Lowland Rider

by Chet Williamson

  Jesse left the restroom and walked back to the lockers, where he selected one in the top row. He put the folded suit and shoulder bag into it, dropped two quarters into the coin slot, and closed the door. He drew the key from the lock and looked at the number on both it and the locker itself. 4602.

  He put the key into his pocket and walked to the subway entrance, where he purchased a dozen tokens. Pushing through the turnstile, he walked to the platform for the IND uptown local. When it arrived, he stepped on and sat down.

  The ballad of the Lowland Rider had begun.

  PART

  2

  Home he did ride, and woe betide

  When he saw what was done.

  He swore to rend the killers' flesh

  Before the day was done.

  Then did he ride ower countryside

  Until the murthering crew

  Came into sight, and he did fight,

  And every man he slew.

  But in the midst of bonie brawl,

  A young child by perchance

  Did enter in, and bold Gordon

  Nae gave him half a glance,

  But struck with speed, too late to heed

  The father's warning cry.

  In coldest grue the child he slew,

  And tears came to his eye.

  Loud Gordon wailed when he beheld

  The boy to whom he'd giv'n

  A deadly blow, and made to go

  Unto his Lord in Heav'n.

  "I have brought death to this sweet bairn,

  As death was brought to me.

  For Jesu's sake, the law should break

  Me on the gallows tree."

  Away he rode into the night,

  And stopped within a glen,

  And there he swore to hide away

  From sight of living men . . .

  —Jamie Gordon, the Lowland Rider

  CHAPTER 3

  There was no poetry in the subway. It was composed of surfaces with no rhythms. In the stations, tile predominated, the color of old men's teeth, and beneath one's feet cement, never clean, stretched snowlike in all directions, into distant chambers, up toothy steps, down into maws that seemed volcanically lit, with tongues of yellow fire. It was a cavern of flatness, with the omnipresent crevasse of the tracks, a canyon dropping into darkness.

  Within the tile walls, and deeper in—inside the glass and metal tubes that burrowed through the lightless tunnels—the people moved, and stood, and sat, each of them lost within themselves as well, twice-buried. The floor drew their sight, or books, or newspapers, the concentration on which steadied them, held their center, while without they were rattled and whirled down black paths, shunted from one dark region to the next. Eventually they rose, left the false light, and ascended into day.

  But there were some who never ascended, or, if at all, only infrequently. The pit was their home. They had learned to live with walls all around them, the stench of urine, the grayness at their feet, with the sounds of crashing wheels, of huge blocks of air displaced by the rush of the trains. They survived on the debris of the surface dwellers, of food discarded, money lost, occasional generosity. Often they stole, often they were caught, and just as often were set free again to scurry back to their holes. Most of them were mad, but the city had run out of room for its madmen, so they wandered the streets, and sank like stones into the tunnels for shelter from the rain and snow, and the discouraging presence of the sane. The passengers feared them. The transit police tolerated them and pitied them, and sometimes fed them. They dubbed them "skells," walking skeletons, dwellers with death, denizens of the city's large grave.

  Gladys H. Mitchell had been a skell for fifteen years. Prior to that, she had been a prostitute. She had come down into the subway when she was thirty-eight years old and looked fifty. Her skin was etched with wrinkles, and her breasts hung low. Makeup alone could no longer hide the ravages of her past, and there had been fewer clients every month. So she had descended to undertake cheap services of oral sex in shadowed corners or vacant end cars, kneeling with her back to the storm door while the men stood gazing through the grimy window into the car ahead. Few men wanted her any other way. She had become an alcoholic, and carried syphilis.

  Early one morning it occurred to her that it would be convenient and economical to sleep on the train instead of returning to the surface and seeking out one of the transient hotels she usually tenanted while the rest of the city awoke. Rush hour, when it came, jarred her, and she had to transfer three times. But she slept, and, if she was not as refreshed as she would have been after sleeping in a bed, she was at least rested, and spared the five dollars her landlords would have assessed her, now that they were no longer willing to accept the levy in services rendered. So the next morning she spent on the trains as well, and the next, and the next. It was the end of her. She never went back to the surface.

  She was cheated many times, was raped occasionally—incidents she never reported—and slowly grew to detest men far more than before. The day quickly came when she could no longer command even the smallest remuneration for her favors, and from that time on her descent began in earnest. The only benefit with which her subterranean existence provided her was the abatement of her alcoholism. As her finances decreased, so too did her opportunities to buy liquor. Of necessity, she drank less, and slowly the bottle loosened its hold on her. However, by the time the pressing demand for alcohol was gone, something quite different had muddied her mind, stolen her sanity.

  For years, as long as she could remember, she had been a counterfeit of love, a mere repository into which men could, without emotion, void their lust. She had not wanted it that way, but she had borne it all, every indignity, every rough word and act, until all the love had been burned out of her. She hated not only men, but love itself and its consequences, with the concentrated hate one feels toward the object, once deeply sought, that one can no longer hope to possess, as the irredeemably poor grow to hate not only the rich, but gold itself.

