by Robert Stone
“My word!” Igo exclaimed. He enjoyed using this mild expletive because of the contrast it made with the rest of his vocabulary. “My word! This recruit has the attitude of a dog.”
Mackay himself was surprised. He had never noticed himself cringing.
Igo took to addressing Mackay as “Pooch.” He announced that he would drill the cringe out of him. He made things very unpleasant. Every morning after the training company was dismissed from inspection, Igo would drill him in the manual of arms.
“Here, Pooch,” he would call amiably, to summon Mackay.
At one point Mackay told himself that if Igo called him Pooch once more, he would bash the boatswain’s mate’s brains out with his useless Springfield training rifle. He decided instead to interpret Igo’s drilling as being in his own best interest. He had noticed that in the navy people were rarely actually struck; in that way the navy was unlike St. Michael’s. He noticed also that the food was good, better than he had ever had anywhere.
Every morning he drilled with Igo. When they had gone through the manual of arms, Igo would menace him by waving a variety of objects over his head and try to catch him cringing. It was absurd and comical. Still, Mackay found it very hard to stare straight ahead and not to wince at the expected blows. Mackay thought of his cringe as a rat that lived near his heart, a rat with his own face. He hated it far worse than he hated Igo.
By the time he left boot camp for the fleet, he was able to stare the boatswain’s mate down.
“Congratulations, sailor,” Igo said to Mackay. “You’re too scared to cringe.”
Mastering the shameful reflex had been instructive, and Mackay never forgot it. He often wondered if everyone had a rat at his heart to kill.
Six years or so out of the navy, Mackay beheld himself a family man, married and the father of a baby boy. His mother was dead. Through good luck he was able to find a job as a photographer’s assistant. Eventually the job would lead to his working as a news photographer and then to his becoming an artist, but it was a hard job with long hours and low pay. Mackay enjoyed it nonetheless and supplemented his income by working as a house painter. He lived with his family in a pleasant apartment on the West Side near Central Park. His wife was a graduate of the High School of Music and Art and of Reed College. Their friends were people of spirit and artistic interest. It was the early sixties and a good time to be young in New York. Mackay felt that the city in which he lived was a different city from the one in which he had grown up.
On a bright autumn Saturday Mackay walked over to Columbus Avenue for the morning paper and discovered that there was a picture of his old friend Chris Kiernan on the front page of the Daily News. The accompanying headline read: SAMARITAN KILLED IN SUBWAY SLAYING.
Kiernan had been riding the Seventh Avenue Express down from his in-laws’ new apartment in the north Bronx. His Korean-American wife and their infant child were with him. At the 145th Street station a young man had boarded the train and begun harassing passengers. The young man was an unemployed immigrant from Ecuador and he had been drinking. He went through the cars from one end of the train to the other, making menacing gestures and cursing the subway riders in Spanish. Reaching the car in which Kiernan and his family were riding, he passed by them without comment. But in the same car he began to abuse a lone middle-aged woman. The woman looked at Kiernan, a big man with a practical face, plainly a husband and father wearing a suit and tie. She called to him begging for help. As the train pulled into the 125th Street station, Kiernan went over to the young man and began to struggle with him. When the doors opened Kiernan wrestled him out onto the platform.
“You’re getting off here,” Kiernan was reported to have told the man. He gave the Ecuadorian a shove that sent him flying and returned to sit beside his wife. A ragged cheer went up.
The car doors should have closed then but they did not. Instead of continuing on to 116th Street, the train remained in the 125th Street station and the doors stayed open. Out on the platform the angry Ecuadorian struggled to his feet. According to witnesses, he went halfway up the stairs to the next level but then seemed to change his mind and came back down. Still the doors failed to close. The drunk young man got back on the express and stabbed Kiernan through the heart. Kiernan stood up and tried to chase him. The man fled up the stairs. Kiernan fell dead on the station platform in what the Daily News described as “a pool of blood.”
