“Your momma went uptown,” Mrs. Diamond Freeland said, standing flatfooted before Oliver, her flower print dress distended over her generous stomach. “What are you going to do? You’re her son.”
“Where uptown?” Oliver asked, trying to control his quavering voice. He wanted to slap everybody in the apartment. He was scared and they weren’t being any help at all.
“She we-went sh-sh-shopping!” Yolanda wailed. “She got her check today and it’s Christmas and she went to get the babies new clothes and some food.”
Oliver’s hands clenched. Momma had asked him what he wanted for Christmas, and he had said, “Nothing, Momma. Not really.” She had chided him, saying all would be well when the check came, and what good was Christmas if she couldn’t find a little something special for each of her children? “All right,” he said. “I’d like sheet music. Something I’ve never played before.”
“She must of taken the wrong stop,” Mrs. Diamond Freeland said, staring at Oliver from the corners of her wide eyes. “That’s all I can figure.”
What happened?”
Yolanda pulled a letter out of her blouse and handed it to him, a fancy purple paper with a delicate flower design on the borders, the message handwritten very prettily in gold ink fountain pen and signed. He read it carefully, then read it again.
To the Joneses.
Your momma is uptown in My care. She came here lost and I tried to help her but she stole something very valuable to Me she shouldn’t have. She says you’ll come and get her. By you she means her youngest son Oliver Jones and if not him then Yolanda Jones her eldest daughter. I will keep one or the other here in exchange for your momma and one or the other must stay here and work for Me.
Miss Belle Parkhurst
969 33rd Street
“Who’s she, and why does she have Momma?” Oliver asked.
“I’m not going!” Yolanda screamed.
“Hush up,” said Mrs. Diamond Freeland. “She’s that whoor. She’s that uptown whoor used to run the biggest cathouse.”
Oliver looked from face to face in disbelief.
“Your momma must of taken the wrong stop and got lost,” Mrs. Diamond Freeland reiterated. “That’s all I can figure. She went to that whoor’s house and she got in trouble.”
“I’m not going!” Yolanda said. She avoided Oliver’s eyes. “You know what she’d make me do.”
“Yeah,” Oliver said softly. “But what’ll she make me do?
Reggie and Denver, he learned from Mrs. Diamond Freeland, had come home before the message had been received, leaving just as the messenger came whistling up the outside hall. Oliver sighed. His brothers were almost never home; they thought they’d pulled the wool over Momma’s eyes, but they hadn’t. Momma knew who would be home and come for her when she was in trouble.
Reggie and Denver fancied themselves the hottest dudes on the street. They claimed they had women all over Sleepside and Snowside; Oliver was almost too shy to ask a woman out. He was small, slender, and almost pretty, but very strong for his size. Reggie and Denver were cowards. Oliver had never run from a true and worthwhile fight in his life, but neither had he started one.
The thought of going to Miss Belle Parkhurst’s establishment scared him, but he remembered what his father had told him just a week before dying. “Oliver, when I’m gone—that’s soon now, you know it—Yolanda’s flaky as a bowl of cereal and your brothers ... well, I’ll be kind and just say your momma, she’s going to need you. You got to turn out right so as she can lean on you.”
The babies hadn’t been born then.
“Which train did she take?”
“Down to Snowside,” Mrs. Diamond Freeland said. “But she must of gotten off in Sunside. That’s near Thirty-third.”
“It’s getting night,” Oliver said.
Yolanda sniffed and wiped her eyes. Off the hook. “You going?”
“Have to,” Oliver said. “It’s Momma.”
Said Mrs. Diamond Freeland, “I think that whoor got something on her mind.”
On the line between dusk and dark, down underground where it shouldn’t have mattered, the Metro emptied of all the day’s passengers and filled with the night’s.
Sometimes day folks went in tight-packed groups on the Night Metro, but not if they could avoid it. Night Metro was for carrying the lost or human garbage. Everyone ashamed or afraid to come out during the day came out at night. Night Metro also carried the zeroes—people who lived their lives and when they died no one could look back and say they remembered them. Night Metro—especially late—was not a good way to travel, but for Oliver it was the quickest way to get from Sleepside to Sunside; he had to go as soon as possible to get Momma.
