Gravesend (21 page)

He got outside and didn’t know where to go. He couldn’t believe he’d shot Mr. Natale and Hockey Head and the Gravy Stirrer. He couldn’t believe he’d gotten no money for it all. He couldn’t believe Sweat was dead. He couldn’t believe his pants were wet. He couldn’t believe the bullets had missed him. He had no more time to think. He headed back in the direction of the car. He was moving as fast as he could. He had no keys. He’d have to keep going and head for the subway.

When he looked back the Russian was behind him. It was strange to see him in the daylight like that, gun across his chest, plodding along. He wasn’t running. Eugene guessed he didn’t feel the need to exert himself since he was after a kid with a limp. Eugene thought about firing back but he wanted to save his bullets and the Russian wasn’t firing yet. He knew he wasn’t moving fast enough. He couldn’t move faster. He looked up at the El in the distance. A train thundered by. He wished he was on it.

Seventeen

Alessandra was on the train home from Maimonides. She didn’t know what time it was and she was too lazy to open her phone to check. Afternoon probably. She’d been with Stephanie all night and all morning at least. She needed a shower and an espresso with Sambuca in it and lemon rubbed on the rim of the cup and a long, glorious smoke. She needed to shave her legs. She needed to lose Amy’s number. She needed to get Stephanie a gift certificate to a spa. Poor girl. She needed to think about the Lou Turcotte thing. She needed to enjoy her old man a little bit more. He was narrow, defeated and sad, definitely of the neighborhood, but he was so much better than that Mrs. Dirello. Alessandra was blessed in that way.
Blessed
. Funny word. Something her mother would’ve said. What did it even mean when you didn’t believe in anything? She wished she’d been born somewhere other than Brooklyn, other than Gravesend, but she’d been lucky not to wind up like Conway or Stephanie. Had to be something about the way her parents raised her that made her different.

She was the only person on the subway car. She’d chosen the middle conductor’s car, an old habit when the train wasn’t crowded, and she looked out at the neighborhood below through glass etched with tags. The interior of the car was bright orange and smelled vaguely of honey-roasted peanuts and piss.

As the train turned from New Utrecht Avenue onto Eighty-Sixth Street, she caught a quick glimpse of the building that used to be the Loew’s Oriental. She’d seen many movies there.
Goodfellas
.
Strange Days
.
Point Break
, four times. Now it was a Marshall’s. She thought of folded pants and racks of ugly shirts and it made her wish that the place was still a theater, that she could get dressed and go there alone and order a tall soda and a popcorn and sit with her legs crossed in the tilted mezzanine.

Roofs of apartment buildings and storefronts shot by. She tried to see in windows, attempted to decipher signs written in Chinese and Russian.

She strained to see down to the avenue. Old ladies with shopping carts. Chinese men blowing on hot coffees in doorways. Others with plastic bags, talking on cell phones, texting, looking down. The sidewalks were wet where storeowners had hosed them down. Garbage flitted around, paper bags and rotten fruit, and she swore she could almost smell it all the way up in the train.

The smoke from Conway’s house was still ribbony in the air and hung over the neighborhood like a posse of black ghosts.

She wondered what had happened to Conway. She didn’t really feel bad for him, not anymore. She felt bad for Duncan, all those years ago, of course she did. And she felt bad for Pop. Ray Boy Calabrese, she wasn’t sure what she felt for him. Something like pity mixed with disgust.

She was sick of how she thought about things. She wasn’t a very good person, she’d started to understand that. She was self-centered, a bad daughter, and a she had no real friends. She was going to be nice to Stephanie, get her the spa thing, and cook some for her old man from now on even if she was no good at gravy and
braciole
. She could grill salmon and vegetables. He’d appreciate that just as much.

The train slowed down at Bay Parkway, where Alessandra had switched earlier to get back to Maimonides, and she stood up. She wasn’t getting off here, but she always liked to stand between Bay Parkway and Twenty-Fifth Avenue, her stop. She clung to the handrail and looked down at the fruit markets, the dollar stores, the new Russian and Chinese bakeries and groceries, the pho and sushi joints, HSBC which used to be—what?—Dime Savings, the Russian video store turned cell phone dive, Sovereign Bank which used to be Independence Bank, the corner Korean restaurant with the bamboo shades that always seemed to have a line out the door, McDonald’s, Stephanie and Conway’s Rite Aid which used to be Genovese, the salon school with the loopy close-up mural of a woman with Victoria Gotti hair, and the big cement lot with hoops up where she used to watch boys from Most Precious Blood and St. Mary’s play basketball or football or kill-the-man-with-the-ball on Wednesday afternoons when school let out early.

When the doors swished open, she walked out onto the platform. One of her favorite things to do on the platform was to look out through the fence at the avenue running off in the direction of Cropsey. She liked the way the blacktop unfolded like a piece of film, the way it cut through the tight little world of cars and houses and trees and sidewalks. She did that now and remembered something she’d long forgotten. In high school, she’d go to the Bay Parkway stop, pay a token—it was tokens then, no stupid cards—just to sit on the bench and look down at the neighborhood. The view was better there. She wouldn’t get on the train. Sometimes she’d have cigarettes, sometimes she wouldn’t. She’d sit there and look and think about the things you think about when you’re a kid and escape seems possible.

She was alone on the platform now, the others who had gotten off at the stop disappearing downstairs and through the turnstiles. She sat on a bench and crossed her legs and faced the north side of Eighty-Sixth Street. The avenue wasn’t beautiful. Nothing was beautiful. It was pretty cold, cold enough that her breath leaked out of her mouth like sputtering exhaust. It wasn’t beautiful at all, none of it, but it was nice enough.

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.”