The Fortress of Solitude Jonathan Lethem

Two white girls in flannel nightgowns and red vinyl roller skates with white laces, tracing tentative circles on a cracked blue slate sidewalk at seven o’clock on an evening in July.

The girls murmured rhymes, were murmured rhymes, their gauzy, sky-pink hair streaming like it had never once been cut. The girls’ parents had permitted them back onto the street after dinner, only first changing into the gowns and brushing their teeth for bed, to bask in the orange-pink summer dusk, the air and light which hung over the street, over all of Gowanus like the palm of a hand or the inner surface of a seashell. The Puerto Rican men seated on milk crates in front of the bodega on the corner grunted at the apparition, not sure of what they were seeing. They widened their lips to show one another their teeth, a display to mark patience, wordless enduring. The street strewn with bottle caps half-pushed into the softened tar, Yoo-Hoo, Rheingold, Manhattan Special.

The girls, Thea and Ana Solver, shone like a new-struck flame.

An old white woman had arrived on the block before the Solvers, to reclaim one of the abused buildings, one which had been a rooming house, replacing fifteen men with only herself and her crated belongings. She was actually the first. But Isabel Vendle only lurked like a rumor, like an apostrophe inside her brownstone, where at this moment she crept with a cane between the basement apartment and her bedroom in the old parlor on the first floor, to that room where she read and slept under the crumbled, unrestored plaster ceiling. Isabel Vendle was a knuckle, her body curled around the gristle of old injuries. Isabel Vendle remembered a day in a packet boat on Lake George, she scratched letters with a pen dipped in ink, she pushed stamps against a sponge in a dish. Her desktop was cork. Isabel Vendle had money but her basement rooms stank of rinds, damp newspaper.

The girls on wheels were the new thing, spotlit to start the show: white people were returning to Dean Street. A few.

Under the ailanthus tree in the backyard Dylan Ebdus at five accidentally killed a kitten. The Ebduses’ tenants in the basement apartment had a litter of them, five, six, seven. They squirmed on the ground there, in that upright cage of brick walls, among the rubble and fresh-planted vines and the musky ailanthus sheddings, where Dylan played and explored alone while his mother turned over ground with a small trident or sat smoking while the couple downstairs sang together, one strumming a peace-sign-stickered, untuned guitar. Dylan danced with the tiny, razor-sharp, bug-eyed cats, chased them into the slug-infested brick pile, and on the second day, backpedaling from one of the cats, crushed another with his sneakered foot.

Those basement tenants took the kitten away broken but alive while Dylan, crying, was hustled off by his parents. But Dylan understood that the kitten was mercifully finished somehow, smothered or drowned. Somehow. He asked, but the subject was smothered too. The adults tipped their hand only in that instant of discovery, letting Dylan glimpse their queasy anger, then muted it away. Dylan was too young to understand what he’d done, except he wasn’t; they hoped he’d forget, except he didn’t. He’d later pretend to forget, protecting the adults from what he was sure they couldn’t handle: his remembering entirely.

Possibly the dead kitten was the insoluble lozenge of guilt he’d swallowed.

Or possibly it was this: his mother told him someone wanted to play with him, on the sidewalk across the street. Out front. It would be his first time to go out on the block, to play out front instead of in the brick-moldy backyard.

“Who?”

“A little girl,” said his mother. “Go see, Dylan.”

Maybe it was the white girls, Ana and Thea in their nightgowns and skates. He’d seen them from the window, now they were calling to him.

Instead it was a black girl, Marilla, who waited on the sidewalk. Dylan at six recognized a setup when he saw one, felt his mother’s city craftiness, her native’s knowledge. Rachel Ebdus was working the block, matchmaking for him.

Marilla was older. Marilla had a hoop and some chalk. The walk in front of Marilla’s gate—her share of the irregular slate path was her zone—marked. This was Dylan’s first knowledge of the system that organized the space of the block. He would never step into Marilla’s house, though he didn’t know that now. The slate was her parlor. He had his own, though he hadn’t marked it yet.

