Lowboy Part 7

"Right," Martinez said, tipping his hat to Violet. "And this lady is ...?"

"Yda h.e.l.ler," said Violet.

"Nice to meet you, Miss h.e.l.ler. I hope you don't mind-"

"What have you got for us, Officer?" Lateef cut in.

Martinez cleared his throat. "Well, sir. Not so much. I saw the boy."

"What boy?"

"Sorry, Detective," Martinez said indulgently. "I saw a boy. Fitting the description you sent out."

"Where was this?"

Martinez glanced over his shoulder, as if confiding a secret, then pointed at the grate under their feet.

Lateef looked at Violet, but she was on her knees already, craning her neck to see into the shaftway. He beckoned Martinez closer. "I have no doubt, Officer Martinez, that this is more fun for you than standing in front of Dunkin' Donuts pretending to be a traffic light, but Miss h.e.l.ler and I are a little pressed for time. Where-where exactly-did you see the boy?"

"Right in there," Martinez said, sticking out his lower lip. "Right where she's looking at."

"You're sure it was him?" Violet said without turning. "Did he tell you his name?"

Martinez smiled again. "Ain't too many blond kids s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around down there, Miss h.e.l.ler."

"Someone was with him?" Lateef said. "A woman?"

Martinez nodded. "She run away, though. Both of them did. Back into the tunnel."

Violet looked at him over her shoulder. "How long ago was that?"

"Quarter to eleven."

"Half an hour," she said, sitting back on her heels.

"Thirty-seven minutes," Martinez corrected her, looking at his watch. "Thirty-eight, actually."

Lateef shook his head. "And these grates don't open?"

"Not for us, sir," Martinez said brightly. "You got to call MTA central for the key. They don't even have it at the station."

"And you did that, I a.s.sume?" Lateef said, bringing his hands together in an att.i.tude of prayer.

"Did what?"

"Called the MTA. Put in a key request."

Martinez coughed and looked down at his belt.

"All right," said Lateef. He took in a slow and charitable breath. "All right, Martinez. Go ahead and place that call."

"He's long gone," Violet murmured.

"Martinez," Lateef said, keeping his voice level, "go down into that station-go right now, do you hear me?-and put in that request."

Martinez grinned at Violet. "I got to tell you, Detective-"

Lateef spun on his heels and raised his eyebrows at Martinez. Martinez sidled off, muttering to himself, running a thumb over his mustache as if to rea.s.sure himself that it was still in place.

A long and uneventful moment pa.s.sed. Violet seemed to have forgotten why they'd come. "Thirty-eight minutes," she said, staring off into the traffic. "He could be in Sheepshead Bay by now."

"He could be," said a small voice. "But he not."

Slowly, deliberately, with no outward sign of surprise, Violet brought her face down to the grate. "Have you seen my son?"

A laugh. "I more than seen seen him, Lady Bird." him, Lady Bird."

Lateef was crouched next to Violet now, s.h.i.+elding his eyes from the glare off the street. In the halflight underneath the grate an upturned face looked toward them, as flat and empty as a cardboard box. The face seemed to be smiling.

The doors came together and the C started rolling and Lowboy made himself invisible. He'd come out onto the platform ahead of the train and he didn't think the motorman had seen him. On the other hand there was no sure way of telling. His eyes were dazzled by the tubelights and his legs were weak from running and his head was alive with what the wall had told him. I'll get off at the next stop, he thought, checking his pantlegs for soot. I'll switch to the downtown local. He kept his breath steady and tried not to seem too excited.

For once no one was watching him. Two middle-aged women in biker jackets were having a fight across the aisle and n.o.body seemed to have noticed him sit down. He waited a moment longer, watching the women sneer and poke at each other with their short ungraceful fingers, then decided it was safe to close his eyes. Things got quiet right away. He thought about what had happened with Heather Covington, how his body had stopped listening to his brain, and decided that he felt all right about it. There were reasons why it didn't work, he thought. It was cold for one thing. And anyone could have seen us. And she smelled like she was 1,000,000,000 years old.

Her name wasn't even Heather Covington, he said to himself. I can't believe I ever thought it was.

