Free Vespers by Jeff Rovin Page B

the top of the tunnel.
    The ceiling was about twelve feet above them. There were concrete ledges, iron girders, and discoloration from water seepage. There was a lightly metallic odor coming from the damp metal. Beneath it, in the distance, Joyce could already smell the distinctive odor of the guano.
    “What are you looking for?” Gentry asked.
    “Cockroaches,” she said. “If bats moved in somewhere ahead, the roaches would have moved out. Like at your apartment.”
    Arvids shined the flashlight slowly along the ceiling. “I don’t see any, but they travel pretty fast. And they could have gone in about a million different directions. This is a very long tunnel.”
    “How long?”
    “This particular trunk heads up to the middle of Central Park, which is about two and a half miles north. Then it doubles back and heads southwest to Penn Station.”
    “I didn’t realize the two stations were connected,” Joyce said.
    “Everythingis connected through these tunnels,” Arvids said. “All the train lines-commuter, subway, everything.”
    Joyce felt a cool draft from the left and asked Arvids to shine the light over. About six feet away was a concrete wall with a hole cut in the center. The opening was about two yards up from the ground, a yard across, and nearly a yard tall at its highest point. The edges of the hole were jagged, as though it had been punched out with a hammer.
    “What’s that?” Joyce asked.
    “It’s probably the work of the tunnel people,” he said.
    “The who?”
    “The homeless people who live underneath the train tunnels. We had most of them cleared out, but they keep coming back. The tunnel people live on this level, and the mole people are on the lower levels. We think there are about five hundred homeless living down here altogether, but we’re not sure.”
    “You’re kidding,” Joyce said. “There are that many homeless people here?”
    Arvids nodded. “They’ve got communities with a mayor, teachers-it’s really very organized.”
    “Does anyone ever go to them?” Joyce asked. “Help them?”
    “We have an outreach program here at the station,” Arvids replied. “But they don’t like intruders. Some of them come up for food and supplies, but most of them never leave the tunnels.”
    “And why would they make a hole like this?”
    “Could be a short cut. Or sometimes they do it for ventilation, especially during the summer.”
    “Amazing.” Joyce asked Arvids to keep the flashlight on the jagged hole. Stepping high and long over the third rail, she went over and examined it. There was no guano and no smell of guano coming from inside. She returned to the group. Gentry didn’t look happy.
    “I was careful,” she said.
    Gentry made a face. “Nothing there?”
    “Nothing. Let’s go.”
    They continued walking between the tracks.A third train passed. This time Joyce felt as if it was the intruder, not her.
    It was not at all surprising to the scientist that the deeper they went into the tunnel, the more excited and contented she became. The act of creeping around had always made Nancy Joyce feel free. It probably came from growing up with a father and an older brother who liked war movies and Westerns. Some of Joyce’s earliest memories were of sitting on the floor to the side of a big TV. She would play with Colorforms or her Etch-a-Sketch and look up whenever the TV grew quiet. She didn’t like the shooting or talking parts, but she always watched when cowboys or soldiers crawled through the mud, crept under barbed wire, or moved stealthily around corners or mountainsides. Soon Joyce began creeping around by herself, daring her brother, Peter, to catch her, and then squeezing behind the sofa or under the piano bench where he couldn’t fit. But Peter’s armscould fit, and he usually dragged his sister out and punished her with a tickle attack to the sides and underarms. When Joyce was seven she began poking through the thick, nighttime woods on her own. There