CHAPTER 31
THE CITY
It was late autumn, and the trees in Central Park had surrendered their bright colors, the leaves dried and crackling in the cold winds of the coming winter. It was a time of transition in the city, a time when the millions of pedestrians couldn’t decide between wearing their heavy coats and down parkas or trying for one last day of temperate stylishness with a sport coat or a blazer. It was a time when the cabbies started talking about the Jets’ chances in the tough Eastern Division and moaned about the Yankees fading in the stretch before the relentless Orioles. It was a time when big crowds jammed Lincoln Center as a new Philharmonic season opened, and filled a crush of expositions and shows at Madison Square Garden. Conventioneers filled the hotels and unloaded their money at the wrong restaurants and tacky souvenir shops on Eighth Avenue. Wary natives made preparations for the long months of slushy streets and uncollected trash bags outside their buildings. Indifferent northern winds sluiced through the streets, accelerating between the towers of tall buildings. It was a time of change in the city.
Allison Nightingale had such a beautiful name. But no one ever used it anymore. No one called because she had no phone; no one wrote to her because she had no address. She herself had abandoned the name, calling herself “Allie” (an unconsciously cruel pun that often described current quarters), if anyone inquired—and that was very, very rare.
Allie walked with a heavy, determined stride. Her gnarled, liver-spotted hands gripped the wrapped-paper handles of two shopping bags, both jammed with oddments and topped off by scraps of cloth. Her face looked like a lump of half-kneaded dough: loose flesh hung in pouches, half-folded in upon itself, vaguely forming the features of a human face. There were age and pain in her features, and an awareness of nothing more than the world’s indifference. Dark birdlike eyes peered from beneath her heavy brow, pinched from below by her puffy peasant cheeks. Her nose was a shapeless mass, red and blotchy, dominating her toothless mouth and her cracked orange lips. She could have been a caricature from Brueghel, or perhaps from Bosch.
She wore a gabardine housedress, wrapped tightly across her washerwoman thighs and hanging halfway down her wool-socked calves. One over the other she wore three men’s button-up sweaters instead of a coat. Her hair, the color of an angry winter sky, lay matted and caked beneath a yellow patterned scarf. She had wrapped her feet in burlap so that they would fit more comfortably into her oversized, black, high-topped sneakers.
She was one of the city’s outcasts, one of its silent aliens.
Her daily life was a scavenging expedition. During the summers, if she was quick enough, she could grab a scrap off the plate of a departing alfresco diner. In harder times, she hovered in the alleys behind restaurants, waiting for them to toss out their garbage. Only the most severe conditions drove her to the soup kitchens and Salvation Army missions, where she listened to a song or a prayer in exchange for buttered bread and broth.
Streets and shopping bags were now the fixtures of her life, but it had not always been so. As a child she had enjoyed the warmth of Virginia society—post-World War I southern decadence in its flower. Private schools, debutante parties, dates with boys from VMI. It was like that till 1929, when her father contributed to the Wall Street mythology by jumping from an office window after the Crash. Everything changed after that: alcoholic mother, menial jobs as typist and secretary, a love affair with a factory foreman who left her at the altar. She ran after that, leaving her past behind, rolling through the years taking any job she could find—roadhouse waitress, five-and-dime clerk, office cleaning lady, anything that paid the rent.
By the time she reached New York, she was broken and battered. She was growing old in body and spirit, and her only wish was to become invisible, to live without being seen or bothered. Her chance came when she defaulted on the rent for her South Bronx room, with no job, no family that she knew of, no friends. She could not remember actually deciding to live on the streets—it suddenly happened, that was all. She had seen other hardy old women living like that, and now she had joined their strange and silent sorority.
Tonight, she schlepped along Lafayette Street after a long day of foraging. She had been up past the Park, down Sixth Avenue past Radio City and the jewelry district, through midtown, and down toward the Village. Her mind was a pleasant blur of sensory impressions. Chestnuts roasting at a corner vendor’s wagon on 8th Street made her pause; the aroma made her think of her childhood, when she was a little girl who wore bright yellow dresses with petticoats and slips and little white anklet socks. But she had been a different person then, living in a different world. The memory had a falseness to it, as though it had never really happened.
