Lowland Rider Read online

  It wasn't a cop, though. It was Enoch. He opened the door and walked in, no coat on, looking warm as could be in just that thin white outfit he always wears. The Noisy Boys all looked as though God had just entered. They got deathly quiet and nearly all bowed their heads and looked down at their feet. Only Red Hair kept his eyes on Enoch, nodding to him and then gesturing back into the car, as if to indicate the boy lying there bleeding, his feet still weakly beating on the dirty linoleum.

  Enoch looked at Red Hair and nodded a short, sharp nod. That seemed to be all Red Hair had been waiting for. He edged past Enoch as though he were afraid to touch him, as did the others, and in a moment only Enoch, the dying boy, and I were in the car.

  Enoch stood next to where I sat, watching the boy's life pass away, and then he turned toward me and smiled, not saying a word, only looking at me as if he expected approval, even worship. I looked away. For all that I've seen since I've come down, the look on his face was the worst of all. The irony of it is that I saw there what I myself have been trying to achieve—a complete and total separation from my surroundings, the ability to look on all horrors unscathed. But what terrified me, gave me such nausea, was the implication that he not only rejoiced in the act, but had caused it as well.

  And I foolishly thought of Moriarty then. Sherlock Holmes's old enemy, that "Napoleon of Crime" who ruled the underworld of London like a spider rules its web. What better image for Enoch, whom I have come to think of more and more as a ruler of this true underworld, this human cesspool to which I've confined myself?

  He looked away from me then, and went back and sat next to the boy. He waited until all movement had stopped, then knelt beside him and pulled the trumpet from the split throat. It was bent and dark with blood, which lay in a pool around the boy's head. Enoch put his face to the boy's, and I was glad it was turned away from me so that I could not see it. Yet I felt powerless to look away. It seemed, as it had with the old woman, that he was kissing the dead face. Yet, when his face came up after a few moments, it was free of blood.

  He rose, smiled again in my direction, and passed on to the next car. I retreated, not wanting to be found in the presence of the dead by some transit cop.

  I'm beginning to think of Enoch as the Devil himself, who rules this particular hell. Maybe I'm starting to flip out all the way. The thought scares me, scares me even more than Enoch does. I can just picture myself like Baggie, with her dead rats and her worn shopping bags, prowling these tunnels and trains like some frizzy-haired Charon. Even the thought of becoming Rags is appalling. There is a sense of the grotesque that I like to think I've avoided in my appearance and bearing, even though I've been down here for half a year, and still feel that nothing will make me ascend. I think I will die here, whether soon or many years from now I have no idea. I only know I'd like to die like a man.

  My self-disciplined inaction is starting to rankle as well. I hate Enoch. I would like, in some way, to cause his destruction, to kill him as painfully and mercilessly as he has, not killed, perhaps, but caused the deaths of others. I'm certain he is responsible. Maybe he's why I came down here. Among other things, so many other things. I still look for patterns.

  I ate well today. I bought a hot dog, and had the man put everything on it. I asked where Bennie was, and he said that Bennie had retired. I'll miss him. This new man doesn't seem as happy as Bennie was, not happy at all. I'll miss the way Bennie would smile and say, "Run it through the garden, right?" Through the garden. That always made me laugh.

  How can you have a garden where no sun shines? I'll get some sleep now. I'm tired.

  PART

  1

  Oh, there was a rider daring,

  Yes, there was a rider bold,

  Who hadna need for silver,

  Nor had he need for gold.

  His name was Jamie Gordon,

  And frae glen to glen

  'Twas the name most feared

  By all the lowland men.

  Death rode on his saddle,

  And death rode by his side,

  For death was a' there was to him,

  Nae pomp, nor peace, nor pride.

  This man, sae guid in years lang syne,

  Sae kind to one and a',

  Was pulled sae low by murther foul,

  The sin of Cain's great fa'.

  He had two daughters very dear,

  Whose eyen shone like the sun,

  Also a wife, whose bonie smile

  Could make the Isla run.

  The love he bore for these fair three

  Was like unto the love

  That Jesu bore for man below

  And his great Lord above.

  One day when Gordon traveled out

  About his lowland farm,

  A band of outlaws sought his kin,

  Purposed to do them harm.

  They had their way with Gordon's wife,

  And then they cruelly slew

  His lovely wife, light of his life,

  And both the daughters too . . .

  —Jamie Gordon, the Lowland Rider

  JESSE GORDON'S JOURNAL:

  SEPTEMBER 24, 1986

  I have descended. I have come into Hell. I am here for eternity, or until I die, whichever comes first.

  I loathe it, and that is good. It is damp and dark and the air is filthy. You chew it as much as you breathe it. It stinks too. It smells of sour bodies and shit and urine that's puddled too long, that's dried so it's smelled forever.

  I'm here forever. It's been only three days, and already it feels like forever. I wonder if this is how prisoners feel when they know there's no hope of parole. I know there isn't, no hope at all, and I know because it's in no one's hands but my own. I'm my own jailer, and I've sentenced myself, though I'm still not sure why, and I don't know if I will ever be sure.

  Why do we do things? Why take this job and not that one? Why marry her and not her? Why take this way home? Why love this man, hate another? Why live? Why die?

  I used to believe it all had purpose, that the things I did I did for a reason, that I was guided, even, if not by the good old Judeo-Christian white-bearded God, then at least by some thing. Even when bad things happened—a relative's death, a car engine blowing a gasket, throwing up my guts for no logical reason—I thought it was undoubtedly for the best. Somehow I would worm and weasel around until I had an answer, until I could rationalize it to myself.

  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.

  CHAPTER 2

  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.