“You moved here?” said Marilla when she was sure Dylan’s mother had gone inside.

Dylan nodded.

“You live in that whole house?”

“Tenants downstairs.”

“You got an apartment?”

Dylan nodded again, confused.

“You got a brother or sister?”

“No.”

“What your father does?”

“He’s an artist,” said Dylan. “He’s making a film.” He offered it with maximum gravity. It didn’t make much of an impression on Marilla.

“You got a spaldeen?” she said. “That’s a ball, if you don’t understand.”

“No.”

“You got any money on you?”

“No.”

“I want to buy some candy. I could buy you a spaldeen. Could you ask your mother for some money?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know skully?”

Dylan shook his head. Was skully a person or another kind of ball or candy? He couldn’t know. He felt that Marilla might begin to pity him.

“We could make skully caps. You could make them with gum or wax. You got a candle in your house?”

“I don’t know.”

“We could buy one but you got no money.”

Dylan shrugged defensively.

“Your mother told me to cross the street with you. You can’t do it yourself.” Her tone was philosophical.

“I’m six.”

“You’re a baby. What kind of a name is Dylan?”

“Like Bob Dylan.”

“Who?”

“A singer. My parents like him.”

“You like the Jackson Five? You know how to dance?” Marilla laced herself with her hoop, buckled her knees and elbows at once, balled her fists, gritted her teeth, angled her ass. The hoop swung. She grinned and jutted her chin at Dylan in time with her hips, as though she could have swirled another hoop around her neck.

When it was Dylan’s turn the hoop clattered to the slate. He was still fat, podlike, Tweedledee. There was no edge on his shape for the hoop to lodge. He could barely span it with his arms. He couldn’t duck his knees, instead scuffed sideways, stepping. He couldn’t dance.

That was how they played, Dylan dropping the plastic hoop to the ground a thousand times. Marilla sang encouragement, Oh, baby give me one more chance, I want you back. She punched the air. And Dylan wondered guiltily why the white girls on skates hadn’t called to him instead. Knowledge of this heretical wish was his second wound. It wasn’t like the dead kitten: this time no one would judge whether Dylan had understood in the first place, whether he had forgotten after. Only himself. It was between Dylan and himself to consider forever whether to grasp that he’d felt a yearning preference already then, that before the years of seasons, the years of hours to come on the street, before Robert Woolfolk or Mingus Rude, before “Play That Funky Music, White Boy,” before Intermediate School 293 or anything else, he’d wished, against his mother’s vision, for the Solver girls to sweep him away into an ecstasy of blondness and matching outfits, tightened laces, their wheels barely touching the slate, or only marking it with arrows pointing elsewhere, jet trails of escape.

Marilla whirled in place, singing When I had you to myself I didn’t want you around, those pretty faces always seemed to stand out in a crowd —

Isabel Vendle found the name in a tattered, leather-bound volume at the Brooklyn Historical Society: Boerum. As in the Boer War. A Dutch family, farmers, landowners. The Boerums kept their wealth in Bedford-Stuyvesant, had actually come nowhere near Gowanus, none except a wayward, probably drunken son, named Simon Boerum, who built a house on Schermerhorn Street and died in it. He’d been exiled here, perhaps, a prodigal, a black sheep sleeping off a long bender. Anyway, he’d lend his name—he wasn’t about to say no!—to the band of streets laced between Park Slope and Cobble Hill, because Gowanus wouldn’t do. Gowanus was a canal and a housing project. Isabel Vendle needed to distinguish her encampment from the Gowanus Houses, from Wyckoff Gardens, that other housing project which hemmed in her new paradise, distinguish it from the canal, from Red Hook, Flatbush, from downtown Brooklyn, where the Brooklyn House of Detention loomed, the monolith on Atlantic Avenue, ringed with barbed wire. She was explicating a link to the Heights, the Slope. So, Boerum Hill, though there wasn’t any hill. Isabel Vendle wrote it and so it was made and so they would come to live in the new place which was inked into reality by her hand, her crabbed hand which scuttled from past to future, Simon Boerum and Gowanus unruly parents giving birth to Boerum Hill, a respectable child.

