Lowland Rider (9 page)

He started to speak, but his throat was tight. He cleared it and said, "Yes. Yes, I play. I can teach you."

If you teach me.

~*~

They taught each other. Although they each had much to learn, Jesse had more. His decision to descend into the New York City subway system had been born of despair and revulsion. He had seen the act as a suicide sees the ocean in which he will drown himself, as a haven, an end, a comfort, something to which all thought can be yielded, all effort surrendered. What Jesse Gordon had not reckoned with was that, unlike a suicide, he had chosen to live, and living beneath the city, he quickly discovered, was the most exacting and painstaking way to live that he had ever known.

It was not merely riding, floating on waves until the sea eventually pulled you under; there was no sweet sleep at the line's end. That was where you rose from sleeping, and struggled again to stay above the waves, because beneath them, instead of rest, were sharks and smaller, fiercer fish, who bit your flesh with barbed teeth when you let yourself go under, so that all you could do was stay afloat. Not try to stay afloat—there was no trying, for there could not be. You did it, and that was all.

I have found a friend here. It's absurd, ridiculous. If anyone had told me a month ago that my closest friend would be a black subway bum with an addled mind, I'd have called him crazy. Crazy or not, it's true. We're
both
crazy,
everyone's
crazy.

One thing is certain, though. If it wasn't for Rags—his name is Rags—I don't think I could survive the winter. I'm not sure I can even with him, but at least I've got a better chance. He is above all a kind man—dear, like a father at times in the way he treats me, and at other times like a child I must take care of. I'm certain there is something chronically wrong with his mind. He's extremely forgetful when it comes to general things like what month it is, but when it comes to the specifics of surviving underground, he is a master. Being with him, I almost feel like a student of Zen. His explanations are often as cryptic as those of some guru who speaks only in riddles, wanting his student, to figure out what the hell he's talking about. I'm afraid I'm just as great a mystery to him. It's amazing that we're able to communicate at all.

Yesterday he asked me, "You hungry?"

I told him I was. I hadn't had a bite in twenty-four hours. I wondered if I should offer to buy him a sandwich. I had the money—about ten dollars in my pocket, but then I wondered what he ate—and how. More to the point, I knew that if I expected to stay here, live down here for any length of time, I had better learn the ways of the place. I still feel like a stranger, and I wonder if I will ever be able to feel at home the way Rags seems to. I asked him what he usually ate.

"Oh, what I find," he told me. "Sometimes I get some money, I buy me a whole hot dog or cheeseburger or somethin'."

"A
whole
one?"

"Yeah. Most times you can find a half or a few bites tossed away, you look hard."

My stomach churned at that. "You eat what other people throw away."

"Sure.
Lotsa
soft pretzels down the Brighton Beach line, but it don't take long to get sick of that shit. Fill you up, though. You ever see one of them things get wet? Puffs right up like a sponge."

"You ever steal any food?"

"Try not to, 'less I'm real hungry. Bible says thou
shalt
not steal."

Rags quotes the Bible quite a bit, something I found surprising at first, until he told me he had once been a preacher. I didn't ask him how he ended up like he has. When and if he wants me to know, I assume he'll tell me, and till then, it's none of my business. "
Whatta
you feel like?" he asked.

I said it didn't matter, that anything was fine, and he suggested we get on the Seventh Avenue line and head over to Penn Station, that the food was good there.

I didn't like it. It meant leaving the subway, going up into the station itself. "How'll we get back on the lines?" I asked him.

From somewhere in the folds of his swaddling, he brought out two tokens. "With these," he said, smiling at me. "I always got tokens, just like I always got pennies. Other stuff shines, and people pick it up, but not pennies. Even they
see
pennies, don't
wanta
pick 'em up. Not worth
bendin
' over for a penny. Is for me, though. And tokens. They're dark, not so shiny. See it, think it's old gum or dog shit or somethin'. Not me, though. I can tell a token fifty yards off. People always
droppin
' tokens."

My argument went up in flames, but I thought, after all, Penn Station is still underground. There is something important to me about not seeing daylight, and I knew I wouldn't unless I went out to where the old ticket windows used to be, and I would be careful not to do that.

Penn Station, like the subways themselves, contains a mixture of people—businessmen, travelers, and a few skells, but not many. I felt terribly out of place there, mostly because of
Rags's
presence. My own appearance might be called scruffy, but not yet shabby, while Rags is unmistakably a derelict. I recalled that when I had taken trains out of Penn station I'd seen police rousting tramps and obvious psycho cases out of the terminal area and up onto the streets or down to the tracks below, and I asked Rags if we—while thinking he—wouldn't be bothered.

"Just keep
movin
'," he told me. "They see you
goin
' someplace, they hope it's out of their eyesight, so they leave you alone. Don't matter you move slow or fast, just
so's
you keep
movin
'."

We went up the stairs to the large, low-ceilinged room whose middle is taken up by the big call-board. Rags stationed us between the islands of seats where the passengers waited and the west stairways to the tracks. "We'll stand here, but you see a cop, you start
movin
'."

A few passed while we stood there, and when we saw them we moved, hugging the wall, going toward the subway entrance. They gave us the eye, but didn't say anything, and after they'd passed, we returned to our original location. After a while Rags nudged me, and I looked where he directed and saw a bearded man in his mid thirties sitting on one of the benches. He was hurriedly eating a hot dog and watching the call-board as the train information rolled. His arm was looped through the strap of his leather shoulder bag, and he balanced a bag of
french
fries in his other hand. When he ate a
french
fry he did so gingerly, with an expression of distaste. "He's the one," Rags said. "Watch me."

