Lowland Rider (8 page)

"She a crazy woman," Rags said.

The man nodded in agreement.

"She kill things."

The man cocked his head, and Rags saw him frown.

"Not people. Rats and stuff."

The man spoke. "Cats? Dogs?"

Rags nodded and smiled, pleased that a conversation had begun. "Yeah. Sure. Cats, dogs, any of that shit."

"She had a bag. Something dead in it."

"Yeah. Sure. Baggie, they call her. Leave her alone mostly, just gets
ridda
crap animals, they don't bother her. I hate her, though. She ain't right. She say evil, but there inside, that's where she got the evil. Bad through.
Lotta
hate."

"She must hate animals anyway."

"Yeah. Breeders, she calls 'em. I
useta
talk to her before she went way off. See a rat or somethin', she say them damn
breeders
—funny word."

"Funny lady."

"
Funny?
Not too damn funny . . . oh,
I
see what you mean. Like
weird
funny, yeah, she
weird
funny all right."

The train rolled on, and Rags watched the white man, who had now turned his attention to the advertising panels, from which a defaced Miss Subways gazed out. "Where you
headin
'?"

"Uptown."

Rags laughed. "Well, shit, sure.
Wheresabout
uptown?"

The man looked at Rags, and, for an instant, the grimness of his face was frightening. "Nowhere special. Just riding."

"Where you live?"

"
Here.
"

Rags shook his head as though he'd heard incorrectly. "You mean New York or
what
?"

"Just here."

"
Down
here?"

"Yes."

"The tunnels?"

"Yes."

"Bullshit. You ain't no
skell
."

"
No
what?"

"
Skell
. What we called live down here. You no
skell
. You lookin' too
good
be a
skell
."

The man shrugged. Rags took it as an invitation, stepped across the aisle, and sat next to the man, who didn't move, except to open his mouth and breathe through it rather than through his nose.

"What's your name?"

The question seemed to take the stranger by surprise. He turned sharply and glared at Rags for a long time. Finally his face softened, and Rags felt the man was looking through him, toward something far away. "Jesse," he said at last, so softly that Rags could barely hear above the rattle of the car. "My name's Jesse."

"Jesse, huh? Hello, Jesse. I'm Rags." Rags grinned. "Bet you can't guess why I'm called that."

Jesse smiled back as he took in
Rags's
cloth-wrapped legs. "Bet I can. How come?"

"How come what?"

"How come you wear all those . . . those cloths?"

Rags's
face twisted for a moment, but then the grin returned. "They
warm
, boy.
Nothin
'
warmer'n
you wrap a whole
lotta
shit around you like a mummy. Keep you
good
and warm."

"Why don't you just wear two pair of pants or something?"

"Hell, you can't find no pants down here. But you find
lotsa
rags."

"It's not all that cold, is it?"

Rags frowned. "Cold enough. Cold enough for me."

~*~

Jesse Gordon looked at Rags and wondered why he was lying. The early fall had been warm. The light turtleneck Jesse wore was more than sufficient, so the heat which surrounded
Rags's
body must have been stifling. The man's face was bright with sweat, and the smell coming off' him was vile. Though there was no trace of dried urine or caked feces, two odors that seemed to predominate many of the stations, the stench of sweat, both fresh and long-dried, was so great that Jesse nearly gagged, until several minutes of proximity inured him to the smell, and he was able to examine the man boldly.

Rags was tall and wide, and Jesse suspected that much of his girth was due to the layers of cloth wrapped around him. The face, in contrast, was gaunt, deeply fissured black on black so that, from a distance, the
sheened
visage might resemble those African masks, carved of ebony, that Jesse's father had had in his shop before they were stolen in a burglary.
Rags's
head was tilted slightly to one side, whether from an unevenness in the
multitextured
collar of cloth that sheathed his neck or from a goiter Jesse could not tell. He guessed the man's age to be fifty. Despite the weight of years and experiences that Jesse could only imagine, there was a vitality about Rags, an inner fire that made the black man far more alive than all the other derelicts Jesse had seen in his short time below ground. The way in which he had confronted Baggie had impressed him as well. There had been an air of command in his tone that, no matter what his appearance or status, would brook no refusal. Whatever else he was, Jesse thought, this man was not a beggar. There was still pride in him.

There was something else as well—adaptation. However long Rags had lived down here, it was far longer than the span of Jesse's own tenancy, and Jesse needed a mentor. There were, he well knew, techniques, tricks, procedures he must learn if he was to continue living below. In the few short weeks he had been in the tunnels, he had felt immersed in a quagmire of confusion. Like most New Yorkers, he knew only enough about the underground routes to get back and forth on frequently traveled byways. Everything beyond the Seventh Avenue local that took him to work, and the Lexington Avenue—Pelham Bay Park lines that went to his father's home in the Bronx, was a mystery. The hundreds of miles of track, the hundreds of stations that honeycombed subterranean New York City were nothing to him but brightly colored lines on a map, whose
Plexiglass
guard was most often veiled by fluorescent spray paint. The reality into which those parallel and intersecting lines translated was equally hidden to all but those who needed to travel them, to explore firsthand the dark lifeline, the web work of steel veins by which the city moved. In the mind of Jesse Gordon, as in the minds of most New Yorkers, those strange, interweaving lines were a source of fear. Even the lines with which one was aware had their
unpleasantries
, even their dangers. Might not those
unknown
routes then hold unheard of horrors, vicious deaths, predators more animal than human?

