The Warriors

by Sol Yurick

  They all came out of the shadows, ran, and were clattering up the stairs and vaulting the turnstiles while the furious changemaker was screaming at them, shaking his fist from behind the booth bars.

  They turned and gave him the upyourself sign. The changemaker started to come out of his booth. Bimbo brandished the bottle. The coin flunky ducked in and down in his cage.

  They ran up the second flight of stairs to the train as it was ready to close its doors. Lunkface threw himself between the doors and held them open as, laughing, the others slipped under his arms one by one into the train.

  But Hinton turned, took out the Magic Marker and went back to the advertising signs and wrote the Family name, big, across everyone else’s marks—and he downed the Golden Janissaries and the Spahis for good measure, and strolled over and ducked under Lunkface’s arm while, a few cars up, the conductor was shouting at them to let the doors alone.

  July 5th, 12:45–1:30 A.M.

  They thought it was only a matter of taking a long, dragging ride in an empty train. The shit was off here; the subways were relatively neutral territory; you only had to fear the fuzz. They might even sleep a little. But the train was crowded. People were sitting in every seat; the aisles were jammed.

  “Maybe it’s that old night shift,” Dewey whispered to The Junior. But something was wrong with the riders—all of them. They were eerie, weird, something else. What was it? The doors closed. The clothes were wrong, but not with all of them: the faces were—off, but not with all of them: the eyes—sitting or standing they all looked asleep—but the eyes were open—yet closed. The Dominators moved together. Wild and crazy looks flicked over them. They tightened their enclave, shutting out the Other to feel safer. Men drooped from the poles or hung from the handholds; women lolled, their hair uncombed, gazing laxly into space, sitting with their legs loose, spread out; people leaned on one another in twos or threes; some of them concentrated on empty space; others peered at newspapers; some of them were bent over sheets with rows of figures, peering intensely, making marks with pencils, muttering to themselves; some of them, pushed, took a few seconds to see the Family, frowned at them and their bust-in noise, and shifting their position, looked away and seemed to forget they had been shoved.

  The place chilled the Family. They looked into the car behind; it was crowded, too. They tried to see what was ahead; too many people were in the way. Hector asked a squatty man with a flattened nose and thick eye-ridge flesh, standing next to him, whether this train went to Coney Island. The man turned slowly, looking up from a sheet covered with printed and penciled figures, as if being dragged away from something very important, as if barely having heard the sound, let alone the words—and looked at Hector’s face, focusing slowly, slowly, the eyes becoming not-dead, perhaps even recognizing another face, trying to think about the question very hard, but not making it and not caring to. Hector repeated the question. The man finally seemed to understand what it was they wanted of him, shook his head, not so much at the question but because it was too much trouble to answer, whether he knew or not, and looked away.

  A woman was seated near them; her head was on her hand and her mad stare conned them, but she was Another Thing; she didn’t see them. They wondered again, and consulted among themselves, trying to figure it out. Two heads bent together, the hairs almost touching, over a sheet full of tables and calculated carefully, gently tapped other numbers while their lips moved prayerfully, the sounds lost in the roar of the moving train.

  Then, all of a sudden, Hinton figured it—they were all coming from the race track. Norbert, his mother’s boy friend, was always putting something of his own, something of his mother Minnie’s Relief check, anything he could get hold of—stealings even—on the horses. Alonso, Hinton’s half-brother, who was a junkie, looked a little like this after he had ridden his Horse. “That’s hooked, man,” he told the men: “But the fix is almost over. Horse players,” he said and then they understood it. It was just that they had never seen so many suckers in one place, and never without the bookie.

  “They’re back from the track. That’s up in Yonkers. Trotters. And man, if they’re anything like that old Norbert, they’re toting the day’s losing and planning how they are going to make it tomorrow.”

  “Man, they go so far for it? Why don’t they patronize Your Neighborhood Book?” Dewey asked.

  “If, they’re like Norbert, they do,” Hinton told them. “Two tracks, flats in the day and trotters at night, a bookie, and maybe two, three policy numbers a day, depending on what them dreams tell him, and a game of cards or craps into the early morning. Norbert, he likes his action, man.”