Mackay stood transfixed on the corner of Columbus Avenue in the rare autumn sunshine reading about Kiernan’s murder. He and Chris Kiernan had known each other since they were both six years old. The Daily News story mentioned the fact that Kiernan had once been a scholar at St. Michael’s. He had gone on to attend St. Peter’s College in New Jersey and later became an army officer. At the time of his death he was an account executive at Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn. His friends were quoted regarding his excellence of character.
Mackay was shaken. A thrill of fear went through him as he picked up the Times and paid for both papers and started home. Although they had not seen each other for ten years they had once been very close. They had suffered shame and pain together that could never be explained to anyone. They were of the same stuff. Mackay felt his existence threatened by Kiernan’s death. He felt diminished.
In Albany, a legislator introduced a bill to benefit the survivors of people who incurred injury or death assisting their fellow citizens in an emergency. It was referred to as the “Christopher Kiernan Bill.” Reading about it all, Mackay smiled uncomfortably and shook his head. Kiernan had always had naive notions of high life. He was terribly ashamed of his origins and even ashamed of his Irish name. He had dressed in a collegiate manner and attempted to eliminate his New York accent. Mackay believed that Kiernan would have changed his face if he could. Like Mackay, he had wanted to leave a great deal behind. How he would have hated the Tammany politician’s “Christopher Kiernan Bill,” Mackay thought. How he must have hated to die in the subway.
It occurred to Mackay over the weekend that he ought somehow to honor Kiernan’s memory. He thought about going to the funeral, about writing to Kiernan’s wife or stopping by the wake to sign the book. In the end he did nothing. He did not want the world of his childhood to touch him. He wanted it gone, buried with Kiernan. It seemed to him that Kiernan would have been the first to understand.
Afterward Mackay would wonder if the bits and pieces of violence he and Kiernan had lived out together had not conditioned the future and led Kiernan to his death. He suspected that past successes had encouraged Kiernan to action. Of course, it had been the right thing, the brave thing. But in spite of his horror, Mackay felt himself considering Kiernan’s undoing with a fascination that might be mistaken for guilty satisfaction.
One thing he knew for certain was that he wanted no part of violence anymore, on any scale. He swore that he would never strike his children or allow them to be hit by anyone. He adopted a mode of politics he believed would place him in opposition to war. He felt a deep commitment to the good causes of the sixties. He felt as though he had earned the right to work for peace and human brotherhood. He embraced those things with joy.
Mackay could not know then that he would one day take a coarse satisfaction in the middle-class elegance of his grown children, whom he would raise in an atmosphere of progressive right-mindedness that would present them with problems of their own. Or that he would brag to them of the rigors of his own upbringing. His life was not to be the irresistible moral progress for which he might have hoped.
The year after Kiernan’s death, Mackay was painting and papering an apartment on Jane Street. About four in the afternoon on a Thursday in March, the first warm spring day of the year, he walked to the Fourteenth Street station and boarded the IRT uptown express for home. A few minutes later he got out at Seventy-second Street to change for the local train.
Standing near him on the platform was an elderly woman in a black cloth coat. She appeared very frail and a little confused.
Mackay, perhaps thinking of his mother felt well disposed toward her.
A tall, fair-skinned man in a light-colored plaid suit came walking down the platform. For some reason, Mackay noticed him at once. The man was whistling between his teeth as he went. He seemed to be looking for someone. His manner was ebullient. Every once in a while he would stop and appear to chat with someone waiting for the local. The people addressed would either look away or simply stare at him expressionless. He had gray hair, a lean foxy face and lively blue eyes.
As Mackay watched, the man approached the elderly woman nearby. Mackay saw him speak to her and saw her look away. The man appeared to be delivering himself of some casual pleasantry, but the woman ignored him and moved down the platform. The tall man followed her; smiling, and spoke to her again. At first Mackay thought that the two must know each other. Then he saw that the woman was frightened. She tried to step around the man and move toward Mackay. The man blocked her way and laughed. Mackay could not hear the words the tall man spoke but he heard the laugh. It was loud and witless. The elderly woman turned her back on her tormentor hugging her pocketbook close. The laughing man stepped around to face her. Mackay drew nearer and quietly moved where he could see the old woman’s face. He saw it convulsed with feat; sheeplike, vacant and repellent. The man reached out and touched an ornament on the woman’s coat collar.
