Lowboy (23 page)

S
he called out his name and he came through the window in the glory and fulfillment of his calling. Not Lowboy’s or any other’s but his own. A cardoor slammed shut and the curtains blew open and he came through the window as magnificent and silent as a god. His gold satin jacket hissed as he spread his arms and fell in elegant bright folds against his ribs. ninjaz 3:10 was written across the back of it like a psalm. He moved in arabesques and loops like a bird or a deer and hit Secretary across the face before his heels had landed on the floor. He took Lowboy by the hair and threw him up against the dresser. He was a vision to behold and Lowboy shivered just to see him. As yet he hadn’t even made a fist.

He let his weight come down on Lowboy’s back and asked a simple question. Lowboy turned his head to answer and saw nothing but a rippling in the air. The question was repeated like a punchline. Sometimes one voice asked sometimes another. His beautiful sad voice mellow and endlessly patient. Her thin panicked screeching. The question was simple but where could the answer be found. Lowboy made wellmeaning mindless noises. He wept and he babbled and he made every face that he knew. Where was the answer.
A drawer of the dresser was closed and his hand was inside it. He rolled his eyes back in his head and felt a coolness.

“Look at me motherfucker.” His eyes inclined toward the mirror but he saw nothing worth seeing. “Look at me.” The voice low and calm and the others behind it. A whirlpool of rabid hysterical hisses and his own voice lost among them like a pigeon locked inside a tabernacle. I’m writing my own psalm, Lowboy said to himself. The drawer was closed again where were his fingers. A face was in the mirror now he shrieked a question at it. A boneless ugly face and very white. Retching and weeping and asking somebody’s forgiveness.

How can this face exist in this my world.

In the blink of an eye it was some later hour and he was being pulled along a hallway by his shins. His arms were crossed at his chest and his right hand was wrapped in a blue football jersey. He recognized the hallway: he was traveling backward in time. The lobby came next and the entryway and the pitted green steps. A palm cupped his head as he went down the steps and he looked up and saw Secretary’s fat inconsolable face. It was night now or something like night and her hair glowed blue and silver in the backlight. He saw his breath and her breath high above it. The poodle lay flat on the fire escape with its bonnet caught between two of the bars.

They stretched him out against the curb and left him. The voices were even louder now if such a thing was possible. Bickering, wheedling, gibbering at each other and at him. Issuing instructions without number. He shut his eyes and turned his face into the wind. He felt no cold. What time is it, he wondered.

“What time is it?” he said into the air.

He knew better than to hope for a reply. He was leaking from his eyeholes and his ears. The voices were more urgent than he remembered them ever being and he frowned and held his breath and listened closely. Apparently there was something left to do.

Soon after that he got onto his feet. What time is it, he said again. Why is it so dark. He stuck his hand inside his shirt and started walking. The street was as dry and lifeless as the moon. Here and there a window flickered bluely. Had they waited until nighttime had they thought that he was dead. He walked with his head down and followed the scuts in the pavement. He passed a window with a TV on behind it and the weatherman waved at him and wished him well. The clock on the livingroom wall said 4:15.

Four fifteen in the morning, Lowboy said to himself. Forty-five minutes to five.

A thought hit him then and the massed voices scattered. It hit him like lightning. 4:15 in the morning. The appointed hour long since come and gone. It was black and cold and lifeless on the street but he saw no sign that there had been a fire.

“Nothing happened,” said Lowboy. He said it out loud so that he could believe it. “No fire.” He waited for the voices to deny it or to change his mind for him but they kept still. How can they deny it, he thought. They can’t. His mouth went dry with victory. What can anyone say. Not a thing in the world. It’s 4:17 in the morning.

He thought about all kinds of people as the shock of it passed through him but the one he thought of most was Violet. A song came to him as he thought about her: “I’m a Little Blackbird” by Clarence Williams. Also “Goose Pimples” by Bix Beiderbecke. Also “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me.”