Rags stood beside me until the call-board started to change again. Then he walked purposefully toward the trash can nearest the man, who, simultaneously with Rags, stood up and moved toward it as well, thrusting his half-eaten sandwich and barely touched
french
fries into the paper bag. Rags didn't say a word—just stood by the trash can and begged the man with his eyes. The man's face soured, but he thrust the food into
Rags's
hand and disappeared down a track entrance. Chuckling, Rags returned to me.

"You pick 'em out," he said, holding out the wet and stringy
french
fries. I ate a few and thanked him. "Pick out the ones
eatin
' on the run don't look like they're
enjoyin
' it anyways. Know damn well they ain't gonna finish. Then, when their train comes, get between them and the garbage and get a little old puppy dog look in your eyes. Easier for them to give it to you than to step around you to throw it away." He held up the packet of ketchup and I shook my head. He tore it open and squeezed the entire contents directly into his mouth, so that I could see what was left of his teeth. It wasn't much.

As he threw the empty packet into the trash, I saw his face change, grow very cold. There was fear in it too. "Come on," he said, and moved toward the subway entrance.

I caught up easily. "What's wrong?" I asked.

"Saw a man we don't
wanta
meet."

The name came to me quickly. "Enoch?"

"No, ain't Enoch. Montcalm."

We were going down the stairs by now, and I took the token Rags handed me. "Montcalm? Who's that?"

"TA cop."

"Just a cop?"

"Not just a cop. Montcalm knows me. Hates me. He's the one
cop'd
bust my ass sure."

"Why?

"I know what he is."

Bob Montcalm sucked in a bolt of smoke and blew it out again immediately. It had been the rag man, he was sure of it. Nobody dressed like that for fun. New York was fucked up all right, but wearing layers of rags hadn't become the newest fashion trend. Not yet anyway, he thought bitterly, watching the staircase where the black man had disappeared. Who had it been in the Oz books he'd read when he was a kid, the ones in his grandfather's apartment? That had been a rag man too, hadn't it?

No. The
Raggedy
Man, that was it. Montcalm bet nobody in Oz smelled like
his
rag man did. He would have gone after the old fart if he hadn't more important things to do.

Montcalm looked at the clock on the call-board and checked it against his watch. 2:38 P.M. Rodriguez had said 2:30, but Rodriguez was always late. Finally Montcalm spotted him, coming out of the newsstand with a
Post
tucked beneath his arm. Calmly, leisurely, the Latino walked through the crowded concourse, looking neither right nor left, and headed toward the men's room on the lower level. Montcalm followed.

The restroom was nearly empty, but it didn't matter. When Montcalm entered, Rodriguez was already in one of the booths. Montcalm crouched and saw the angled points of the alligator shoes beneath the dirty metal door. Taking a comb from his pocket, Montcalm ran it through his thinning hair and studied his face in the mirror. It was not a handsome face. The eyes were deep set, and the shape of the nose revealed that it had been broken at least once. The chin was gray despite frequent shaving, and the lower lip hung pendulously, giving a sleepy, war-weary look.

Bob Montcalm was war-weary all right, but the impression of sleepiness was false. He was as alert to what was happening around him as any New York cop with twenty-five years of service, transit or street, and more alert than most. It was that alertness, that sense of being always on edge, that had brought him his first arrests, his first big successes, and to the attention of his superiors; had brought him to his own supervisory position. It had also brought him to people like Rodriguez. And Gina.

The toilet flushed, and Montcalm slid the comb back into his pocket and started to wash his hands. The booth door opened and Rodriguez appeared, glanced at Montcalm, and gave a short, nearly undetectable nod. Rodriguez washed his hands three sinks down from where Montcalm was standing, and walked out the door. Montcalm remained at the mirror a moment longer, looking at his own face with the expression of a vain man who has found one more gray hair. Then he turned and stepped into the booth Rodriguez had vacated.

The packet was where it was supposed to be, right behind the toilet bowl. Montcalm locked the booth door, sat on the seat, and opened the packet. He counted the bills, then put them into his inside coat pocket. The heroin was next. He opened one of the two Ziploc bags, touched his finger to the white powder, and tasted it. He spat the residue between his legs into the bowl, resealed the bag, put both of them into the outer pockets of his sport coat, made sure the pocket flaps were down, then buttoned his trench coat around him.

Leaving the rest room, he walked a circuitous route to a section of the terminal with lockers, waited until no one was in sight, then opened one of them. Inside was a locked briefcase. This he opened, and into it he put the currency he had received from Rodriguez. He fed the locker more coins, and closed the door tightly.

He took the Seventh Avenue—Broadway IRT to the 103rd Street station, and walked the two blocks to the apartment house where Gina lived. He walked with his hands in his pockets, without fear, knowing that his service revolver could deal with any spindly junkie desperate enough to try and mug him. The street seemed quiet, though, and by the time he got to the door he felt as relaxed as he could possibly expect to feel. She would be glad to see him, he knew. Why wouldn't she? He had what she wanted. He had
always
given her what she wanted.

He had to push the button four times before the buzzer sounded at the lock. While he waited, he saw that two of the lobby mailboxes had been wrenched open and emptied, and thought that he should try to find Gina another apartment in a better building. The filth was moving south from above 110th Street. He hoped he could get her out before it was too late, get her out of it all.

The elevator was out of order again, so he trudged up the stairs to the fifth floor, where her door was ajar. Her thin hand hung on the frame like some white, sickly spider, and as she drew the door open for him, he was shocked anew at the hollowness of her face.

"Hi," he said, and kissed her cheek before she could draw away. She was wearing a worn, yellow bathrobe with bra and panties beneath, and she tugged the cord tighter, hiding her body from him. "Not glad to see me?"

"Sure. Sure I am." Her voice was outwardly calm, but underneath Montcalm could sense her relief, could tell how close she'd been to panic.