Night-Train

by Thomas F Monteleone

  His thoughts were shattered by the approaching roar of a train. A gust of wanner air was pushed into the station as the Local emerged from the tunnel, jerked to a halt, and opened its doors. The old man in the corduroy jacket shuffled into a distant car; Ralphie entered the closest one. As he sat on the smooth plastic seat, the doors shushed closed and the train rattled off into the darkness. The only other passenger in Ralphie’s car, an old woman in a torn coat and high-topped shoes flanked by shopping bags, stared at him with yellow eyes. Her face was a network of wrinkles, her lips so chapped and cracked that they looked like orange, festering sores.

  Ralphie cast occasional glances at her, idly wondering the usual thoughts about her legion. Where did she sleep? What did she carry around in those ever-present bags? Why was she out riding the night trains?

  The rocking motion of the car was hypnotic, almost soothing, and Ralphie knew that he was unwinding from the tension and anger of the robbery. He even grinned, knowing that the thief had gotten little of value. Looking out the window, he realized that he had not been counting the stops, but it did not matter. He had been riding the Broadway Local for so long that he had an instinctive feeling for when his station would be coming up. It was not until the train reached Christopher Street/Sheridan Square that Ralphie again looked through the dirty glass windows. Houston Street would be next.

  Then it happened.

  The lights in the car flickered, and the motion seemed to slow. The bag lady seemed to be as still as a statue, and the sounds of the wheels clattering on the tracks seemed softer, slower. The air felt heavy, thicker somehow, and more difficult to breathe. He stood up, and he had the impression of moving underwater. Something’s wrong, thought Ralphie, and felt a spike of fear stab through him. The train was slowing down, as though against its will, and Ralphie looked out the window, past the reflection of the interior lights, to see something for the briefest of moments—a platform, a station with no sign, no passengers, only a single overhead bulb illuminating the cold beige tiles of its walls.

  For an instant, Ralphie sensed a confluence of forces— forces working against each other. It was as though something had tried to make the train stop at the empty station. Time itself seemed to slow and stretch, and the train seemed to be struggling to pass the place.

  Then the phantom station was gone, replaced by the darkness of the tunnel, and the train was gathering speed, regaining its place in the time flow.

  The air thinned, the old lady moved her head and gripped her shopping bags more tightly, and Ralphie could also move without interference. The train was loud and full of energy once again. Ralphie felt a shudder pass through him. He remembered his mother’s old expression: someone’s been walking on my grave. And he kept remembering the image of the empty station. The sight of that single, naked bulb hanging over the platform was etched in his mind, and he knew that it would prey upon him like a bad dream. He sensed that he had passed a place that no one had ever seen, that no one else knew existed. Yet he had seen it, felt its strange, compelling power.

  The Local lurched to a stop and its doors slammed open. Ralphie looked up and saw the Houston Street sign embedded in the dirty wall tiles. Hurrying from the car, he hobbled across the deserted platform, squeezed through the turnstile, and pulled himself up the steps. The cool darkness of the street embraced him as he reached the sidewalk, and he pulled his collar tightly about his neck. The street was littered with the remnants of people’s lives: overturned trash cans, discarded toys, heaps of evicted furniture, stripped cars, and empty wine bottles. The shabby reality of his neighborhood. The empty shell that encapsulated his life.

  He walked to the next corner, turned left, and came to a cellar entrance beneath a shoe-repair shop. Hobbling down the steps, he took out his keys and unlocked the door to a single-room apartment. He flipped on the light, trying to ignore the tired, gray room. Ralphie hated the place, but he knew he would never escape its prison-cell confines. Throwing his coat over a straight-backed chair, he walked to the small sink topped by a medicine chest that was wedged into the corner of the room. Washing his hands, he peered into the mirror; an old face looked back at him. Only thirty-one, and he looked ten years older. His sandy hair was streaked with gray, his blue eyes pinched by crow’s-feet. He tried to smile ironically at himself, but could not manage it. There was little joy left in Ralphie Loggins, especially at that moment. He knew that the best thing for him would be to crawl beneath his quilt on the mildewed couch and try to sleep.

