Chapter 22 - The Train Westbound

The locomotive sat at idle thirty feet south of where they stood, its engine a low mechanical pressure through the platform concrete. The PA had already announced final boarding. The fluorescent overhead ran the length of Track 7 in strips of institutional white, the harshest light Teo had been under in four months of rooms built for warmth and performance and the specific flattery of darkness. There was none of that here. Penn Station at 5:03 a.m. on a Sunday was concrete and diesel and a flat white light that had no interest in what people carried through it.

The lead man moved first.

Teo moved toward him. One man closing the distance pulled the attention of the other two, and cutting left across the platform opened a line from Cami to the car door behind them if she saw it. She would see it. He kept his eyes on the man coming toward him and the knife was already in his hand, out of the boot and open in the same motion. The man was large and had the reach and none of it mattered yet because the man's eyes had not found the knife.

The first shot came from his right, from an angle he had not read.

It arrived in his left shoulder as a shove, a hard lateral force that spun him half-around and dropped the arm, and the pain came half a second behind the impact, sharp and specific and already its own permanent fact. The wound was present and manageable, and the wound was not the chest. He stayed on his feet because his legs had not received any message that required them to stop, and he kept moving toward the lead man because a man with one working arm and a knife did not sit down.

He connected at the collar. Drove his weight in, took the man back against the platform wall, and the knife found the man's forearm in the close-range confusion, not anywhere he had aimed but enough. The man yelled and pulled the arm back. The balance broke. In the gap Teo turned.

The second shot was inside the station's acoustics before he placed it.

He turned toward the sound and she was there, two body-lengths behind him on the platform, already going down.

He moved before he finished seeing it. His legs closed the distance and his right arm reached her before she reached the concrete. He went down with her, one arm coming around her back, taking her weight against him, and the platform came up hard against his knees. The bad shoulder screamed along a nerve he had not known was there. The sound of it did not reach him for a second.

His hands went to her chest, both of them pressed flat. The round had caught her left side, high, and the blood was immediate, coming up through his fingers before he had fully registered the placement of his hands. The blood was warm, much warmer than he expected from the inside of a body in a cold station. He pressed harder because harder was all he had. His hands had done everything they had ever done in eighteen years of his life, and this was the thing they were doing now, and he pressed harder, and the blood came through anyway.

She was looking up.

The fluorescent strips ran above them, institutional white the length of the platform. She was looking up at them, eyes open, gaze above him. Her gaze was not distant here. Her eyes were on the light and she was inside her body.

Around them the two remaining men pulled back toward the escalator. One of them read Teo's position and the platform and the arithmetic of the situation, and turned away. They moved fast and did not run. The system's arm had done what it was sent to do and it did not linger in Amtrak terminals at five in the morning with a conductor coming and a platform camera running. Ricky's men would be in a car on Seventh Avenue before the PA made another announcement.

The train's engine held its low idle. The PA spoke in the mechanical calm of a recorded voice: this is the final boarding call for the 5:08 Amtrak service to Pittsburgh and Chicago, Track 7. The car door stood open behind them, twenty feet of platform concrete between them and it.

He pressed harder.

"Cami."

Her eyes moved off the fluorescent above them and found him. She was in there, direct, unhurried, eyes on him and staying. They were the same eyes that had looked at him from the Honda's passenger seat with the expressway going past behind her, and the same eyes that had looked at him from Room 9 with the lamp throwing its cone, and the same eyes that had looked at him from the rooftop four blocks from La Reina Roja's sign, the night she had told him about Pittsburgh and he had said not yet and she had been briefly sad and then had been something more durable instead.

Her mouth opened.

"Casi lo logramos, papi."

Her voice was her voice, exactly. It held the same register and the same language and the same tone as every time she had said his name in the dark, the same tone as mira before she said something she meant. She had gotten more precise, not less.

His hands were on her chest and the blood was coming through.

Her name was the only word he had. He gave it to her once, in the register it had cost him to say since the night in the Honda's parking lot when he had said it twice in one sentence and she had looked at him directly for the first time. He gave it to her once and it carried.

She breathed once, slowly.

The weight of her in his arms was still the weight of her. He kept pressing. Her blood had come through his hands entirely now, through his fingers, between them, onto his jacket and onto the platform concrete in the small spreading heat of something that had been inside a body a moment ago. He pressed harder because no other calculation was available to him. The tenderness was there, completely, in his hands. The power was not.

She exhaled.

The weight in his arms changed. Her breathing slowed and then it stopped, and the body against his hands settled. He kept his hands where they were.

The PA said: final boarding call.

His hands stayed on her chest.

###

He stood up.

The decision was already behind him by the time his knees came off the concrete. His knees were wet from the platform and his hands were in front of him with the blood going dark at the edges, and he was on his feet. The car door sat twenty feet south along the platform. Her body lay at his boots. His eyes went from the door to her and back, and from her to the door, and the second pass settled the same way the first had.

