The Taking of Pelham 123

by John Godey

  “I think about God, Peg,” he had said solemnly, and she had told him to save that bullcrap for Father Morrissey and then reversed her field again and started crabbing about not getting any credit for making his lunch, and all their friends would be thinking she stayed in bed until noon….

  But what could he do—tell her that he added up weight? A steady, sober (most of the time) pillar (like they say) of the church? Yet, dear Jesus, you had to do something or flip your lid. The truth of it was that driving a subway train did get to be automatic after almost twenty years—you developed a connection between your eyes and the signals, between your hands and the controller and brake handle, and everything seemed to work all by itself. He hadn’t made a serious mistake in almost twenty years.

  In fact, in his whole time in, he had made only one real mistake, and that shortly after he finished his training and mandatory six months’ yard duty. He had jumped a ball, dear God. Not because he was adding up weight; he wasn’t even doing it back then. But it had happened—moving along at forty miles an hour, he had breezed right through a red signal. To his credit, he realized it right away, but by the time he hit his brake the trippers had worked and emergency braking stopped the train. That was the whole thing. No accident. A sudden stop that jolted the passengers a little, but nobody hurt and no complaints. He had climbed down to the track and reset the tripper by hand, and that was that. Later he got a real reaming out, but old man Meara, the supervisor, had taken into account that he was a green hand and didn’t write him up. In fact, he had never been written up, which proved something.

  The reason was that he did know his rail, and knew it so damn well that he didn’t have to think about it. He knew more than his rail; he understood how the trains worked. Once he learned something he didn’t forget it. Not that it mattered so far as being a safe, on-time motorman was concerned, but he did know that each car was driven by four 100-horsepower traction motors, one for each axle, and that the third rail fed in 600-volt direct current through the contact shoes, and that moving his controller into power position sent a signal to each car’s motor control unit…. He even knew that the sonofabitches cost almost a quarter of a million dollars apiece, which meant that when you were operating a ten-car train, you were in charge of two and a half million dollars’ worth of equipment!

  The truth was that you did almost the whole job automatically, without thinking about it. Take the holding lights back at Grand Central. He had known they were up without really seeing them and known when they went off. Now, heading for Twenty-eighth, he was doing it all automatically, the controller pegging up at exactly the right interval from switching to series to multiple, his eye or instinct, whatever you called it, taking in the signals, green, green, easing through the amber toward the red, knowing he was at the exact right speed for the red to turn amber ahead of him, knowing that if he did have to hit the brake, he could do it without shaking up the passengers. You didn’t think about all that; you just did it.

  So if you didn’t have to think about driving the train, you could afford to think about something else to keep your mind occupied and kill the monotony. He was willing to take a bet that plenty of other motormen played games. Vincent Scarpelli, for instance, from something he had once let drop, Vincent added up the number of tits he carried. Tits! At least his own pastime was not sinful.

  He added up weight. At Thirty-third, he had dropped about twenty riders and picked up maybe a dozen. A loss of about eight. At 150 pounds per passenger (if the people who made elevators figured capacity on that basis, it was good enough for him), the net loss was 1,200 pounds, giving him a current total of 793,790 pounds. Naturally, that was a rough approximation. He could never tell exactly how many people got on or off, considering the length of the train and how little time he had to count them, so it was really just an educated guess. But he was pretty good at it, even in the rush-hour mob scene.

  He realized it was kind of foolish to keep adding in the weight of the cars, since that never changed (approximately 75,000 pounds per car on A Division, with B-1 and B-2 running a little higher) except for the amount of cars. But it made the numbers more impressive. Right now, for instance, although he was only carrying 290 passengers (43,500 pounds) plus a 1-pound allowance each for books, newspapers, packages, ladies’ handbags (290 pounds), you added in ten cars at 75,000 pounds each for the grand total of 793,790.