She cast it from her mind, and began concentrating on finding a place to stay for the night. It was dark now, and as she ambled on, she took no notice of the occasional passerby. Allie knew no fear on the streets because she knew that no one bothered the bag ladies. They had no money, so the muggers were not interested. They had no sex, so the molesters and rapists ignored them. They committed no crimes, so the police were not a threat.
Turning right on Spring Street, Allie wandered into Soho. She had the vaguest memory of a cellarway on this street, a set of steps leading to the delivery entrance of a produce stand. In the wintertime, the owner of the store covered the stairs with doors made of thick, insulating plastic. It was an excellent place to sleep because the plastic kept the wind from whipping through the small enclosure. Allie decided to look for that cellarway before trying the utility closet at the Union Square station.
When she reached the produce market, all closed up with its sliding iron gates and padlocks, she felt a tinge of disappointment. The owner had not yet put out his sheeted plastic doors, perhaps not thinking it was cold enough. Turning around, Allie began her deliberate walk eastward to Union Square.
The blocks merged into one another as she shambled along, and she soon reached the subway entrance. There were more people at the intersection of 14th Street, but they ignored her in their usual fashion. Down the stairs she went, holding her shopping bags tightly in her old spidery hands, until she reached the door to the closet. Grabbing the handle and turning it, she felt another tinge of disappointment. Someone had locked it, and she was denied another place to spend the night away from the cold. But there was no panic or anger in her. This kind of episode in her life had been so often repeated that she had long ago accepted it as part of the way the world worked. She would simply hunt out another place to sleep.
She walked east to the Bowery and found a narrow alley that was a natural barrier against the wind. At its dead end, a dumpster and mounds of trash were piled. There were several large corrugated boxes filled with Styrofoam puffs, and she knew that these made more than suitable beds. She headed for the closest box, walking around a large sewer drain grating, and blended into the darkness of the alley.
Using a piece of burlap as a blanket and the Styrofoam puffs as a mattress, she snuggled into the box and waited for the oblivion of sleep to overtake her. The sounds of the city filtered dimly down the alley: a police cruiser’s siren, the blaring horns of cabs, the bass-beat sound of a portable radio, occasionally the footsteps of someone passing on the sidewalk. They were all the familiar and somehow comforting sounds of the city at night, part of a strange lullaby that had carried her off to sleep every night for thousands of nights.
But there came another sound. A harsh scraping of metal upon metal.
Perhaps it was an atavistic response, but Allie sat up quickly in her trash-box bed and stared into the darkness of the alley. The grating over the sewer drain moved, its metallic surface glinting dully. She watched as it was pushed up and slid off to the left, her mind not yet registering fear, merely curiosity.
A dark shape appeared, struggling out of the open drain, and Allie recognized it as one of the little men—the little hunchbacked men that she had been seeing for years in the dark places of the city, out of the corners of he
r eyes. She did not know anything about them, other than that they only came out at night. They had never bothered her, and she in turn had never bothered them. Between them existed a tacit truce. So she was not frightened at the sight of the small figure standing in the alley.
But she was not prepared for what she saw next.
The little man was holding a long stick that glowed with a green fire. He waved it like a magician’s wand, as though beckoning something else from beneath the street. Allie watched in dull fascination as something else began to rise up out of the drain. Something snakelike, large and thick, wriggled up to the surface. In the dim light she could vaguely make out stalks on its head, a slitted mouth, and glowing eyes. Its segmented body was in constant motion as it moved at the commands of the little hunchbacked man; together, they moved away, out of the darkness and into the street.
Shaking her head, Allie settled back into the chunks of Styrofoam and closed her eyes. Better just to sleep, and leave the strange doings to others.