He could tell by the s.h.i.+fting of his body against the seat that the train was coming into a station. The airbrakes kicked in and people stumbled to their feet but he was having too many thoughts to switch trains now. Sourceless revelations sparked and spun behind his eyelids and memories flashed like stoplights in between. He drew himself up and made his Sherlock Holmes face and tried to have just one thought at a time. Rafa, he thought. That's what the officer called her. Smells like good times down there, Rafa. He stared at the pocked brown floor between his shoes. "Rafa," he said quietly, feeling the sound climb out of his throat. It sounded like a Mexican curseword.

The brakes kicked in harder and the train came up short. He sat forward when the C# and A sounded and discovered that the car was almost empty. The women with the men's haircuts were outside now, laughing and nodding and rolling their eyes at each other. The few people left were sitting alone doing nothing. He let his eyes close again.

The problem was this, he thought. I didn't know her. No one does it that way. They find somebody they know to do it with. That makes it private: a confidential matter. That makes it safe. They do it in the comfort of their homes.

Either that or they pay for it, he thought.

"I wonder how much it would cost," Lowboy said out loud. He remembered the money he'd found and how Heather Covington had picked it up and kept it. More than twenty, he thought. It would cost more than that. Unless you had a girlfriend. He smiled stupidly into the crook of his bent arm. If you had a girlfriend maybe twenty would be enough.

An idea came to him then. Like all good ideas it was so obvious and straightforward that it seemed ridiculous at first. But the more he thought about the idea the bigger and more beautiful it grew, spreading out in all directions like a stain, until it was the only one he had. Before the train pulled out again he knew where he was going next and why.

I'll go to her, he thought. She wanted to do it: she told me herself. She told me on the stairs at Union Square. It's got to happen sometime, Will, she said. It happens to every person in the world.

I'll do it to you right now, if you want me to. He let his eyes open. She told me that.

I'll do it to you, Will. And then you can do it to me. Just put both of your arms around me like this.

He made two fists and took a breath and held it. She was hard to think about, harder even than Violet, but he could do it if he thought of her as nameless. Her name was off-limits to him, strictly prohibited. I know her name anyway, he said to himself. I know what she was called. But when he tried to say the word he made no sound at all.

Her face was easier to think about, less of a risk, but try as he might he couldn't get it clear. He dug his thumbs into his skull and tried again. Her pale smooth face that had always been so friendly. At school he'd tried to draw it in a book, once they'd let him have a book, but each picture he'd drawn had been less true. On the first page there had been a slight resemblance, just enough to place her, but by the middle she could have been any girl at all. As the weeks pa.s.sed he found himself copying details from one sketch to another instead of trying to find her likeness in his memory. Her decaying longsuffering likeness. On the last day he'd drawn a circle with two slanting lines on top of it, a little round house without any openings. After that he'd put the book away.

That was when everything went flat, like cutouts in a children's pop-up book, and he decided not to get up out of bed. The school turned itself into a cutout, sharpedged and glossy as a postcard, and he kept low to keep from punching holes in it. But in spite of his best efforts holes were made. He forgot about her then, forgot about everyone but Violet, and swallowed every last thing he was fed. Meds were slid between his teeth like change into a meter. Time went by.

I wonder where she's living now, he thought. I wonder whether she still goes to Crowley. He thought it over for a while, weighing the pros and the cons, then finally decided that she did. Of course she still goes to Crowley, he said to himself. She was on the waitlist for Crowley before her parents even met. He thought about her father, huge and righteous in his terrycloth robe, reading The Economist The Economist out loud at the kitchen counter. The most fatherish father there had ever been. He would never take his daughter out of Crowley. out loud at the kitchen counter. The most fatherish father there had ever been. He would never take his daughter out of Crowley.

The train pulled into the next station and the car began to fill with halfdead people. That's the tiredness, thought Lowboy. They want to curl up on the ground and go to sleep. He yawned at them as they came in, showing them his teeth, and some of them yawned back. The little whitehaired woman next to him was wearing a mink pillbox hat. Jehovah's Witness, he decided. She was eating nuts out of a napkin and muttering to herself, and as he watched her it occurred to him that he was starving. That's something else that I need money for, he thought. Homefries and bacon. Honeydipped nuts. He pointed at his mouth but she ignored him.