I’m coming Violet, he said. I’m on my way. Do nothing until you hear from me. He saw her sitting tiredly on the black lacquered couch with the red wall behind it, then jumping up when he walked through the door, then swooning when he told her what he’d done. No one swooned anymore but she would if he asked her. People always
did in the old songs. He thought of her on the couch again because it made him happy. I did it Violet, he was saying. I made the world stop ending. She called him her little professor and he was. A policeman was with her but it didn’t matter. The policeman got up and reached for his gun but Violet pulled the rug from underneath him. He tried to get up but she hit him with a frying pan. He started singing “You’ll Wish You’d Never Been Born” and Violet started singing “Black & Blue.” The policeman switched over to “Leavenworth Strut” but Lowboy cut him off with “Sunny Disposish” and Violet was dancing on a stool.

In an alley by the station he saw Quick & Painless and told them the news. He held his broken right hand up as proof and they stood motionless and watched him without blinking. Only the white of the socks on their hands showed in the shadow of the houses and from time to time the glittering of their eyes. When he was a few steps from the alley he stopped and made his presidential face. I did it boys, he said to them. I did it.
Nothing happened
.

At the station he told everyone he saw. They gawked at him in simple disbelief. He walked up the row of turnstiles and picked up farecards from the ground and slid them through the slots and no one stopped him. The station was brighter and more beautiful than he remembered. Argon tubelights palpitated coldly. His skin felt hot against his clothes and when he brought a hand to his eyes his fingerbones clacked in their sockets. Nothing took him by surprise or made him worry. He was moving through a world transfigured and redeemed by sacrifice and it was only right that what he saw seemed foreign. He saw the world the way a headless saint would see it.

The fourteenth farecard was good and he went through the turnstile sideways, breathing very slowly, keeping his right hand pressed against his ribs. There was no pain. The 6 train arrived and he sat down inside it. The station fell away and there was no one on the train but a smell in the air like sheets of almonds baking. Night outside
or could it be the tunnel. Stars passed by like tracklights. The inside of the car was clean and gray and free of any shadows. His hands were on the crosspole and his feet were close together and his voice was like a locust in the air. William of Orange is my name, he shouted. Can I please have a smoke. Sometimes it happened that he spoke very clearly. The car was arranged not with L-shaped seatblocks but with ashcolored benches running the length of each wall. A dentist’s office or a jailcell or a courtroom. The headmaster’s office at the Bellavista Clinic. The smoking lounge with its patterned plastic stools.

Everything else that happened happened softly. In the glass he saw his sly white face reflected. His face made faces at him while he watched it. The stars and struts and guttered bedrock passing. The steady sloughing of the rails and wheels. The train eased into the tunnel like a hand into a pocket and closed over Lowboy’s body and held him still.

What time is it now? someone asked. It was 4:27. The train banked through a curve and straightened itself and gave a kind of cough and lost its power. The tubelights flared and flickered and expired. Lowboy opened his eyes as wide as he could and pressed his ghostly face against the glass. He saw colossal shapes and glyphs and signatures. Damp concrete slathered in ciphers. Turquoise and orange and silver and platinum blond. Bleeding heartwrenching letters. Tags the kids called them. Glorious and shrill and wet and horrifying. A righteous text set down for his eyes only.

He sat on the bench and watched the great words passing. They oozed and writhed and chirruped and collapsed. No use trying to decode them. They dripped against the window like tattoos. He made
a frightened sound and shut his eyes and the tags made words and signs behind his eyelids. They issued decrees. The almond smell was sharper and he knew that if his eyes came open the unthinkable thing he’d thought of would have happened. It was happening now. He pressed his hands against his face and tried to listen. Something in the car was moving. The tags were coming clear to him or was the cipher broken. Yes he had broken it. They weren’t words at all but pictures. Each letter its own heaving organism. They shuddered together like bees in a hive, dancing out messages and swallowing one another and making a history and fucking. When he opened his eyes he understood them perfectly.