  Where the game got to be fun was in rush hour, when the platform pushers jammed people in so that you could hardly believe it. Actually, the real action was on an express, and that was where he had established his all-time record. According to the Transit Authority, the top limit you could squeeze into a car was 180 (220 in a BMT car), but that was way too low. At times, especially when there were delays, you got at least another 20 per car—all 44 seats filled and a good 155 to 160 standing. So that you could really believe the old story about the man who died of a heart attack at Union Square and had to travel into Brooklyn before enough passengers got out to give him room to fall down.

  Denny Doyle smiled. He had told the story himself, claiming that it had happened on his train. If such a thing could have happened, it would probably have occurred one rush hour a few years ago. A main had burst and flooded the tracks, and by the time they got moving again there was a sea of humanity on the platforms, and stops at each station ran to three or four minutes, with people committing murder to board the trains. That night, at one point, he had been hauling over 200 passengers per car, plus packages—well over a million pounds!

  He smiled again and jockeyed the brake handle as he swept into the Twenty-eighth Street station.

  TOM BERRY

  Eyes shut, sprawled in his seat in the front section of the first car, Tom Berry gave himself in trust to the train, soothed by its predictable rocking and yawing, lulled by the dissonant medley of its noises. The stations had slipped by in a pleasant blur, and he made no effort to keep a tally on them. He knew he would rise at Astor Place, prompted by habit and that sixth sense, somehow allied to the instinct for survival, that New Yorkers developed in all the compartmented phases of their embattled coexistence with the city. Like animals in a jungle, like plants, they adapted, they mutated toward specific defenses and suspicions created to cope with specific threats. Cut a New Yorker open and you would discover convolutions in his brain, tracks in his nervous system, that were not present in any other urban citizenry anywhere.

  He smiled at his conceit and lingered over it, refining it, even working up the casual phrasing he would use in telling it to Deedee. It occurred to him, not quite for the first time, that he was zeroed in on Deedee. Like the falling tree in the forest that made no sound unless somebody was there to hear it, nothing counted unless he shared it with Deedee.

  It might be love. At least, that was one possible label to put to the complexity of crazy and contradictory emotions they were tangled up in: sexual frenzy, hostility, wonderment, tenderness, and a state of almost permanent confrontation. That was love? If so, it damn well wasn’t the way poets defined it.

  The smile on his lips flattened out, his brows formed a frown as he considered yesterday afternoon. He had taken the subway steps three at a time and half run to her freaky pad with his heart beating high in the excitement of seeing her. She opened the door to his knock (the doorbell had been out of order for three years) and immediately about-faced and walked away with the precision of a soldier in close-order drill.

  He remained near the door, his mouth unhinged on an aborted smile. Even in this moment of dismay and approaching anger she knocked him out, and never mind the uniform that worked overtime at disguising her beauty: the denims raggedly cut just above the knees, the steel-rimmed glasses, the shiny brown hair dragged back at the sides of her head and then allowed to fend for itself.

  He regarded the brooding eyes and the jutted lip. “You’re regressing. I recognize that pout. You discovered it when you were three years old.”

  “Your college education is showing,�
�� she said.

  “Night school.”

  “Night school. Yawning students and an instructor in a rumpled suit sweating out the hour in excruciating boredom.”

  He edged toward her, careful not to catch his foot in the shabby torn rug that provided bare cover for the floorboards that slanted upward, then dipped again, like something that had been deranged by an earth tremor and never properly subsided again. He was smiling, but without humor.

  “Bourgeois contempt for the lower orders,” he said. “Some people can’t afford to go to college by day.”

  “People. You’re not people, you’re the enemy of the people.”

  The dark anger in her face stirred him perversely (or maybe not so perversely, given the narrow band that separated love from hate, that conjoined passion and rage), and he responded with an erection. Because he felt that it would give her an advantage to know it, he turned his back and walked away to the opposite side of the room. The orange-crate bookshelves leaned drunkenly. The paint-thickened mantelpiece was piled with more books, and below it the nonworking fireplace held books, too. Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Marcuse, Fanon, Cohn-Bendit, Cleaver—the standard prophets and philosophers of the Movement.