The Seventy-second Street IRT station was the one from which Mackay, not yet dispossessed of his cringe, had set out to enlist in the navy. Its platforms were narrow. Its stairways ascended from the middle of the platform to form a central pyramid, so that there was really only one way out. Fifteen feet from where he stood, Mackay saw the old woman begin to cry. She was trying to pull away. The man held her by the coat ornament. Her loose aged lips were trembling. The platform was crowded with people but, looking about him again, Mackay realized that no one else was watching.
Mackay stepped forward. He still hoped that somehow the situation would unmake itself, that some word or action would occur to show its normalcy and innocence. Just before intervening, Mackay took a last decisive look at the man on the platform. What he saw gave him pause. Although he was a day or two unshaven, there was something rather distinguished about the man’s appearance. His bearing was firm and confident. His features were delicate and more pleasant than otherwise. He was neatly and tastefully dressed in a jacket and tie. His hair was wavy and slightly long in the back like an old-fashioned Middle European musician’s. His eyes were happy, although wide and staring.
“Anything wrong?” Mackay asked the elderly woman. She looked at him in desperation.
When the tall man turned to him, Mackay saw that the man was sturdier and younger than he had appeared at a distance. He was looking at Mackay in blue-eyed amazement.
“You!” he said. As though he knew Mackay and recognized him. “You!” the man half screamed. His cry of recognition seemed to transcend the merely personal. He seemed indeed to be recognizing in the person of Mackay everything that had ever been wrong with his life, which Mackay suspected had been quite a lot.
Out of the corner of his eye, Mackay saw the woman who had been menaced edging away.
“Take a walk,” Mackay told the man sternly. Immediately he regretted the pathetic suburban bravado of his words. In his own ears his voice had the quality of a dream. It was as though, upon addressing the man, he had entered something like a dream state. Events thereafter seemed lit in an unnatural light.
“You are from Doc,” the man said. He spoke with a Germanic accent. At first it sounded as though he had said, “You are from God.” When the man repeated it, Mackay got it straight. “You are from Doc.”
Mackay saw the unnatural brightness of his eyes and the starvation gauntness of his bony face. It was frightening to imagine what kind of life had to be endured behind such eyes. They were without order or justice or reason. For a moment, the two men stood motionless on the platform, facing each other. Mackay listened to the older man’s shrill dreamlike laughter.
“You are an English queer,” the man said to Mackay and attacked him.
When Mackay raised his fists the man slipped easily around his guard. Like an inexperienced fighter Mackay had raised his chin contentiously. The man punched him in the throat and for a moment he could not draw breath. He stepped back in confusion, then quickly decided he was unhurt. The man came at him again.
Grappling hand to hand, Mackay realized with horror his opponent’s strength. His first impression of the older man’s age and fragility had been mistaken altogether As they wrestled, he heard the local train approaching in the tunnel behind him. It was the train for which he had been waiting. Mackay felt himself sliding toward the edge of the platform. Braced against an advertising poster, the gray-haired man was kicking at his legs, trying to hook and trip him. Mackay fought for his life.
As the local pulled into the station, the man tried to shove Mackay against it. When the doors opened, people hurried past them, getting on the train or off it. For a moment he caught a glimpse of the old woman he had thought to protect. She was inside the train now, watching through the window with a disapproving frown. Then he had to turn his head away to keep the madman’s fingers out of his eyes.
Aware of the unheeding crowd, Mackay felt bound all the deeper in his dreaming state. In one of his recurring dreams, he would always find himself alone in a crowd, a foreign unregarded presence, the representative of Otherness. At the height of the nightmare some guilty secret or possession of his would be exposed to the crowd and draw their pitiless alien laughter.