Russell Witherspoon and his two buddies, Flack and Cutter, caught the Number 6 train at the Parkchester Station on 177th in the Bronx. Russell was nineteen years old, tall and lanky, with big wide eyes and a blue-black complexion. He could sink a mean jump shot from the top of the key, and had he stayed in high school would have been one of the best collegiate prospects in the city. When he was only fourteen, coaches from St. John’s, Fordham, and even Notre Dame would stop by the playgrounds to ask his name and to find out what high school he attended. But Russell didn’t like high school, and he had a lot of trouble remembering the things that the teachers wanted you to know for their stupid exams, and when he turned fifteen, he just stopped showing up. The teachers didn’t care because he was always causing trouble in the classrooms anyway, and they didn’t bother to report him absent. Russell didn’t give a shit anyway. The day he decided not to go anymore, that was simply it. Besides, he had joined a street gang called the Snake Eyes, and he was getting to be a big deal with his group. They called him “Spoon” and he liked that. He had a reputation for taking up any dare, taking on anybody in a fight, doing anything.
If he kept up his rep, Spoon knew that he would soon be the honcho for the Eyes. Two of the lieutenants had OD’d during the summer, and the current leader of the gang was facing a murder rap next month, and the talk was they were going to ice him. When he was out of the way, Spoon knew there would be a power struggle to see who would take over, and he planned to be the one—the Honcho, the main man who gave all the orders. He had already made up his mind that he would off anybody who got in his way.
Tonight, Spoon had decided to take a ride downtown with his two flunkies, Flack and Cutter. He had promised both of them that they would be his chief lieutenants in the Snake Eyes when he took over, and they were fervently loyal to him. Spoon often thought they would even give him a blow job if he ordered them to, they wanted those Looie spots so bad. Flack was a huge, stupendously dumb hulk of a kid who was only sixteen and still growing. He had a light-brown complexion and an almost honky nose and lips. His hands were as big as tennis rackets and he used them like maces in fights. One conk from one of Flack’s hands and you were down for the count. Cutter was a short little weasel of a guy who carried a stiletto in his boot and a straight razor up the sleeve of his jacket. He was quick with his knives and nobody who knew him would fuck around with him. Nobody likes to get cut; and that was his specialty.
They sat together on the Number 6 as it rattled its way through the South Bronx, across the Harlem River, and down the East Side. Spoon was running short on funds and he needed to roust up some bread. The subways were always good for a few ducats. That bit about there being a cop on every train was bullshit; you just had to watch a couple of cars for a few stops to dig whether you could score or not. And the Guardian Angels were no hassle either. They had no power to arrest you, and if you knew a little karate, you could handle them. In fact, Spoon always liked to see the Angels on the trains—it gave the riders a false sense of security.
He was kind of sad that the cold weather was coming because it was getting harder to pull a snatch on some chick’s gold necklace, and that was the easiest money to be made. Move up to some honey just as the train was about to pull out, just before it closed its doors, and bing-bang, you grabbed the chain off her neck and slipped out the doors just as they closed up behind you. During the summer, Spoon was fencing half a grand a week in gold necklaces alone.
But now it would be tougher. Cold weather, and everybody was bundled up. No good snatchin’ times, just the regular hard-ass stuff—threaten them, rough them up to get what they had. Spoon didn’t care—he would get his any which way.
The train rattled along, and he watched the people getting on and off. The farther they went down toward the Village, the more people got on. They all looked at Spoon and his two goons suspiciously, and he would just smile at them, flashing his gold tooth slyly. He hadn’t seen a cop all the way down the line, and he knew this was a safe ride. There just wasn’t enough cops to go around. Then a dude got on the train at the 77th Street station, and Spoon nudged Flack and Cutter. He was about fifty, wearing a trench coat and carrying a briefcase. He had a big diamond on his right hand and he looked like money. He was their man. The guy sat a few seats away from them and pulled out a subway map, trying to figure out where he was going.
Spoon’s eyes brightened. A tourist was the easiest pickings of all.
He kept his eyes on the guy as the train stopped at 68th Street, then 59th. If the guy got off, they would follow him. If he stayed on, they would move on him closer to the Village. People had been getting out at each stop, and as the train pulled out of Grand Central, there were only five other people in the car, not counting the three Snake Eyes.