The houses here were sick. The Dutch-style row houses had been chopped into pieces and misused as rooming houses for men with hot plates and ashtrays and racing forms, or floor-through apartments, where sprawling families of cousins were crammed into each level, their yards and stoops teeming with uncountable children. The houses had been slathered with linoleum and pressed tin, the linoleum and tin had later been painted, the paint painted again. It was like a coating on the tongue and teeth and roof of a mouth. The lines of the rooms, the fine moldings, had been broken by slapdash walls to make hallways, the bathrooms had had Sears Roebuck shower stalls wedged into them, the closets had been turned into kitchens. The hallways had been pissed. These brownstones, these upright Dutch houses, were bodies, bodies abused, but Isabel would make them well again, she’d fill them with couples, renovators who’d replaster the ornate ceilings, refurbish the marble hearths. She’d already lured a few. The first renovators were motley, truth be told. Disappointing to her, the beatniks who came, the hippies making communes little better than rooming houses. But someone had to be first. They were Isabel’s ragged first recruits, not good, only good enough.

For instance Abraham and Rachel Ebdus. The encountered reality of a marriage was always wearying to Isabel. She, Rachel, was wild-eyed, chain-smoking, too young, too Brooklyn, actually. Isabel had seen her talking Spanish to the men on the crates on the corner. That wasn’t going to solve anything. And he, Abraham, was a painter, splendid—but need the walls of the house be filled top-to-bottom with nude portraits of his wife? Need the paintings in the front parlor sometimes be visible from the corner of Dean and Nevins, scumbled flesh beaming past half-drawn curtains?

Wife supported husband, working half days at a desk at the Department of Motor Vehicles on Schermerhorn Street. Talking Spanish to the undershirts who polished cars in front of rooming houses.

While the husband stayed home and painted.

They had a boy.

Isable tore a thread of smoked turkey from the periphery of her dry sandwich and draped it across the orange cat’s incurious nose, until the doltish thing fathomed what was offered and engaged it with clacking, machinelike teeth.

There were two worlds. In one his father paced upstairs, creaked chairs, painting at his tiny light box, making his incomprehensible progress, his mother downstairs played records, ran water over dishes, laughed on the telephone, her voice trailing up the curve of the long stair, the backyard ailanthus brushed his bedroom windows, dappling the sun into tropical, liquid blobs of light against the wallpaper which itself depicted a forest full of monkeys and tigers and giraffes, while Dylan read and reread Scrambled Eggs Super and Oobleck and If I Ran the Zoo or pushed his Matchbox car, #11, dreamily with one finger down its single length of orange track or exposed the inadequacy of the Etch A Sketch and the Spirograph again, the stiffness of the knobs, the recalcitrance of the silvery ingredient behind the Etch A Sketch’s smeared window, the untrustworthiness of the Spirograph’s pins, the way they invariably bent at perihelion when the pressure of the drawing pen grew too much, so that every deliciously scientific orbit blooped and bent at the crucial moment into a ragged absurdity, a head with a nose, a pickle with a wart. If the Etch A Sketch and the Spirograph had really worked they would probably be machines, not toys, they would be part of the way the adult universe operated, and be mounted onto the instrument panels of cars or worn on the belts of policemen. Dylan understood and accepted this. These things were broken because they were toys, and vice versa. They required his pity and patience, like retarded children who’d been entrusted to his care.