  That night he dreamed of dark tunnels and subway trains.

  It was late afternoon before he awakened, feeling oddly unrefreshed, with the baleful image of the empty station still lingering in his mind. He knew he would not feel better until he had investigated it. When he took a train to midtown, he asked the trainman about the place, but the man said he’d never heard of or seen that particular platform. But, he added, there were countless places like that beneath the city: maintenance bays, abandoned stations, old tunnels that had been partially sealed off. Somebody must have left a light on, that’s why Ralphie had seen it. The trainman placed no special significance on the event, but then Ralphie had not told him how he had felt something reaching out from that place, trying to take hold of the train.

  After having coffee in a small shop off 52nd Street, he walked the streets aimlessly. He had been planning to go to the public library to get a new card, but he felt too restless. He was far too agitated to read, even though reading was one of his only pleasures. When he was a child, his parents had been killed in an auto accident and his leg had been mangled, and he was raised by an uncle, an aging man with a passion for books. Ralphie had educated himself in the old man’s library. But when his uncle died suddenly without a will or a designated heir, seventeen-year-old Ralphie found himself out on the street, a victim of New York State Probate Court, left with nothing. A string of odd jobs leading nowhere, combined with his crippled leg, had beaten him down until he had almost stopped even caring. He lived in a fantasy world half the time, and identified with the desperation of the characters of Gogol and Dostoyevsky, the self-inflicted terror and pain of characters from Hawthorne and Poe. The world had been different when those writers lived, he often thought; people then still knew how to think, to feel and care. In this city, thought Ralphie, people acted like they didn’t even care about themselves anymore.

  Evening was creeping into the streets, and unconsciously Ralphie began working his way toward Times Square, watching the faces of those he passed on the crowded sidewalks. Some people said that it was an unwritten law that you did not look at anyone you passed in the city, but Ralphie knew that was untrue. Everyone looked at everyone else. Only they did it furtively, secretly, stealing glances at one another like thieves. They all walked behind masks of indifference, like Gogol’s “dead souls.” It’s a disease that infects all of us, thought Ralphie.

  He walked down Broadway and turned left on 42nd Street, already ablaze with the neon colors of the theaters, junk shops, and porn parlors. Crowds of theatergoers and tourists mingled with the panhandlers, hustlers, legions of blacks and Puerto Ricans carrying suitcase-sized radios at full volume. Dealers hung out in doorways or strutted and jeered at passersby. The sidewalks were speckled with trash and dark wet patches that could be any number of things. In the middle of the block, Ralphie turned and entered a pair of glass, satin-lined doors leading into Pandora’s, and was immediately engulfed in sweaty darkness, stale smoke, and loud music. The lyrics of a song pounded at him and he listened to the words without wanting to:

  I want to grab your thighs …

  I want to hear your sighs . . .

  M-m-m-make a luuuuuuv to you!

  Ralphie shook his head sadly, took off his coat, and walked past the bar, which was already half filled with patrons. Behind the bar was a light-studded runway backed by a floor-to-ceiling wall of mirrors where the girls could watch themselves dance. Brandy was strutting back and forth across the runway to the beat of
the loud, obnoxious song, wearing only a pair of silver spike heels. She was short and lithe, with stringy dark hair, boyish hips, and pendulous, stretch-marked breasts that seemed absurdly large for her small frame. Sometimes she would bend forward and shake her shoulders, which made her breasts bounce and loll in what Ralphie thought was a most unerotic manner. Then she would smile at the barflies or lick her lips and pout, but it was a hollow gesture. Ralphie had watched the girls playing up to the customers before, and he despised the whole game, hated the fact that they were trapped in it, as was he. Empty exchanges, devalued emotions and thrills.

  As he reached the end of the bar, his boss, Mr. Maurice, spotted him. “Hey, Ralphie-boy! You’re early tonight.”

  “Hello, Mr. Maurice. You want me to start anyway?”

  Maurice, a broad-shouldered, overweight, balding man, grinned and shook his head. “Naw. There ain’t nothin’ out there yet. Go in the back and get a coffee or somethin’. I’ll call ya when I need ya.”

