Atlantis: Three Tales Read Free Page B

first car, because the subway was already pulling in when they got down to it.
    They made the second:
    â€œ. . . tut-tut-tut . . .” Sam was surprised he could still hear it.
    Inside, posts went from the floor to the curved ceiling—green-painted metal up to about stomach height, then white enamel for the rest. In metal fittings, leather loops hung from a pipe just above head-height, in a row down each side of the car. Up by the ceiling, eight-inch-high cardboard strips told of Sloan’s Liniment and Ivory Soap (“ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths percent pure”) and Pine Tar Honey—one (in color: red with yellow letters, a round face grinning beside them, in a bottle cap hat) was for Coca-Cola.
    It had never occurred to Sam they’d have Coca-Cola in New York.
    The subway seats were the same woven wicker as the trunk Hubert carried. Looking down at them, Sam saw their interstices were black—and realized it was dirt!
    â€œCome on,” Hubert repeated, as the train started more smoothly than Sam expected: had a day and a night on the locomotive from Raleigh gotten him his rail legs?
    Hefting up his bag, Sam followed Hubert to the car’s front. A doorway made a vestibule there—half the size of the one on the railway car in which he’d smoked with John Brown. Inside, a wheel hung against the wall; and pipes; and cables. To one side was a flat, green door.
    Over racketing wheels, Hubert said: “The engineer sits in there.”
    â€œThis is the
engine
?”—for through the window in the door ahead he could see into the forward car, as it swung, intriguingly out of sync with theirs.
    Hubert laughed and opened the doors between, to lob the wicker through, then turned to explain over the noise (louder between the cars) how, on the subway, any car could be the engine. All you had to do was put it first.
    They went through the next car into the little booth at its head—
this
was the first car. Hubert told him to look out the front window; Sam stood, hands up beside his face to shade the light. Beyond the glass, with its inch-sized, hexagonal wire reinforcements between layered panes, darkness rushed him, cut by girders, punctured by lights—blue,red, green—a matutinal career through seas of shadow, past nocturnal carnivals.
    â€œNow when you ride on the subway by yourself—”
    Sam pulled back from the window. In the booth’s yellowish light, Hubert’s dark eyes were serious above his short mustache.
    â€œâ€”in the morning,” Hubert went on, “when people are going to work, or in the evening, when they’re coming home—rush hour—you don’t come in here by yourself, now.”
    â€œWhy not?” Sam turned to Hubert.
    â€œâ€™Cause things can happen to you in here.”
    â€œWhat things?”
    â€œPeople can do things to you—like you can get your pocket picked, for one.”
    Sam was going to say, just to be silly,
You been deflected, Hubert?
But Hubert swung—suddenly—the back of his hand against Sam’s pants lap, which made him flinch:
    â€œHey—!”
    â€œYou got to watch out for yourself, that’s all.” The train was coming into the station. “That’s all I’m saying. Now come on.” Carrying both trunk and case now, Hubert strode into the car, grinning again over his shoulder.
    Parting black rubber rims, dark double doors rolled open, and Sam followed his brother onto still another wholly enclosed platform. “
What
sort of things, Hubert?”
    Hubert put the suitcase down for Sam to take. “You just have to remember,” Hubert repeated, “that this is New York,” and the gravity with which he spoke seemed—apparently to Hubert—to cover the situation.
    The subway station they were in, Times Square and Forty-second Street, was even bigger—and more crowded—than the one at Grand