In his indoor world Dylan could float in one of two directions. One was upstairs, grasping at the loose, rattling banister, sliding his small hand around a portion of its burnished smoothness, then hopping his fingers over the gapped joints, to knock on the studio door and be permitted to stand at his father’s elbow and try to watch what couldn’t be watched, the incomprehensible progress of an animated film painted by single brushstrokes directly onto celluloid. For Abraham Ebdus had renounced painting on canvas. The canvases which filled the halls, those lavish, painterly nudes, were his apprentice work, the sentimental traces of his progress toward what had become his lifework, an abstract painting unfolding in time, in the form of painted frames of film. Abraham Ebdus had perhaps finished two minutes of this film. There was nothing to show except the sketches and notes pinned to the walls where the canvases had been before. The large brushes were all stiffened and dry in cans. They’d been replaced with brushes like those a jeweler uses to smooth away diamond dust, and in that third-story studio where window fans whirred, pushing the yellow August sky in to dry the paint, Abraham Ebdus hunched like a jeweler, or a monk copying scrolls, and licked with the tiny brushes at his celluloid frames, his work grown reverent and infinitesimal. Dylan stood at his side and smelled the paint, the thin acrid plume of freshly mixed pigment. He was at the height of the light table on which his father painted, his eyes level and close, and he wondered if his tiny hands might be more suited to the work than his father’s. Bored after a while, he’d sit cross-legged on the floor and draw with his father’s abandoned oil crayons, carefully unpacking them from the metal tin with the French label. Or run his Matchbox car, #11, along the painted floorboards. Or wrestle open an enormous book of reproductions, tipped-in plates, Brueghel or Goya or Manet or De Chirico, and become lost, briefly dreaming himself into a window in the Tower of Babel or a circle of witches sitting with a goat beside a campfire at night or a line of boys with sprouted branches chasing pigs across a brook. In Brueghel and De Chirico he found children playing with hoops like Marilla’s and wondered if he might be allowed to turn her hula on its side and run it down Dean Street with a stick. But the girl with the hoop and the stick on the lonely street in De Chirico had flowing hair like the Solver girls, so never mind.

“That looks the same,” Dylan said, watching his father finish a frame, turn to the next.

“It changes very slightly.”

“I can’t see.”

“You will in time.”

Time, he’d been told, would speed up. Days would fly. They didn’t fly there, on the floor of his father’s studio, but they would. They’d fly, the film would speed up and run together so fast it would appear to move, summer would end, he’d be in school, he was growing up so fast, that was the consensus he alone couldn’t consent to, mired as he felt himself to be, utterly drowning in time there on the studio floor, gazing into Brueghel, searching for the other children among the dogs under the banquet table at the feet of the millers and their wives. Retreating from his father’s studio he’d count the whining stairs.

Downstairs was another problem entirely. His mother’s spaces—the parlor full of her books and records, the kitchen where she cooked food and laughed and argued on the phone, her table full of newspapers and cigarettes and wineglasses—were for Dylan full of unpredictability and unrest, like his mother herself. Mornings she was gone to Schermerhorn Street where she worked. Then Dylan could dwell in the downstairs like a ghost, curling over his own books or in a sun-dazzled nap on the couch, eating leftovers from the fridge or spoonfuls of dry cocoa powder directly from the tin so that his mouth became thick with a clay of cocoa, examining the half-finished crossword on the table, running his Matchbox car, #11, through the ashtrays or around the rim of the pot that housed the gigantic jade plant, which with its thick, rubbery, treelike limbs was another world for Dylan’s specklike self to adventure in and be lost. Then, always before he could compose himself or decide what he wanted from her, Rachel Ebdus would be home, and Dylan would discover that he did not control his mother. Dylan’s solitude which his father left unbruised his mother burst like a grape. She might clutch him and with fingers kneading his skull through his hair say, “You’re so beautiful, so beautiful, you’re such a beautiful boy” or just as likely sit apart from him smoking a cigarette and say, “Where did you come from? Why are you here? Why am I here?” or “You know, precious child, that your father is insane.” Frequently she would show him a magazine with a picture labeled CAN YOU DRAW SPARKY? and say, “That would be easy for you, if you wanted you could win this contest.” When Rachel wanted to fry an egg she’d ask Dylan to stand beside her, then crack the egg on his head and hurry it into the frying pan before it spilled. He’d rub his head, half hurt, half in love. She played him Beatles records, Sergeant Pepper, Let It Be, then asked which was his favorite Beatle.

“Ringo.”