  Gladys H. Mitchell carried a knife, which she had taken, unbloodied, from the side of a wounded, unconscious boy at the Rockaway Avenue station on the IRT Brooklyn line. She liked the knife. It had a shiny steel blade that leapt out of the white pearl handle when she pushed a little button. The blade was long, as long as from the tip of her thumb to the end of her little finger when she stretched her hand apart. The arthritis which had begun to twist her fingers had, over the years, lessened that distance, but the blade stayed as long as ever. The shine never left it. After she had made a kill, she could wipe it on her skirt and look into it, and see her own face glowing back at her, her eyes looking into her eyes. She hardly ever looked any more, though. She no longer knew the woman who looked back at her.

  Her kills were of little concern to the transit police. In their eyes, Gladys H. Mitchell, whose name they did not know, and who came to eventually forget it herself, performed a valuable service which more than made up for her sometimes frightening eccentricities. Vermin, of the animal variety, were a frequent annoyance beneath the city. Rats, despite the best efforts of the exterminators, ran abundantly, and stray cats crept below, much like the skells themselves, to seek a less harrowing cold in winter. Dogs roamed too, less frequently, for their natural skill in concealment was far inferior to that of the cats, and light years away from the rats' highly evolved efficiency. All these creatures were fair game for Gladys H. Mitchell, now known solely as Baggie.

  Transit police new to the beat assumed that the nickname was derived from the obvious categorization of the woman as a bag lady, one of those pieces of urban debris who carry all their possessions in shopping bags from one temporary haven to the next. There was more to it than that. Shopping bags served Baggie not only as luggage, but also as a method of execution.

  The technique had taken months to conceive and years to perfect. She performed, as she always had, late at night and early in the mornings, when stations were bare, empty of all humanity but the predators to
whom Baggie offered no rewards of a financial or sexual nature. She was even too mad to terrorize, so was left alone.

  Alone she sat, on a folding chair of gray metal with a tattered seat cushion that had once been green. She sat out of the light, in the deepest shadows she could find, four or five shopping bags beside and behind her, and one empty at her feet, its open mouth grimacing dumbly toward the tracks, a strong odor telling of something small and delicious within. She sat, and she waited.

  It was this intense patience that had come hardest to her, but she had mastered it fully, sitting still for hours if need be, watching the platform, the tracks, the open bag. Eventually one would come, disguised, of course, as cat or rat or dog, slinking close, scuttling away, its claws chattering on the dirty pavement, then coming nearer, eyes clicking from woman to bag to woman to bag, from where the smell of food was coming, and finally, finally, if she just held still long enough and breathed quietly enough, the furry head would vanish into the bag, and then the shoulders, and more, until only the tail, that long, sleek devil's tail that all men have, tucked into the cleft of their buttocks, remained visible.

  Then, only then, did Baggie, self-forgotten Gladys H. Mitchell, come to life. The knife, its blade already exposed, sparked down, piercing the brown paper with a dry snap, impaling the beast within with a wet, squelching impact. It often squealed, and she laughed when that happened, wrenching the knife free and thrusting down again into the thrashing brown paper, into the trapped body of the longshoreman who had torn her anus, twenty years before, under the Queensboro Bridge, or the writhing forms of the six trade school boys, now magically fused into the shape of one small dog, who had paid her for one fuck only—for the youngest of them—then had all taken their turns, and the ten dollars back as well, leaving her bruised in an alley.

  She killed them again and again, until nothing moved for the longest time, until her own heavy breathing and the awesome trembling of a train far down the tunnels were the only sounds to touch the station. Then she would rest for a moment, spent as if after a long ago tussle on some unmade bed. She would wipe the knife and turn it, smiling as it caught the few traces of light that invaded her dark haven, and then lean down, pick up the perforated bag and its contents, warm and dripping, and place them carefully into another bag, this one with handles of white, twisted twine.

  "I have you," she would whisper. "Now I have you."

  A train would come, she would board it, fold her chair and lay it down, array her bags on the seat beside her, the most precious at her right hand, and go to sleep, her pale, creased face as guiltless and untroubled as a child's.

  JESSE GORDON'S JOURNAL:

  OCTOBER 3, 1986

  There is so much misery here. Today—around five in the morning—I was riding in the last car of the Number 6 train on the Lexington Avenue IRT. I was alone in the car except for a transit cop who was sitting, half-dozing, at the other end. At 103rd Street an old woman got on. I say old, but I suppose she could have been anywhere from forty to eighty. When they're in her condition it's hard to tell. She wore a heavy cloth coat that fell below her knees, absolutely shapeless, making her look like a big block with arms and a head. She had a bunch of shopping bags with her, and one of them gave off a stench much worse than urine or feces, a smell like rotting meat. The cop got up right away, wrinkled his nose at the smell, but smiled a little too. "Okay, Baggie," he said. "Which one is it?"

