Lowland Rider (3 page)

But this I cannot rationalize. There is no reason for this. A merciful god, even a stupid, inept god, would not have let this happen. There is no
reason
for it, for any of it. And that means we live in Chaos, we reside in Hell, and we are all ultimately
alone
there.

And it is because of that aloneness that I write in this notebook. I bought two of them less than an hour ago. It was the first human contact I've had for three days, ever since I walked down the steps of Penn Station and said good-bye to daylight for good. I suppose it was the kind of human contact I may as well get used to here—detached, cold, hostile. Not one word was spoken. I merely put the notebooks down on the counter, laid two dollar bills beside them, and received my change. Very simple. A machine could have performed both functions.

So I write, and I wonder if anyone will ever read these words, come across them in the locker and care enough to see what they say. If so, I suppose I should start at the beginning.

My name is Jesse Gordon, and I am thirty-four years old. I have lived all my life in New York City—in the Bronx until I left my parents' home, and then in Manhattan. My father was an antique dealer —at least that's what the sign over his shop said. But beneath it in smaller letters read, FINE ART-RARE Books, and that was where his heart was.

The old man had a good heart. That's why he never got out of the Bronx. It's also why my mother died when she did—of worry, and of fear.

The Bronx is Shit City. It's filled with junkies and thieves and people who would shove a knife into you for a dollar. My father's store was on Castle Hill Avenue in a neighborhood that got uglier and uglier over the years. When I was at NYU in the seventies, it got so bad that if I was involved in a school activity that would keep me in Manhattan after dark, I would crash at a friend's place rather than take the subway and walk the two blocks to my folks' apartment house.

Mom died of a heart attack in 1972, my sophomore year. It happened two days after Pop's most recent burglary—he had at least one a month. She had wanted Pop to sell the shop and find a place in Manhattan, or maybe Brooklyn, but he couldn't. It wasn't because he didn't want to, but because no one would buy, and because he had
no
money saved, none at all. He
could
have, if only he hadn't been so generous. The junkies, probably the same ones who had robbed him the week before, would come in with books mostly, and probably stolen at that, and Pop would give them a fair price, a damn
good
price, when they would've been content with a small fraction. I was in the shop with him one time when a woman came in with a baby. She was Hispanic.

Jesus, after what they did I still write that—Hispanic. Fuck it. She was a grease-ball spic who was probably thirty but looked fifty, her baby wrapped in a blanket that looked like it had lain under an old car for a month. She had three books with her, Reader's Digest Condensed Books from the sixties, utterly worthless, water-stained, smelling of mildew. She held them up to my father and asked in Spanish if he'd buy them. He understood her. He'd actually thought enough of those people to learn their language. This bittersweet, foolish look came into his face, and he just nodded and unlocked his cash register and gave her three dollars. I tried to stop him, to make him come to his senses. "Dad," I said, very reproachfully, and he just looked at me and shook his head. The woman didn't even say
gracias
, but scuttled out of the store as if she were afraid he'd change his mind and ask for the money back. She didn't know my father very well.

I was angry. I told him that that money was probably going to go right into her or her boyfriend's arm. And he just looked at me and shook his head again like he pitied me, and he said, "You've got to believe in people, Jesse. They're the only thing you
can
believe in. I want to think I helped feed her child, not her habit."

That was my father, that was what he thought, and that was what killed him.

After Mom died he insisted on keeping the store open, insisted on living in the apartment they'd always lived in, and over the years the neighborhood deteriorated even further. By the time he was killed it seemed as if all the structures of his life had ended and were being replaced by the structures of my own. I had a wife, a child, a job, a home.

My wife was Donna, and even now, after so short a time, I struggle to remember her face outside of the memory of photographs. She was short and very pretty, with dark hair and a rather pale complexion. I remember that when I was falling in love with her, she struck me as looking like one of Poe's heroines, except that I had always thought of them as taller than Donna. When I graduated from NYU I got a job at a small advertising agency, a "no account" agency, as we referred to it, where I became a copywriter, and met Donna at one of the parties the agency threw for their clients. She worked for a finance company we did print ads for, and she was my liaison when I worked on the account. We started seeing each other and before too long we decided to get married. It was all very old-fashioned, very un-New
Yorkish
. There was no living together first. In fact, I had pretty well made up my mind that I loved her even before I talked her into bed. Once we were there I was sure of it.

We both kept working after we got married, until we decided we wanted a child. It was a decision that was long in coming, but we wanted to have a baby before Donna was thirty. Almost nine months from the first day we tried, Jennifer was born. She was a beautiful baby, and I know she would have been a beautiful little girl, a beautiful woman, if they hadn't killed her.

It hurts so much that I don't think it will ever stop hurting. It's been three days now. It was Sunday when it happened. My whole family taken, so quickly and in such a way. Have there always been madmen? Has there always been evil in the world? I suppose so. But it seems as if now is their time, as if they have been hidden all these centuries and at last they are surfacing until each one of us comes face-to-face with them, and must cope or die.

Perhaps there is a third way. To build a wall around yourself. To harden yourself. To sink into the furnace and, instead of burning, to be annealed. To become one with steel, so that you never have to feel pain again, and, though you remember past pains, future ones can never hurt you. That is why I have come down to this, why I am where I am, and if I am to be burned instead of hardened, then even the flame holds no fear for me. I can't be hurt more.

I'm babbling. Putting these half-formed thoughts down on paper only makes me feel more confused than I already am. It isn't simple. There are reasons, but there are also irrationalities about what I've done. I realize that, and because I do I think I'm still sane. Whether or not I can maintain my sanity down here—there I'm not sure. I pray to God I…

That's very good. "Pray to God." It dies hard, faith. That I should use that term now is perhaps the most irrational thing of all. Pray to God indeed.

