Shorter Fiction

What he needed was a long, warm, dark night, and no one waiting for him at home. Then he could relax and paint the name leisurely, artistically. If he had that time he’d make each letter a giant blast of paint that could smack the passengers right between the eyes, every screaming inch of their ride.

I N K H E A D

Because his friend died, right here, on these tracks. Reaching his skinny arms out to the sky, then smack! landing on the tracks, the big grin not even off his face. Died because of joy—death from excessive happiness.

The grin started as soon as the train came out of the Carroll Street tunnel, quitting the darkness of the underground and roaring into light. Sun, air, the sky expanding over the open tracks at Smith-9^th, the two of them balancing between train cars, flying, heading towards 4^th Avenue, and leaning way out into that shiny day.

The trains had the door at each end, practically an invitation. You could just step out, like you were stepping out for a smoke in a movie, you could step out and balance on top of the coupling, where the cars connected, let the wind blow, let your head be free.

Inkhead would have laughed about the train cars coupling—fucking—except he was lying in the morgue with no heartbeat. Silent forever, that’s where joy and one slip of his foot put him, his moms all busted up and his sister so pissed off at Danny she’d spit on the sidewalk whenever she saw him.

But he just wanted to remember the day, the first part of that day. Him and Inkhead—Mikey—but he had black hair so he’d gotten the nickname Inkhead. People thought he dyed it. “Man, you dye your hair or somethin’, man?” But he hadn’t. Danny knew he hadn’t. His moms said they were “black Irish,” which was white people, but with black hair and the blue eyes.

In sixth grade, Sister Serena read the poem about the inky inky seas or ink something, and gave a big speech about the word and what it “connoted,” and it was Danny himself who named Mikey “Inkhead,” right then. A bunch of the others started to use it after that, even sometimes his sister.

Danny painted, super careful with each letter, even as he listened hard for the next train. He used white paint for the letters because he knew Mikey liked white stuff, like his white T-shirts and his white sneakers. So he wanted to make white letters at the spot, where Mikey could see his name anytime he looked up from the tracks there, like he was looking up that day when Danny got to him.

Except he hadn’t got to him. Didn’t save him. He’d run away instead, bawling like a baby, howling, because he’d seen. Mikey’s eyes were open but he was just as definitely dead as if he was a squashed bug, but with a whole lot more blood. He’d heard screams, the train brakes, yelling and sirens. He heard it all from the stairs at the end of the 4^th Avenue platform, hiding and praying No No No No No over and over until he had to go home and listen to his whole family howling. By then he was silent.

Danny went to the funeral, but they might as well have rolled a stone into his seat and rolled it out again at the end of the Mass. His moms was balling her eyes out and the way Mikey’s moms was crying was scary. But Danny was like stone and that was the way he was for a lot of weeks afterward.

He’d only started breathing again the day he got the idea for the monument. One day when the weather felt like the weather on Mikey’s last day, the same big clear air, he went up to the 4^th Ave. overhead station. He was thinking he was going to jump off a train, or jump in front of a train. He was thinking that if the train ran him over it would be possible to feel something again, and it would be possible, finally, to feel nothing more forever. Instead he started remembering. He played the whole movie, and part way through he got to the happiness, the sheer goddamn happiness of that ride, the rise of light and sky to Smith-9^th. He knew Inkhead felt it. The walls and fences, all the limitations of their lives were rolled back. The speed was forever, the world was endlessly sweet. He found himself actually remembering that feeling, and feeling it.

So he didn’t get himself squashed like he planned. Instead he got the idea for the painting. Not that he could “paint” like an artist, but he could make letters like any fool and Inkhead could see them and laugh like he laughed that day.

Inkhead would appreciate the way Danny chose to make the letters, all capitals and very definite, like the letters like Sister Serena would make on the blackboard. She had this stupid sentence, “Every good boy deserves fudge,” on the board and she was underlining the parts of speech with the chalk, pressing so hard the chalk screeched under her fingers, so hard that it snapped, but she kept right on going. Underline, double underline, jabbing the board with the chalk, working herself into a lather about the VERB AND OBJECT, while the little pieces of chalk flint landed on Katherine Rose Connelly’s sweater, with Katherine Rose trying to subtly brush it off.

Sister Serena whips around and, oh boy, he and Mikey are sitting there laughing, their shoulders shaking like pigeon wings. Now they get Sister Serena’s icy calm treatment. Now it’s Would You Care to Share Your Joke With the Rest of the Class? And when they said nothing for like a minute, it was I Don’t See Anything Funny About Grammar, Gentlemen, etc. etc. and blah blah blah, and Both of You Will Report to This Room Immediately After School.

It was that day, after school, they kind of designed these letters while they wrote repetitive promises to obey God and Sister Serena across the blackboard. They made the letters square and clean-cut like their dads weren’t, making them get bigger and bigger towards the end and who knows why, the whole thing was just funny and they were friends after that, for good.

The concrete was rough and pebbly. It wasn’t any kind of fun painting, just work. The sweat slid from his armpits down his arms and he had to keep wiping his arm against his shirt, which had been white in the morning but now was dirty and smeared with paint and sweat. The train cops could catch him any second and then, he could see it, they’d forced him to paint over Inkhead’s monument, something he would never ever do.

But, miracle, Danny finished it. Miracle of miracles, it’s still there. He finished it and never did get caught.

Years have gone by. Weeds have grown on the tracks, cut down by winters and screeching trains, and grown back again. For some reason they never painted it over, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and the letters hardly faded. Whatever, Inkhead stayed.

The grown Danny rides that train back and forth to work every day. Coming into the light out of Carroll St., riding through open sky towards the 4^th Avenue parapet, seeing the letters, and never letting the child Mikey out of his still-beating heart.

    end.