The doors closed after exactly ten seconds and the station fell resignedly away. He'd seen the sleight of hand a thousand times be-fore-the room whose doors close on one place and open, after a few minutes of darkness, on another-but today he was seeing the world with different eyes. The walls of the car, for example, which had always seemed so solid, were actually as hollow as an egg. A hole had been cut into the bottom of his seat and behind it was a dusky fibrous vacuum. The pencaps and candywrappers stuffed into the opening only made the hole seem emptier. Another stageset, Lowboy thought, and bit down on his sleeve to keep from laughing. Unreality broke over him again, stronger and more emphatic than before, but this time he was able to endure it. It's a wave, that's all, he told himself. A wave like any other. You can ride it like a surfer if you want to.

In the furrows between crests of the wave he saw things very sharply, the way the air comes clear after a rain. He saw the inside of the car for what it was: a controlled environment, a staging area, planned down to the last detail by people he would never know or see. No surprises in here, Lowboy said to himself. No accidents. He studied each element of the car with his new eyes, imagining it as a kind of blueprint: He would never meet the people who'd drawn the blueprint, never have a chance to question them, but he could learn things just by looking at the car. You could see, for example, that they were fearful men. The pattern on the walls, which he'd always taken to be meaningless, was actually made up of thousands of miniature coats of arms, symbols of the authority of the state. The interior of the car was waterproof, the better to be hosed down in case of bloodshed. And the seats were arranged not for maximum efficiency, not to seat the greatest number of people comfortably and safely, but to express the designers' fear with perfect clarity. No one sat with their back turned to anyone else.

He decided to get out at Columbus Circle. To his surprise it happened very simply. He stood up and guided himself into the funnel of exiting bodies, feeling the s.p.a.ce around him compress like air sucked into a jet, and let himself be spat onto the platform. The people around him never pitched or stumbled. It's only when you think about things that they get hard to do, he thought. A Bronx-bound D pulled up across the platform and the crush of bodies grew more intricate. How easy this is, Lowboy said to himself, letting the crowd spin him clockwise. So much easier than standing still. Whole families pushed past him as if he were nothing but a misplaced turnstile. After a quarter of an hour, like tidewater playing with a cigarette filter, the current had brought him full circle. But as soon as he thought about what he was doing he froze in his tracks like a deer.

He might have stayed there forever if the tunnel had let him: he might even have forgotten his calling. But from one moment to the next the crowd was blown away like smoke and he was left alone again. He propped himself against a column and looked around him, wondering where everyone had gone. a.s.sorted panhandlers and tourists remained but they seemed pitiful as orphans in the sudden hush. As if no train were ever coming for them.

On the far side of the column a man was standing with his back to Lowboy, in exactly the relation the cars were designed to prevent. A show of power, Lowboy said to himself. A territorial display. The man's right hand held a black leather briefcase, the kind people handcuff themselves to in movies, and his left hand held a plain brown paper bag. The bag was rolled shut but Lowboy could tell what was in it. The smell was sweet and dank and unmistakable. The thing in the bag was a Jamaican beef patty.

Here we go, Lowboy thought. He felt himself gliding forward. He tried to keep his guts from making noises but there was no stopping them. His arms had gone slack and his bones cracked like pieces of kindling. The platform had begun to fill again, like a theater lobby at intermission, but he never took his eyes off the bag. I wonder if he'll eat it all, he thought. I wonder if he'll throw it away. The man was bald and thickheaded and his rumpled grease-smeared trench-coat ended just above his shoes. The trenchcoat matched the briefcase perfectly. He ought to have sungla.s.ses on, Lowboy said to himself. He looks like an unemployed spy.

The briefcase seemed heavy. What could there be inside it? The man set it down on the platform, less than a foot from the column, as if to offer him a better view. It never occurred to the man to look behind him. He's daydreaming, Lowboy said to himself. He's composing a poem. No wonder he got fired from Her Majesty's Secret Service.

The man unrolled the paper bag and started eating. The smell of it was everywhere by then. By the time the patty was two-thirds gone Lowboy could barely keep upright. At one point he thought the man had noticed him: he stopped in mid-swallow and his head ticked very slightly to the left. But then he was taking another bite, grunting softly as he chewed, glaring down at his fists as though they were somebody else's. His chin glistened like b.u.t.tered rubber. Lowboy stepped back against the column and let his eyes rest flatly on the ground. His stomach was spasming and turning cartwheels but the man in the trenchcoat couldn't have cared less. His briefcase was less than an arm's length away, blacker and more official-looking than ever. It vibrated coldly against the concrete. There was some kind of machinery inside it.

