When she had tired of speculating, she went on to comparing. She looked up and down both sides of the car. On her first sweep, she concentrated on the size and shape of all the noses she could see. She awarded appropriate but valueless (imaginary) prizes to the possessors of the largest, smallest, and most unusual. A man wearing an astrakhan cap won the prize for the largest, with a nose big enough to accommodate nostrils that put Oreo in mind of adjacent plane hangars, fur-lined. His prize: free monthly vacuuming with a yet-to-be-invented nose Hoover. Modeling clay, the prize for the smallest nose, went to a redheaded woman with the nose of an ant. A hand passing from the redhead’s formicine brow to her mouth would have to make no humanoid detours around cartilaginous prominences. Most unusual was the cross-eyed young man whose nose pointed to his left ear. Picasso réchauffé. His prize wasn’t really his. It was a blindfold for others to wear in his presence.
Before she could go on to hands and shoes, Oreo got a seat. Sitting on the edge of the seat because of her backpack, she felt at the neck of her dress to make sure the mezuzah was still in place. She loosened the drawstring of her black handbag (the kind that looks like a horse’s feed bag), pushed aside the bed socks her father had left her, and took out the coffee-stained list of clues.
1. Sword and sandals
2. Three legs
3. The great divide
4. Sow
5. Kicks
6. Pretzel
7. Fitting
8. Down by the river
9. Temple
10. Lucky number
11. Amazing
12. Sails
She crossed off the first item on the list. If number 2 was as farfetched as number 1 had been, “Three legs” could mean anything from a broken chair to Siamese twins. No matter. She was ready for any kind of shit, prepared to go where she was not wanted, to butt in where she had no business, to test her meddle all over the map. Oreo was one pushy chick.
Her bravery was beyond question. She had chosen, against the advice of older, more cautious adventurers, to eschew the easy canoe trip up the Delaware, piece-of-cake portage across the swamplands of New Jersey, and no-sweat glissade across the Hudson to Manhattan and to travel instead the far more problematic overland route via the Penn Central Railroad. What further ensign of Oreo’s courage need be cited?
The subway concourse at Thirtieth Street
Oreo knew that there were several stiff trials ahead before she reached the official starting point of her overland journey, the Waiting Room of Thirtieth Street Station. The first and second trials came together: the Broken Escalator and the Leaky Pipes. Countless previous travelers had suffered broken ankles and/or Chinese water torture as they made their way between the subway and Thirtieth Street Station. With the advent of wide-heeled ugly shoes, which replaced hamstring-snapping spike heels, much of the danger had been taken out of the Broken Escalator’s gaping treads. Much — in fact, all — of the movement had been taken out of the B.E. almost immediately after it began its rounds. Thus it had had a life of only two minutes and thirty seconds as a moving staircase before it expired to become the Broken Escalator of Philadelphia legend. Oreo had prepared for this leg of the journey by wearing sandals, which provided firm footing on the treads of the B.E. and also served as a showcase for her short-toed perfect feet.
The Leaky Pipes filled the traveler’s need for irritation, humiliation, irrigation, and syncopation. According to the number of drops that fell on the traveler from the Leaky Pipes, he or she was irritated, humiliated, or irrigated. These degrees were largely a function of the Pipes’ syncopation. With a simple one, two, three, four, a few even simpler souls would be caught by the drops of the offbeat. One who fell victim three or more times to this rhythm could safely be said to have passed beyond the bounds of irritation and into the slink of humiliation. The unlucky ones were those who got caught in a one, two, three, four, — , six, seven, eight. They would end up soaking wet by the time they got to the foot or the head (depending on their direction) of the Broken Escalator. Ninety percent of those caught by the one, two, three, four, — , six, seven, eight were white. They just couldn’t get the hang of it. Black people were usually caught by the normal, unsyncopated, one, two, one, two — it was so simple, they couldn’t believe it.
Oreo stood at the top of the B.E. and closed her eyes. She did not want to be distracted by looking at the drops. She just listened. She was in luck. The Pipes were in the one, two, three, four phase. She opened her eyes and observed that the drops (two and four) hit the same side of the B.E. on every other tread. It was a simple matter then to make her way down along the dry side, leaping over the treads on which the drops fell to avoid lateral splash. She did so hastily — and just in time too, for the Pipes switched into a different cycle just as her sandal hit the last tread, and one drop narrowly missed her exposed heel.
The third trial was suffering through the graffiti of Cool Clam, Kool Rock, Pinto, Timetable, Zoom Lens, and Corn Bread (the self-styled “King of the Walls,” who crowned his B with a three-pronged diadem). It was not considered fair to squint and stumble along the passageway to the station. No, the fully open eye had to be offered up to such xenophobic, nonews lines as
DRACULA AND MANUFACTURERS HANOVER TRUST SUCK
the polymorphous-perversity of
BABE LOVES
BILL & MARY & LASSIE & SPAM
the airy, wuthering affirmation of
CHARLOTTE & EMILY LIVE!
the Platonic pique of
SOCRATES THINKS HE KNOWS ALL THE QUESTIONS
Oreo stared at these writings, a test of her strength. So intense was her concentration that at first she paid little notice to a tickle at her right shoulder. She felt it again and whirled to look into the eyes of a lame man she had passed near the Babe-Bill-Mary-Lassie-Spam graffito. One of the foil-wrapped packages from her duffel-bag lunch was in his hand. He had been picking her packet! She reached out to grab it but ducked when she saw the man’s arm go around in a baseball swing. There was a whoosh! as molecules of air bumped against one another, taking the cut her head should have taken. Strike one. With the count 0–1, she noticed that the bat was a cane. She ducked again for strike two. “Well, aint this a blip!” Oreo said aloud, finally getting annoyed. She grabbed the cane and gave the man a mild hed-blō. She did not want to strike a lame old man with a full-force hed-krac. When the old pickpacket saw the look in her eye, he turned and ran down the passageway at Olympic speed. He was really hotfooting it, honey! He was really picking them up and putting them down! Because of her backpack, Oreo did not catch him until he neared the end of the passageway. Felling him with a flying fut-kik, she pressed on his Adam’s apple with his cane until he promised he would not try to get up until she gave him leave.
She asked him his alias and his m.o. Perry recounted how he had gone into a hardware store and asked for a copper rod. The proprietor brought it to him, saying they were having a special on copper rods that day and that he was entitled to a fifteen percent discount. Perry, caviling emptor, who had read in the papers that the discount was supposed to be twenty percent, took the rod and racked up the storekeeper’s head with it. He paid not a copper but, rather, copped the copper before the coppers came and he had to cop a plea. He had taken the rod home, sheathed it in wood, crooked one end, and brazenly decorated the other end with a brass ferrule. With this cupreous cudgel and a fake limp, he had been lurking in the subway concourse, preying on unwary commuters, rampaging up and down the passageway.