around one of the young woman’s squirting thighs. The young white guy was screaming for
an ambulance on one side of the station and the old black chick was screaming for someone
to give her a help, to give her a tie-off for God’s sake, anything, anything at all, and finally
some elderly white business type had reluctantly surrendered his belt, and the elderly black
chick looked up at him and spoke the words which became the headline of the New
York Daily News the next day, the words which made her an authentic American apple-pie
heroine: “Thank you, bro.” Then she had noosed the belt around the young woman’s left leg halfway between the young woman’s crotch and where her left knee had been until that
fabled A-train had come along.
George had heard someone say to someone else that the young black woman’s last words
before passing out had been “WHO WAS THAT MAHFAH? I GONE HUNT HIM DOWN
AND KILL HIS ASS!”
There was no way to punch holes far enough up for the elderly black woman to notch the
belt, so she simply held on like grim old death until Julio, George, and the paras arrived.
George remembered the yellow line, how his mother had told him he must never,
never, never go past the yellow line while he was waiting for a train (fabled or otherwise), the stench of oil and electricity when he hopped down onto the cinders, remembered how
hot it had been. The heat seemed to be baking off him, off the elderly black woman, off the
young black woman, off the train, the tunnel, the unseen sky above and hell itself beneath.
He remembered thinking incoherently // they put a blood-pressure cuff on me now I’d go off
the dial and then he went cool and yelled for his bag, and when one of the paras tried to jump down with it he told the para to fuck off, and the para had looked startled, as if he was
really seeing George Shavers for the first time, and he had fucked off.
George tied off as many veins and arteries as he could tie off, and when her heart started to
be-bop he had shot her full of Digitalin. Whole blood arrived. Cops brought it. Want to
bring her up, doc? one of them had asked and George had told him not yet, and he got out the needle and stuck the juice to her like she was a junkie in dire need of a fix.
Thenhe let them take her up.
Thenthey had taken her back.
On the way she had awakened.
Thenthe weirdness started.
3
George gave her a shot of Demerol when the paras loaded her into the ambulance—she
had begun to stir and cry out weakly. He gave her a boost hefty enough for him to be
confident she would remain quiet until they got to Sisters of Mercy. He was ninety per cent
sure she would still be with them when they got there, and that was one for the good guys.
Her eyes began to flutter while they were still six blocks from the hospital, however. She
uttered a thick moan.
“We can shoot her up again, doc,” one of the paras said.
George was hardly aware this was the first time a para- medic had deigned to call him
anything other than George or, worse, Georgie. “Are you nuts? I’d just as soon not confuse
D.O.A. and O.D. if it’s all the same to you.”
The paramedic drew back.
George looked back at the young black woman and saw the eyes returning his gaze were
awake and aware.
“What has happened to me?” she asked.
George remembered the man who had told another man about what the woman had
supposedly said (how she was going to hunt the motherfucker down and kill his ass, etc.,
etc.). That man had been white. George decided now it had been pure invention, inspired
either by that odd human urge to make naturally dramatic situations even more dramatic, or
just race prejudice. This was a cultured, intelligent woman.
“You’ve had an accident,” he said. “You were—”
Her eyes slipped shut and he thought she was going to sleep again. Good. Let someone else tell her she had lost her legs. Someone who made more than $7,600 a year. He had
shifted a little to the left, wanting to check her b.p. again, when she opened her eyes once
more. When she did, George Shavers was looking at a different woman.
“Fuckah cut off mah laigs. I felt ’em go. Dis d’amblance?”
“Y-Y-Yes,” George said. Suddenly he needed somethingto drink. Not necessarily alcohol.
Just something wet. His voice was dry. This was like watching Spencer Tracy in Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde, only for real.
“Dey get dat honkey mahfah?”
“No,” George said, thinking The guy got it right, god- dam, the guy did actually get it right.
He was vaguely aware that the paramedics, who had been hovering (perhaps hoping he
would do something wrong) were now backing off.
“Good. Honky fuzz jus be lettin him off anyway. I be gittin him. I be cuttin his cock off.
Sumbitch! I tell you what I goan do t’dat sumbitch! I tell you one thing, you sumbitch
honky! I goan tell you . . . tell…”
Her eyes fluttered again and George had thought Yes, go to sleep, please go to sleep, I don’t get paid for this, I don’t understand this, they told us about shock but nobody men- tioned
schizophrenia as one of the—
The eyes opened. The first woman was there.
“What sort of accident was it?” she asked. “I remember coming out of the I—”
“Eye?” he said stupidly.
She smiled a little. It was a painful smile. “The Hungry I. It’s a coffee house.”
“Oh. Yeah. Right.”
The other one, hurt or not, had made him feel dirty and a little ill. This one made him feel
like a knight in an Arthurian tale, a knight who has successfully rescued the Lady Fair from
the jaws of the dragon.
“I remember walking down the stairs to the platform, and after that—”
”Someone pushed you. “It sounded stupid, but what was wrong with that? It was stupid.
“Pushed me in front of the train?”
“Yes.”
“Have I lost my legs?”
George tried to swallow and couldn’t. There seemed to be nothing in his throat to grease
the machinery.
“Not all of them,” he said inanely, and her eyes closed.
Let it be a faint,he thought then, please let it be a f—
They opened, blazing. One hand came up and slashed five slits through the air within an
inch of his face—any closer and he would have been in the E.R. getting his cheek stitched
up instead of smoking Chesties with Julio Estavez.
“YOU AIN’T NUTHIN BUT A BUNCH A HONKY SONSA BITCHES!”she screamed.
Her face was monstrous, her eyes full of hell’s own light. It wasn’t even the face of a human
being. “GOAN KILL EVERY MAHFAHIN HONKY I SEE! GOAN GELD EM FUST! GOAN
CUT OFF THEIR BALLS AND SPIT EM IN THEY FACES! GOAN—”
It was crazy. She talked like a cartoon black woman, Butterfly McQueen gone Loony
Tunes. She—or it—also seemed superhuman. This screaming, writhing thing could not
have just undergone impromptu surgery by subway train half an hour ago. She bit. She
clawed out at him again and again. Snot spat from her nose. Spit flew from her lips. Filth
poured from her mouth.
“Shoot her up, doc!”one of the paras yelled. His face was pale. “Fa crissakes shoot her up!”
The para reached toward the supply case. George shoved his hand aside.
“Fuck off, chickenshit.”
George looked back at his patient and saw the calm, cultured eyes of the other one looking
at him.
“Will I live?” she asked in a conversational tea-room voice. He thought, She is unaware of her lapses. Totally unaware. And, after a moment: So is the other one, for that matter.
“I—” He gulped, rubbed at his galloping heart through his tunic, and then ordered himself to get control of this. He had saved her life. Her mental problems were not his concern.
“Are you all right?” she asked him, and the genuine concern in her voice made him smile a little— her asking him.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“To which question are you responding?”
For a moment he didn’t understand, then did. “Both,” he said, and took her hand. She squeezed it, and he looked into her shining lucent eyes and thought A man could fall in love,
and that was when her hand turned into a claw and she was telling him he was a honky
mahfah, and she wadn’t just goan take his balls, she was goan chew on those mahfahs.
He pulled away, looking to see if his hand was bleeding, thinking incoherently that if it
was he would have to do something about it, because she was poison, the woman was