  Her voice floated across the room. “I’m not going to see you anymore.”

  He had expected it and had gauged the exact tone, down to the last nuance. Without turning, he said, “I think you ought to change your name.”

  He meant to throw her off-balance with an irrelevancy. But as soon as he spoke, he recognized the ambiguity of his words and knew she would misinterpret them.

  “I don’t believe in marriage,” she said. “And even if I did, I would sooner shack up with a… well, with an anything… than marry a pig.”

  He faced her, his back against the mantelpiece. “I wasn’t proposing marriage. I meant your name. Deedee. It’s too cute and frivolous for a revolutionary. Revolutionaries should have no-nonsense names. Stalin, steel. Lenin, Mao, Che—hard, dialectical names.”

  “Like Tito?”

  He laughed. “Score one. Actually, I don’t even know what your right name is, was.”

  “What’s the difference?” Then, shrugging, she said, “Doris. I detest it.”

  She detested a number of things besides her name: the Establishment, the political system, male dominance, wars, poverty, cops, and, especially, her father, that eminently successful accountant who had provided her with silks, satins, love, capped teeth, and an education at an Ivy League college, and who almost—but not quite—understood her and her present needs, and from whom, to his extreme distress, she would now accept money only in the direst straits. Well, she wasn’t so terribly wrong about most of what she thought and felt, but her lack of consistency about some of it bugged him. If she hated her father, she shouldn’t take money from him at any cost, and if she hated cops, she damn well shouldn’t be sleeping with one.

  She was flushed, and very pretty, and somehow defenseless. He said gently, “Well, all right, what have I done?”

  “Don’t try to bluff me out with that fake innocence. Two friends of mine were in the crowd, and they saw the whole thing. You brutalized an innocent black man.”

  “Oh. Oh, yes. Is that what I did?”

  “My friends were there, on St. Marks Place, and they told me exactly what happened. Not a half hour after you left here—left my bed, you bastard—you reverted to type; you beat the life out of a black man who was doing absolutely nothing wrong.”

  “He wasn’t exactly doing nothing wrong.”

  “He was urinating in the street. Is that a serious crime?”

  “It was more specific than urinating in the street. He was urinating on a woman.”

  “A white woman?”

  “What’s the difference what color she was? She objected to being pissed on. And don’t tell me that it was an act of political symbolism. He was a stupid mean bastard, and he was maliciously pissing on a woman.”

  “So you beat him to a pulp.”

  “Did I?”

  “Don’t try to deny it. My friends saw the whole thing, and they recognize police brutality when they see it.”

  “How did they describe what happened?”

  “Don’t you think I understand that nothing is better calculated to stir up savagery in a white racist than the sight of a black penis, that universal threat, that threat of superior potency?”

  “It didn’t look all that potent. In fact, it was shriveled from the cold.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Look,” Berry said patiently. “You weren’t there. You didn’t see what happened.”

  “My friends saw it.”

  “Okay. Did your friends see him pull a knife on me?”

  She looked at him scornfully. “Exactly the kind of thing I expected you to say.”

  “Your friends didn’t see that part of it? And they were right there—right? Well, I was right there, too. I saw what was happening, and I intervened—”

  “By what right?”

  “I’m a cop,” he said in exasperation. “I’m being paid to maintain order. Okay, so I represent the forces of repression. But is it repressive to prevent people from pissing on other people? That punk’s rights weren’t being infringed upon; the woman’s were. The Constitution gives everybody the right to freedom from being pissed on. So I stepped into the situation. I intervened on behalf of the Constitution.”

  “Above all, don’t try to be funny about it.”

  “I pushed him away from the woman, and I told him to button up and get the hell off the street. He buttoned up, all right, but he didn’t get off the street. He pulled a knife, and he went for me.”