V
iolet and Lateef sat on the 4 train in the early morning, an empty seat between them for propriety, studying the backlit ads across the aisle.
NEW CAREERS IN COMPUTING AND CAPTAIN MORGAN SPICED RUM AND THE INSTITUTE FOR PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY AND JONATHAN ZIZMOR’S FACIAL FRUIT PEELS
. From a police recruitment poster a grayscaled woman of no particular age or ethnicity beamed at them like a televangelist: imagine a mother thanking you for finding her missing son. Lateef glanced furtively at Violet. They’d spent the last three hours doing next to nothing and the wait seemed to have affected her. She was sitting up straight with her hands in her lap, moving her lips very subtly, like someone just learning to read. She seemed more foreign to him at that moment than at any time since he’d first seen her. She hadn’t said a word to him since they’d left the Second Precinct.

“Two more stops,” Lateef heard himself saying, as he might have to a tourist or a child. She nodded almost imperceptibly.

“We might not find Will there, you know. He might be gone already.”

She said nothing.

“He might not be coming to Union Square at all.”

“I know, Detective.” She shook her head. “We shouldn’t count our blessings.”

He smiled and nodded. “That’s right. Or our chickens, either.”

She didn’t answer.

“If you see your son, Miss Heller—this is important—point him out to me right away.” He cleared his throat. “Don’t pursue him yourself. Can we agree on that?”

She said something too quietly to hear.

“What was that?”

“I hate trains.” She took a breath and held it. “I hate them.”

“Just two more stops,” he repeated lamely, glancing at his watch. “We’re in good shape, Miss Heller. It’s been less than fifteen minutes since the sighting.”

“What sighting?”

He watched her without answering, waiting for her to acknowledge him, but no acknowledgment came. It was impossible that she’d forgotten the last quarter hour—the call, the positive ID, the frantic rush to the 4—but no other explanation came to him. Her expression was the same as when she’d first come to his office: the same spiritless dullness, the same defeat. What’s changed in her, he wondered. What pills did she take. What is it that I’m not seeing clearly.

Stop asking questions, he told himself tiredly. Stop playing detective. You’ve been asking questions all day and they’ve been the wrong ones and you’ve been too stupid to answer even those. Too stupid or too self-satisfied or too smitten. You’re going to sit here quietly now and get off at Union Square and wait for the boy to come out of the 6. If he doesn’t come out you’ll have to start over from nothing, which wouldn’t be a bad idea at all. Pretend you’ve never seen her and begin at the beginning. Good morning, Miss Heller. I’m Detective Lateef. Imagine yourself thanking me for finding your missing son.

After a time she seemed to recollect him. Her eyes came slowly into focus and she leaned away from him and licked her lips. “Detective,” she said, still not turning her head. “I want you to do something for me.”

“That doesn’t surprise me, Miss Heller.” He managed a smile. “You usually do.”

“You’d know my son, wouldn’t you? You’d know him if you saw him.” She took in another slow breath. “You’d recognize him, I mean.”

“If I didn’t, I’d just—”

“I want to know what you’ll do when you find him. Will you tell me that?”

He waited to answer until she’d looked at him. “I hope you’re not planning on leaving me, Miss Heller.”

She blushed as though he’d asked her something shameful. “I’ll be there,” she murmured.

“Then why ask me that question?”

It took her a long time to answer and when she did the words came out awkwardly, tentatively, as though she’d already forgotten what he’d asked. “Just tell me what will happen when you find him.”

He was about to repeat his question when he saw that she was looking at the poster. He pressed the heels of both his palms against his eyes. “I’m going to approach him very slowly, with my hands away from my body, so that he can see he’s not in any danger. I’m going to talk to him. I’m going to make sure that no one else comes within fifteen feet. I’m going to keep all weapons holstered. And I’m also going to keep you close at hand.” He leaned toward her then like the host of a talk show, arranging his hands in his lap. “I’ll have to judge his state of mind, to start with, and you know your son best. That’s why I need you to stay right with me, Miss Heller.”

She closed her eyes and sat up straight and nodded. A few hours earlier she’d have laughed at his manner but now she barely seemed to be listening.

“You won’t need me for the rest of it, will you? You won’t need me really.”

He took her arm and gripped it. “What’s the matter with you, Miss Heller? How many of your pick-me-ups did you take?”

She smiled at him or at something just behind him. “I don’t have any pick-me-ups, Detective.”

