Joseph McElroy - Night Soul and Other Stories

“It’s an old Schwinn.”

“Yeah, does it have brakes? I noticed it,” she was contemptuous but more than that.

“You did?”

She had nothing to say, but then, “Where did you get it?” she added. She was subtly tired, preoccupied. Why did he think she didn’t know bikes? “Out of work?” she said then.

“I’m going to work right now.”

“A messenger working nights?” she said, lost for a moment, he thought. “I’m in materials,” he said, “materials science —” “I hate science,” the woman said. “—on a good day,” he finished.

“On that bike?” she said; “on a good day? I’m not long for this one.” Did she mean the day? She patted her handlebar. “You unloading it?” he said. She looked at him then, like she knew him and was momentarily surprised to. The train slowed in the tunnel abruptly, stupidly, and a standee’s heavy bag swung into him like a rock. The unreal stench coming this way, homeward-bound travelers leaned to let the derelict by. “I like my bike, it’s better than the bus,” he said.

“You work nights,” she said.

“Not every night.”

“You can have it,” she said, gesturing. “But what do you do to justify your existence?”

“We grow bone in a lab, that’s what we’re doing right now.”

The woman smiled, she looked away at what was coming. “You don’t do any such thing,” he heard her say. How could she say this? It sounded true. As if he didn’t know what he was doing.

It was a plumber’s canvas tool bag that had swung into him on the shoulder of a guy who looked like a plumber, wiry with a drink bottle in a paper bag. The woman told him to watch his bag. An old thought came to mind and was gone about subway-floor bottles and cans, things here below, here was the foul homeless vagrant streaming sweat with a face of different colors and you leaned to dodge his hand as the woman in the hooded old windbreaker snatched the plastic bottle off the floor and flung it into the man’s back. His hand brushing your shoulder reached for the pole, missed, grasping at the bike-woman, who had said something to the plumber with a little sting to it. The perhaps quite able hands of the homeless man in their ragged coat cuffs reach the woman, her suede coat, her preoccupations, and her fellow bicyclist swiped the black man away and the plumber recoiled from the touch. The woman had let go her bike. She was her face then, the sweet olive cheeks, and under the skin a fine pallor today that would pass. Was she unwell? “I have a list of things rolling around on the subway floor,” he said. “More things,” she said.

A teenage girl was sizing up the bike, and now she had a hand on its top tube. She caught you looking. What she knew, she knew, to the beat of her earphones, the fine asymmetry of the nose ring, could she be fifteen? They were in the station. The plumber shoved the black man stumbling onto the platform this lost soul wearing a safety-pinned coat and something happening with the skin, genetic. A child screamed, the homeless man had fallen on top of her, one shoe off, sockless, and the woman, forgetting her bike, was out there pulling at him. The teenage girl was rolling the woman’s bike off the car, people getting on. He let go his bike, What had happened? He got a couple of fingers on the rear rack of the fancy bike to hold it against the girl, who had backed and turned it, and a man in a blue MTA uniform materialized and was guiding the bike out onto the platform. And there was its owner, but waiting for what?

He righted his bike as it tipped off the pole, the doors tried to close too soon and came together and he understood that the woman had gotten off but not he, and had said something about her bike — was it his? The homeless man was being yanked to his feet, which was like being thrown down.

The doors jolted open again. “Your bike,” he called. She laughed over her shoulder. “Yours if you want it,” she had certainly said. Persistent, the teenage girl tried to cock her leg over it, a man’s-frame top tube, but the MTA man held the handlebar, looking around him. The Service Exit gate opens and a woman pushes a stroller through, the bike woman following her. Call again, catch her eye, the MTA supervisor rolls the bike through the open gate, and the woman beyond the turnstiles thanks him but looks back startled at the train as the car doors jerk closed.

He had raised his voice against this interference with him. He had looked her in the eye, the heck with her he liked his bike he was telling her. And was this woman traveling just one stop? Confronting a woman in a vest inside the change booth now, she pointed back at the platform while the MTA supervisor held her bike handlebar at the stem.

Up against the glass of the car doors the homeless man’s bare face now, the black forehead and maculate tan across the nose and cheek and some pink skin as well where pigment had spilled, he was pointing to you or the floor, stepping back as the train moved yet pointing at something, and what was the woman with the bike doing on the other side of the turnstiles? And did it matter who he was, going to work when others are going home?

An eccentric woman with news for you. In the lab ahead racks of 200-ml tissue baths. Ultra-thin films of silk that may dress our wounds. Elsewhere lattices of silk on which bone cells like to grow. A red-haired college student who had boarded the car at the other end looked hard at the four emptied seats and then, behind him, finding someone he knew, reached into his shoulder bag to find a book for her which she opened with delight, talking to him, her friend, the two of them thrilled to meet while, sitting next to her, the older woman in the hooded windbreaker craned to get a look at the book too. She was the one who had thrown the bottle. The red-haired student stepped away from something underfoot.

“Nice bike she had there,” the plumber looked at you personally, even professionally, at your hand feeling in your pocket for a pencil and pad.

“Not for her.”

“Thought I recognized her. What’s her name?” The plumber looked like one. He’d spent time crouched, adjusting, threading into confined and challenging spaces. The plumber didn’t like him. They didn’t like each other.

“That’s not gonna do him any good,” the plumber kicked the lace-less shoe lying on its side on the floor, the sole coming loose from the upper.

“No?” was the quick reply.

He would talk about it a little at work, the woman with the bike.

She didn’t seem to want her bike, a high-end hybrid. Had she expected him to get off? Some city eccentric, though in the soft dark circles under her eyes, the brown and blue irises, experience lurked, and along the bones of her hands and around the mouth what she was made of, was it something there for a stranger? What had she seen? His bike. At his stop he would bear it downstairs from the platform, then upstairs to the street.

Speeding through the park the whirr of the wheels like wings, the late light, things in the air, a gossamer shine along a witch-hazel stem, a web, sparrows he had watched from the window of his bedroom. He saw the man sitting on a bench not as if he’d worked all day, not well-off looking at all, too old and yet not old enough to be doing whatever he was doing, And further along a woman he recognized reading the Classifieds. And then a bird’s yellow underside glimpsed, tail bobbing, Prairie Warbler upside down quickly foraging. But now a gray hint of smoke from leaves burning so close by that the boy rising suddenly from beside his friend’s experiment to dart in front of the man’s bike was part of the path itself, no time to brake, the bike wheel caught the kid’s ankle knocking it away. He heard the yelp, a curse, and did not stop, the boy had simply risen and darted into the path of the oncoming bike.