The Subway Kid
by Brian Spinney
I was riding home on the 8-South train on a Tuesday afternoon, when it happened. I remember it was a Tuesday, because the Pistons were playing the Lakers and some of my friends were coming over to watch the game. Most days I walked home from school, but that Tuesday was too humid. Sweat formed on my stomach and shoulders the moment I stepped out of class and onto the sidewalk. The train’s air conditioner would make the twenty minute ride home just bearable.
I keep calling it a train, but let me clarify that. The 8-South is really a subway car that spends most of its time above ground ducking around buildings in the city. And it doesn’t travel south either. It goes from east to west, but it’s the most southern train in the city, and I’m pretty sure that’s where the name came from.
I waited for the train a block away from Harding High, where a few kids and some old people sat with me on benches that only faced the street. Most of the other kids took the bus everyday, because their stop, 8-Livingston, was the only stop that made it close to the suburbs. Even then, the kids still had to walk a few blocks to their neighborhoods.
My friend Scotty was walking up the sidewalk towards the bus stop, and as soon as he saw me, he started telling me why the Lakers were going to beat the Pistons tonight. Kobe Bryant was going to lead the Lakers to a title—I told him to keep dreaming. We had been at odds since Shaquille O’Neal had become a Laker.
A girl from my grade, Jennifer, was walking behind Scotty. It wasn’t that I could see her, but I could certainly hear her. She was loud and obnoxious, and she could never stop bragging about her brother who joined the navy. Today was no different as she told some girl with her that her brother was somewhere in Spain at this very moment. I turned my back as she approached, but she caught me rolling my eyes.
“What, Derek? It’s not like you could ever be in the navy.”
“Whatever,” I said. “Who wants to be in the navy, anyway?” Though it didn’t matter what I said, because the comeback was drowned out by the 8-South train as it rose from the ground and stopped a few feet away.
Scotty and I got in a car that was really old, the blue and silver paint was chipping away and ruining the graffiti someone had spent a lot of time creating. The name ‘trent’ or maybe it was ‘tree3’ was sprayed on the side, but when the doors opened, the last two letters disappeared into the folds of the door and I couldn’t read them.
I sat in the back and Scotty sat next to me. The train lurched forward and away from the stop. Everyone was quiet, except for Jennifer who had somehow made it on the same train as us. I could hear her talking at the front of the car to two girls who laughed at everything she said.
At Bowler Street, Scotty got off the train. He lived in the flats with his mom and his sister on the sixth floor, but I hated going to his place because we always had to walk up all those flights of stairs. I wished Scotty had been going to my house instead of his, because some old lady took his seat and crammed her bag between us. It was a giant shopping bag from a department store, but it looked like her purse. It was old and smelled moldy. It probably was mold. She was moldy.
I looked at her a couple of times out of the corner of my eye, but she wasn’t as interested in me. She just stared straight ahead with one hand in her lap and the other on her bag. As the train got up to speed, I turned my attention to watching the buildings go by. Each building was separated by city streets, and I did my best to notice something significant in each alley. Anything was better than brooding over the fact I was crammed on a bus seat with a smelly old lady.
The 8- was coming up to a turn, and I could feel myself falling into the bag lady. I leaned away from her as best I could, looking hard out the window as if my concentration could keep me from falling towards her. We came from under the bridge and I straightened up as soon as I could. I had to push off the lady’s bag with one hand, but she took offense and pulled it close to her like she feared I was going to take it.
She was a crazy old lady. I wanted to tell her not every kid was a criminal, but I thought better of it and went back to looking out the window. The buildings with their backs to me disappeared for awhile, and I could see Lemieux Street. Most people said “Lumex” and pronounced the letter x, but I tried to say it right. My mom had corrected me and told me the right way to say it when I was younger.
On Lemieux, I could see a couple of people standing behind a car. It looked like they were pushing each other, a couple of guys and a girl who was trying to pull one guy away from the fight. Another guy—I can only remember his bald head—marched towards the fight.
The bald man walked up to the man the girl was pulling away and raised his arm to the man’s chest. He shot the guy several times; the man fell onto the fence next to him, doing his best to remain standing. The girl was screaming, but I couldn’t hear her or the shots before that. I just watched the gun bounce in the bald man’s hands and other man’s body heaving immediately afterwards. The girl brought her hands up to her face and pulled at her hair. I filled in the sound effects in my head.
The man who was shot was wearing a blue windbreaker and it got caught on the fence as he fell. The bald man tucked the gun in his pants and started running away, and the guys who had started out pushing each other were running in all different directions.
The train kept moving and the people on Lemieux Street disappeared behind buildings. I tried to strain my view down alleyways to see the people again, but we were already too far ahead.
Were there three shots or four, I asked myself. Everything happened so fast. The only clear part was the guy grabbing onto the fence trying not to fall down. The bald man, I needed to remember him, too. In case I had to be a witness in court, but I couldn’t remember much about him. I could only see the gun bouncing each time he shot the guy in the windbreaker.
I looked behind me and ahead of me to see if anyone else on the train saw what I saw. All I wanted were eyes as frantic as mine to share what I had just seen. Jennifer and her friends weren’t even looking in that direction. They were still laughing at each other. I looked at the lady next to me a couple of times—she noticed after the third time.
“I just saw someone get shot,” I explained.
