She wanted to say something out loud, but she didn’t know what.
She let go of a long breath and watched it smoke out in front of her. Used to be she thought that meant something, when you could see your breath in front of you, like it was something coming out of you that only had shape on cold days.
It didn’t mean anything.
She pretended she was smoking. She closed her eyes and drew a breath in and put her fingers up to her mouth and imagined that she was lipping an American Spirit. And then she exhaled. The fact that her index and middle fingers smelled like tobacco from smoking her father’s hand-rolled cigs was almost enough to fool her into thinking it was the real thing.
She heard something then, down the stairs, and looked to her left. The MTA guy in the booth was yelling at some kid for jumping a turnstile. He was on a microphone that echoed through the station. Alessandra watched the stairs, waiting for the kid to come charging up, guessing he was going to get caught since there wasn’t a train coming into the station.
He showed up soon enough, limping, holding the railing, not moving very quickly. He was definitely going to get caught, this kid. Alessandra didn’t know many things about breaking the law but she guessed it was ill-advised to try to jump a turnstile and skip a fare if you were crippled.
The kid was breathing heavily, looking over his shoulder, and he was palming something she thought was a cell phone. When she realized it was a gun, she stood up and hurried all the way down to the end of the platform.
He got to the top of the stairs and looked at her and then he jerked his head around in every direction. He seemed upset that there wasn’t a train and he stomped his bad leg.
Alessandra noticed that his pants were wet. She put her head down.
“Yo,” the kid said.
She turned and faced the tracks.
“Lady,” the kid said, and she could hear that he was coming over to her. “I know you. I saw you with Stephanie Dirello at the fire yesterday.”
“That’s not me,” Alessandra said. “I don’t know you.”
“I need help. Bad.”
“I’ve got to go.” She turned to him and started to walk, tried to nudge past him, but he put his hand out and grabbed her arm.
“Gimme a sec,” he said.
“I’ve got to go,” she said. She pulled her arm away and took a step forward. She tried not to look at the gun, wanting him to think she hadn’t seen it.
“Lady,” he said, and she saw out of the corner of her eye how he lifted the gun and leveled it at her. “I just need your help a sec.”
She stopped. “What?”
He looked back at the stairs. “I’ve got this guy after me. I need you to help me hide.”
She waved her arm in the air. “Where? What can I do?”
He spun his head around. “Fuck. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll get down on the tracks and when he comes up—”
“Down on the tracks?”
“I’ll get down there in that gap.” He motioned to the foot-deep space between the rails. It was full of oily puddles and wet garbage matted with pigeon shit. Alessandra had heard of people who had fallen onto the tracks and crawled into that space and gone untouched when a train rolled in, but it seemed like a dumb move. Everything about the kid seemed dumb.
“I can’t let you—”
“When he comes, just tell him I’m gone. Tell him I got on a train.”
“He’s right behind you, he knows there hasn’t been a train in a few minutes.”
The kid ignored her and limped to the edge of the platform. He put the gun in his pocket and jumped down to the tracks, landing way too close to the third rail.
She shivered at the thought of seeing him zapped. She said, “Watch the third rail—”
“I know,” he said, lying down between the running rails. “I saw a show about this.”
Her instinct was to take off, but she stuck around for some reason and went back to the bench. She couldn’t see the kid from there. He was tucked away. She looked at the tracks in the distance and was glad to see that there wasn’t a train coming from Coney yet.
Alessandra heard the guy coming up the stairs before she saw him. He was singing in Russian. His voice was so deep it sounded like he was singing into a barrel. She pictured a fat, bearded man, someone from an opera in a tux, and she was surprised to see a handsome guy with eggshell white skin and Dolph Lundgren hair emerge onto the platform. He was wearing a black tracksuit. He didn’t have a gun that she could see, but she figured it could be hidden.
He stopped singing. “You see a little kid with limp?” he said to her. He imitated the kid’s walk. “Walks like this. Funny.”
“I think he got on a train,” she said.
“There has been no train. Not since he came up here. The man downstairs saw him. Said he jumped the turnstile. I told him I’d take care of the kid. There has been no train. Did he go poof?”
“I’m pretty sure he got on a train.”
“You protect him. He’s just a kid. I understand. But he’s a bad kid.”