The local gathered speed and pulled away. Mackay began to feel his strength ebbing, subverted by guilt, by weakness, by fear and indecision and lack of confidence. Somewhere in the darkness the next express was on its way. With his back to the tracks, Mackay held on.
They fell together to the filthy platform and rolled over, struggling in the half-light. The platform was deserted now. Distant voices echoed in tiled corridors. Mackay’s assailant struggled to his feet and began to kick him. Mackay tried to dodge away; he was caught and kicked. Unable to escape, he dove at the man’s legs and brought him down.
Again they rolled across the platform. Mackay took hold of the other man’s hair and tried to ram his head against a steel pillar. The man butted him, breaking teeth, bloodying his mouth. Struggling to his feet, Mackay turned to run, but feeling the man’s grip, turned to face him. He knew that was better than turning his back. The tunnel rang with the screech and roar of another train, bearing down on the express track.
Mackay took hold of his assailant’s jacket and tried to bind him in the cloth. The man broke free and got an arm around Mackay’s neck. The man’s body had an evil smell. Driven by terror, Mackay somehow broke the hold and they were face to face again and literally hand to hand. The lunatic was pushing forward. He seized Mackay’s arms at the biceps, trying to gather strength for the shove that would impel him off the platform.
Freeing his right arm, Mackay landed a lucky punch that brought his knuckles hard against the older man’s collarbone. The man raised both hands to protect his throat. Explosively, an empty darkened train roared out of the tunnel and along the express track, passing through the station without stopping.
With his arms free, Mackay hurled punch after punch in panic and desperation. He heard, or thought that he heard, bone crack and felt the contours of his opponent’s face yield to his fists. Sensing indecision in the older man’s movements, he was driven to a blind fury, swinging hard and wild until his arms hung useless at his sides. Many hours later; when both his hands seemed to have swollen to the size of outfielders’ gloves, he would discover that he had sustained multiple fractures in both hands.
Pale-faced and vacant-eyed, the strange German sat down on the platform and shouted. It took Mackay several seconds to realize that the man was shouting for help.
“Help!” the man called at the top of his voice. “Help me someone please!”
Mackay leaned ag
ainst a signboard, breathing with difficulty. He was so tired that he was afraid of losing consciousness. His vision seemed peculiar; it was as if he saw the dim empty station around him in spasms of perception, framed in separated fragments of time. The disconnectedness of things, he saw, was fundamental. Years later, photographing a civil war in Nigeria, he would find the scenes of combat strangely familiar. The mode of perception discovered in the course of his absurd subway battle would serve him well. He would go where the wars and mobs were, photographing bad history in fragmented time. He had the eye.
At his feet, a bleeding man sat shouting for help. Mackay moved panting toward the subway stairs. There was blood on his hands. When he reached the foot of the stairs, he saw for the first time that the stairway was crowded with people and that many of the people were shouting as well. At first he could make no sense of it.
Then it came to him that the people on the stairs had come down and seen him beating a well-dressed older man. Mackay was wearing his navy peacoat, which was too warm for the weather and his painting clothes. It was March 1965, and his hair hung down halfway to his shoulders. He had grown a beard from the first of the year. The people had been afraid to come down to the platform.
“Police!” someone shouted. “Call the police!”
Mackay remembered the mounted policeman bearing down on him in the park years before. His impulse was toward flight. He imagined a summoned policeman coming down the stairs. He imagined his own panic-stricken flight to the dead end of the platform. He saw himself shot down.
Burning with fear and outrage, Mackay hurled himself up the stairway and shoved his way, bloody-handed, through the crowd. The people nearest him snarled in terror as he passed.
“Police!” someone else shouted. Mackay shook off a hand on his arm. Someone punched him from behind. The crowd seemed monstrous, like the mob in a Brueghel crucifixion. A driven creature, with fists and elbows, he cut his way up to the light.