  He dismissed Ralphie with a turn of his head and resumed his conversation with one of the new dancers, a young girl clad only in a Danskin leotard.

  Ralphie walked into the darkness beyond the bar and through a black curtain into the girls’ “dressing room,” where a small alcove held a coffee maker and a stack of Styrofoam cups. As he poured some of the black liquid into a cup, someone entered behind him. Turning, he saw that it was Brandy, completely nude. She went over to the bench and table beyond the alcove.

  “Hi, Brandy. How are you?”

  The girl looked at him and smiled weakly, but said nothing. She treated him as all the other girls did—as a mascot or a pet. Funny, he thought, that he had never grown accustomed to the way people treated him. Just because he was short and crippled didn’t mean that he had less of a need for warmth and a little caring. Then Ralphie banished the thought, embarrassed that he could slip into self-pity so easily.

  He left the back room, sat down at one of the vacant tables farthest away from the bar, and sipped his coffee. A half hour passed under the haze of cigarette smoke and the blare of loud music as Ralphie ignored the laughter and the whistles from the customers.

  Finally Maurice appeared, slapping his shoulder in mock friendliness. “S’after eight—ya better get out there and bring in some rubes, huh? Whadayasay, Ralphie-boy?” Another slap, this time on the arm.

  “Yeah, okay, Mr. Maurice.” Ralphie stood up and pulled on his coat, wrapping his scarf around his neck. He hated this job, but it was by far the best-paying gig he had ever found. If he didn’t need money so badly, he would have quit long ago.

  Walking past the bar, he saw that Chrissie was dancing now. She had long legs that seemed too thin when she wore a dress but actually looked all right when she was nude. Her face was long and thin, which made her eyes look large and forlorn. She was not what anyone would call pretty, but she had, as Maurice phrased it, “a big rack,” and that was what the guys liked.

  Ralphie pushed through the glass doors and felt the autumn night touch his face, the brilliance of the lights cut his eyes. He began his spiel, the words so automatic that he never thought about them anymore: “All right, fellas! No cover! No minimum! Take a peek inside! We got the best show in town! Young girls for you! All nude … and that means nay-ked!”

  On and on, he repeated his litany of the flesh, until the hours of the night had whipped past him and the traffic had thinned out, the pedestrians ‘finding their cars and cabs. Maurice finally came out and jerked his thumb toward the interior of the bar. “Okay, Ralphie. Nice job, baby. Now let’s pack it in.”

  Ralphie followed his boss inside, past the hunched row of late-night customers. They were the hangers-on, the ones who closed the bars, the loneliest of the lonely. This last crew watched Jessie work through her final number, wearing only a pair of glitter platform heels as she swished her hips and played with her blond pubic hair. She had an attractive face, but it was flawed by her empty-eyed smile.

  Ralphie sat at the back table after getting a cup of coffee. As he used its heat to warm his fingers before sipping it, more thoughts of the Broadway Local rippled through his mind; he was beginning to fear that he was becoming obsessed with it. There were whispers and giggles behind him as the girls emerged from the dressing room, putting on their coats and preparing to leave. They filed past him, ignoring him as they always did, but on this particular night the action seemed to eat at him more than usual. He knew that he should be accustomed to the treatment, but he wasn’t. The strange thing was that, for the first time, he felt himself actually disliking them, almost hating them, for their lack of compassion, their lack of simple, honest feeling.

  And that scared him.

  CHAPTER 9

  MARSDEN

  They called it the South Bronx, but it looked like a war zone.

  Lya stood on the corner of 162nd Street, staring into the face of devastation. Before her stretched endless rows of shabby three-story brownstones, at least half of them gutted by fires and vandals. The broken windows were open wounds in the face of the brickwork, the shattered fragments ground into shining dust on the sidewalks. Mounds of trash, broken parts of toys, and rusting automobiles littered the curbsides, and the spray-can graffiti was everywhere. There were few people on the streets, and they seemed to be of only two types: the very young or the very old. The children sat on stoops or huddled in the doorways of abandoned buildings; the elderly hobbled along the rubble-strewn streets with a slow, debilitated gait.