Lowboy held his breath and reached toward the briefcase. The man with the patty gave a cough, cleared his throat petulantly, then coughed a second time. Down the wrong pipe, Lowboy decided. That's all it is. He closed his hand around the mottled snakeskin grip. It came to eager life under his touch.

"How was your weekend with Shakila, by the way?"

A second man had appeared beside the first. He was fine-boned and yellowish and he stared sleepily out at the tracks. The man with the patty had his mouth full. He held up a finger and nodded.

"Noisy," he said at last.

The second man laughed. "You should spend your time more constructively, my brother. Chess or model airplanes. Pay-per-view."

"It was all right, actually. Pretty nice."

"Shakila," the second man singsonged. "Shakila. Shakila. Shakila."

The first man took a slow, thoughtful bite of his patty. Two or three more and it would be gone forever. Lowboy bit his lip and pulled the briefcase closer. No one on the platform seemed to notice.

"I'll tell you something about that girl," the second man said. "Shakila isn't even her real name."

Lowboy craned his neck to get a better look. The conversation seemed to harbor another message inside it, a confidential message addressed to him and him alone. A great show was being made of not seeing him crouched there against the column with his right hand on the briefcase. The not-seeing had been worked out masterfully. The man with the patty had finally finished and was wiping his fingertips one at a time on a dirty bandanna. Lowboy could easily have bitten the man on the calf. A mechanism inside the briefcase was keeping him from picking it up and running: a gyroscope or an electromagnet. A magnet, he decided. He felt the same charge pa.s.s through him that he'd felt at museum of natural history when he'd let his fingers rest on Andrew Jackson. This is what power feels like, he thought, clenching his jaw to keep his teeth from rattling. Rich people feel this way every day. They plug themselves into it like toasters.

"Want me to tell you her real name?" the second man said, looking every possible place but down at Lowboy.

"You'd tell me either way," the first man answered, bringing the bandanna up to wipe his nose.

The second man smacked his lips. "It's Emily."

At the sound of that name Lowboy fell over backward and staggered to his feet and started running. The briefcase was rattling and throwing off sparks but its current was propelling him forward now, feeding into his legs and stomach, working his body by remote control. Emily, the man had said. The word seemed senseless to him, a random a.s.sortment of everyday noises, but he knew that it was connected to the briefcase and to the feeling of power that was carrying him up the escalator and out through the turnstiles and into the late morning light. Emily. From the platform to the sidewalk he had no other idea. By the time he reached the curb it had come quietly to rest, taking root against his memory like a virus, flooding his consciousness with copies of itself.

"Emily," he said in a reasonable voice, staring out into the traffic. Already it was the only name he knew.

Clouds hung low over midtown, pressing against the roofs and water towers and LED displays, but the sky above his head was high and blue. He looked up and saw that the cold couldn't last. That summer had been the hottest ever, the hottest in the last one hundred years, and the summer before had been the second hottest. n.o.body denied that. n.o.body could. He looked over his shoulder at the stainless steel globe that divided Broadway from Central Park West, glowing so brightly in the sun that he could see it even when he closed his eyes. The globe was less than thirty years old, younger even than Violet, but already it was almost obsolete. Antarctica doesn't look like that, he thought. Not anymore. Greenland doesn't either. The knowledge made him feel melancholy and privileged at once, predestined for glory, a n.o.ble and underestimated prophet. He could make the clocks run backward, after all. He could keep the world from ending with the help of just one person. Such a small and ordinary thing. But that person was nowhere to be found.

His head was clear again, obedient and still, and the machinery had quieted to a purr. He remembered where he was and turned and walked into the park. The briefcase was almost weightless now. Trying to cooperate, he decided. It wants me to get it open. But even as he had that thought his face flushed with embarra.s.sment. It's a briefcase briefcase, he reminded himself. An item of luggage. It doesn't give a s.h.i.+t whose hand it's cuffed to.

