legs, though free, would not function, and he toppled sideways out of the chair. A grunt of pain escaped him, and he reached out toward the fleeing Carlos, who turned, looked back, hesitated, then came once more to Jesse's side. "Come
on
, man," he said, fitting his hands beneath Jesse's armpits, "we gotta get
out
."

Suddenly Jesse twisted in the boy's grasp, grabbed Carlos's left wrist with his right hand, and pulled him across the front of Jesse's body so that the body fell on his left side. As he scrambled for footing, Jesse's arms came up and down, smashing into Carlos's face. The boy moaned and went limp long enough for Jesse to find the knife. He opened the blade and began to stab.

Carlos squealed and tried to stop the knife, but it was useless. Jesse was far stronger, and Jesse was mad. The twists and turns of life and death had sidetracked rationality. He did not care that Carlos had come back at the risk of his own life to save him. The only thing that mattered at that moment was that Carlos was one of them who had done it, who had done everything, and he plunged the blade into the boy's face and chest and neck over and over, until they were both soaked with blood, and Carlos lay still.

By then, the flames were crawling around Jesse's feet. He folded the knife, jammed it into his pocket, and staggered out the door. Halfway down the street, he heard the first siren, and shambled back into an alleyway. It was dark and empty and cool, and he closed his eyes and fell onto the stones, letting their chill dampness soothe his aching body. He slept.

When he awoke, it was still night, although the dim light in the alley had another quality now. It was of a dark redness, like blood, and in its light Jesse's bloodied hands were black with a blackness one could fall into. He looked at his hands and remembered everything. Then he rolled over and vomited. When the sickness passed and he could think again, he thought first of Donna and Jennifer and of the fact that they were dead, gone away from him forever, and he began to weep. Rage took him, and he slammed his fists against the unrelenting stones until the sides of his hands began to bleed. Then he stopped, and remembered that he had killed the boy who had come back to help him.

The world was an open sore, and now he was no better than those who had hurt him. He saw the city as a great wound in which maggots teemed, thirsting for blood, and he was one among many, one of the filthy white grubs that clawed and burrowed. The killing had dehumanized him, and he felt filthy, as if he would never be clean again, regardless of whether or not the blood would come off his hands. He felt soulless. He felt dead.

He would bury himself.

He evaded the crimson eyes of police cars and fire engines by leaving through the other end of the alley. There was still change in his pocket, enough to get a subway token with which to get back to his apartment. He went through the night, all the way from the Bronx to Manhattan, with blood on his hands and clothes. But no one said a word to him about it, so he knew that he was dead and unseen. No one who shared his subway car looked at him, no one noticed him on the street, even the doorman in his building sat with his back to him and did not look up as Jesse stepped into the elevator.

In his apartment he stripped off his clothes and washed until his body was clean. Then he walked naked from room to room. He picked up things that had belonged to Donna, that she had touched every day. He stood over Jennifer's crib, looking into it and seeing her there. He looked into the mirror for a very long time, memorizing himself, knowing that he would never be naked again.

From his chest of drawers, he took three pairs of underwear and three pairs of socks, two short-sleeved cotton T-shirts for summer, and two black wool turtlenecks for winter, two pairs of jeans, a wool stocking cap, and a lightweight, down-filled jacket. He picked up a color photograph of Donna and Jennifer from the nightstand, set it on the bed, then put it back where it had been.

"No," he said quietly, even that small word making his battered jaw ache.

A brown leather shoulder bag was in his closet. He got it out, opened it, and fit the clothes inside. As he zipped the bag shut, the telephone rang. He looked at it, but did not answer, and eventually it stopped ringing. Then he sat down and waited for morning.

Just after dawn, he drank some milk and ate a few slices of bread. At nine o'clock he dressed in a suit, and put the bag over his shoulder. The last thing he ever did in the rooms he had shared with his wife and child was to take the bankbooks from the china closet and put them into his pocket.