Oliver descended the four flights of concrete steps, grinding his teeth at the thought of the danger he was in. He halted at the bottom, grimacing at the frightened knots of muscle and nerves in his back, repeating over and over again, “It’s Momma. It’s Momma. No one can save her but me.” He dropped his bronze cat’s head token into the turnstile, clunk-chunking through, and crossed the empty platform. Only two indistinct figures waited trackside, heavy-coated though it was a warm evening. Oliver kept an eye on them and walked back and forth in a figure eight on the grimy foot-scrubbed concrete, peering nervously down at the wet and soot under the rails. Behind him, on the station’s smudged white tile walls hung a gold mosaic trumpet and the number 7, the trumpet for folks who couldn’t read to know when to get off. All Sleepside stations had musical instruments.
The Night Metro was run by a different crew than the Day Metro. His train came up, clean and silver-sleek, without a spot of graffiti or a stain of tarnish. Oliver caught a glimpse of the driver under the SLEEPSIDE/CHASTE RIVER/SUNSIDE-46TH destination sign. The driver wore or had a bull’s head and carried a prominent pair of long gleaming silver scissors on his Sam Browne belt. Oliver entered the open doors and took a smooth handgrip even though the seats were mostly empty. Somebody standing was somebody quicker to run.
There were four people on his car: two women one young, vacant, and not pretty or even very alive-looking, the other old and muddy-eyed with a plastic daisy-flowered shopping bag—and two men, both sunny blond and chunky, wearing shiny-elbowed business suits. Nobody looked at anybody else. The doors shut and the train grumbled on, gathering speed until the noise of its wheels on the tracks drowned out all other sound and almost all thought.
There were more dead stations than live and lighted ones. Night Metro made only a few stops congruent with Day Metro. Most stations were turned off, but the only people left standing there wouldn’t show in bright lights anyway. Oliver tried not to look, to keep his eyes on the few in the car with him, but every so often he couldn’t help peering out. Beyond I-beams and barricades, single orange lamps and broken tiled walls rushed by, platforms populated by slow smudges of shadow.
Some said the dead used the Night Metro, and that after midnight it went all the way to Darkside. Oliver didn’t know what to believe. As the train slowed for his station, he pulled the collar of his dark green nylon windbreaker up around his neck and rubbed his nose with one finger. Reggie and Denver would never have made it even this far. They valued their skins too much.
The train did not move on after he disembarked. He stood by the open doors for a moment, then walked past the lead car on his way to the stairs. Over his shoulder, he saw the driver standing at the head of the train in his little cabin of fluorescent coldness, the eyes in the bull’s head sunk deep in shade. Oliver felt rather than saw the starlike pricks in the sockets, watching him. The driver’s left hand tugged on the blades of the silver shears.
“What do you care, man?” Oliver asked softly, stopping for an instant to return the hidden stare. “Go on about your work. We all got stuff to do.”
The bull’s nose pointed a mere twitch away from Oliver, and the hand left the shears to return to its switch. The train doors closed. The silver side panels and windows and lights picked up speed and the
train squealed around a curve into darkness. He climbed the two flights of stairs to Sunside Station.
Summer night lay heavy and warm on the lush trees and grass of a broad park. Oliver stood at the head of the Metro entrance and listened to the crickets and katydids and cicadas sing songs unheard in Sleepside, where trees and grass were sparse. All around the park rose dark-windowed walls of high marble and brick and gray stone hotels and fancy apartment buildings with gable roofs.
Oliver looked around for directions, a map, anything. Above the Night Metro, it was even possible ordinary people might be out strolling, and he could ask them if he dared. He walked toward the street and thought of Momma getting this far and of her being afraid. He loved Momma very much. Sometimes she seemed to be the only decent thing in his life, though more and more often young women distracted him as the years passed, and he experienced more and more secret fixations.
“Oliver Jones?”