“Children like Ringo,” she told him. “Boys do. Girls like Paul. He’s sexy. You’ll understand.”

She might be crying or laughing or cleaning up a broken dish or clipping the nails of the cats who lived in the backyard, the two who’d stayed from the litter downstairs and had grown and now killed birds regularly among the bricks and vines. “See,” she’d say, squeezing the cat’s paw to extend its claws, “you can’t clip them too close, there’s a blood vessel there, they’ll bleed to death.” She was wild with information he couldn’t yet use: Nixon was a criminal, the Dodgers moved to California, Chinese food gives you a headache, Muhammad Ali resisted the war and went to jail, Hitchcock’s British films were better than his American ones, circumcision was unnecessary but women preferred it. She was too full for the house, had to vent herself constantly into the telephone, and too full for Dylan who instead worked Rachel’s margins, dodging her main force to dip sidelong into what he could make sense of. He might creep downstairs to slink at her shelves, in the shadows, under the nudes. There he could pretend to consider her books— Tropic of Cancer, Kon-Tiki, Letting Go, Games People Play —his eyes blurring while he eavesdropped on her calls, calls,“. . . he’s upstairs . . . California never mattered . . . paying all the bills . . . said the texture of the mushrooms reminded me of something and he turned bright red . . . playing that Clapton record at four in the morning . . . completely lost my French . . .” Alternately, Dylan tiptoed close under the cover of Rachel’s monologue, thinking it was another phone call, to find someone seated at her table instead, drinking iced tea, sharing Rachel’s ashtray, laughing, listening, detecting Dylan’s footfalls which Rachel had ignored.

“There he is,” they’d say, as if Dylan were always the topic just abandoned.

Then he was beckoned to the table to be met. Dylan would recall the visitors only as Rachel described them later, to Abraham at dinner: the not-brilliant folksinger who’d opened for Bobby Dylan once and wouldn’t let you forget it, the horny yippie who faced prosecution for stuffing subway turnstiles with slugs, the rich homosexual who collected art but wouldn’t buy one of Abraham’s nudes because they were women, the radical black minister from Atlantic Avenue who had to scrutinize everyone new in the neighborhood, the old boyfriend who now worked as a piano tuner at Carnegie Hall but might join the Peace Corps to keep out of Vietnam, the Gurdjieff-quoting English couple on their way to bicycle across Mexico, the woman from the Brooklyn Heights consciousness-raising group who just couldn’t believe they’d bought on Dean Street. So many of them, all reaching for Dylan’s head to muss his hair and ask why Rachel let it grow into his eyes, grow to his shoulders. Dylan looked like a girl—that was agreed on by pretty much everyone.

Then—and this was finally always the essential problem with floating downstairs—Rachel would stir from her chair, cigarette in her fingers, and usher Dylan to the front door, point out the children playing on the sidewalk, insist that he join them. Rachel had a program, a plan. She had grown up a Brooklyn street kid and so would Dylan. And so she’d eject him from the first of his two worlds, the house, into the second. The outside, the block. Dean Street.

The second world was an arrangement of zones in slate, and the peeling painted fronts of the row houses—pink, white, pale green, various tones of red and blue, always giving way to the brick underneath—those were the flags of undiscovered realms which lay behind and probably determined the system of slate zones. As far as Dylan could tell no kid ever went into another’s home. They didn’t talk about their parents either. Dylan knew nothing else to talk about, and so drifted silently into the group of children, who seemed to understand this, and vaguely parted their ranks to make room for him. Maybe every kid had drifted in this way.

Nevins and Bond Streets, which bracketed the block at either end, were vents into the unknown, routes to the housing projects down on Wyckoff Street. Anyway, the Puerto Rican men in front of the bodega on Nevins owned the corner. Another group, black men mostly, lingered in the doorway of a rooming house between the Ebduses’ and Isabel Vendle’s, and they would shoo away the ball-playing boys, yelling at them to watch out for the windshield of a car forever parked in front of the rooming house, a Stingray, which one Puerto Rican man with a waxed mustache frequently polished and rarely drove. Finally, a mean black man who glared but never spoke broomed the slate and scissored weeds in front of two houses close to Bond Street. So the children of Dean Street instinctively bunched in the middle of the block.