Flack poked him in the arm and Spoon looked at his burly friend. The big kid was looking out the window of the train, his hands cupped over the glass. “Hey, look-a-this, man …”
“Say what?” said Spoon casually.
“Sumpin’ out here, man. Look!”
Cutter turned and cupped his hands to the window. “Fuckin’ A! Whassat shit! Hey, Spoon, dig it!”
He didn’t want to let his prey out of his sight, but there was something about the way his buddies were acting that told him they weren’t kidding. He looked out the window …
… and saw the milky white thing inching up the glass on the outside. It looked like a huge hunk of snot, only it was moving like a slug on a sidewalk, leaving a shining trail behind it. He looked at it close and could see little suckers holding it fast even though the car was swaying and careening through the tunnel. What the fuck was that thing?! It made him shiver as he looked at it and he had the sudden urge to puke, but he swallowed hard and kept it down.
“What is it, Spoon?” asked Flack.
“Don’t know.” He turned away from the glass. “Leave it the fuck alone. That looks like a bad dude, whatever it is. Let’s git the guy at the next stop and get the fuck outta here.” He whispered his last two sentences harshly, and grinned inwardly as his two lieutenants turned quickly from the glass and tensed up for the move.
He felt the train slowing to a stop at 33rd Street, and he wished that they were farther downtown. He didn’t want to run the streets so far uptown, but he didn’t like the looks of whatever it was that was climbing up the side of the train either. He nodded and all three got up together, moved quickly down the aisle, and stood in front of the nicely dressed man with the briefcase.
Cutter slipped his straight razor out of his sleeve and had it up under the guy’s nose in a flash. No blood yet, but there would be if he tried anything.
“Okay, Jack,” said Spoon. “Real quick—the ring, your wallet, and the case. Or he cuts your fuckin’ nose off!”
The man’s eyes almost bulged out of his head as he silently yanked off his ring and then slowly pulled his wallet from inside his breast pocket. He started to whimper like a puppy as Cutter touched the flat edge of the cold steel ag
ainst the side of his nose.
The train was slowing down a lot now, and Spoon looked around at the other passengers to see if it was the usual scene. It was: five people all staring at him, hate and fear boiling in their eyes, but all of them motionless and crapping themselves before they would make a move against them. Ain’t nobody that would fuck with the Snake Eyes.
The train stopped. Spoon and his friends, their loot in their hands, moved to the door, waiting for it to spring open. Their victim fell back in his seat, gasping and almost crying as soon as they moved away from him. Spoon thought maybe he was having a heart attack, and he grinned. Dumb scared-shit honky! You deserves it!
They started to rush for the platform as the doors flew open, but something was in their way.
Flack was in the lead and the first of the milky snot-like things fell off the roof of the car and landed on his shoulder as he stepped out. He screamed and tried to fling it off, but it was grabbing him, oozing over him like thick glue. There was a real quick spitting sound like it was eating into him with a million little teeth, and he fell back on the floor of the subway car, convulsing like he had hold of a live electric wire.
All this happened in about a second. In the next, Spoon saw more of the slick white things pouring off the roof, sliding upside down onto the ceiling of the car and then plopping down. One of them landed on Cutter’s face, completely covering it. It pulsed a few times as it grabbed on tight, and then blood started spurting out in all directions. Cutter dropped like a stone and didn’t move.
Now everybody else was screaming and running toward the back of the train; the people who had been waiting on the platform outside ran off yelling. The floor and ceiling were covered with the blob things. As Spoon turned to run toward the other end of the car, one of them attached itself to his leg, and it felt like it was on fire as a million needles lanced his flesh, tearing it away. Another one grabbed his other leg and he started to go down. His head smacked the floor hard, but he didn’t feel the pain. He was watching the milky white lumps swarm over him, and the last thing he saw was that there was nothing below his knees but two tan sticks of bone. They sure do work fast, he thought slowly, deliberately. The blood was draining from his brain and he was going numb. Then another one slithered over his head.
Night-Train Page 28