  “You didn’t hit him or anything?”

  “I gave him a shove. Not even a shove. A nudge, to get him moving.”

  “Ah. Excessive force.”

  “He used excessive force. He came at me with a knife. I took it away from him, and in the process I broke his wrist.”

  “Breaking a man’s wrist isn’t using excessive force? Couldn’t you have taken the knife away without breaking his wrist?”

  “He wouldn’t let go of it, and he kept trying to stab me. So I broke his wrist. The only alternative was to let him stick the knife in me, and I’m not ready to go that far yet for the sake of good community relations.”

  She was silent, frowning.

  “Or,” he said deliberately, “to please my girl and her half-baked radical ideas.”

  “Damn you!” She moved with astonishing speed, hurling herself across the room. “Get out of here! Get lost, you pig! Pig!”

  He underestimated the force of her rush. It slammed him back against the quivering mantelpiece. Laughing, protesting, he tried to catch her busy hands, but she surprised him again. She doubled up her fist and hit him in the stomach. It didn’t hurt him, but it doubled him over in a violent protective reflex. When he straightened up, he grabbed her shoulders and began to shake her. Her teeth rattled. He saw a look of pure rage come into her eyes, and she tried to knee him in the groin. He twisted away, then caught her knee and imprisoned it between his thighs. Once again, he erected. She felt him against her, and stopped struggling, and looked at him in astonishment.

  And so to bed.

  At climax, straining beneath him, her cheeks wet with tears, she whispered, “Pig. Piggie. Oh, my pig….”

  As usual, she would not let him kiss her good-bye or even touch her once he had strapped the .38 back on. But neither did she make her customary impassioned plea that he dispose of his gun or, even better, turn it on his masters.

  He smiled and reflexively touched the bulge of the gun against his bare skin. The train stopped, and he opened his eyes a slit to check the station. Twenty-eighth. Three more stops, a four-block walk, five wind-sucking flights of steps…. Was it the perversity of their relationship that attracted him? He shook his head. No. He ached to see her. He ached for her touch, even her anger. He smiled again, in memory and anticipation, as the train doors ratt
led open.

  RYDER

  Waiting for Pelham One Two Three to arrive, Ryder looked at the front-enders, studying them incuriously. Four of them, four overachievers. The young black with the fancy threads and the death-dealing eye. A Puerto Rican, thin, undersized, wearing a soiled green battle jacket. A lawyer—anyway, he looked like a lawyer, taking into account the attaché case, the sharp eyes, the brooding stance of a schemer. A boy of about seventeen, carrying schoolbooks, his head down, his face a flame of active acne. Four. Not four people, Ryder thought, four units. Maybe what was going to happen would cure them of being front-enders.

  Pelham One Two Three came down the track. The amber and white marker lights at the top were like a pair of mismatched eyes. Beneath them, the sealed beams, which were the real eyes of the train, seemed by some optical trick to waver, to flicker like a candle in a wind. The train came on, as always with the appearance of going too fast to be able to stop. But it came to a smooth halt. Ryder watched the front-enders converge on the door and enter. The dressed-up black turned into the front half of the car, the others to the rear. He picked up his bags, holding them both somewhat awkwardly in his left hand, his shoulder dragged down with their weight. He walked toward the platform without haste, his right hand in the pocket of his raincoat on the grip of the automatic.

  The motorman was leaning far out of his window, looking back down the platform, watching the passengers board the train. He was middle-aged, with a ruddy face and silvery gray hair. Ryder rested his shoulder against the side of the train and, in the same moment that the motorman became aware that his view of the platform was blocked off, placed the muzzle of the gun against his head.

  Whether it was the sight of the gun, or the impact of it on his flesh, or even the unexpectedness of Ryder’s looming presence, the motorman jerked his head back in a violent reflex and struck it jarringly against the window frame. Ryder crooked his hand inside the window and this time carefully placed the gun against the motorman’s cheek, directly under his right eye.