Henry was a black kid with a younger brother, Earl, and a front yard which was paved flat instead of a plot of ruined or halfheartedly gardened ground. The low fence dividing Henry’s paved housefront from the slate of the sidewalk was stone as well, poured cement. Henry was three years older than Dylan. His stoop and yard formed the meeting point, the base of operations. Older boys from farther down the block would arrive and choose sides. Principally Davey and Alberto from across the street and near the corner, from the house which overflowed with cousins and whose stoop was for teenagers smoking. They’d arrive arms swinging, bouncing a new spaldeen. They’d buy a strawberry Yoo-Hoo and share it and give Henry or Henry’s friend Lonnie the cap for skully. Dylan sat with Earl on Henry’s stoop and watched. Marilla’s fiefdom of black girls was across the street. Dylan never went there after the first time, but words crossed Dean Street between Marilla’s yard and Henry’s, and the girls sometimes crossed too. Henry’s yard was the center and Henry was the center. Henry always chose the game.

Two doors from Henry’s was the abandoned house. It wore cinderblock bandages over the windows and doorway like a mummy with blanked eyes and stilled howling mouth, and had a blasted yard with no fence or gate. The stoop was barren too, no rail. Possibly someone had taken the ironwork for scrap. The mummy house was a flat surface with no windows, so it made a high wall for wallball, a game where a spaldeen was bounced high against the wall by a thrower and caught by a catcher standing in the field of the street, zipping between cars to make the catch.

A spaldeen fit a hand perfectly and often seemed to be magnetized there. Henry and Davey in particular seemed only to have to lope a step or two and raise their hand to have a ball appear in their palms. A shot winged off the third floor of the abandoned house flew out the farthest, and one which cleared the gates on the opposite side of the street was a home run. Henry seemed able to do this at will and the fact that he didn’t each time was mysterious. Henry could err too, throw too high and roof a spaldeen, and then the groan would go out to buy another, and pocket change was collected. “That’s how many up there by now?” mused Alberto one day. “If I could get up there I’d be throwing them down all day.”

Dylan and Earl would be sent to visit the bodega and say the pregnant word, spaldeen, and Old Ramirez would supply another one suspiciously, resenting the business. Dylan would fondle the newborn pink spaldeen but surrender it instantly to Henry, and likely not touch it again until it was scuffed and enervated, bounced out from a thousand angled hurls. That was if Dylan touched it again at all. His chance came between games, the airy transitions when all arms unexplainedly dropped and someone asked for a suck of someone else’s Yoo-Hoo and someone else turned their T-shirt inside out stretched over their elbows, to the laughter of the girls. The spaldeen would roll inert to the gutter and Dylan could retrieve it and marvel at its destruction. Now it deserved roofing. Maybe Henry had a system, like an umpire taking baseballs out of circulation.

The stoop of the abandoned house was also a proscenium stage for secrets, hidden in plain sight in the middle of the block. The broken slate in front of the abandoned house was thirty feet of no-man’s-land. Dean Street’s trees bunched, like the kids, in the center of the block. They seemed particularly inclined to cover the abandoned house in dappled shade, blobs of light like those thrown by the backyard ailanthus into Dylan’s bedroom, and to muffle the sound of parents calling kids’ names in for dinner into distant phenomena, like birds’ cries. Dylan walked his side of Dean with his head lowered and memorized the slate, could say when he was in front of Henry’s or the abandoned house without glancing up, just by the shapes at his feet, the long tilted slabs or the one sticking-up moonlike shape or the patch of concrete or the shattered pothole which always filled with water after those summer thunderstorms which came and instantly broke the humid afternoons into dark, electrified pieces.