“You listen now, Miss Heller. Look at me. I don’t pretend to know what’s wrong with you and I don’t want to know. But whatever it is, you’d better fix it fast. I have no intention of missing your son again—none whatsoever. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, Detective. Yes, you do. I’m sorry.” But the smile and the diffidence behind the smile were clearer to see than ever.

The train banked hard to the left and the local track met them, flickering behind a row of I beams like a dragon in a black-and-white cartoon. Lateef watched it in the feeble hope that it might calm him. He remembered what Violet had said about trains and he found himself studying the car and the passengers, asking himself what it was about them that she hated. As he looked out the window he began to feel the tunnel’s hold, its inescapable authority, the unconditional order it imposed. He wondered whether that might be the reason. We have no say, he thought. None whatsoever. We can’t affect the speed or the direction or the order of the stations. The only choice is whether to get off. His thoughts embarrassed him and he recognized their simplicity but he couldn’t bring himself to part with them. They brought him nearer to her, possibly even nearer to the boy. They hid a promise of a kind in their simplicity.

“Ali,” she said suddenly, putting her hand over his. Her eyes were clearer now than he had ever seen them. She was looking where Lateef had been looking before, through the line of I beams at the local track. They were passing a 6 train, passing it at the slowest possible crawl, their twinned lights coloring the air between the cars. The 6 looked full to overflowing. A delay uptown, Lateef thought, not quite sure what he was meant to be looking for. Then she took his hand in hers and it dawned on him that she’d called him by his first name and that she was touching him willingly for the first time since they’d been in her apartment.

“What is it, Miss Heller?”

“Halfway down the car.” Her hand gave a twitch. “Do you see him?”

“I’m not—hold on a minute—”

“Do you see the man in the fur hat?”

He shaded his eyes. “The Hasid?”

“Look past his left shoulder. Right now there’s a woman in the way.” She got to her feet and crossed the aisle as though the train were standing still. Lateef got up more cautiously and followed. He picked out the Hasid again and took stock of the woman beside him, a fortyish commuter in a nondescript brown coat. There was no one behind her. He wondered almost idly whether the woman was the Hasid’s wife, whether she was wearing a wig like some Hasidim did, and why the car should be so crowded at that hour. He made an effort not to wonder about Violet. He’d just decided that the woman wasn’t Hasidic at all when he saw the boy behind her clear as day.

“You see him now,” said Violet. She said it kindly. “He’ll turn this way soon. He always likes to look out on both sides.”

A man in sunglasses pushed past the Hasid, hiding the boy again. Lateef cursed him silently. “You’re sure that’s your son? Did you get a good look?”

He expected her to ignore him and she did. She rested her forehead against the scuffed glass and stared across the flickering divide. Her mouth hung slightly open. He put his hand on her shoulder and she gave a groan and slid out of his grasp.

“We should sit down, Miss Heller. We don’t want him to see us.”

She turned away at once and clutched at the crosspole. I’ve frightened her, Lateef thought. Maybe that’s for the best. He held his arm out and she took it gratefully.

“You could watch,” she said. “He doesn’t know you.”

“You’re forgetting I chased him through half the West Village.” He smiled. “I wouldn’t mind forgetting that myself.”

“That’s right,” she said quickly. “You did that. I forgot.”

“We can see him from here,” Lateef said, helping her to sit. He
kept an empty seat between them as before. Two girls in matching turquoise parkas gawked at her, not sure whether to laugh, but she looked past them as if they were made of wax. She hasn’t even noticed them, he thought. She barely seems aware of where she is. The boy was still facing away from them, his head tipped to one side, swaying lightly with the canting of the train. Lateef appraised his features point by point. The flat blond hair, the boyish stoop, the shapeless thriftstore sweater. It had to be the same boy. He looks relaxed, Lateef thought. Thank the Lord for small mercies.

As he had that thought the local started braking. No sense keeping him in sight, Lateef said to himself. Let him go and get ready. Get off the train at Union Square and wait. The feeling of entrapment broke over him again and he felt his palms and underarms go damp. The local was falling back silently and smoothly and the boy was already drifting out of view. He waited for Violet to react but she did nothing. He kept his eyes on the 6 and when the boy was finally gone he willed himself to turn and look at her. He was sweating freely now. Her head was propped against the wall and her eyes were partly closed. She’s sleeping, Lateef thought. How can she be sleeping. But she didn’t look asleep so much as dead.