A long white limousine waited by the curb. A young, slender woman in violet chauffeur’s livery, with a jaunty black and silver cap sitting atop exuberant hair, cocked her head coyly, smiled at him, and beckoned with a white-leather-gloved finger. “Are you Oliver Jones, come to rescue your momma?”
He walked slowly toward the white limousine. It was bigger and more beautiful than anything he had ever seen before, with long ribbed chrome pipes snaking out from under the hood and through the fenders, stand-alone golden headlights, and a white tonneau roof made of real leather. “My name’s Oliver,” he affirmed.
“Then you’re my man. Please get in.” She winked and held the door open.
When the door closed, the woman’s arm—all he could see of her through the smoky window glass—vanished. The driver’s door did not open. She did not get in. The limousine drove off by itself. Oliver fell back into the lush suede and velvet interior. An electronic wet bar gleamed silver and gold and black above a cool white-lit panel on which sat a single crystal glass filled with ice cubes. A spigot rotated around and waited for instructions. When none came, it gushed fragrant gin over the ice and rotated back into place.
Oliver did not touch the glass.
Below the wet bar, the television set turned itself on. Passion and delight sang from the small, precise speakers. “No,” he said. “No!”
The television shut off.
He edged closer to the smoky glass and saw dim streetlights and cab headlights moving past. A huge black building trimmed with gold ornaments, windows outlined with red, loomed on the corner, all but three of its windows dark. The limousine turned smoothly and descended into a dark underground garage. Lights throwing huge golden cat’s eyes, tires squealing on shiny concrete, it snaked around a slalom of walls and pillars and dusty limousines and came to a quick stop. The door opened.
Oliver stepped out. The chauffeur stood holding the door, grinning, and doffed her cap. “My pleasure,” she said.
The car had parked beside a big wooden door set into hewn stone. Fossil bones and teeth were clearly visible in the matrix of each block in the walls. Glistening ferns in dark ponds flanked the door. Oliver heard the car drive away and turned to look, but he did not see whether the chauffeur drove this time or not.
He walked across a wood plank bridge and tried the black iron handle on the door. The door swung open at the suggestion of his fingers. Beyond, a narrow red-carpeted staircase with rosebush-carved maple banisters ascended to the upper floor.
The place smelled of cloves and mint and, somehow, of what Oliver imagined dogs or horses must smell like—a musty old rug sitting on a floor grate. (He had never owned a dog and never seen a horse without a policeman on it, and never so close he could smell it.) Nobody had been through here in a long time, he thought. But everybody knew about Miss Belle Parkhurst and her place. And the chauffeur had been young. He wrinkled his nose; he did not like this place.
The dark wood door at the top of the stairs swung open silently. Nobody stood there waiting; it might have opened by itself. Oliver tried to speak, but his throat itched and closed. He coughed into his fist and shrugged his shoulders in a spasm. Then, eyes damp and hot with anger and fear and something more, he moved his lips and croaked, “I’m Oliver Jones. I’m here to get my momma.”
The door remained unattended. He looked back into the parking garage, dark and quiet as a cave; nothing for him there. Then he ascended quickly to get it over with and passed through the door into the ill-reputed house of Miss Belle Parkhurst.
The city extends to the far horizon, divided into quarters by roads or canals or even train tracks, above or underground; and sometimes you know those divisions and know better than to cross them, and sometimes you don’t. The city is broader than any man’s life, and it is worth more than your life not to understand why you are where you are and must stay there.
The city encourages ignorance because it must eat.
The four quarters of the city are Snowside, Cokeside where few sane people go, Sleepside, and Sunside. Sunside is bright and rich and hazardous because that is where the swell folks live. Swell folks don’t tolerate intruders. Not even the police go into Sunside without an escort. Toward the center of the city is uptown, and in the middle of uptown is where all four quarters meet at the Pillar of the Unknown Mayor. Outward is the downtown and scattered islands of suburbs, and no one knows where it ends.
The Joneses live in downtown Sleepside. The light there even at noon is not very bright, but neither is it burning harsh as in Cokeside where it can fry your skull. Sleepside is tolerable. There are many good people in Sleepside and Snowside, and though confused, the general run is not vicious. Oliver grew up there and carries it in his bones and meat. No doubt the Night Metro driver smelled his origins and knew here was a young man crossing a border going uptown. No doubt Oliver was still alive because Miss Belle Parkhurst had protected him. That meant Miss Parkhurst had protected Momma, and perhaps lured her, as well.
