Gravesend (22 page)
“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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