  She didn't say a word, just plopped down in a seat, her arms still holding all the bags. I could see that one of them had a dark, wet spot at the bottom of it. She looked at the cop, and her face went sour. There was real hate in the look.

  "Come on now," said the cop. "You'll get your bounty." He pulled a wrinkled dollar bill from his pocket and gestured with it to the stained bag. "That one, isn't it?"

  She shook her head in short, sharp jerks. "Fuck you," she said. "Oh, fuck you." Her voice sounded like it came from the bottom of a mile-deep gravel pit, like the inside of her throat was caked with scars.

  "Come on now, we treat you good. Lemme have it now . . ." He reached out and grabbed the handles of the bag, but she pressed her arm tight against her body and made a sound almost like a growl.

  "Get away, fuck you," she spat at him. I could see the drool sliding down her chin.

  "You know what'll happen," the cop went on calmly, still holding the handles. "You know. You'll have to go up. Up above. And we won't let you come back. You'll have to stay up there. You can never come back. Not ever, Baggie. You let me have it now."

  The old woman muttered and mumbled, but she let the bag slip off her arm. The train was moving now, heading uptown to 110th Street. The cop held out the dollar, but the woman, Baggie, wouldn't look at it, just looked down into her lap. I could hear her teeth grinding together—what she had left of them anyway. The cop tossed the bill onto her lap, and she spat on it, spitting on herself in the process. And the thought crossed my mind, as it has every waking hour since I've been down here, that I really have condemned myself to hell.

  The cop looked down into the bag, gave a tsk tsk, shook his head, and closed it up again, then glanced over at me and gave a little smile as if to say, Boy, there's all kinds, ain't there? and I gave him back a look of humor and regret, as though I pitied her, and agreed that the cop and I were better than her. I knew that that, in my case, was a lie. Still, the look came easy to me.

  The train stopped at 110th Street and the cop got off. Through the window I saw him go over to a trash can and dump the bag inside, then move on down the platform. That station would stink like rotten meat all morning, but I guess the cop didn't care. He figured 110th Street was trash anyway. I found myself hating him for that, but then I remembered, and agreed with him. It is trash. They could take everything from 110th Street on up, including all of the Bronx, and shitcan it. I wouldn't shed a tear. Not now. Not after what happened.

  Hell with it. Back to the woman, the crazy woman.

  The doors closed and we rattled off toward 116th. Right away, as soon as the closed doors are between her and the cop, she begins to scream, very loudly. Doesn't move, just yells as loud as she can, what I assume were curses against the cop for taking her bag. I could make out "cocksucker," and "motherfucker," and a few more, but most of it was unintelligible, though it all sounded obscene because of that rough, scratchy quality of her voice. Then finally she saw me.

  She stopped dead, why I can't say. There was nothing about me that could have been considered remarkable. I was wearing jeans and a black turtleneck, and I suppose the expression on my face was one of pity and curiosity—surely she must be used to that. But she looked at me with terror, as though I were a ghost, or a walking dead man (not so far from the truth), or someone she thought would kill her in the next few minutes. The intensity of her gaze rocked me, and I must have looked as frightened of her as she seemed to be of me. We sat there, the train trembling, our eyes locked on each other. I think we might have sat there until the end of the line, if the black man had not come in…

  CHAPTER 4

  When Rags stepped into the car and saw Baggie, his face tightened so that in both texture and color it resembled a prune. "Ol' bitch," he said quietly, and then, louder, "Yo! Bitch!"

  She looked up at him cautiously, like a cat unwilling to draw her eyes away from one enemy to confront a lesser one.

  "Get on out," he growled, and now her attention grew more fixed on him, less on the white boy, though her eyes still flashed back and forth between them. "Gwan, get outa here. Gitcher ass out."

  The white boy opened his mouth, but Rags shot him a quick look, gestured him to silence.

  "Fuckers…" the woman whined, gathering up the loops of her shopping bags and slipping a tattered arm through them, while with her other hand she grasped her folding chair. The car lurched as she pushed herself to her feet, and she sprawled on the green and yellow linoleum, her knee striking the floor sharply. The white boy staggered to his feet to help, but Baggie shrieked a short,
high, piping scream, and scuttled back, ratlike, from him.

  "Get away! Get thee behind me! Evil, evil . . ."

  She repeated the word, crooning it over and over as she pulled herself to her feet, picked up her things, and, bouncing off the hard, plastic benches, moved toward the cars in the front. When she drew near Rags, he pressed against the wall. As filthy as he was, he could not bear to have her brush against him.

  The door clattered shut behind her, and Rags relaxed, turning to look at the white boy, who, he saw now, was older than he had first thought. "Devil can quote scripture, they say . . . I think we jes' heard it." He walked the length of the car and sat down across the aisle from the man. Rags couldn't categorize him, and that made Rags curious. He wasn't just a passenger, he looked too settled in for that, nor was he an undercover cop—the shoulders weren't set right, the eyes didn't poke and probe—and he looked too clean, smelled too good to be a skell.

  "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."