“Miss Heller,” he said. The name stuck in his throat.

“Yes?”

“Here’s what’s going to happen, Miss Heller. We’ll get off at the next stop and wait for the local. I’ll put everyone up the line on track alert.” When she said nothing to that he shook her shoulder gently. “Wake up, Miss Heller. Stay with me now. If he doesn’t get off the local, we’ll have to get on it ourselves. Some men from my department should be at Union Square already. We’ll leave them there in case we somehow miss him.”

“All right, Ali,” she said. There was an appeal behind her use of his name, a warning of some kind, but it thrilled him regardless. She let him carry her weight as if it were the most natural thing in the world. This will be over within the hour, he reminded himself. A few more hours at the most. He studied their conjoined reflection in
the window, a middle-aged black man and a semiconscious foreigner, trying to picture what might happen then. He couldn’t picture anything.

When they were almost at the station it occurred to him that his backup would be waiting on the platform and he shifted away from her and sat up straight. She slid farther down against him without opening her eyes. He stared at his reflection helplessly.

At last the station came. “Violet,” he said, more sharply than he’d intended. She sat up grudgingly and fixed her hair. The girls in the parkas were giggling openly now. He got to his feet and reached behind him and guided her up.

“Is this it?” she said, passing a hand over her face. The gesture was familiar to Lateef but for a time he couldn’t place it. Finally he recognized it as his own.

“Is this it?” she repeated. She seemed not to expect an answer. What’s wrong with me, he wondered. Why can’t I picture either of us tomorrow. The train came to a stop and the doors slid smoothly open and he led her slowly to the nearest bench, making an effort to keep himself from trembling. I’m frightened of her, he said to himself. Frightened of her and for her. He felt no surprise at the thought.

Before they reached the bench her eyes had closed again. He stared at her the way the girls on the train had been staring and as he did so he remembered what had happened the last time she’d seen her son. Why didn’t that put me on my guard, he thought. God knows that should have been enough. But of course he knew why. He sat down next to her and took her hand.

“Violet,” he said. “Listen to me, Violet. I want you to open your eyes.”

She opened them at once and looked toward him. Toward him but not at him. “Go on ahead,” she said steadily. “This is just something that happens.”

“There’s nowhere to go, Violet. We have to wait here for the local.”

She nodded. “When it comes, go ahead.”

“He’s supposed to get off here, remember? You have to be ready. You have to wake up.”

“Where are the men you said would be here? The men from your department?”

“I don’t know.” He hadn’t thought of them until that instant. “Most likely they’re waiting for us upstairs.”

She looked past him with what might have been concern. The local track was half a step behind her. A quivering started up along its rails.

“Here it comes,” said Lateef.

She met his eyes now. “What do we do? Do we get up?”

“We stay right here until it comes to a full stop. We don’t turn around. As soon as it’s stopped we get up and we go.”

She smoothed down the creases in her jeans and said nothing.

“If for any reason he doesn’t get off, we get on. We wait until the doors start to close and then we move. Can you do that with me?”

She closed her eyes tightly, as though the question itself was too much for her, then opened them and took hold of his sleeve. The quivering turned to screeching as the local’s airbrakes hit. He watched the train arrive on other people’s faces. A man in a transparent raincoat turned his head from left to right like a video camera, eyeballs ticking back and forth grotesquely.

“Can we turn around yet?” Violet said through her teeth. “Should we be getting up?”

“Hold on,” he told her. “A few seconds more.”

He stood without turning and helped her get up and kept her close to him until the doors opened. She’ll be all right, he told himself. Just keep her moving. He turned her around by the shoulders, perhaps a little roughly, then stepped forward to look up and down the platform. Its curve was in his favor and the whole train was in view. He counted under his breath from one to nine, ticking his head from side to side as the man in the raincoat had done. No one got off who looked anything like the boy.