Free Lowboy by John Wray Page B

with such unexpected severity that she almost cried out loud: He’s not important to them. They’re not afraid for Will at all. It’s everybody else that they’re afraid for.
    Lateef laid the folder down and cleared his throat. “There seems to be nothing I can do to convince you not to waste my time, Miss Heller. So what I’m going to do is this: I’m going to read you the details of your son’s original offense.”
    “Please don’t,” she said woodenly. “I know perfectly well—”
    “On Monday, March fifth, 2008, at one forty-five p. m., William Heller, age fourteen, and Emily Wallace, age fifteen, entered the Fourteenth Street subway station at the southwest corner of Union Square. They were seen by the station attendant, Lawrence Grayson, who notified the truancy officer on duty, Robert T. Sullivan. Officer Sullivan located both children on the downtown 6 platform. He approachedwith circumspection, as Emily Wallace was, in Officer Sullivan’s opinion, ‘in hazardous proximity to the tracks.’ William Heller appeared agitated. He was moving in what the officer described as a ‘spiraltype pattern,’ talking animatedly to Emily Wallace, who was standing still. After approximately one minute Emily Wallace took hold of William Heller by the shoulders and embraced him. Officer Sullivan did not interpret this as a sexual gesture.”
    He paused there—there, of all places—and coughed into his fist. For dramatic effect, Violet thought, and the knowledge made her mouth go dry with hate. When he spoke again she closed her eyes and shivered.
    “William Heller freed himself from Emily Wallace and pushed her onto the tracks.”

B lood was rushing to Lowboy’s head like steam from a boiler as he let himself be dragged into the dark. Heather Covington was a few steps ahead of him, whispering to herself affection ately, moving carefully along the tunnel’s concrete seam. The last feeble light lapped against her. He could just make out her feet in their cellophane leggings, rustling with each step she took, as though she were picking her way through fallen leaves.
    The tunnel was wide and straight and the lights of the A took a long time to fade. It got warmer and damper and soon it got too warm to breathe. The world is inside me, Lowboy said to himself, and I am inside the world. He opened his mouth but no air entered it. Every so often Heather Covington would reach back and pull on his shirt, hissing at him to hurry, but he refused to be rushed. What he was about to do was no small or trivial thing. He kept his eyes on the back of her head, cropped and burly as a man’s, and let his shoulder brush against the bowed concrete. A song came to him as he watched her: “Toddlin’ Blues” by Bix Beiderbecke. Richard used to play that song and he would dance to it. Also “Fidgety Feet.” HeatherCovington had feet like that. He wondered when the next A train was coming.
    Every half-dozen steps the wall fell back into a mansized socket. Lowboy had seen them often enough from the train, even once seen a person inside: a frightened-looking woman in a wrinkled orange jumpsuit, holding a wrench across her body like a soldier at a drill. Richard had told him that the woman lived in the tunnel, that she’d never once seen daylight, and he’d still been too young to know better. He’d lain awake that night shivering with envy, picturing catacombs and petrified forests and houses built on phosphorescent lakes. And Richard had sat at his bedside, more patient than he ever was by day, and had run his fingers through his hair to calm him.
    A river cut across Manhattan once, Richard had said. Split the city in half, about where Broadway is now. You still awake, Will?
    Yes, Richard, he’d answered. I’m awake.
    The Quiet River, the Indians used to call it. Musaquontas. You can’t get rid of a river, you know. You can only dig it under. They’ve had to close whole stations down because of it. The truth of the matter is,