Lowland Rider (27 page)

The day before, after Jesse had lost Montcalm, he had ridden the Jamaica Avenue line back and forth until midnight, when he disembarked from the train at the Woodhaven Boulevard station. He sat on the benches for a while, dozing occasionally, and
some time
after one in the morning went into the men's room to wash himself and clean his teeth. When he came out he saw, in the dim light at the end of the platform, a man in his sixties bent over the body of a teenage boy. Months before, when he had first descended, he might have thought the boy had fainted and the man was trying to help him. But his innocence had long since fled, and he saw the act for what it was, and walked slowly and silently down the platform.

The man was working something in his hands with a sawing motion, like a diner bent over a particularly tough steak, and Jesse finally saw that he was attempting to sever the boy's hand at the wrist. The boy was beyond help. A gash showed wetly across one side of his neck, and his eyes were already glazed over. The man did not hear Jesse until he was three yards away, then turned and looked up at the tall form standing over him. His eyes widened, and he tensed like a gray cat too old to spring. Still, he made an effort at it, and leaped feebly, the knife scratching on concrete as Jesse easily sidestepped and kicked the man's knee so that he fell heavily, the knife skittering across the platform.

Jesse snatched it up, pushed the man over, placed his left elbow on the man's chest, and held the knife across his throat. The man's body shook beneath him like a mass of congealed rage, but he made no attempt to push Jesse off, his energy depleted by his stalking and killing the boy.

"What?" Jesse asked him. "What is this for?"

The man's head shivered, the jaw jutted upward, as though he were possessed, and he tried to spit into Jesse's face, but the gobbet fell back weakly on his own.

"The hand," Jesse went on. "Who the hell is the hand for? Answer me, you bastard." He pressed the edge of the knife against the white stubble that covered the
wattled
neck, and a thin line of blood appeared, though the man made no outcry. "Who is it
for
?"

Suddenly there was recognition in the man's face, and he smiled so that Jesse could see the yellowed teeth, a brown stain capping each one like a wig on a skull. "For
you
," the man whispered wetly. "For
you
, Lord!"

Jesse shuddered, then slashed the knife across the man's throat. After he rolled the body off the tracks, he could still see the man's smile.

He saw it even now. The man had been insane, that was certain. He had to be insane to do what he'd done in the first place, and he had to be insane to mistake Jesse for Enoch, for surely that was what he had done.

The hand was for Enoch, the murder was for Enoch. Somehow all of it, every death down here, every beating, every crime of man against man was for Enoch. How far did his influence reach, Jesse wondered. How long were the fingers of that bloody hand? Did they reach to the surface of the city? And if so, how far beyond the city's edges? Where did they stop?

Did
they stop?

And what, he wondered most of all, would he be killing when he killed Enoch?

PART

4

It was beginning to grow quiet on the trains. Rags figured it must be about 11:30. The theater crowds were all home, the middle-shift workers were at their neighborhood bars. Nobody riding the trains now except for the people who really had to get somewhere and couldn't afford a cab.

The car Rags was on was empty, a Lexington Avenue local going downtown from 241st Street. It was a nice long ride, safe and secure, a good train to sleep on. Not many transit cops this time of night, and the ones you did see didn't bother you unless you were making a nuisance of yourself or smelled like shit or something. Rags took a deep whiff of himself and decided that he didn't smell too bad for a summer night. He had been washing more frequently in the months since he met Jesse. It just seemed like something he wanted to do.

Get himself clean again.

He had been having weird thoughts ever since he told Jesse about why he came down into the tunnels. He had never told anyone before, and he wondered why he'd gone and told Jesse something so secret, so personal, so terrible about himself. Still, he was glad he had. Jesse hadn't said or done anything that led Rags to believe he thought
Rags's
sin was unforgivable. Instead, he'd said some things about being forgiven, about good works saving his soul. And he'd said that when Rags died he wouldn't go to hell. Now how did Jesse know that?

Then Rags remembered the poem that had affected Jesse so much when he'd read it, that Lowland Rider poem. He fumbled in the layers of cloth and brought out the book of ballads. As if by chance, it fell open to
Jamie Gordon, The Lowland Rider
, and Rags read:

"So take thy saddle and thy sword,

Avaunt
into the night,

Nae
seek for rest, nor walk again

Beneath the bright daylight."

Well,
that
was on it, sure enough. Jesse hadn't seen sunlight since he'd come below. Rags read on:

"But be my faithful harvester,

And ride the lowland dark,

And gather in the men of sin

On whom I place my mark.

"For when their time is come to die,

Then shall they see
thee
ride

Upon the path that they must cross

Til
you be by their side.

"Then hold thy sword in front of them,

That sword that brought thee woe,

Command them, in sweet
Jesu's
name,

Away with thee to go.

"Then bring them to the
Judgement
seat

Where God alone may tell

Them whether to fly Heavenward

Or sink, condemned, to Hell."

Rags hadn't read the ballad for a long time, and the words made him feel funny, as if something really strange was happening down here with Jesse. "Gather in the men of sin ..." Wasn't that just what Jesse had been doing? Messing with all these people he had no business to be messing with? Still, all the same, Rags respected him for it. He didn't remember ever respecting anybody as much, unless maybe it was his Daddy, who'd died when he was just a little boy.

But if Jesse was making the ballad come true, and it surely looked like he was, then he wouldn't be the final judge, would he? It was God alone that would tell Rags whether he went to Heaven or Hell, not Jesse. Still, if Jesse had some inside information…

Stop it, Rags told himself. It was stupid—worse than that, it was blasphemy—to think that Jesse was some kind of messenger of God or something. Hell, no. He was just some poor soul like Rags, down here for much the same reason. Trying to pay. Just trying to pay for what he'd done. But Rags wondered if maybe Jesse wasn't getting more sins to his account than he had when he started.

