Lowland Rider

by Chet Williamson

  CHAPTER 6

  Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong, thought Manuel Alvarez as he sat back, trying to make himself relax on the hard plastic seat. The rush had hit the way it always had before, the sweet warmth surging through him, the world suddenly friendly again. But now something was, dammit, wrong. He didn't feel good, and he'd always felt good before, always for a nice long time. But this time he felt slow and lazy, like his legs were made of iron. He was sure he'd done everything right, just the way he always had, just the way his brother Juan had shown him when he'd taken his first jolt. And the stuff was good, he was sure it was He'd always been able to trust King's shit before, so why would it be different now?

  But why the fuck did he feel so bad?

  He looked at the Seiko he'd ripped off the week before, and saw that it had only been fifteen minutes since he'd slipped the needle into his vein, since the warmth had hit him in the toilet of the 125th Street station. He'd just wanted to ride then, lie back and let the train cruise him for a while, maybe later find Juan and his friends and rip off some Krylon and do a little bombing. He'd expected to stay warm for hours. So why was he so cold? And why were the ads so blurry, the letters so hard to read? Why was the car empty all of a sudden, and what were those noises, those badass moans and groans, why did his head hurt so much, why did his gut ache?

  Why the hell was he lying on the floor?

  And why was it getting so dark? All except for that dude, that dude who was bending over him, and looking into his face, that gorgeous, beautiful dude whose face was glowing brighter and brighter, until it seemed that all the pain in Manuel Alvarez's body was just burned away, and it wasn't cold any more, but warm again, wonderfully warm, as though it were the best and longest trip he'd ever taken, the ultimate score, the high that would last forever and ever.

  ~*~

  Enoch stood up. There was dirty snow on the floor where he had knelt over the body of the dying boy, but the knees of Enoch's pants were unstained, white, and shining. A smile formed gently on his soft mouth as he gazed down at the stiffening body.

  The train came to a harsh stop, throwing forward the passengers in the cars ahead, but Enoch only swayed like a reed in the breeze, as if the car in which he was now the only living being were under some special dispensation, some glamour, some enchantment. The doors clattered open and he stepped out, moving against the herd plunging toward the street, seeking instead the opposite way, the darkness, into which the whiteness of his visage was slowly lost to sight, like a lantern vanishing into the depths of a cave.

  PART

  3

  Then did there appear to him

  A figure robed in black.

  It had nae mouth, nor ear, nor chin,

  And een a nose did lack.

  But eyen it had that blazed at him,

  More fierce than tongue can tell,

  And such a voice, as hollow as

  The deepest pits of Hell.

  "Yea Gordon," quoth the spectre strange,

  "Now hearken unto me.

  If thou'lt nae be Life's messenger,

  Then Death's shalt thou noo be . . ."

  —Jamie Gordon, the Lowland Rider

  JESSE GORDON'S JOURNAL:

  DECEMBER 10, 1986

  …one of the surprising things is that it is hardly ever dark down here. When you think of the tunnels you immediately think of blackness, and yet, in all the weeks I've been down here, I haven't been in total darkness for more than a few seconds at a time, when the trains momentarily lose their interior power. This world is lit by neon, and I'm slowly learning to function within it. Food seems to be the only area in which I'm not a real skell, for all the skells I've seen suffer from malnutrition of one kind or another, and I won't do that to myself. I try to eat a well-balanced diet. There are fruit and vegetable stands down here, and sometimes I buy a trip to the salad bar at a subterranean restaurant. There are places where you can pick up a decent sandwich pretty cheap. On the whole, I eat about the equivalent of one large meal a day. At this rate, the money should last quite a few years. Rags doesn't know I have it, and I'll continue to keep him in the dark. Every once in a while I pretend to find some money, and then I treat him to a cheeseburger. I should give him more for all he's taught me. Still, a lot of things I had to figure out on my own, and now I have it pretty well down to a science.