A dozen steps into the park he came across a sheltered patch of lawn. He waited for a dogwalker to pa.s.s, keeping his face averted, then laid the briefcase flat against the ground. It gave the faintest s.h.i.+ver. He hesitated a moment longer, listening closely, but he heard nothing but the ambient panic of the city and his own hurried breathing. The briefcase was completely silent now. A screwdriver ought to do it, he thought, fingering the catches of the lock. But there was no need for a screwdriver. He pulled the briefcase toward him and the lock popped meekly open.

"What the h.e.l.l," said Lowboy, making his Philip Marlowe face. "What the h.e.l.l."

The briefcase was practically empty. It held one roll of duct tape, one small manila envelope, a stack of Xeroxed pages, and a fitness magazine. No machinery or ductwork to be seen. The hum must have been coming from some part of me, he thought. My right arm possibly. He'd just begun to consider this, opening and closing his right hand, when something about the magazine caught his eye. A talkshow host was taking his pants off on its cover and a caption next to his righthand nostril read AB CUBING BLITZKRIEG ... WHO STARTED THE FIRE??? AB CUBING BLITZKRIEG ... WHO STARTED THE FIRE???

The shape of the magazine looked wrong somehow. Lowboy picked it up with two fingers, listening closely, then held it cautiously up to the light. A second magazine slid out of the first and fell onto the gra.s.s. On its cover a middle-aged woman in a white paper smock was lying on an operating table.

Everything had seemed strange to him since leaving the school but the magazine was the strangest thing by far. On each page a woman was visiting the doctor. The skin of their faces was pulled back too tightly, like astronauts' faces at takeoff, and the rest of their bodies looked sunburned. They were sitting on upholstered vinyl tables or lying across them with their ankles in stirrups. They seemed to be upset. The hands of the doctor were just visible, too close to be in focus, holding a variety of expensive-looking instruments. The women's eyes were fixed on the instrument in the doctor's hands, or on the stirrups, or on some other object in the room. The text under the photographs was a jumble of medical terminology and profanity that made no sense to him at all. In the middle of the magazine, where the centerfold should have been, jars of honeycolored fluid were arranged in a tight black grid like pictures in a yearbook. At the lower left corner of the page, cut off along the bottom, the words actual size were printed in fluorescent orange letters. Each jar contained a crumpled human figure.

Flipping slowly through the magazine, taking in each relevant detail, Lowboy wondered if the world deserved to end. When he reached the last page he took a deep breath and started over at the beginning. This can't be about s.e.x, he thought. But the captions underneath the pictures told him that it was. Finally he laid the magazine facedown on the ground and wiped his hands back and forth in the gra.s.s. I'll save half the world, he decided. The other half can burn away to nothing.

The Xeroxes were even more confusing. Columns of tiny decimals, twelve or thirteen to a page, with minuses or pluses in between. The last number on the last page was 640., which seemed meaningless at first, but when he opened the manila envelope he found $640 in twenty-dollar bills. That changed everything. He felt like jumping up and down or letting out a Cherokee war whoop or kissing the next person he saw on the lips. But he contented himself with making his bankrobber's face.

"Got you now, Indian Killer," he said, grinning down at Andrew Jackson. The stack was almost thicker than his hand. Jackson said nothing but that was only to be expected.

Money has to do what you want, Lowboy said to himself. No matter how awful. And so do the people you pay.

Ten minutes later he was back on the A. Crowley Academy was between two stops-Christopher Street on the 1/9 and West Fourth on the A, C, E-but he'd always liked West Fourth the best. West Fourth was where the college kids got out. He never grew tired of watching them, so grown up and self-sufficient in their expensive dirty clothes. There'll be more girls with that new haircut there, he thought. The one with the bangs. Emily might have it herself. But he knew even then that she'd look just the same, only taller and more serious, and that she'd be as patient with him as ever. That helped almost as much as finding the $640.

"Emily," he said under his breath. He'd been afraid of her until that moment, afraid of what she might do, but now he was the opposite of afraid. She'll be happy to see me, he thought. Happily surprised. He drummed with his fingers against his seat's hollow back and hummed a tune to keep from getting restless. "You Don't Learn That in School" by Nat King Cole. When he got out at West Fourth he walked past the college kids without looking at them once. He kept his eyes on the posters and the square-cut white tiles and the glossy gumspots on the cement floor. No time for sightseeing, William, he said to himself. It's already 11:45.