Rags closed the book of ballads and tucked it away into one of his soft crevices, then sat back with his head against the glass. No matter what Jesse's sins were, he thought, he'd profited by knowing him. Even though Rags thought he was going to die, knew the cancer on his neck was going to kill him, he wasn't as afraid anymore, and that was good.

Rags was dozing, and only dimly aware that the train had stopped at the 86th Street station. The doors were open for only a short time, and he heard a pattering of feet, the unequivocal crash of the doors closing, a choked exclamation that was definitely out of the ordinary.
Rags's
eyes opened.

Standing five feet away from him was Baggie, a snarl smeared across her face like blood. Her elbows jutted outward, and she held to her chest by twine handles a shopping bag, the contents of which rounded the bottom. Her shoulders hunched over the bag like a, bat's wings.

Rags's
mind was still dulled by sleep, but he was awake enough to realize that this was not the Baggie of old. That woman had been insane, not dangerous. But now there was something about her that terrified Rags, a look in her eyes that went far beyond the aggressive madness she had previously displayed. There was violence, murder, blood, and although the bag she carried bore no red stains, he knew that inside there was something alive, possibly dying. Possibly human.

"What you got?" he asked roughly, ready for her to leap at him with those
clawlike
fingers. The train lurched as it pulled out of the station, and Baggie smoothly moved with it, years of long tenure underground giving her the motion of the train itself.

"Not for
you
, nigger!" she spat at him. "Not for
you
!"

Rags got to his feet. "You show me what's in that bag."

Baggie looped the handles over her left arm, and dipped her right hand into a pocket, from which she drew something hard and shiny. Rags heard a clicking sound, and found himself looking at a long-bladed knife, its blade dulled by something that looked like, but that Rags knew wasn't, rust. "You get back, nigger. Nigger breeder. All want to fuck me, don't you? Fuck me and take what's mine, take what I done for
Him
. Oh no you won't. I'll cut off your black balls first, cut 'em off and take 'em to Enoch."

Rags felt suddenly, horribly cold. "What you got?"

"For
Him
, not for you. You get back now. I don't need no more, but I will, you try and take it . . ." She started to back toward the door to the next car.

They were at a standstill. Baggie did not want to have to fight while she carried the bag in her arms, and Rags didn't want to go up against the knife. It was long and sharp, and he knew she had used it recently and would be willing to use it again. When she bumped against the door, she reached back with the arm that bore the shopping bag and pulled the handle, then pushed her way through, closing it firmly behind her.

Rags waited for several seconds, then went up to the door and looked through the window. Baggie was walking down the aisle of the next car, which was empty except for a young Hispanic boy, his head buried in a comic book. He glanced up when Baggie passed him and watched her until she went by and looked through the window into the car ahead. Rags figured she saw more people, for she sat at the end of the car, her eyes fixed suspiciously on the boy, who now ignored her and read his comic book.

At 14th Street she got off the train and transferred to the BMT west, then, shortly afterward, to the IND train that, when it went beneath the East River, became the Beast. Rags followed her every step of the way, slipping behind posts the few times she looked behind her. Her monomania concerning the contents of the bag seemed to free her mind of a minor disturbance like Rags, and he could see that she now had a smile on her face, and her shoulders shook with what Rags, at a distance, could only imagine to be laughter.

He positioned himself in the car behind hers and continued to watch her through the window. At one point he could have sworn the bag moved, and Baggie's head jerked down and looked inside it. Her long fingers joined to make a fist, and he saw her punch into the bag once, twice, then smile and nod calmly. Though the noise of the train was loud, just before she had struck the thing within, Rags imagined that he could hear a high-pitched wail like a cat's. He wondered if it was, after all, just a cat, and if he was on a fool's errand. But then he remembered what she had said, and what her eyes had said, and he leaned back against the metal, following without motion.

Baggie got off the train at Van
Siclen
Avenue station, the next to last stop on the line. Rags got off as well, and lurked behind a stanchion, peering out with one eye. They were the only ones who had left the train at the stop, and the hard surfaces of the station amplified every sound. Rags scarcely dared breathe.

Finally he heard Baggie's footsteps move off in the direction of the tunnel out of which the train had come, and he moved slowly around the stanchion so that it would remain between them as she passed by. She walked to the end of the platform without turning around, then set down her bag and lowered herself heavily to the track bed. She reached up, took the bag, and walked off over the loose stones into the darkness. Rags waited until he could barely hear her footsteps, then dropped over the edge of the platform and followed her. He hugged the wall from fear of trains, and so that if Baggie turned she would not see his silhouette against the light of the station.

Walking through the tunnel was a nightmare. The stone walls seeped water which collected in puddles, and often Rags heard things nearby splashing their way through them. They sounded big enough to be dogs, but Rags suspected they were rats. In a way he was glad there was no more light than the small blue bulbs spaced every fifty feet or so. He didn't want to see what was down here, skittering along near him. When he began, he stopped frequently to listen for Baggie's footsteps, but was so appalled by what else he heard that after a while he stopped listening and simply walked, as quietly as possible.

They had traveled what Rags estimated to be three or four blocks, when a light brighter than the dim blue globes began to shine somewhere up ahead and to the side. A spur, Rags thought, remembering the term his grandfather, who had been a porter on the Southern Central, had used. A spur, probably unused for years and years. And suddenly he thought, what am I doing down here? It had begun as curiosity, to assure himself that the worst he suspected about Baggie was true. And now that that curiosity had brought him into a situation he didn't want to be in, he found it impossible to turn around and walk back to the station. What was the matter with him? Why was he here? And what if she was taking that thing in the bag to Enoch? Sweet Jesus, what then?