Her bag had fallen at the edge of his knees and he picked it up with his good hand. The lockbox was inside, $4,200 in a Master Lock box, the money she had built dollar by dollar over eleven months in a room above a club that had been counting on her to stay. The lockbox had not existed to him until she set it on the nightstand at the Motor Inn. Teo had not asked how long. He carried the bag toward the car door now.

His left arm was operating at maybe forty percent. The car's vertical handle came up under his right hand and he stepped up into the car. A conductor at the far end looked at him across thirty rows of seats, at the jacket, at the hands, and began moving toward him. Teo found the nearest seat and sat down.

The doors closed.

The pneumatic seal of them was definitive, mechanical, complete. Track 7 sat on the other side of the door with its yellow edge paint and its fluorescent strips running the length of the platform. Through the window the platform pulled back as the train began to move, the light of it receding, the concrete moving away at the specific pace of a train beginning, which is slow at first and then is not slow.

She had said four words. She had said them in her own language and her own register and her own voice, in the specific tone she used when she meant something, and he had heard them, and they had been for him and they had been hers in the same four words. She had said casi and she had not been wrong. They had almost made it. The word was exact. The word was hers. The weight of casi had settled into him somewhere past the shoulder and past the blood on his hands, and it was going to be there when he got off this train and the morning after that, and he was going to carry it for a long time.

The conductor reached him. Teo held out the ticket with his right hand, the blood on the hand and on the paper.

"Sir. I need to ask if you —"

"Pittsburgh." His eyes stayed on the window. The platform was still visible.

The conductor looked at him for several seconds. Teo watched the window. The man took the ticket and stood there a moment longer and then was gone, and the platform had pulled completely out of sight, and there was only the tunnel beginning.

###

The tunnel took everything.

The platform disappeared behind the first curve and then there was the tunnel wall moving past the window, concrete and service lights in their intervals. The train ran south and west at building speed. The car swayed slightly on the rails and the window showed him dark and the service lights at intervals and his own face in the glass.

He looked away from his face.

The money was still in his jacket. He could feel it, the bulk of it against his ribs, Ricky's money in its rubber bands. Her bag was in the overhead rack where he had put it, which he would not fully remember doing for another twenty minutes. The lockbox sat inside the bag, and inside the bag with the lockbox was the prepaid TracFone she had used for Sunday calls to Abuela Luz, which she had told him about in the Honda one night in October.

The left shoulder was settling into a sustained burn that required attention he was not going to give it until Pittsburgh. He had taken rounds before. The texture of this one was different from the previous two, not the kind. It was present, and it was manageable, and it had missed the chest.

The tunnel did not change. You changed inside it and it did not register the change. Teo had been in this tunnel before, south of the Bronx on the 6 late at night, and it had looked exactly like this.

His hands were in his lap.

The blood on them was cooling. The center stayed dark and wet. The edges went brown and stiff. He had swallowed his own blood in initiation. He was carrying hers on his hands now, going west, and the weight of the difference was not something he could hold yet. He did not try.

The tunnel ended.

Gray light came in from the left side of the car, the pre-dawn light of a November Sunday over New Jersey. The Meadowlands opened up: industrial wetlands and scrub grass between New York and everywhere else. A water tower stood visible for a few seconds and then was gone, and the distant glow of a refinery stack held on the southern horizon. The sky was lightening by degrees from the south, the same November morning light that had come up on every Sunday for the eleven months she had called Abuela Luz from a room above a club on the Bruckner. That light, the one that was coming up now.

He had run the math on everything his whole life. The ConEd bill had been weighed against the delivery shift, and the knife had been weighed against the stash house, and the rising in the organization had been weighed against what it would cost Cami to be seen by the thing that was rising him. The math had told him every time that there was a version of this that worked if he was smart enough and fast enough and careful enough, and he had been all three of those things, and he had been on the platform with his hands pressing the wound before she reached the floor.

The math did not always return what you put into it.

Outside the window the Meadowlands went past in the building gray light, and the train was moving west at speed and not slowing. The first low buildings of Elizabeth came up behind chain-link fences and back lots, rear windows catching the morning, lives going on behind the glass.

He was eighteen years old.

In his jacket he carried a left shoulder that needed a hospital and a stack of bills that belonged to a man currently standing in an office reading the arithmetic of the safe and arriving at a name. Two Amtrak tickets had been purchased six days ago for $134 in the dark of his bedroom on Courtlandt Avenue, round trip, Pittsburgh via Philadelphia, departing Track 7 at 5:08 a.m. One ticket was on its way to Pittsburgh. The other would sit in his jacket pocket for as long as he kept the jacket, which might be a long time.

Fernando was on a couch in Mott Haven with the TV on. The sentence Fernando had started twice was probably the same sentence. Teo did not know how you told someone something like this on the telephone, or whether you did. Pittsburgh would have to be the place where he figured it out. Pittsburgh would have to be the place where he figured out most things now.

He watched the window.

His hands rested in his lap. The city was gone. There was nowhere else to look.