What happened when he got to Crowley was like a beautiful ballet. At 11:55 he sat down on a stoop across the street from the entrance and looked into the cla.s.srooms and waited. There were three of them all told, one to the left of the entrance and two to the right, each filled with identically inclined heads. Writing in their notebooks, Lowboy thought, and the idea relaxed him. All was well at Crowley. He sat and thought about Emily and watched the girls writing. After exactly three minutes an electric bell sounded and they got to their feet like ballerinas, revolving toward the hallway door in unison, falling willingly and easily into graceful double file.

At 11:58 the doors of the building swung open and the uppercla.s.s girls came outside: juniors first, still giddy at their lunchtime independence, seniors a world-weary minute later. He kept himself quiet and waited. At 12:03 she shouldered the lefthand door open, blinking skeptically in the midday light, swinging a black bookbag against her leg. The last of them all. Two redfaced blond sidekicks came out alongside her, talking in low courtly whispers, their awkwardness a tribute to her own. If she'd had on a dress they'd have been holding it up by the corners.

Halfway down the steps she stopped and dug out a pack of Salem Lights 100's without bothering to look behind her. The sidekicks formed a human screen to shelter her from Crowley's allseeing eye. She used to smoke Kools, Lowboy reminded himself. So did I. She was about to take another step when she stopped again, as though someone had called out her name or touched her, and brought her right hand up to shade her face. He himself had made no movement. The sidekicks were disoriented, unsure whether to break rank, but she said something under her breath and they laughed and went on down the steps without her. Neither of them looked across the street. Lowboy wondered what she could have told them.

She was studying him now, squinting slightly as she looked, as though a sunlit valley lay between them. He said nothing, did nothing, only waited for her to come across the street. He couldn't have gotten up to save his life. If he could have run away he would have done it. His calling and his belief in his calling had suddenly abandoned him completely.

He'd have run away if he could have because seeing Emily was more than he could stand. Violet had said that Emily would confuse him, that she would keep him from improving, but he'd never felt less confused in all his life. A memory came to him of their last day together, the day of the accident, when they'd met on the corner of Ninth Street and Broadway and she'd decided not to go to school. Let's run away, h.e.l.ler, she'd said. n.o.body will run away with me but you. Where should we go? he'd said, and she'd looked at him and said, You tell me where. Her hair had hung down into her eyes and she'd been crying. You're my best friend, h.e.l.ler, she'd whispered. He'd laughed and said, Well, you're my only friend. I like that, she'd told him. That means you're all mine. She'd taken his hand and put it in her back pocket. He hadn't felt confused then either. It's all right, Emily, he'd said. I'll take you somewhere. I'm going to take you with me underground.

Slowly and cautiously he held up a hand. She shook her head and stubbed her cigarette out against the railing and coughed into her palm. The look on her face wasn't serious after all: it was wiped clean, opaque and transparent at once, like the windows of a midtown office building. The doors swung open behind her and two teachers skipped girlishly down the Crowley steps, pa.s.sing her without a glance, laughing and chattering and fixing their hair. They seemed younger than her by a hundred years.

Suddenly she was in motion again, perfect in her deliberateness, crossing the wide spotless sidewalk in front of the school. It took her a long time to reach him. She stopped at the bottom of his stoop, whispered something to herself, then came up in a rush and sat above him. He looked sideways at the streetblackened cuffs of her jeans and saw that her feet were bare inside her sneakers. She never did like socks, he reminded himself. Not even in winter. He tried to catch her eye but she was staring back across the street at Crowley. I'm invisible, he said to himself, making his illusionist's face. I'm invisible until she looks at me. He brought a hand up in slow motion and let his fingers close around her ankle.

"I caught you smoking, Emily," he said.

Now she looked down at him. "Don't talk to me," she said. "Don't talk to me for a second." She slid her shoulder out from under the strap and pressed two of her knuckles to her lips. Her voice was uneven. That little lisp of hers, he thought. I'd forgotten that too. He let go of her ankle and waited for her to go on.

"Jesus Christ, h.e.l.ler," she said finally. "Holy s.h.i.+t."

"I've thought about what you said to me," he said, smiling up at her. "At Union Square that last day. Remember? Right before we went into the station."