Subway

by Edward C. Doerr

appears
in this issue.

conclusion

“This was how it went, isn’t that right, Mikey?” the man with the voice of my grandfather said. “You waited for it, didn’t you?”

I shook my head, tears stinging and refracting the white of the man’s eyes into idiot shapes. “No, no. I hated it.”

“You know that’s not true, Mikey. You let it go on for so long because you loved being held, isn’t that it? You loved feeling anything. You relished the degradation, isn’t that it, Mikey?”

“I never told anyone, because they wouldn’t believe me. I hated him,” I whimpered.

“But you hated yourself first. You were thirteen by the time you realized it, but you hated yourself.” The man with the voice of my grandfather paused. The smell of humiliation singed my nostrils, hung in a pocket above my head like a distended storm cloud. Echoes of my sobbing reverberated in the empty prison of the car. Rivulets of anguish snaked down my smooth cheeks but could not cleanse the revulsion that seemed to coat my skin. These were tears of self-pity.

I was alone with my shame and guilt.

When I had no more tears to shed, I looked up. The subway car was dark. If not for the sound of his breathing or the sense of his presence next to me, I may have thought that the man with the hypnotic eyes and hair had left me alone.

“Who are you?” I asked again, sniffling.

“Cheer up, Mikey. I’m your angel. You prayed for me every night. You prayed for something awful to happen to gramps, prayed that you’d never have to see him again. Well, here I am. Better late than never.” My eyes began to adjust to the darkness, and I saw the silhouette of his head thrown back in laughter. When he spoke again, the Southern twang in his voice disappeared. His words snapped like dry twigs. “How is gramps doin’?”

“What?”

“The doctors treating him okay?”

How did he know about the doctors? I’d just found out that morning. My mother called me frantically at eight as I was getting dressed for work. She told me grandpa had been hit by a car around the corner from his house. He’d been out for his morning walk, and the car just swerved into him.

The doctors held out little hope, mom said as she struggled to fight off a wave of tears. He was comatose and on a ventilator. She pleaded for me to visit him on my way home from work, even if he was still unresponsive. It would give me closure, she said. Allow me to say goodbye to him my way. What she didn’t know was that I wouldn’t be saying any heartfelt goodbyes, but I promised I would visit him anyway.

“It was a, a whaddayacallit, a hit and run, right?” the man next to me asked, intruding on my thoughts.

“He was out for his morning walk and got hit by a car,” I said coolly.

“Neighbors see anything?” the red-haired man asked.

“Yeah, Mr. Sewell was out front watering his garden and thought he saw...” I paused, energy draining from me like blood from a stab wound. Mom said Mr. Sewell told the police that he’d seen a young man speeding away from the scene in a tattered Chevy pickup, but then again Mr. Sewell didn’t have very keen eyesight. All he saw was a nest of red hair, like a tumbleweed set ablaze.

“Thought he saw what?” the young man with green eyes asked.

Looking into this man’s eyes, I could envision exactly how it had happened. This large man, squeezed into a pickup that had seen better days, hunched over the wheel. He was hunting for someone in particular, though a fleeting glance could have misconstrued this man’s intention for a whimsical drive in the suburbs.

Even to passersby who caught glimpses of this man, nothing about him seemed dangerous. For one, he was smiling broadly. But for those who knew better, this was a deceptive gesture. Taking a left onto Asp Lane, the man with red hair spotted my grandfather walking toward him. He would have been wearing his requisite outfit: a white jumpsuit with a white sweatband around his forehead. Compressing the gas pedal with his large foot, the man with hateful green eyes aimed for my grandfather, who — lost in his own world — had no time to react.

Mr. Sewell called for my grandfather, screaming for him to watch out. But the loud rumbling of the pickup’s diesel engine drowned out Sewell’s warning. My grandfather looked up in time to see the pickup’s grill mere feet from his face. Behind the wheel, the man’s smile broadened as a fiery strand of hair came undone and fell like a comma across his face, framing it in a conflagration of rage.

My grandfather would’ve been tossed effortlessly aside like a newly planted tree uprooted during a windstorm. A bloody mist sprayed the pickup’s windshield. My grandfather struck a tree horizontally, smashing his back, and slid down it, landing crumpled at its base. It had taken less than fifteen seconds.

The lights in the subway car came to life. The man was smiling, flashing a set of perfectly white teeth. “Sewell didn’t by any chance see me, did he?”

I didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.

The man with the halo of fire on his head laughed. He was no longer holding the gun, and as he stood up and stretched his arms above his head, his shirt rose from the front of his pants. The gun was gone. He followed my gaze, looking down to where the weapon had been.

“No more gun, Mikey. Don’t need it no more. I got your attention now.”

Arrogance dripped from the green-eyed man’s every word, smugness captured in a perpetual smile. The illuminated subway car imbued me with confidence. In the light, nothing could go wrong. It was darkness that I needed to fear, the unknown, shadowy corners that (chortled) loomed in the darkness.