  “Well, they sure look like Something Else,” The Junior whispered. The Family looked around contemptuously; they were free of slave habits.

  The train came to a station. 225th Street. Where was that? Hector gave the word to The Junior, the reader, to get over to the map and decide where they were, where they were going, and how they were going to make it back to Coney Island. The Junior elbowed between two men whose clothes were grease-spotted and stunk of garlic. It was hot here and the creaky fans weren’t getting rid of the heat or the smells. He leaned over the head of a wrinkle-faced monkey-woman; she wore an old-lady straw hat with fake flowers around the crown, a dress printed with soiled flowers; a little pince-nez was balanced on her nose; The Junior thought he smelled dried piss. She looked up at a spot on the ceiling and her head bobbed on her skinny neck with the train movements but her hand was steady on the racing form and she marked endless and intricate little signs, completely filling in the margins, without even looking down, talking to herself with a knowing little smile. The men recognized it for the junkie’s smile when they promised themselves a fix. Dewey pushed over beside The Junior and looked close at her. Her eyes, huge-dup by the glasses, looked directly at Dewey, who looked back at her for a second out of his thick-rimmed glasses, and the men had to laugh because they eight-eyed each other, but she didn’t even notice Dewey. Dewey, he bowed. She didn’t see. He waved his hand in front of her face. The men laughed and Bimbo buried his face in Lunkface’s shoulder because it wasn’t polite to laugh at an old lady that way. Then Dewey, he made faces, but she only saw some secret future.

  “Man, look at the Duchess. She’s saying that, ‘Well, I put two on Goalong, and Goalong, he comes in and that pays me four-fifty. And then I put it all on Comeonin, and Comeonin, he goes along. And then she is really flying high on that old horse. Only it comes out different in the end,” Hinton said. Dewey got tired of the play and came back.

  The Junior was having trouble with the map. He had seen city maps before, but this wasn’t like any map he knew. It was abstract, as if the contours of the city had been worn smooth. No feature of the landscape was clear, and he was sure the relationships were wrong; it looked more like some wrong diagram, not like a map at all. Where was Coney Island? But after a moment he found where they had been and he found where they wanted to go. He could, if he had time enough, work it in from the ends, his fingers carefully following the train lines, unraveling the threads for each line, BMT, IND, and IRT, because they were printed in different colors. He had it worked out that they were on one of the IRT lines. They came to another station. No one got on and no one got off.

  Lunkface saw the Little Man Everyone Pushes Around; he had saucery, lid-chopped eyes and looked like a moron. He had thick, pale lips closed over his moving mouth, like he was chewing with his front teeth. His black Borsolino hat was too big and sat just above his eyebrows. Lunkface nudged the men and gave them the nod and they laughed at the way the simp looked.

  The Junior was having difficulty with the center of the map. He had it figured out that they were on the wrong line; they had to change somewhere, or they would never get to where they wanted—where? All the train lines met in the center of the city, and got tangled up there, and then emerged again, and everything ended up where it should end, but The Junior was having trouble following it; he moved h
is forefingers slowly along the lines trying to bring them together, but train jolts kept knocking his fingers loose. He tried to rush it so he wouldn’t look duncy in the eyes of his Family.

  The face under The Junior’s chin was talking right up at him. She sounded like Another Thing because she didn’t say words, but a high, croon. He muttered, “What, Lady?” at the piss-smelling Duchess, but she kept on sounding and frightened him. He looked back at the Family standing in their little clump, all waiting on him, and he was sure they were laughing at him. He was supposed to be the big reader, and so he left the map before he had it figured, and fought his way back. Hector asked The Junior if he had the route worked out. The Junior said of course he knew what to do; to have said otherwise would have been to lose face.