“I don’t know.” She stood up. “I’m going to go.”
“I’ll look around. I’ll find him. Maybe he’s hiding in the garbage?” He went over to the garbage bin and kicked the side of it.
Alessandra started to walk to the stairs.
“He’s stupid enough to jump down on the tracks, you think?”
She stopped at the top step.
The Russian limped over to the edge, still imitating the kid, and looked down at the tracks. “There he is!”
The kid stood up, wavering dangerously close to the third rail again.
The Russian took a gun out of his waistband and waved it in the air. “Very stupid to jump down there! What if a train comes? You will be a fucking pancake.”
Alessandra couldn’t move. The kid took out his gun and fumbled it and it fell through a slat to the side of him. She couldn’t hear it hit the street down below, but she imagined it spiraling down in front of a bus or a fruit truck. The kid looked stunned. He turned and started to limp away on the tracks in the direction the train would be coming from.
The Russian laughed. “Pancake,” he said. “You will be a pancake!” He fired at the kid and missed wide.
“Don’t,” Alessandra said. “He’s just a kid.”
“Not just a kid. A bad kid.” The Russian fired again and missed behind the kid’s shuffling feet. The poor bastard couldn’t run. He was blundering along. A moving target but barely. Alessandra got the sense that it’d only be a matter of time before the Russian buried a bullet in his back.
“Tell him to get off the tracks,” she said.
“I’ll be very happy if he gets off the tracks.” He kissed the air and said, “Please, get off the tracks. Come, come.”
The kid was almost alongside the spot where the platform ran out. If he continued on the tracks, he might not get shot but he’d have to deal with an oncoming train soon enough. Alessandra wasn’t sure if the space between the rails extended that far.
“But he won’t get off the tracks,” the Russian said. “Now I’ll shoot for real.”
Alessandra tightened up. She wanted to jump on him, knock the gun out of his hand. But she didn’t.
He closed one eye, steadied his aim, pinched his lips, and fired at the kid, hitting him square in the back. The kid made no noise. He just flopped forward, thudding between the rails.
The Russian walked forward and fired twice more into the kid.
Alessandra sat down on the step and put her head in her hands.
The Russian came over and sat down next to her. He put his gun back in his waistband. He took her hand and shook her index finger out of her grip. He made her put the finger up against her mouth. “Shush,” he said. “Okay? Shush.”
She nodded.
“I don’t want to have to hurt you. You’ve seen nothing, yes?”
She said, “I didn’t see anything.”
“Good.” He stood up and started singing again.
Now he was singing “New York, New York,” except he was getting all the words wrong. He walked downstairs and through the push-in doors.
Alessandra was shaking. She stood up and turned to the tracks. She couldn’t think about the Russian and whether or not he would come after her to keep her quiet. A train was coming. It pulsed the platform, moving closer and closer.
She watched as it went over the space where the kid’s body was and cringed. She was going to do what, throw up her hands, try to get the conductor to slam on the brakes?
Doors opened in front of her and closed. The middle car conductor gave her a look: You getting on or what?
She stayed where she was.
The train pulled out.
She moved down the platform, hugging herself, and stood across from where the kid was. The crawl space between the rails had kept him from getting mashed. The conductor in the first car hadn’t even seen him. Alessandra guessed he’d just looked like more trash.
No way the kid could be alive. She watched his back, and it wasn’t moving. She wanted to crawl down to the tracks and haul his body onto the platform. She thought he deserved that. He was just a kid, no matter what he’d done.
But she wasn’t capable of it.
She walked downstairs and looked at the MTA guy in the glass booth. He was reading a book and had headphones on. Acting like he hadn’t seen or heard anything. No sirens yet, but there probably would be soon. She went down to the street and moved quickly away from the El, thankful she was wearing flats. She was thinking about going to Villabate later and getting a lobster tail for her father, remembering that it used to be his favorite kind of pastry. She kicked into a run, pulling the flannel up on her shoulder.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
William Boyle is from Brooklyn, NY and lives in Oxford, MS. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Mississippi Noir (Akashic Books), The Rumpus, L.A. Review of Books, Salon, Hobart, Needle: A Magazine of Noir, and other magazines and journals. This is his first novel.
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