Jesse still believed in that predisposed idea, that nearly archetypal concept. There were certain lines he dared not ride, certain stations at which he would not yet get off, and when the necessity of transferring required him to step from the relative safety of the train into those strange burrows, he moved quickly, unhesitatingly, only his eyes showing the panic he was ashamed, in view of the purpose of his presence there, of feeling. Fear was still with him.

In the eyes of this large and odiferous black man, however, was no fear. The train, the tunnel, the entire network of catacombs were home to him. Jesse could feel it in the ease with which he sat beside him, the relaxed tone of his voice, all the qualities of self-possession which Jesse was so quick to notice, as they were so lacking in himself.

"How long have you been down here?" Jesse asked.

Rags shifted his body inside his cloth cocoon. "Long time. Years 'n years."

"You stay here all the time?"

"Most. One damn place bad as another.
Somedays
I go up above, get me some fresh air, maybe a
washup
at the shelter, little soup or somethin'. Mostly, I stay down here."

Jesse thought that perhaps he shouldn't ask, but did anyway. "Why?"

"I like it down here," Rags answered, perhaps too quickly. Then he sat silently, looking at his hands folded in his lap. After a time, he spoke again. "Here's where I feel safest."

"Down here?"

"Ain't so much crime's you'd think. Leastways it's what they say, and I think it's true.
Lotta
thievin
', boys
snatchin
' purses and like that, but rapes and murders and stuff, they say there ain't that much."

Jesse nodded. "You ever… see anything like that?"

A snort came from Rags, loud enough and sharp enough to make Jesse look up quickly and see a gobbet of mucus hanging from one of
Rags's
nostrils. The black man wiped it away with a ragged sleeve. "I seen things. And not too long ago neither. I seen that Enoch… talk about your devil, your evil…"

"Who? Enoch?"

"Never you mind. Don't gotta know about Enoch. Know too much,
more'n
you want."

The train howled to a stop. As it lurched, Jesse tensed and felt his stomach wrenched for what seemed the thousandth time that day. Rags, on the other hand, let himself roll with the motion of the train, like a wooden doll with a round, weighted bottom. He looked eminently relaxed. "You roll
with
it, not against it. It goes, you go. It stops, you stop. Otherwise you'll get a big mess of bruises."

Jesse smiled. "I
am
a big mess of bruises."

"They go 'way. You gotta remember, though. Go
with
it. That's the whole damn rule down here. Otherwise it spits you back up quick."

They rode on. Jesse tried to become aware of the motion of the car, pretending he was part of it. After a few moments he was swaying to its rhythms, which now felt more gentle, less violent.

"See there," Rags said. "You
ridin
' smoother already." The car hit a rough piece of track, and
Rags's
back slammed against the seat. "Shit…"

"Go with it, huh?" Jesse said, rubbing his sore spine with his knuckles.

"
Sonovabitch
. I shoulda been set for that one. I
remembered
that one."

"Wait a minute. You know the bumps in the lines?"

"Well, hell, not all of 'em. But this one damn sure. One I ride most."

"Why this one?"

"
S'long
. Got a
lotta
stops. Don't have to change trains so damn much. That's the ticket. That's what you want. Why you be
gettin
' off and
walkin
' down those damn tunnels you don't have to? You find the
long
ones, you ride them."

"Are there any that, uh, that you wouldn't ride?"

"I ridden 'em all. Each line shit somewhere on it, but one line be
baddest
. That's the Beast."

"The Beast?"

"New Lots."

"What?" asked Jesse, not understanding.

"
Nostrand
to New Lots Avenue. Out in Brooklyn. Everybody call it the Beast 'cause it so bad." The dark lines in
Rags's
forehead grew blacker as he frowned. "I don't ride it no more." His voice grew softer, and Jesse barely heard the last words "…leave that to Enoch."

It was the second time Rags had mentioned the mysterious Enoch, and Jesse's curiosity was aroused. "Who's this Enoch anyway?"

"
Jes
' a man," Rags said vehemently. "He's
jes
' a
man
, that's all he is, no more." But it sounded as though Rags was trying to convince himself of that.

"What's he do?"

"He don't do
nothin
'
." Rags gave a bitter chuckle. "
Nosir
, he don't do
nothin
'
hisself
,
jes
' lets others do for him. He smart, but he
jes
' a
man
!" Rags banged a hammy fist onto his own thigh.

Suddenly Jesse felt uncomfortable. He realized that, although they had been talking like old comrades, he knew nothing about this big, strong black man by his side. He was alone in the last car of a subway train in the hours before dawn with a man who dressed in rags in the hottest weather, a man who stank of sweat and lived in tunnels, a man who, Jesse began to think, was most likely to be insane.

Just as quickly as that thought came to him, there came another—more complex and disjointed, illogical even, but sharp and strong just the same.
This is what you wanted
, it said, and added,
and are you not, insane as well?

"You play chess?"

Jesse looked up.
Rags's
face was still again, and his voice was calm. "Chess?"

"I found this." He held out a small black plastic box. On it, in gold, were the words,
Magna-Chess
. Snapping open the catch, Rags showed Jesse the interior—a red and black chessboard, and thirty-two small black and white plastic pieces with tiny black magnets affixed to their bases. "Guess it fell
outa
somebody's pocket. Never learned how to play, but I always wanted to."

Jesse clenched his teeth. He felt caught between laughing and running from the car, all the way through the train until he reached the motorman's compartment. Two madmen, speaking of chess. Of form, and structure, and strategies. It was funny and sad and absurd, and he thought of Donna and his father and Jennifer, and wondered why he was where he was, what he was really looking for, and if he could find it, and, most of all, if he wanted to find it.