Finish, Jesse. Finish the story.

Yes. Here:

My name is Jesse Gordon and my family is dead.

My father died on the street, stabbed.

My wife died, raped and shot, on the floor of my father's back storeroom.

My baby died with a bullet in her head.

That is how simple it all was. That is the truth, that is my story, that is why I am here.

Jesse Gordon was making love to his wife when the phone rang and they told him that his father had been killed. Donna stayed in the apartment with the baby while Jesse took a cab to Harlem Hospital on 136th Street, across the Harlem River from the Bronx where his father had lived. The cabby was reluctant to go so far uptown after midnight, but Jesse handed him a ten dollar bill that stopped his protestations. At the hospital he was met by a Detective Pinehurst, a dour looking man with pockmarked cheeks and a black moustache flecked with gray. "Mr. Gordon, I'm very sorry," he said perfunctorily.

"How did it happen?" Jesse asked. His voice was steady, but inside he felt as if he had fallen from a high precipice and not yet landed. Apprehension filled him, as though he were waiting for himself to cry or scream or both. Memories of his father slipped through his consciousness like thieves across a black rooftop: Coney Island and his father's boxlike, knee-length trunks, the whiteness of his inner arms as he threw himself above a wave; playing baseball on Randall's Island, his father laughing when Jesse hit one over his head; the dry hack as the old man blew the dust from the fore-edges of his precious books, redistributing the colloids instead of effacing them, then taking a drag from his Lucky Strike and coughing again; the feel of the leathery skin, the wiry stubble against his own smoother cheek the last time he embraced his father in a goodbye.

Detective Pinehurst led the way into a small examining room and closed the door behind them before he answered Jesse's question. He indicated that Jesse should sit in the sole chair, a dented plastic and chrome affair. Pinehurst took the examining stool. "It shows every indication of a mugging," the detective said. "Apparently your father was walking home—he was found half a block from the entrance to his apartment house." Pinehurst stopped at Jesse's explosive sigh, then went on. "His wallet was beside his body, but there was no money in it."

"How was he killed?"

Pinehurst shrugged. "By the mugger, we assume."

"I mean
how
," Jesse pressed. "A gun? A knife?"

"A knife. He was stabbed."

"Did he suffer?"

"I'm afraid the doctors will have to answer that."

"But you know, don't you?"

Now it was Pinehurst's turn to sigh. "Preliminary examination seemed to indicate a stab wound in the left lung. That's not necessarily an immediate cause of death."

"Then he might have lived for a while?"

"He might have. Then again, maybe not. Mr. Gordon, the doctors and the medical examiner can answer these questions a whole lot better than me."

"All right then. Let me see the doctor."

The physician who had made the examination had gone home at midnight, but at Jesse's insistence, a phone call was put through. The man did not sound as if he had been sleeping. "The point of entry was between the fourth and fifth rib, just missing the heart," the doctor said gruffly.

"He didn't die immediately?"

"I doubt it. Death from this type of wound . . . are you sure you want to hear all this?"

"Yes."

"Well, death probably came through asphyxiation rather than loss of blood. Your father might have lived, oh, say twenty minutes after the attack."

"Now wait a minute." Jesse's voice was edged with iron. "Does that mean that he could have lived if. . . if someone had called an ambulance, gotten help?"

"That's hard to say."

"But it might have been possible."

"Maybe. Maybe not. It's really beside the point now. I understand Mr. Gordon was dead when they found him."

"I . . . didn't know that."

"If it's any consolation, I doubt that your father suffered very much. He probably went into shock right away. It's . . . a fairly effective defense the body puts up against pain." There was silence on the other end of the line. "Mr. Gordon?"

"Yes. Thank you."

"That's all right. I'm very sorry about your father."

Jesse made the necessary arrangements with the hospital, and Detective Pinehurst drove him back to 72nd Street. Donna was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee when he came in. She had been crying, and when she saw Jesse she cried again, went to him and embraced him. Exhausted, he wept at last. She led him to the sofa and sat with him, holding him, until the tears were gone. "The bastards killed him, Donna," he said. "I guess I always knew they would. He had to know too." When he fell asleep, she covered him with the afghan, then went into the bedroom and lay awake for a long time.

In the morning Jesse Gordon awoke with the feeling that everything had been a dream, that he had sweated through one of those tyrannical nightmares in which a loved one is taken and comes back to say good-bye and so makes the parting all the more painful. But when he found himself on the couch, he knew that it had all been real, and he wrapped the afghan's tired fringe around his fingers and tightened the cords until his fingertips turned red, then cried again.

He made the funeral arrangements mechanically, and buried his father on a bright and sunny Thursday afternoon. He was surprised at the rapidity and ease with which his father's life insurance company paid off the fifty thousand dollar policy of which his father had made him sole beneficiary, and rather dazedly deposited it in a low interest, easy access savings account until he could decide how to invest it.

Two weeks later he received a call from the assessor, who wanted to meet with him at his father's store. "I imagine it'll take more than a few hours," Jesse told the assessor, a soft-voiced man named Rhoads.

"We can make several visits until I'm finished," Rhoads said. "I suppose evenings would suit you best?"

"A weekend would be better," Jesse answered. Rhoads sighed. "It always is." They arranged to meet Sunday afternoon at the store.

Just as Jesse was slipping on his jacket prior to their meeting, Donna decided she wanted to go with him.