  I wash—my body and my underwear—every three days. Undershirt, shorts, and socks get the sink treatment with soap from the receptacles. I dry them under the electric hand dryers. Every few weeks I wash sweaters and jeans the same way, dry them as best I can under a dryer, then carry them around with me until they air-dry enough for me to put them in the locker. Rags thinks I'm crazy. The other day he asked me what I do it for. "So I don't smell so bad," I answered.

  "Meanin' I do?"

  "It's your choice."

  He looked angry and embarrassed, and I was sorry I'd said it. "I ain't tryin' to impress anybody," he said. "Who you tryin' to impress?"

  I didn't tell him that I couldn't eat at a salad bar smelling like a sewer, so I just shrugged and mumbled something about liking to feel clean, and let it go at that. I don't like to argue with Rags. He's been a tremendous help. Without him, it would have taken me months to figure out which lines I could ride on the longest, to learn which cops were willing to overlook skells, which stations I could sleep in safely. Appearances are important too. If you don't want to be victimized, look poor, and just a little mean, so it's not worth anyone's while to hassle you. But when a cop comes around, you lose that hardness and look harmless instead—gentle as a kitten—simple and sleepy and not too swift, so that the worst they'll do is tell you to move along, no loitering, which you do, being very careful never to argue with them. "Most of 'em's nice," Rags told me, "but now and then you get some prick who gets his kicks outa beatin' on skells. Like Montcalm."

  "The guy at Penn Station?"

  "Yeah. Real mean bastard. Been around for years. I remember him when I first come down here. He was just a nobody then. Now he a sergeant."

  "Hates skells, huh?"

  "Back then he'd jes' as soon kill you's look at you. Course he never did, but he kicked and beat on a good many, includin' me. That was when he was straight, too."

  "You mean he's crooked?"

  "As a dog's hind leg. Into drugs, and that's the worst."

  "How do you know that?"

  "Through the grapevine."

  "Grapevine?"

  "There's more than jes' us down here. Word gets round about things like that."

  Montcalm. Someone to watch for, though I don't even know what he looks like. I've been back to Penn Station every day to renew my locker, so I may have passed him a dozen times. I may have even sat next to him on a train and never knew it, though I doubt that, if he's really as hard on skells as Rags makes out. He could probably tell I was one. Maybe the smell isn't there—though I come close on the third day—but the look is. And the attitude. I feel like a skell now. I have to admit that I'm almost comfortable down here. Or maybe comfortable isn't the word. Maybe it's resigned. Resigned to my fate.

  Every now and then I wonder if they're looking for me. They must know I'm still alive. They'd hardly think the boy's body was my own, and who else could have closed out my bank account? Are they looking for me? Does anyone care? Am I wanted for murder? I think about these things, but they really don't worry me. I read discarded newspapers occasionally, but so far I haven't come across anything about myself, not even in the Post. When I first came down I was too depressed—depressed. What, an understatement. I was too devastated to even think about checking any newspapers, so I probably missed it. It doesn't matter. No one will be looking for me down here, and even if they were, my beard is fully grown in. It makes me look very different—far heavier than before, and somehow crueler, which is only fitting. That poor boy.

  My poor wife and daughter.

  There is no God.

  CHAPTER 7

&n
bsp; Jesse Gordon and Rags stood in front of the dirt-caked mirrors of the 157th Street station men's room and shared half a pumpernickel bagel. Strands of lint clung like webs to the grainy surface, but Jesse picked them off, flicked them away, and chewed reflectively. "Don't have any cream cheese, do you?" he asked Rags.

  Rags chuckled. "You sure crazy. Next you be askin' for that lox stuff. What is that anyway?"

  "Salted fish."

  "Jew food."

  "So are bagels." Jesse swallowed the last bite and washed his hands at the sink. "Haven't seen you for a few days. Where you been keeping yourself?"

  "South mostly. Down to Coney and Brighton Beach." Rags let a few drops of water touch his hands, and patted his face with them. "Whyn't you never come down with me? Get you up above. Sun's shinin', weather's nice and warm, trees gettin' green. Don't you miss all that?"