I stood with a renewed sense of power. I was not a helpless ten-year old. Pressing my chest against his, I leaned toward his face. “Listen to me. I don’t know how it is you know what you know or how you’re doing the things you’re doing, but I’m sick of you. And your assertions.”

The man cocked his head, the smile locked on his face. “I’m proud of you, Mikey. You sound like a man. You wanted to tell gramps off like that, didn’t you?”

“Are you following me? How did you know that? How did you know I went to see him?”

“You’re a predictable man, Mikey. You thought he’d be sitting up in that hospital room, and you’d tell him to drop dead. Exit with your head held high. But weren’t you surprised when the nurse on staff told you he was fine? He’d recovered with minor injuries, and they’d released him. The whole thing had been a false alarm. They’d taken out the ventilator, scanned his head. Given what had happened, he barely had a scratch on him. A miracle really. And you left staring at the floor like a loser, didn’t you?”

“No, I didn’t,” I said. “I left with my head held high.”

“No, you didn’t. You shuffled out of there like a student leaving the principal’s office, didn’t you?”

“My head was high.”

“I don’t believe you, Mikey.”

Without realizing what I was doing, I crooked my arm in and wheeled around, my elbow connecting with the side of the man’s head, landing in the tuft of fire that bunched just above his ear. Seizing the moment, I kneed him in the stomach, not giving him the opportunity to retaliate. He fell to the floor, wheezing.

“I’m so proud of you, Mikey,” the red-haired man gasped.

I gnashed my teeth, quaking bodily and clenching my fists until I’d squeezed the color from them. I howled with a sudden surge of anger. Sparks of hate flashed behind my eyes, as if I’d just shorted out an electrical current in my brain. This shriek was my only verbal response, and I kicked him under the jaw, lifting him off the ground a few inches and sending him sprawling backward. He scrambled to stand.

The subway car door opened, startling me. I turned my head in the direction of the noise and saw, through the windows, that we were at a platform. The connecting cars had also reappeared, but I had no time to consider when or how this all had happened. I’d been more focused on the man with the red hair than I’d realized.

A young boy boarded the car, giving me a suspicious and lingering look before glancing anxiously at the man with the red hair and green eyes. He walked toward the elderly woman sitting at the other end of the car, tossing a final concerned look at me.

I turned my head back toward my erstwhile captor in time to see him stand up and bolt out of the car, a white cloth falling from his back pocket. He slipped passed the door as it slid closed and stood just outside it, smiling and waving calmly from the otherwise deserted platform. He mouthed something that looked like, “Rest well,” but I couldn’t be certain.

The train left the station, leaving the man with green eyes and red hair behind.

My heart still racing, I stooped down to pick up the pristine cloth. I sat down and unfolded it: a generic pillowcase. I stared at it for a moment, befuddled, and bunched it into a ball. I sighed heavily and put my head back, letting the subway car cradle me, rocking me back and forth to the soothing sound of relentless metallic momentum.

I got off at the next stop, passing through the turnstile and ascending the stairs. None of the events on the subway congealed in my mind. It was the progression of details that stood out: the white hoodie, the gun, the old woman, the suffocating darkness, a hand on my knee, the fight, the disgust, the fear, the rejuvenating sense of power, the young boy.

I breathed in deeply as I emerged onto the street, the familiar scent of the city night saturating my lungs. Still grasping the pillowcase, I turned right, plunging headlong into the shadows of the night that reached out like giants’ fingers, snaking across sidewalks and crawling up building facades.

By the time I found myself standing at the foot of my building, my feet ached and my head was swimming in the intermixing waters of delirium and horror. I pushed through the doors and headed for the elevator.

I’d left the light on in my apartment, so I didn’t notice the flashing red dot of my answering machine at first. But, passing it on my way to the shower, it glowed (like his hair, like that guy’s hair) hypnotically.

I pressed the playback button, and a voice spoke with authority: “Mr. Saxon, my name is Detective Howard Gardner. I’m with the New York City Police Department...”

I tuned Gardner out, his voice droning on in the background. But as he spoke, I fingered the white pillowcase. I opened it up and pressed my face into it.

The familiar potpourri of stale tobacco and aftershave.

Pulling my face from the comforting whiteness, I saw three half-crescent blood streaks on the surface of the pillowcase. I reached up, putting my fingers to my cheek. Someone had gouged three cuts into the side of my face. I thought nothing of it, figuring I had managed to cut myself at some point that day, a phantom injury.

I bunched the pillowcase into a ball and tossed it aside before continuing on my way to the bathroom. Closing the door and flicking on the light switch, I expected to face the layout of my bathroom.

Instead, I was in my grandfather’s living room. My grandfather was lying on his mothball-scented couch. Someone loomed above the old man, a pillow pressed over his face. There were muffled grunts of protest and alarm, and his feeble arms flailed above his head in blind desperation, fingers crooked like talons.

He still wore his hospital band around one slender wrist. At last, his frantic fingers hit home, puncturing the side of his attacker’s face and tearing the flesh of his cheek. The attacker let out a howl of rage and pain and turned away from his victim.

And, in that moment I locked eyes with my grandfather’s killer.

Three crescent puncture wounds bled freely from his face.