Wallball, stickball, stoopball, touch. Henry and Lonnie played Alberto and Davey most afternoons, touch in the street, Puerto Rican against black, two-man football, screaming for a long catch in the stolen time between passing cars and the Dean Street bus. The bus stopped the game the longest, the players pressed impatiently against the doors of parked cars to make room, waving the bus on, faster, faster, go. Don’t be afraid of hitting us, they waved at the drivers. Just go, damn, don’t watch us, we watch ourselves.

One day Henry slapped the side of the bus hard with his palms, then lay flat in the street as though hit. The big bus ground to a halt and stood pulsing in the middle of the block, passengers craning heads to peer open-mouthed through the windows while the driver stepped out to see. Then Henry stood and laughed and ran, freakily fast, feet kicking back like a cartoon, and disappeared around the corner. Lonnie and Alberto laughed at the driver and then pointed down the block. “It wasn’t me, man,” said Lonnie, still laughing, spreading his hands wide in innocence. “Fuck you want me to do? I don’t even know the guy, he’s a crazy kid from the projects.” This lie was told in the street in front of Henry’s yard, his home. But the projects explained pretty much anything, so the driver shook his head and got back in the bus. Dylan watched.

The girls might play tag. There was something faintly regrettable and unmanly about tag but if the girls played Henry and Lonnie played too, and then Dylan and Earl were slipped into the circle of tapped feet—Eeny, meeny, miney, Moe, my-mother-says-to-pick-the-very-next-one. You might be It. As It Dylan floundered madly and sometimes heard himself yell. It made him a little yellish, he couldn’t say why. Nobody cared, everybody yelled sometimes seemed to be the verdict. Games dissolved mysteriously, groups bunched, It split into two, a boy chased a girl to the corner and out of the game. Subjects of focus changed like the angle of light. A kid might have a bunch of baseball cards one day, there was no explanation. Potential skully caps were collected, the need for wax discussed, but skully was never played. Maybe nobody knew how. Isabel Vendle looked out her window. The men on the corner arranged clacking dominoes, the fish store on Nevins Street was full of sawdust, a kid would come up from the projects and pierce the privacy of the Dean Street kids and everyone would be mysteriously jangled. Whole days were mysterious, and then the sun went down.

Dylan didn’t recall giving out his name but everyone knew it and nobody cared what it meant. They might sometimes bother to mention that he looked like a girl but it wasn’t apparently his fault. He couldn’t throw or catch but that was just too bad. Not everyone could was the general drift. So Dylan communed with the spaldeen in distaff moments, when it went dribbling to the curb or was punched down the street by the fender of a passing car. Dylan was pleased to fetch it then for the older boys who stood aggrieved, shaking their heads. The ball might be swept nearly to Nevins Street, to the bodega, it might be stopped by one of the grizzled domino players on the crates who’d peruse it briefly before turning it over. The spaldeen was always scarred from its encounter. “Roof it, Henry,” Dylan would whisper as he ran it back, whisper it to himself, but to the ball too, an incantation. Sometimes roofing it was the very next thing Henry would do. Then instead of calling for a new spaldeen the older boys would abruptly slink off, to hang on Alberto’s gate at the other end of the block and bathe in innuendoes and flicked cigarette butts from the teenagers on the stoop there. The teenagers were waiting for night. Dylan stuck to Henry’s concrete fence, the white kid. He could hear Rachel call from there, beyond he wasn’t so sure. From Henry’s and the abandoned house to his own Dylan knew the slate precisely.

The boy lingered in the study and paged through Isabel’s photo albums while the mother sat on the back terrace, smoking. Isabel watched a squirrel ribbon the telephone pole, begin to scurry across the fence top. The squirrel moved as an oscillating sequence of humps, tail and spine bunching in counterpoint. Some humped things are elegant, Isabel mused, thinking of her own shape.

Inside, an Italian plasterer reshaped a florette on the parlor ceiling, sweating atop a ladder in the corner by the high front window. The boy at Isabel’s table flapped the laden pages, absorbed as if he were reading.

The boy was humped too, over the book. More a hedgehog than a squirrel, Isabel decided.

“Can you get any flavor out of this?” said Isabel to the young mother, frowning.