His bank opened at ten o'clock, and he closed out the checking account and the savings account he had opened with his father's insurance money. The bank employees were doubtful and suspicious, but Jesse's credentials were in order, and they gave him the money grudgingly, over fifty thousand dollars in twenty dollar bills and ten rolls of quarters. These he added to the contents of his shoulder bag.

The morning was cool as he walked the twenty blocks to Penn Station. He watched the people he passed more closely than he ever had before, and saw greed in the grim faces of the men, hardness in the painted faces of the women. He was glad to be dead, glad to be going under the ground where they all, every one of them, were dead.

The station was crowded with people hauling suitcases on wheels, and Jesse thought the noise they made sounded like hundreds of squealing rats. He went down a hall toward a subway entrance until he came to an alcove housing a wall full of metal lockers with a decal of an eagle, wings spread, on each one. There was a restroom nearby, and he went into it. A young black man stood at a urinal. He glanced at Jesse, then back at his own reflection. Jesse entered the booth at the far end of the row and took off the suit, folding it neatly, and put on one of the pairs of jeans and black turtlenecks he had in his bag. Then he put a small wad of twenty dollar bills and a handful of quarters into his pocket and zipped the bag shut. When he came out of the booth the black man was gone.

Jesse left the restroom and walked back to the lockers, where he selected one in the top row. He put the folded suit and shoulder bag into it, dropped two quarters into the coin slot, and closed the door. He drew the key from the lock and looked at the number on both it and the locker itself. 4602.

He put the key into his pocket and walked to the subway entrance, where he purchased a dozen tokens. Pushing through the turnstile, he walked to the platform for the IND uptown local. When it arrived, he stepped on and sat down.

The ballad of the Lowland Rider had begun.

PART

2

Home he did ride, and woe betide

When he saw what was done.

He swore to rend the killers' flesh

Before the day was done.

Then did he ride
ower
countryside

Until the
murthering
crew

Came into sight, and he did fight,

And every man he slew.

But in the midst of
bonie
brawl,

A young child by perchance

Did enter in, and bold Gordon

Nae
gave him half a glance,

But struck with speed, too late to heed

The father's warning cry.

In coldest
grue
the child he slew,

And tears came to his eye.

Loud Gordon wailed when he beheld

The boy to whom he'd
giv'n

A deadly blow, and made to go

Unto his Lord in Heav'n.

"I have brought death to this sweet
bairn
,

As death was brought to me.

For
Jesu's
sake, the law should break

Me on the gallows tree."

Away he rode into the night,

And stopped within a glen,

And there he swore to hide away

From sight of living men . . .

—Jamie Gordon, the Lowland Rider

There was no poetry in the subway. It was composed of surfaces with no rhythms. In the stations, tile predominated, the color of old men's teeth, and beneath one's feet cement, never clean, stretched
snowlike
in all directions, into distant chambers, up toothy steps, down into maws that seemed volcanically lit, with tongues of yellow fire. It was a cavern of flatness, with the omnipresent crevasse of the tracks, a canyon dropping into darkness.

Within the tile walls, and deeper in—inside the glass and metal tubes that burrowed through the lightless tunnels—the people moved, and stood, and sat, each of them lost within themselves as well, twice-buried. The floor drew their sight, or books, or newspapers, the concentration on which steadied them, held their center, while without they were rattled and whirled down black paths, shunted from one dark region to the next. Eventually they rose, left the false light, and ascended into day.

But there were some who never ascended, or, if at all, only infrequently. The pit was their home. They had learned to live with walls all around them, the stench of urine, the grayness at their feet, with the sounds of crashing wheels, of huge blocks of air displaced by the rush of the trains. They survived on the debris of the surface dwellers, of food discarded, money lost, occasional generosity. Often they stole, often they were caught, and just as often were set free again to scurry back to their holes. Most of them were mad, but the city had run out of room for its madmen, so they wandered the streets, and sank like stones into the tunnels for shelter from the rain and snow, and the discouraging presence of the sane. The passengers feared them. The transit police tolerated them and pitied them, and sometimes fed them. They dubbed
them
"skells," walking skeletons, dwellers with death, denizens of the city's large grave.