The hallway was lighted by rows of candles held in gold eagle claws along each wall. At the end of the hall, Oliver stepped into a broad wood-paneled room set here and there with lush green ferns in brass spittoons. The Oriental carpet revealed a stylized garden in cream and black and red. Five empty black velvet-upholstered couches stood unoccupied, expectant, like a line of languorous women amongst the ferns. Along the walls, chairs covered by white sheets asserted their heavy wooden arms. Oliver stood, jaw open, not used to such luxury. He needed a long moment to take it all in.
Miss Belle Parkhurst was obviously a very rich woman, and not your ordinary whore. From what he had seen so far, she had power as well as money, power over cars and maybe over men and women. Maybe over Momma. “Momma?”
A tall, tenuous white-haired man in a cream-colored suit walked across the room, paying Oliver scant attention. He said nothing. Oliver watched him sit on a sheet-covered chair. He did not disturb the sheets, but sat through them. He leaned his head back reflectively, elevating a cigarette holder without a cigarette. He blew out clear air, or perhaps nothing at all, and then smiled at something just to Oliver’s right. Oliver turned. They were alone. When he looked back, the man in the cream-colored suit was gone.
Oliver’s arms tingled. He was in for more than he had bargained for, and he had bargained for a lot.
“This way,” said a woman’s deep voice, operatic, dignified, easy and friendly at once. He could not see her, but he squinted at the doorway, and she stepped between two fluted green onyx columns. He did not know at first that she was addressing him; there might be other gentlemen, or girls, equally as tenuous as the man in the cream-colored suit. But this small, imposing woman with upheld hands, dressed in gold and peach silk that clung to her smooth and silent, was watching only him with her large dark eyes. She smiled richly and warmly, but Oliver thought there was a hidden flaw in that smile, in her assurance. She was ill at ease from the instant their eyes met, though she might have been at ease before then, thinking of meeting him. She had had all things planned until that moment.
&
nbsp; If he unnerved her slightly, this woman positively terrified him. She was beautiful and smooth-skinned, and he could smell the sweet roses and camellias and magnolia blossoms surrounding her like a crowd of familiar friends.
“This way,” she repeated, gesturing through the doors.
“I’m looking for my momma. I’m supposed to meet Miss Belle Parkhurst.”
“I’m Belle Parkhurst. You’re Oliver Jones ... aren’t you?”
He nodded, face solemn, eyes wide. He nodded again and swallowed.
“I sent your momma on her way home. She’ll be fine.”
He looked back at the hallway. “She’ll be on the Night Metro,” he said.
“I sent her back in my car. Nothing will happen to her.”
Oliver believed her. There was a long, silent moment. He realized he was twisting and wringing his hands before his crotch and he stopped this, embarrassed.
“Your momma’s fine. Don’t worry about her.”
“All right,” he said, drawing his shoulders up. “You wanted to talk to me?”
“Yes,” she said. “And more.”
His nostrils flared and he jerked his eyes hard right, his torso and then his hips and legs twisting that way as he broke into a scrambling rabbit-run for the hallway. The golden eagle claws on each side dropped their candles as he passed and reached out to hook him with their talons. The vast house around him seemed suddenly alert, and he knew even before one claw grabbed his collar that he did not have a chance.
He dangled helpless from the armpits of his jacket at the very end of the hall. In the far door appeared the whore, angry, fingers dripping small beads of fire onto the wooden floor. The floor smoked and sizzled.
“I’ve let your momma go,” Belle Parkhurst said, voice deeper than a grave, face terrible and smoothly beautiful and very old, very experienced. “That was my agreement. You leave, and you break that agreement, and that means I take your sister, or I take back your momma.”
She cocked an elegant, painted eyebrow at him and leaned her head to one side in query. He nodded as best he could with his chin jammed against the teeth of his jacket’s zipper.