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this young lady doesn’t want to be bothered by you, then I would really think you’d let her go.”
    â€œListen, I know her, so mind your business,” the young man said and she said to Eliot “No he don’t.” Then out of nowhere a friend of the young man ran down the subway stairs and said to him “What’s this chump doing, horning in on your act?” The elderly man got up from a bench and started for the upstairs to get help. “You stay right here, grandpa,” the first young man said, “or you’ll get thrown on your back too.” The elderly man stopped. Eliot said to the young men “Please, nobody should be getting thrown on their backs. And I hate to get myself any more involved in this, but for your own good you fellows ought to go now or just leave everybody here alone.”
    â€œAnd for your own good,” one of the young men said, “you’d be wiser moving your ass out of here.”
    â€œI can only move it once I know this girl’s out of danger with you two.”
    â€œShe’ll be plenty out of danger when you move your ass out of here, now move.”
    â€œBelieve me, I’d like to, but how can I? Either you leave her completely alone now or I’ll have to get the police.”
    That’s when they jumped him, beat him to the ground and, when he continued to fight back with his feet, fists and butting his head, picked him up and threw him on the tracks. He landed on his head and cracked his skull and something like a blood clot suddenly shot through to the brain, a doctor later said. The girl had already run away. The young men ran the opposite way. The elderly man shouted at Eliot to get up, then at people to jump down to the tracks to help Eliot up, then ran in the direction the young men went to the token booth upstairs and told the attendant inside that an unconscious man was lying on the tracks and for her to do something quick to prevent a train from running over him. She phoned from the booth. He ran back to the platform and all the way to the other end of it yelling to the people around him “Stop the train. Man on the tracks, stop the local train.” When the downtown local entered the station a minute later, he and most of the people along the platform screamed and waved the motorman to stop the train because someone was on the tracks. The train came to a complete stop ten feet from Eliot. A lot of the passengers were thrown to the floor and the next few days a number of them sued the city for the dizzy spells and sprained fingers and ripped clothes they said they got from the sudden train stop and also for the days and weeks they’d have to miss from their jobs because of their injuries. Anyway, according to that same doctor who examined Eliot at the hospital, he was dead a second or two after his head hit the train rail.
    For a week after the funeral I go into my own special kind of mourning: seeing nobody, never leaving the apartment or answering phone calls, eating little and drinking too much, but mostly just sleeping or watching television while crying and lying in bed. Then I turn the television off, answer every phone call, run along the river for twice as many miles than I usually do, go out for a big restaurant dinner with a friend and return to my job.
    The Saturday morning after the next Saturday after that I sit on the bench near the place on the subway platform where Eliot was thrown off. I stay there from eight to around one, on the lookout for the two young men. I figure they live in the neighborhood and maybe every Saturday have a job or something to go to downtown and after a few weeks they’ll think everything’s forgotten about them and their crime and they can go safely back to their old routines, like riding the subway to work at the station nearest their homes. The descriptions I have of them are the ones the elderly witness gave. He said he was a portrait painter or used