  The train began to slow and stopped where there was no station. The train moved a little. The train began to inch along, gaining momentum, jerking them, and then stopped again suddenly. No one but the Family seemed to notice. Those others were still coming off the kick because, as Hinton saw, they were figuring, trying to do it in imagination with figures what life didn’t do, because figures never lied, did they? New numbers worked out what they would do next time; told them what they had done wrong. But if logic and calculations made it . . . Hinton knew it all: no one limousined home. Norbert, his mother’s boy friend, stumbled in, busted every time, the money spent, and told Minnie how he should have really won it only . . . And then he beat her up for lipping him because he really should have won it, but . . . Hinton knew the whole story. Some fireworks were still going outside. The players didn’t turn to look and didn’t care. Their celebration had happened at the track and the only sparks they cared about were the kind you saw from pony hooves. Their explosions were always in the future—if they could only figure it—when there would be no “but for . . . ,” no more “someday.” Hinton knew all about it.

  Dewey nudged and pointed; “The Professor,” he said. They looked at an old man wearing a stained homburg, a wing collar, a striped tie, ragged-lapeled jacket and open, velvet-collared coat in spite of the heat. He leaned his head on his knobby hands which were supported by a rolled umbrella. “Man, how can you thread yourself so queer?” Dewey asked. “Look at that cocoon.”

  The train had stopped again. The motor under their feet kept humming erratically. The fans spun, but it got hotter and hotter because there was no motion-breeze blowing in. The warriors sweated in their dirty clothes. They looked out into the darkness. “What’s keeping this train here?” Lunkface wanted to know.

  “Yeah, what for do you pay all them taxes?” Dewey said.

  “You sounding me?”

  “No, oldest brother,” Dewey mock-whined. “But you get most of your loot from your family . . . I mean the keepers. Truth?”

  “Well, I got other ways.”

  “But most is from the old folks in prison. Truth?”

  “So?” Lunkface asked threateningly.

  “So, they pay taxes. That is taxed money you get and you have got the right to class-A service. Isn’t that the truth? Ask your father. Am I right, Papa Hector?”

  Hector appeared to think it over. “He’s right.”

  “I never thought of it that way.”

  “I wouldn’t shit my brother,” Dewey said.

  Hinton agreed, nodding gravely; Hector turned away and grinned at the Professor instead.

  But the train had been standing still for about five minutes and they began to get nervous. Maybe the word was out; the net was spread; they were checking all the trains as they came past, hoping to rope all the warriors who had escaped. It had been more than two hours since the rumble on the plain, but they might still be laying in wait all over. Hinton thought, again, that if they took off the insignia and spread around to different parts of the train, they wouldn’t be seen or known, but he didn’t say it; he didn’t want to be put down. The pony-junkies noticed nothing. They were down, and drowned in the lose-gloom, and were getting those empty-pocket, come-down shakes. And these Hard Men, thinking of what might be waiting for them at the next station, considered their position and what to do if . . .

  “What’s the next stop, Junior? Where are we, man?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Hector gave The Junior that stare of contempt he’d tried to avoid in the first place. But the train began to inch-inch along again, stopping and starting, knocking them back and forth, rocking them with the other slobs. These Other let themselves be jerked around, loose that way, by the motion of the train, because they didn’t care what happened to them. But the Family braced itself on wide-apart feet and fought it because they had pride. Dewey couldn’t take his eyes off the Duchess under the map and the way her face looked up and the way she talked with a God-Who-Had-Not-Made-Good-The-Promise. A big woman, wearing a man’s checked lumber jacket, with a fat, lumpy face, button eyes and nose, crammed a candy bar into her buttonhole mouth, dropping chocolate slivers on Tomorrow’s Post Position. Lunkface couldn’t help staring at the simp in the big black hat and he nudged The Junior to look too. That Lunkface didn’t know his own strength and The Junior was bugged, but he looked.

  The train started. It moved very slowly. They were beginning to pass banks of quick-rigged emergency lights. Workmen were on the track; they stopped working to look up as the train came slowly past. The train edged along two threads of rail slowly so it wouldn’t fall. The rest of the tracks had been removed and there was nothing outside but the drop to the street. Huge cranes towered over the sides of the train, swinging girders; there was the din of riveting; welds flared and smoke bellied upward. The workmen’s faces looked weird in the quick-shifting lights. No face stayed whole long, the features changing size, dancing. Maliciously, they peered up and pointed and seemed to leer. It made the men nervous. The train screech-crawled into a station; a loud-speaker was already blurring something at them, not making sense yet, but telling them what they had to do. The tone was loud and commanding. What was it saying? Hector wondered if it was some kind of blockade so the cops could get them? Maybe the workers were really plain-clothes men.

