Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [50]
Jude could feel his lungs heaving. It was freezing down here. He braced himself against the door frame to keep it open, clutching the stitch in his side.
“What’s wrong?” The door was still open, the train clacking.
Jude glanced over his shoulder. A few people were sprawled across the orange plastic seats, listening to headphones, sleeping, none of them aware of the plastic machine gun Jude held at his side. Three kids near the opposite end of the car were tagging one of the doors, two of them standing guard while the third sprayed. Jude closed his eyes. He kept them that way for a long time, or what seemed on his father’s pot to be a long time. His high had diminished only faintly, and Jude was aware of the flux of his thoughts, rocking roughly along with the engine, the open door roaring. The metallic rattle of a can of spray paint. The fumes, overwhelming. Even across the train car, they were as strong as if Jude were huffing them himself.
They’d played laser tag before, Jude and Teddy and Johnny and Delph and Delph’s cousin, who owned the set. Running barefoot on the pavement, in summer grass. Jude and Teddy hiding behind a parked car: shhh.
How to say how shitty he felt at that deafening threshold, how unworthy, nearly sick, so cowardly he couldn’t open his eyes, the guy whose brother he’d killed waiting for him on the other side? He shivered at the thought of Johnny finding out how low he’d sunk, stealing drugs for a free high, while all this time Johnny, sober and upright, had been hopping train cars. “Just don’t look down!” Johnny called helpfully, and it was suddenly so ridiculous, this fear of the subway—he’d huffed freon!—“You wimp!” said his father, “you wimp!”—that Jude opened his eyes and, laser gun cradled across his chest, crossed the platform in one dexterous leap—Mario sailing from cliff to floating bridge, Pitfall Harry traversing tar pit—and when the train screeched to a halt (“Fourteenth Street, Union Square”), Jude kept going for one slow-mo second, hooking an arm around a pole to catch himself, laser gun ch-ch-ch-ing to a stop.
Here he was. The noise was gone and he was inside again, in another, identical, freezing cold car.
“C’mon,” Johnny said, unfazed. He dragged Jude out through the doors just before they slid closed again. They raced down the platform, their laughter echoing against the Lego-yellow tiles, the aroma of wet garbage and hot exhaust and the cool iron earth, a man pissing in a corner, a woman shaking a can of change, Johnny winning by a good ten yards, until, halfway up a flight of stairs, he was shot. Jude heard the sound—keo, keo, keo, the fighter planes of Space Invaders—and saw the red light exploding from Johnny’s chest. Staggering backward two steps, Johnny clutched the target over his heart with one hand, grabbed the railing with the other, and groaned, “Go, man! Go on without me!” Jude did, but not before firing up at the top of the steps, illuminating the target of Johnny’s dark-shirted killer, who fell quickly, without ado, out of sight.
Jude turned around and ran in the other direction, up another set of stairs. He ran past a homeless mariachi band, a troupe of break-dancers, endless stretches of graffiti. He ran past a white-shirt and returned his salute as they crossed paths. He ran past a black-shirt and fired at him from the waist, but it was just a regular guy smoking a cigarette, his eyes filled with confusion and fright. At the end of the corridor, Jude followed the signs to the downtown platform and the sound of the arriving train, and slipped into the last car just as the doors sighed closed. He kept running, car to car, his legs throbbing, his breath inflating his smile. People looked at him, people looked away, some gasped or screamed, he could be arrested or chased or shot at for real, but he was too