  "No. I prefer it down here."

  The two of them walked out of the men's room and sat on a bench near the end of the platform. "Can't talk you into it."

  "Nope. No thanks, Rags."

  "You don't know what you're missin', Jesse. I just set back and wait, and when that train come out of the tunnel into the warm sun, it's like bein' born all over again. And how you gettin' on?"

  "Getting by okay. One day's pretty much like another."

  "That's the nice part, ain't it? No surprises. Leastways not too many." Rags patted the bundle of cloth along his left side.

  "Still there, are they?" Jesse asked smiling.

  "Yeah. I keep checkin', though." He tilted his head even further than usual and looked at Jesse. In his collar of rags, his head resembled a black marble egg gone crooked on its base. "Wanta see 'em?"

  Jesse was about to nod, but instead he asked a question. "What's wrong with your neck, Rags?"

  For a moment Rags's face quivered like jelly. "My neck?"

  "Why do you hold your head to the side like that?”

  “It's . . . nothin'."

  "No, Rags. It's something. Pull your scarves away.”

  “Jesse…"

  "Come on, Rags," Jesse urged gently. "Let me see."

  Rags sighed deeply, pressed his head further to the left, and tugged down on the mass of cloth. Jesse saw what looked like a smooth and ovoid piece of coal, three inches long, jutting nearly an inch from the right side of Rags's neck.

  "Does it hurt?" Jesse asked.

  "Naw, not at all."

  "Have you seen a doctor about it?"

  "Oh, sure," Rags chuckled, covering the tumor quickly, as embarrassed as if he'd been showing his privates. "Sure, we got Blue Cross down here."

  "I'm not kidding, Rags," Jesse said. "That's nothing to fool with."

  "Who'm I gonna see down here, Jesse? There ain't no doctors down here."

  "Up above, Rags. Go to a hospital. They'll look at it, it won't cost anything."

  Rags shook his head angrily. "What good'd it do? I couldn't afford no operation or nothin'."

  "There are always ways around that, Rags. But you've got to have it looked at. If something like that was malignant . . ." Jesse left the rest unspoken.

  "Malignant. Like a cancer?"

  "Don't tell me you haven't thought of that."

  "A cancer," Rags said again, and then shook the thought from him like a dog shaking off water. "You want a book or don't you?" His hand went inside the labyrinth of fabric, made it heave like a cat beneath a blanket, then reappeared, clutching two books, one of them small and bound in black leather, the other larger, bound in a light gray cloth. A few traces still remained of the orange ink that had adorned the spine. "Which?" Rags asked, offering both.

  "See a doctor, Rags. Promise."

  "All right, damn it, I'll see a doctor, now hush up about all that. Which?"

  "I guess I feel like a ballad today," answered Jesse, taking the gray book and opening it at random. An old black woman stepped around the corner and eyed them nervously, a large basket purse hanging at the end of one arm. Jesse flashed a smile, hoping to relax her, and looked down at the book. The woman edged past them and moved rapidly away.

  "Lady's scared," Rags whispered.

  Jesse nodded and flipped through the book. The pages were so damp that they felt like cloth, as if Rags's essence had penetrated the hard covers and transmuted the paper. He stopped at a ballad of Robin Hood and read it. When he finished, he turned to Rags, who was painfully intent upon his Bible. Jesse waited until he looked up, then handed back the volume. "Have you read all of these?"

  Rags pumped his head up and down. "You bet. More'n once, too, like the Bible. I forget 'em by the next time I read 'em, though, so I don't get bored. Which reminds me—you sure your name ain't Jamie Gordon?"

  Jesse laughed. "No, why?"

  "I was ridin' and readin' the other day and I found this one I forgot about. Lemme see now…" Rags paged through the book for a few minutes. While he did, Jesse noticed a stocky white boy in denim enter the platform area. He looked around, gave Jesse and Rags a quick glance of appraisal and a smirk of dismissal, then moved slowly toward the woman. Her eyes were fixed on the dark hole of the tracks. She did not see him. "Here we go," Rags said. "Look here."

