“I’m not dawdling; I’m looking after my money.” Only he glanced up to see people cascading down the steps, breaking to left and right of him, like water at a rock. Jamming coins back in his pocket, Sam snatched up his suitcase to follow Hubert, who pushed one nickel into the slot ahead, then another into the one beside that. As they hefted the cases over, they were practically pounded through shadowless stiles by the wooden paddles swinging round behind them. “What does it do?” Sam looked back, frowning. “Whack you in the butt every time you go in?”
“That’s just to make sure people like you go and get on with it.” Hubert hurried ahead. “This way!” he called over his shoulder. “Let’s get the first car!”
Hubert was twenty-three. Last year Hubert had gone to Europe and traveled there four months. When he’d got back, he’d worked in the tobacco fields in Connecticut. This eagerness for the first car — something he’d imagine from John or Lewy — was not what you expected from a big brother about to start his second year in law school — all of which Hubert could claim. But with a sister in between, Hubert was his brother nearest Sam in age; perhaps that enthusiasm was what had kept them so close, in spite of it all.
They didn’t make the first car, because the subway was already pulling in when they got down to it.
They made the second:
“… tut-tut-tut…” Sam was surprised he could still hear it.
Inside, posts went from the floor to the curved ceiling — green-painted metal up to about stomach height, then white enamel for the rest. In metal fittings, leather loops hung from a pipe just above head-height, in a row down each side of the car. Up by the ceiling, eight-inch-high cardboard strips told of Sloan’s Liniment and Ivory Soap (“ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths percent pure”) and Pine Tar Honey — one (in color: red with yellow letters, a round face grinning beside them, in a bottle cap hat) was for Coca-Cola.
It had never occurred to Sam they’d have Coca-Cola in New York.
The subway seats were the same woven wicker as the trunk Hubert carried. Looking down at them, Sam saw their interstices were black — and realized it was dirt!
“Come on,” Hubert repeated, as the train started more smoothly than Sam expected: had a day and a night on the locomotive from Raleigh gotten him his rail legs?
Hefting up his bag, Sam followed Hubert to the car’s front. A doorway made a vestibule there — half the size of the one on the railway car in which he’d smoked with John Brown. Inside, a wheel hung against the wall; and pipes; and cables. To one side was a flat, green door.
Over racketing wheels, Hubert said: “The engineer sits in there.”
“This is the engine?”—for through the window in the door ahead he could see into the forward car, as it swung, intriguingly out of sync with theirs.
Hubert laughed and opened the doors between, to lob the wicker through, then turned to explain over the noise (louder between the cars) how, on the subway, any car could be the engine. All you had to do was put it first.
They went through the next car into the little booth at its head — this was the first car. Hubert told him to look out the front window; Sam stood, hands up beside his face to shade the light. Beyond the glass, with its inch-sized, hexagonal wire reinforcements between layered panes, darkness rushed him, cut by girders, punctured by lights — blue, red, green — a matutinal career through seas of shadow, past nocturnal carnivals.
“Now when you ride on the subway by yourself — ”
Sam pulled back from the window. In the booth’s yellowish light, Hubert’s dark eyes were serious above his short mustache.
“—in the morning,” Hubert went on, “when people are going to work, or in the evening, when they’re coming home — rush hour — you don’t come in here by yourself, now.”
“Why not?” Sam turned to Hubert.
“’Cause things can happen to you in here.”
“What things?”
“People can do things to you — like you can get your pocket picked, for one.”
Sam was going to say, just to be silly, You been deflected, Hubert? But Hubert swung — suddenly — the back of his hand against Sam’s pants lap, which made him flinch:
“Hey — !”
“You got to watch out for yourself, that’s all.” The train was coming into the station. “That’s all I’m saying. Now come on.” Carrying both trunk and case now, Hubert strode into the car, grinning again over his shoulder.
Parting black rubber rims, dark double doors rolled open, and Sam followed his brother onto still another wholly enclosed platform. “What sort of things, Hubert?”
Hubert put the suitcase down for Sam to take. “You just have to remember,” Hubert repeated, “that this is New York,” and the gravity with which he spoke seemed — apparently to Hubert — to cover the situation.
The subway station they were in, Times Square and Forty-second Street, was even bigger — and more crowded — than the one at Grand Central. They had to go up stairs and down. With their gilt signs, the plate glass windows indicated clothing stores, barber shops, bakeries. One store even sold magic tricks: through its window, when, with his case, Sam went over to look, a small man with a sharp beard turned to smile out at him — thick glasses made his eyes huge marbles — over red and blue boxes, through chains of metal rings, past cardboards with small figures attached to them, by black top hats, colored scarfs, oriental bird cages, and black wands with white tips. (Sam vowed he’d come back to that one.) The store windows were right in the ivory tiled wall, as if this were some outside street, so that he kept glancing up, expecting to see the sky above this buried city.
Saturday morning not that many people were traveling. Still, most of the ones who were stood across the tracks, off between the girders on the other platform. Drones at work in sweet, rich New York.
Following Hubert through resonant tunnels, considering his trajectory, like a bullet’s through a beehive, Sam wondered which of the enclosed images he’d recall in a day, in a decade. Then an idea came to rupture his contemplation of — even in the quick of excitement — the evanescence of time, that made him near break out laughing. Imagine writing a letter to Lewy and John (they were his best friends), with a page even for Mama and Papa, telling the wonders of his trip so far: he’d fold it, pack it into his cap so that the pages were fixed beneath the band. Then, by its visor, he’d sail the gray and brown tweed into the air, so that, as if become helmet, it shattered all these artificial ceilings, crashed out and up from under the flagpoles on the skyscrapers above, into liquid air, to go soaring south to Raleigh — really, about as sensible as putting a message into a jeweled box and floating it off on the water, in hopes somehow it would wend home. Still, the image stayed. What might John or Lewy say if they saw a cap falling at them, a dark disk, an eclipsed moon — that turned out stuffed with his adventures?
John said, “They could figure it out on you.”
But, chuckling, Lewy wandered away, barefoot over fallen blossoms, as if codes and journals and secrets and cyphers had ceased to interest him as he searched the spring night.
“Is it all underground…?” Sam asked, wonderingly — having just realized that the “sub” in the “subways” Hubert and Lucius and Lemuel and Corey and Hap and Elsie had all, in their turn, been talking about, whenever, over these last years, they’d come home for one vacation or another, was short for “subterranean”!