Lowland Rider (31 page)

There were few people in the 86th Street station. It seemed to her that, except for rush hour, the trains were less populated than they used to be. Fear, she thought, although she realized with some surprise that she felt none. She supposed it was because of Jesse, and the fact that he was always around when she descended into the system, so that now, even when she was alone, she still felt safe, as though part of him were still with her, as though his courage and determination had rubbed off on her.

It was an apt description, Claudia thought. A great deal of Jesse had rubbed off on her. She found herself thinking of him constantly, and since she could not be with him as often as she wanted, she sublimated her desire for his company by writing about him. Her piece on him had grown over the past few weeks to eighty pages, and she toyed with the idea of expanding it to book length. It would be far too long for an article in
Manhattan
, unless Julia serialized it. It could be a book. An honest-to-God original
book
.

If Jesse agreed. Only if Jesse agreed.

She never wanted to do him any harm, or cause him any more pain. She respected him more than she had ever respected any man because of the way he had come back from his loss to do what he had done, no matter how bizarre his reasons. Their affair of years before was repeatedly on her mind, and she tried over and over to remember why it had ended. He had been an ardent and skillful lover, and they had been happy together. The only thing she could recall about the breakup was that outside the bedroom she had found him too unexciting.

Too unexciting. Jesus. He sure as hell was exciting enough for her now, even frightening, when she thought about it.

Yes, although the tunnels no longer scared her, she
was
frightened of him, just a little. There was something alien about him, something that she knew she would never understand, no matter how long she knew him, or how much he told her, or how close they might become.

She looked at her watch again, and hoped he would not keep her waiting too long.

"Jesse," Rags panted. "Stop. Stop a minute."

Jesse turned and saw Rags limping toward him, his face the color of wet ashes. "Rags."

"It's done. She's dead."

"Baggie."

"Yeah. I killed her. But I didn't somehow, I don't understand it at all . . ."

"The knife."

"Wasn't no knife. I don't know what happened to it, maybe Enoch took it, I—"

"Enoch? He was there?"

"Oh Jesus God, yes, he was there. And I stabbed her, and she cut me, but my neck . . ." He fumbled at the rags, pulling them away from his skin, showing Jesse the intact tumor. ". . . there's no cut now. I was bleeding bad, but he touched me, and there's no
cut
."

Jesse's eyes narrowed, and he looked at Rags as though he were something even more unclean than he was. "Where is he? Enoch?"

"Up 66th Street. IRT. But it don't matter where, Jesse. I think he's anywhere, anywhere he wants to be. He want you to find him, you find him—he not want you to, you won't."

Jesse whirled around and started toward the tracks. "Where you going?" Rags called, hurrying after him.

"I have to meet Claudia. I'm late," he said. "Then I'll see Enoch. For the last time."

Rags stopped and watched Jesse walk away. He almost called out for him to stop, to come back, to let Enoch alone, but it was as though something locked in his throat and stopped him from saying it. Instead he put a hand to his throat and felt the whiskery and wrinkled flesh, the hard egg of the tumor, searched again for a scar, a scab, a slash that he knew had to be there, but which he could not find.

"Hey hey
hey
, pretty lady. You waiting for something?"

"
Waitin
' for us."

"Well, man, she's found us, haven't you,
darlin
'?"

They were not young. They were no possessors of that fresh, boyish bravado that could be humored, then intimidated, and eventually dismissed, leaving only filthy words and a few obscene gestures in their wake. These two men frightened Claudia, as they would have frightened anyone standing alone at night on an empty subway platform. They were big and brawny and ugly, their arms slathered with obscene tattoos. The larger of the men, the more outspoken one, wore a stained cowboy hat with a multicolored arrangement of feathers that would have looked more at home on a trout fly. They both wore tank tops that showed off their backs and shoulders, which were matted with dark hair. White men of no apparent ethnic origin, they constituted their own distasteful minority.

"I'm waiting for someone else," Claudia told them coldly, wishing she could turn away from them and yet hesitant to do so, afraid that they would touch her from behind.

"No, you ain't," said the first man. "You're waiting for us. This is Al, and I'm Roy. And what's your name."

She turned her back and looked toward the tracks, but Roy slowly moved around with her, like a storm cloud that refuses to blow away. "I don't mean to be rude," she said, afraid to offend him, "but I really am meeting a friend here."

"Lady friend?"

"A man friend. He'll be here any minute."

"So will Christmas. But I ain't shopping for presents yet,
y'know
?" Al chuckled behind her. "You want a present?"

"No. Thank you."

"You like to watch movies?"

She shook her head and looked down at the ground, praying for Jesse to get there.

"Aw, that's too bad. Al and I got lots of movies. We make 'em. Video movies. We sell 'em too. Get good money. See here?" He held out a fist and Claudia recoiled, but then saw that he was showing her a ring on his index finger. She didn't know if the diamond was real, but it looked as though it might be. It was large, and sparkled nearly green in the station light. "Bought that with what we made. Don't make many copies either. Be surprised what people pay for certain kinds of things. Things they can't see anywhere else, or if they do, they're fake. We don't fake 'em. They're real."

Claudia felt like throwing up and crying at the same time. She didn't know if they were liars or if they were telling the truth. She knew such people existed, but never expected to meet them, to be here now talking with them, alone. Except for the three of them, the station was as empty as the moon.

The only thing she could do was walk away and hope they didn't follow her or try to stop her. So she started to move between the pair of them toward the exit, but the one called Al grabbed her left arm. "Uh-uh," he said. "
Goin
' with us."