  He set the book on Jesse's lap. It was open to a ballad entitled, Jamie Gordon, the Lowland Rider. Jesse started to read:

  Oh there was a rider daring,

  Yes, there was a rider bold…

  Jesse became lost in the poem, adrift in a story so similar to his own that tears came to his eyes, and a shuddering gasp escaped him. "Hey," said Rags. "Jesse, what's the…"

  The words were cut off by an echoing shriek. The two men looked up and saw the denim-clad boy wrestling with the black woman at the platform's edge. The boy held a knife with which he was trying to cut the handle of the woman's bag, which she was pressing to her side with surprising ferocity. He grunted as he sawed away, the bag in one hand.

  Jesse jumped to his feet and started to move toward the struggle, but Rags put a heavy hand on his shoulder. "No way," he whispered harshly. "Come on," and he turned and headed for the exit. Jesse took a step toward Rags, then looked back to where the man and woman were still fighting. The man was kicking the woman in the legs now, and she staggered to stay upright. Her screams were growing weaker, but she still hung on to the purse.

  "Jesse!" It was Rags who called his name, but for a moment it seemed to Jesse Gordon as though the woman, whom he had never seen before, had called on him for help.

  Jesse!

  He heard it again, and knew that it was not Rags, not even the woman, but someone else, a voice that ordered him to do what he had been about to do on his own before Rags had tried to stop him. He started to run.

  ~*~

  The boy had reached the end of his patience. If he could not slash the purse off a live arm, he would wrench it off a dead one. His arm shot behind him like a bow being drawn, and plunged forward, intending to tear through the old brown cloth coat, to cut and weaken and kill, if need be, the old woman who was being so absurdly uncooperative.

  The knife never touched her. Something grabbed his arm and twisted him around as easily as if he were a child, and suddenly he was facing the younger of the two bums he'd seen sitting on the platform. In the dark frame of hair and beard, the man's eyes were alive with fury, like some Biblical avenger, and the fist that drove the boy to the concrete landed with the impact of a trip-hammer.

  When he shook his head to clear his vision, he still felt his knife in his hand. Beside him the old woman was panting with exhaustion and terror, clinging to her ratty purse like a lifeline, and above him stood the crazy hum, fists clenched at his sides. "Bastard!" the boy spat out, and came up fast, his knife held low, aiming for the gut. The bum jerked away, his fists went up, and thundered down on the back of the boy's head. The boy sank down again, his face striking the concrete, his nose breaking with a sharp snap that echoed for a moment until it was muffled by the boy's howl of pain.

  He twisted again, and brought himself to a sitting po
sition, the knife held in front of him, the blood from his nose darkening his jean jacket. "That's it, man," he said brokenly. "I'm gonna kill you now."

  He lifted himself carefully to his feet. Except for the brutal pain in his nose, he was unhurt, and the street coolness that had betrayed him by its absence had returned. No more quick, angry, unplanned thrusts. He had the knife, so he would back this turkey up and wait for his moment. No use being stupid.

  The bum's eyes grew wary, but the boy could detect no fear in them as he backed him toward the wall. The boy held himself low, moved on the balls of his feet, ignored the blood that dripped down over his mouth and chin, ignored everything except the sonovabitch he intended to gut. The bum was getting closer to the bench. Soon, the boy knew, the back of his legs would strike it, unsteadying him for just a moment, just long enough.

  Two more steps, then one, and the bum bumped the bench, rocked on his heels, and the boy pounced.

  At that same second something grabbed him at his groin and his neck. Unable to scream out his pain, he felt himself being lifted into the air, and through a red haze saw the dirty, vaulted arch of the station ceiling move past him and turn dark. Then he was flying, weightless, through the air for what seemed like minutes, but what was actually just long enough for him to realize how stupid it all was, because the old bitch probably had nothing anyway. With that in mind, he landed on the third rail.