  The doors opened. The words came in a little more clearly. Something about the track being out for repair. Transfers. Busses to catch. Train travel resumed further down the line, or on another line. The name of the station made no sense to them since they didn’t know what station they were on or where that stop was. Was there some kind of sign?

  The horse-creeps were somnambulating up slowly and beginning to drift to the doors and file out like they expected it, or it didn’t matter. If the hardhands were ambushing, all they had to do was screen themselves behind the pony-sleepers till the Family came up, Hector thought. Maybe they should just stay here. But the cops would get them here, too. Or they would have to ride back where they had come from. Dewey’s hand went up and he fingered the insignia on his hat; others must have had the same idea because Bimbo also gave Hector the asking look. Hector frowned and Dewey’s hand just made adjusting moves as he twisted and straightened out his pin.

  They got out of the train. Everyone was heading one way. The crowd was bunched up at the exit, swirling, compressing into a tight mass. The train doors closed behind them and whether they liked it or not, they were trapped. They moved along slowly. The loud-speaker kept giving out orders again and again in impossible-to-understand sentences. They shuffled ahead. People closed in tight behind the Family and they were penned up and being pushed. The sleepers began to get a little nervous and were coming to life. They surged along a little faster.

  Far ahead, near the exit—though only Lunkface was tall enough to see clearly what was going on—everyone seemed to go a little crazy. They were all pushing hard there, talking loud as they tried to funnel through two narrow, one-man doors. They weren’t excited around the Family yet. Lunkface yelled “Let’s get out of here,” and the Family tried to phalanx up and spear through. The sleepers still ambled, some of them still calculating on their dream sheets, holding the figures close to thei
r faces under the dim, shaky, platform lights.

  At first the Dominators shoved ahead a little faster, keeping tight formation. But the wave of excitement at the exit of the station house began to travel back along the thick line of people. Everyone around the Family became agitated and began to push forward harder. There was no wind; it was very hot here. Everyone wanted to get it over with. Irritated, people began to ask, “What’s the holdup?” and “Come on, come on,” over and over again. The Family was made more nervous by the chant; they didn’t know anything; they weren’t making way fast enough; the longer they hung around, the sooner the cops might come down on them.

  Then, from the roof tops, on a level with and alongside the station, a line of punky tots stuck their heads above the roof balustrade and began to sound them all up and down, cursing them in Spanish and English making sheep-sounds. The kids made drum and bugle sounds with their mouths and then began to fling lit firecrackers at them, using the overhand grenade-throwing swing. Everyone began to curse them out but, safe across about fifteen feet of four-story drop, the kids gave better than they got. And now, the mob behind the Family, driven by the firecrackers, began to close up and push harder.

  The Family was driven around. They shouldered and high-elbowed with Lunkface pointing the wedge. They began to drive through faster, holding on to one another, finding comfort from the feel of one another, merged into a hard oneness among the wild particles of the Other that beat against them. They caught up the Simp, the Professor, and the Duchess in front of them and plowed them along for a few feet. Everyone was beginning to noise it now. The Simp’s eyes were wider, more moronic; his hat flopped around his head without falling off and he threw himself all around, grinning more and more as he hit out. The Simp hit into the Professor who was still nibbling on his sandwich which jammed into his face. The Professor began a long speech in a krauty accent, crumbs yelling out of his mouth. The Simp hit against Lunkface who tried to hit back but couldn’t swing his hands free. The Dominator drive carried only about four feet and they piled into a solid reef of people, clogged, cackling for no reason at all. Pushed, the Other screamed and laughed angrily. Excitement kept passing along like a wave coming by, up, and behind them and the whole line rammed forward and smashed up against their backs. The Junior, who was in back, tried to turn with Bimbo to face the pressure but, caught sideways, was almost thrown down. Hinton, helpless, was lofted and carried for a moment, his legs dangling, useless. Even Lunkface became scared. As they all got nearer to the doors of the station house, it began to get wilder and wilder.