She gave a scornful laugh that she did not feel. "I'm not going
anywhere
with you."

Roy grasped her other arm, and she winced from the pain. His fingers felt like hooks, and she smelled garlic on his breath, stale and sour. "That's just because you weren't invited yet. They like to be invited, Al, you know that. Now listen.
Darlin
', wouldn't you like to come along with us and make a movie? Be a movie star?"

"Let me go," she told them through gritted teeth.

"
Darlin
'," Roy went on, "didn't you hear me right?" He reached inside his belt and drew a knife from a hidden sheath. The blade was five inches long and looked like a machete to Claudia. The handle was made from a deer's hoof. "You been invited."

"What . . . do you mean you're going to take me somewhere?"

"Uptown. Way uptown to Tremont Avenue. Where we have our studio. Where we'll make you a star,
darlin
'."

"And how the fuck do you expect to get me there?"

"
Whoo
, nice mouth on you. We can do some things with that mouth. Why, we're
goin
' up on the train,
darlin
'. Trains aren't too busy this time of night."

"All it takes is one person," she told him. "All I have to do is yell."

"And all I have to do is stick this in you. I'd enjoy that just as much here as
stickin
' something else in you uptown."

She couldn't believe what he was saying. It seemed impossible. Everything seemed wrong, a dream, a nightmare. She tried to reason logically. "If I go with you, you'll kill me up there anyway, won't you? You'll kill me, and tape it.
Won't
you?"

"You can't be sure of that,
darlin
'. Hell,
we're
never sure what we're gonna do till we start to, you know,
improvise
. But you can be sure of one thing, and that's that if you
don't
come along, or you try to make a fuss, then you're dead for sure."

She choked back a sob. "Why?" she asked everything.

"We just like your looks," Roy said. "I mean, honey, you are just
right
. And you happen to be in the right place at the right time. Just like Lana Turner in that soda shop."

A train came, but it was a local. "Next one," said Roy. "We're waiting for the express, sugar. The Sugarland Express. That was a movie too. And we'll get on it real quiet and go uptown to Sugarland."

Claudia kept waiting for Jesse, kept praying that the express would never come, but it pulled into the station only several minutes after the local. Roy and Al marched her down the platform until they saw that the last car was empty, hurried her into it and forced her down on a seat between them. Al started to rub her breasts, but Roy pushed his hand away. "Keep it in your pants, boy. We don't
wanta
mark the merchandise before we shoot it, do we? Plenty of time for
squeezin
' later. You can pretend her
tits're
lemons and you're
makin
' juice if you want, but wait till the fucking
camera's
rolling, boy."

When the doors slammed shut, Claudia felt as though they were slamming shut on her life. The only thing that could save her now was a policeman, and even that was not certain. If she cried for help, these men might be crazy enough to kill her anyway, or keep her alive and kill whoever she tried to get to help her. They might have guns, for all she knew. And she was sure that they were insane.

The train seemed to boil along forever before it made its next stop at 125th Street, where two rangy, black teenagers got on their car. They sat across from Claudia and the two men, but near the front, so that twenty feet separated them. The train pulled out again, and Claudia decided that this was her only chance, that she had to do something, anything, to avoid being led like a sheep to these madmen's slaughter. She looked at the boys and said, "Excuse me."

Roy and Al jerked their heads toward her in warning, and Roy hissed, "Shut
up
, bitch…" The boys had turned and were looking at her curiously, though they said nothing. Roy snapped his glare back toward them.

"What?" one of the boys asked with barely disguised hostility.

"Nothing," Roy snarled.

"I wasn't
askin
' you," the boy said.

"I'm telling you. Mind your own business."

Claudia's mind raced. This was her chance to start something, something to take their attention away from her for a moment, long enough for her to try to run. She didn't know where, but anywhere was better than this car, between these two men. So she said, as viciously as she could, "Stupid niggers!"

The boys bristled, and one of them got to his feet. Roy and Al were both looking at her, surprised by what she'd said, and too obtuse to realize what she was doing.

"Mind your own business, you black bastards," Claudia added venomously. "You mess with my friends here, they'll cut you up!"

Slowly awareness grew on Roy's face. "You little cu—"

He never finished the word, for the boys were on them, fists swinging. Claudia screamed, and threw herself on the floor and under a seat as one of the boys lashed a vicious fist at her, but Roy got between them and stuck the knife in the boy's belly. Claudia heard the crash of metal against metal, as the boy gave a choking cry and fell away. Al had tackled the second boy, and was on the floor with him, smashing his head against the green and yellow tile. She looked up at Roy, expecting to see him coming toward her with the bloody knife, to finish her before she had time to jump up and run into the next car.

But Roy was staring at something, staring with wide eyes toward the end of the car where no one had been, and suddenly she heard a loud explosion and saw a flower of blood bloom on Roy's face, directly under his right eye. Roy's knife fell from his hand. He sat down, then slumped over onto the seat and didn't move again, except for some spasmodic shaking that might have been caused by the motion of the train.

Al was still pounding the boy's head against the floor, but Claudia noticed that the sound it made had gone from hard and sharp to wet and soft. There was another explosion, and part of Al's skull and hair leaped from the top of his head and skittered off along the floor. Al fell on top of the boy like a spent lover.

It was very quiet in the car.

Claudia lay beneath the seat, hardly daring to breath. She heard footsteps cross the floor, and saw a shod foot come down inches from her face. Someone said, "Claudia?"