  It was an alien world of gray destruction. There was a haziness in the air that covered everything like a pall, or punctuated only by the sounds of the sparse traffic, which seemed to scurry through the area like frightened insects.

  Lya had taken the D Train across the Harlem River to this forgotten part of the city, and although she was terrified, even at midday, she was determined to research her story. Her producer, Jerry Morhaim, had offered to drive her up to the unfamiliar borough, but she had refused, wanting to do this on her own.

  Locating the correct address, she climbed the steps and knocked on the door. From across the street, several children eyed her fashionable appearance with open suspicion. A siren wailed in the distance.

  The door opened and revealed a wizened, sad-eyed old man. He smiled toothlessly, then covered his mouth with one hand.

  “Oh, shit! Forgot to put in my teeth this morning!” he mumbled. “Sorry, Miss Marsden. Come on in, please.”

  She followed him into a surprisingly well-furnished but old-fashioned living room: a floral-patterned sofa and chairs with antimacassars on the arms, pictures of Jesus and the Last Supper in Woolworth frames, faded wallpaper.

  “Sit down, please,” said Richard Frieter. “Be back in a sec.”

  He disappeared up some stairs as Lya studied the room. It was like passing through a time warp; she could practically smell the past. She was instantly reminded of her grandmother’s house in rural Maryland, which she had not seen for many years.

  “Okay, here we go,” said Frieter, descending the stairs. His hair was thin and short like the fur on a tennis ball, and his stubble of gray beard made him look like a Village mendicant. He grinned and Lya could see a brilliant array of white dentures. “All the years I been wearing these things, I should start remembering. Would you like anything to drink, miss? Tea, coffee, maybe a little nip of rye?”

  “Oh, no, thank you. I had breakfast a little while ago. I would just like to ask you a few questions, Mr. Frieter, if you don’t mind?”

  “Sure! Go right ahead. Gonna use it for your TV show, huh?”

  “Well, I might. It depends on what you can tell me. I wanted to interview you because your records said that your father also worked for the IRT, and—”

  Frieter smiled and rolled his eyes. “Hell, yeah! My old man got me the job when I was seventeen. That was way back there. I been with the Transit Authority for forty-seven years! Can you imagine that?”

  Frankly, Lya couldn’t imagine working any single job
for forty-seven years. “Yes, that’s quite an accomplishment,” she said weakly.

  “Started out as a trackman, you see. All day long walking those tunnels, checking for breaks and chinks in the rails, replacing bad bulbs, calling the maintenance crews, stuff like that. Then I got to be a motorman—that’s what my father was. He was with the subways since they started, you see.” Lya was somewhat taken by the old man’s simple charm. When he spoke, his bony face seemed to light up with animation. His eyes were still clear and penetrating, and the enthusiasm in his voice revealed his lifelong fascination with trains. “What year did you begin working in the subways, Mr. Frieter?” Lya pulled a small dictation cassette recorder from her bag and placed it on the sofa beside her. She turned it on and adjusted the volume control as he began to answer.

  “Well, that was 1934. The BMT was running strong by then, and the IND was getting started, too. Subways was getting bigger every year. Always lots of new construction.”

  “And your father had been working with the IRT since the beginning, so that would be around the turn of the century, right?”

  “October 1904, honey! My father was there when Mayor George B. McClellan drove that first train out of City Hall station, you see!”

  “Yes, I do see,” said Lya. “Now, let me ask you, Mr. Frieter, do you remember your father ever telling you … oh, how would you say it? … ‘stories’ about the subways?”

  “Stories? What kind of stories?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Strange happenings, crashes. Things like that?”

  Frieter grinned. “Oh, sure! He was a great one for stuff like that. I remember once he told me about when they were digging for the BMT down on Twenty-fifth Street and there was a dynamite blast—caved in two blocks of street, all the way down to Twenty-third! And there was this trolley car rolling along up top, and wham! the sumbitch rolls right into the hole! Yeah, I remember him telling me lots of stuff like that.”