I walked yesterday’s walk. Saw her running through again, and the thing. Felt her bump. Smelled her smell. Retraced the path I’d taken to the edge. Went back down, slow and easy this time. Looked for clues. A scarf. A shoe. A tiny stone from a piece of jewelry. A purse with ID. The kinds of things left behind in old movies to get the hero to the woman who was going to be the death of him.
No train was coming, but the minute I spent down there was sad and crazy and made me feel as vulnerable as a blasted bleeding body in a combat zone. I struggled to get back up on the deck, searching for the Homeland Security camera and thinking I’d better use the other exit, when the homeless man hooked me under the armpit and helped me up.
A sign of life. Maybe this station was home. He could’ve seen something. The clue.
I brushed myself off. “Thanks, guy. I know this looks weird, but I was here yesterday, the guy who jumped down there, maybe you saw me? I’m trying to find the girl,” I explained, reaching into my pocket to pull out a fiver, whether he knew anything or not. “She fell down first, but nobody believed me—”
“So am I.”
Yeah. It was that kind of movie.
The homeless man looked like a braided rope of sinewy, dried meat nearly lost inside a soiled overcoat, face hidden under a massive beard, smelling like an open sewer. He picked a crisp, fresh shirt and pants out of the shopping bag next to him, slipped out of the coat, started changing.
I headed back the way I’d come, figuring the token booth clerk had already called the cops about the terrorist on the tracks who he’d spotted in his monitors. But the booth was closed. Could have sworn it was open when I came down. I went for the exit, but the gate was locked into place. Darkness flooded the stairs leading to the street. The lights went out on the MetroCard machines, then in the overhead fixtures. Something pushed my chest and I fell back into the monster, fully dressed and itself again: overlapping out-of-synch images of a blond slab of muscle and a thatch of shadows grinning teeth and blazing laser-painting eyes.
What was I thinking? These are the moments I need Grandpa, I said to myself. What good is not being afraid if you can’t figure out what needs to be done.
I pulled the gun out — what I should have done in the first place — and stuck the muzzle in the vague borderland between the monster’s neck and head. “Where is she?” I demanded, keeping the question as simple as the threat of a released safety.
“I don’t know.”
I lowered the gun and put a round in its kneecap. The explosion was muffled, the kick subdued. The monster didn’t fall, but its blond mask hair ruffled. I put one in the hip. Nothing. Elbow. Shoulder. Sternum. I finished the clip into its head out of sheer defiance. When I was done, I dropped the gun. It felt like I’d been firing a .38.
“You didn’t die, so she didn’t,” the monster said.
“Is that important?”
“Yes.”
The strong arm ending in a big bruiser hand grabbed me by the material at the back of my neck like a kitten, lifted, and carried me off. Except the fingers felt like claws scratching the bones of my spine.
We went off into the subway tunnel gloom, monster feet splashing through puddles and kicking refuse. My head got knocked into a few caged lights along the way.
As a warning gust of air blew at our backs, a side tunnel opened up. The tracks ended, the lighting dimmed. The monster’s footsteps were drowned by the screech and grind of a train turning out of the station.
Someone cried out from a niche and scuttled away as we passed.
We entered another station, the mix of raw rock face, rusted wrought-iron gates, and bare sculptured sconces and pendants telling the sad story of abandoned visions of grandeur. Faded graffiti peppered tiled walls curving into the arched ceiling decorated with an incomplete mosaic. Something mythological. Modern banks of lamps set high on the wall at each tunnel mouth defined the boundaries of the excavated cave. The monster threw me onto the steel and rotten wood platform and hopped up after me, making the floor tremble.
It was the laser-pointer eyes pricking the back of my eye-balls with burning needles that made me blink and flinch. Not fear.
Looking back on the situation, the smart move would have been picking up right away on the monster not knowing where Medicine Snake Woman was and blowing its eyes out to buy time to get away. But I wanted her. And this thing was my only connection to her. The way to my Medicine Woman was through it. Plus, it tried to kill her. And I never got an actual clean shot at the monster.
And here was my true warrior moment. The one that came after the last ass kicking. And the best I could do was say, “What do you want?”
“Her.”
“Can’t help you there, big fella.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Because she’ll come for you.”
See, in the movies and books, this works the other way around — she’s supposed to be the bad guy’s prisoner and I’m the one who’s supposed to do the rescuing. Of course, that’s when I stumble into the setup and maybe I die but for sure I lose the woman and the bad guy puts a hurt on everybody.
I remembered that look she gave the bunch of us in the station when she was running, and wondered if she’d been searching for a chump. I like to think it was a warrior she’d been after.
But right then I felt like my long-lost cousins and distant great-uncles walking high iron without nets or cables. Only on this job, I’d run out of bolts and there was no way off the beams, and that iron was shaking and it was 1907 and the Quebec Bridge was falling into the St. Lawrence River all over again. Grandpa told me everything he could about living through that terrible day, losing his father, mourning with the rest of the Kahnawake Mohawks, but this was the first time I’d connected with the words he’d whispered in my head.
This time, the past was sticking to me, and it weighed more than all the steel that fell into the river that day. That past, it was as heavy as the spirits of the men who died under the steel, and the sorrow of their families, and the strength it took for those left to keep living another day.
The monster, it watched me like it couldn’t decide if it was time for me to die yet. So I did the only thing there was left to do.
Sat down. Not so hard, carrying that weight. Waved a hand at the space in front of me. All I needed was a pipe to share a smoke with a monster.
“Why her?” I asked, like I had something to trade of equal value.
The monster grumbled and clicked. Tree trunks snapped somewhere inside it. I think it was laughing. “Medicine.”
“Yeah, everybody wants medicine.”
“Yes.”
“She doesn’t know me, doesn’t even like me. You’ve got a long wait coming.”
“No.”
The thing became its stubborn resolve, standing by the rusting iron gate to a shadowy set of stairs, arms by its sides, blond hair and coal-fire eyes fading, until it was just a part of the background — another ruined, incomplete part of the city’s foundation. Trains rumbled in the distance. Traffic sounds from the street above filtered through air vents. I watched a water bug dart in spurts around me.
Then she was there. Standing next to me. Out of nowhere.
“Get out of here!” I yelled, and then I cursed, because if the monster had been sleeping, he was awake now.
Of course, it had always been awake.
It rolled great shoulders and shifted forward like a landslide, its porcelain mask of skin breaking, shattering the illusion of humanity. The brooding muscle man became a mountain of broken stone, an avalanche of pebbles that might have been the calcified souls of the dead, on which floated a thatch of pale wood that, if alive, would have been a badge of life in a cold and forbidding world, but since the wood was bare and brittle, could only be a sign of death.