She looked at me for a moment then turned her head back to face the front of the train. Somebody was just shot, lady! The other people obviously hadn’t seen what I had or else they would’ve been looking around like me or telling the train operator to call the police or something. We needed to call the police. The “we” being my unwilling witness and myself. Didn’t anyone have a cell phone? But someone must have called the police by now—someone on Lemieux Street, right?
At the next stop, the bag lady moved to another seat across the aisle. She was definitely crazy—only a crazy person would act the way she had after hearing that someone had been shot. Still, I was glad she moved. It would’ve been better if she had taken her moldy smell with her, too.
I got off the 8- on Pearson Street, my house was around the corner. I was trying to think of what to tell my mom. Hey, Mom. Saw a guy get shot. Hey, Mom. Bang, bang, bang, bang. Dead man. I saw it. Actually, I didn’t see the guy die, but he must have been in pretty bad shape. I was trying to form the story for the sake of all the people I’d have to share it with.
I couldn’t find words that summed up the situation well enough. I kept looking in people’s yards where the grass meets the fence, but my thoughts jumped from how my friends would react when I told them and how much detail I’d have to go into. What did the guy in the windbreaker do to get shot in the middle of the day anyway? It might’ve been about the girl who was screaming. He could’ve just made the bald guy mad. Scotty’s brother got stabbed because he spilled his drink on a guy in a club. It could’ve been as simple as that.
I wasn’t paying attention, and I walked into the light post on the corner in front of my house. The bald guy shot the other guy and ran down Lemieux Street and jumped in a car and drove away. He was going to hide. The police were definitely looking for him. I couldn’t be sure about the last part, but it was what I imagined a person would do after they shot someone. He couldn’t just stand there with a gun in his hand.
Mom was cooking in the kitchen. I could smell the sauce when I stepped in the door; the sound of pots clanking together meant she was working on a big dinner.
“Hi, honey. How was school?”
I didn’t answer immediately. I didn’t need to though. I think she asked how school was to show she was paying attention to me. Her asking was like how some people ask, “How are you?” and don’t really care if you say anything back.
I sat at the kitchen table with my back to the wall. Mom had her back to me at the stove. I read the headlines on the front page of the paper, and I almost expected the shooting to be there. I could see the picture on the front-page—the bald guy had his arm outstretched with a gun in his hand and the other guy grabbing onto the fence with one hand and his face all curled up. But it was too early to be in the paper. It would be in tomorrow’s paper.
“It was alright,” I said. If anyone else had been in the house, they would’ve thought I was crazy to answer my mom’s question after so long.
“Did you ride the train home?”
“I saw someone get shot,” I said.
“On the train?” She spun around with a knife and half a tomato. She was concerned, her face full of worry.
“No, no,” I said, shaking my head, too. “A guy shot another guy a couple of times on Lemieux Street.” I was facing my mom, but I was really looking at the napkin holder on the table, I could see her off to the side.
“You weren’t there, were you?” She was still on full alert. I told her I was on the train.
“Oh,” she said, the concern disappearing from her face. She turned around and continued cutting the tomato on the cutting board. I could suddenly hear each thwack as she brought the knife down.
“Just as long as you’re okay.” Thwack, thwack. “You had me worried for a second that it happened on the train.” Thwack, thwack, thwack. There was scraping sound when she made room to cut more tomato.
“That’s what happens, Derek—when you get into drugs,” she said.
I stopped listening to her. My mom looked incredibly small. Her head was so small; she was so small. My small mom in her small kitchen with her small curtains and her small knife. The bun of her hair bobbed while she made dinner—she put a lot of effort into the way her hair looked.
I suddenly wanted to smash all her tomatoes and throw her sauce across the room, but I didn’t. I got up from the table and went into my room. How did she know it was because of drugs? How did she know? It wasn’t like I told her any details. She didn’t know there was a girl there, too. She didn’t even ask what I saw from the train.
I wanted light in my room and pulled up the blinds. There was the other side of the street—a green house and a blue house. The same houses that were always there, unchanging and neglected.
My mom didn’t care about the guy who got shot; she went back to cutting tomatoes as soon as I told her the shooting wasn’t on the train. Maybe I should’ve told her the guy got shot on the train instead. Then she would ask where I was and how it happened, what I saw and if the police showed up. She didn’t know that the guy was shot because of drugs. She always talked like that, but it was the first time it made me really made.
That night I watched the news instead of the game and told my friends I wasn’t feeling good, so they wouldn’t come over. I flipped over to check the score, but I was really watching the news. There was the four o’clock news on Channel 4 and the five o’clock news on WERI 25 and then updated news at ten. I watched them all, but none of them mentioned a shooting on Lemieux Street. I checked the paper the next day and watched the news that night, too, but there wasn’t a mention of anything that night either.
If I was a reporter, I would’ve made the shooting the lead story. I’d talk about the shots and what the guy falling down looked like and the girl who was screaming. The guy tried not to fall down, but he just got shot too many times.
I sat in the room and dribbled a basketball until my mom yelled from downstairs that the light in the kitchen was blinking. I held the ball and wondered who decided that the seams should run the way they do. I stared outside at the houses across the street—not at the lower part of the house, but straight across to the roof of the house where pine needles got stuck in the gutters.
My mom couldn’t have known it was because of drugs. She just couldn’t.
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