“Sure,” said Rachel. She hadn’t extinguished her cigarette to accept the beaded glass of ice and soda. The smoke drifted into the August air unstirred.

“For all of me that’s dying my tongue is dying soonest.”

“Maybe put lemon in it,” Rachel suggested.

“I put lemon in my soup. I can’t also put it in my soda. Take the bottle with you when you go. I should drink formaldehyde.”

Rachel Ebdus ignored the remark. She was unshockable, a bad sign if Isabel was looking. The young mother leaned back in her chair perilously, cigarette between fingers on a hand propped over her shoulder. Her black unbrushed hair was madness. Isabel pictured it on fire on her patio in the deafened afternoon.

The man on the ladder gathered excess with his blade and allowed it to drip heavily to the butcher paper on the parlor floor, which crackled as it accepted the weight.

The boy’s intensity, his gaze, might be wearing the gloss off her old photographs. He hadn’t turned a page for a whole minute. He remained curled around the album as Isabel was curled involuntarily around her whole self.

Isabel saw that Rachel Ebdus watched the plasterer. “The old art lives in him,” she told the younger woman. “He drinks beer on his breaks and talks like John Garfield, but look at the ceiling.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“He says his father taught him. He’s only bringing out the beauty which was hiding. He’s an instrument of the ceiling. He doesn’t need to understand.”

Isabel felt irritation with herself or Rachel Ebdus, she wasn’t sure which. She hadn’t brought the image entirely into the light: that though mute, the house conveyed a language of itself, as the plasterer carried forward his father’s trade.

“He’s got a great ass,” said Rachel.

Outside, the squirrel shrieked.

Isabel sighed. She actually craved one of the woman’s cigarettes. Was it possible to begin smoking at seventy-three? Isabel thought she might like to try. Or perhaps she was only impatient with her own inability to fathom anything about Rachel Ebdus besides the woman’s insatiability. And the cigarettes lay on the ironwork grille of Isabel’s patio table within a hand’s reach, whereas the plasterer’s ass was in every sense less accessible.

“If it’s in any way a question of money—” Isabel began, surprising herself by getting to the point.

“No, it isn’t,” said Rachel Ebdus, smiling.

“I don’t want to embarrass you. Both Packer and the Friends School have scholarship possibilities. I don’t know about Saint Ann’s. But I would also be glad to help.”

“It isn’t about money. I believe in public school. I went to public school.”

“That’s idealistic indeed. I do think you’ll find that all his friends will be at one or another of the private schools.”

“Dylan has friends on the block. I doubt they’re going to Brooklyn Friends or Packer.”

Days were not always like this. There were days like white pages, when no squirrels screamed in the trees and no boys leafed through her albums and no plasterer sweated at her ceiling and a neighbor stinking of radicalism and a tenuous marriage did not sit grinding cigarettes into Isabel’s china teacups and enjoying the ginger ale Isabel could no longer taste while offering as conversational checkmate a neat implication of racism, days when the only dischord in the tall Dutch house was the orange cat clawing newspaper bundles in the basement apartment into frayed, piss-smelling bales, days when Isabel sat upstairs at her table, scraping the nib of her pen across the signature line of a check to some moderately worthy cause, or to her favorite and completely unworthy one, her nephew Croft who’d hidden himself at a commune in Bloomington, Indiana, after impregnating a black cook at the house in Silver Bay and who, she’d been assured, divided Isabel’s monthly donation neatly in half, sending one portion to the distant cook and her child and donating the other to the commune’s petty-cash reserves for food and marijuana. To hell with Rachel Ebdus. Isabel subsidized feral hippies and the mulatto offspring of her criminal relations and Rachel Ebdus could certainly send Dylan, God help him, to Public School 38 to show his sole white face among that ocean of brown, to air his waterfall of girlish hair among the Afros, if that was what suited her principles. Isabel could wish now for this day to be unsquirreled entirely, for it to be one spent not even at her desk but rather one in which she lay in bed still, ignoring the orange cat’s cries, rereading Maugham or De Maupassant.

She wondered if Rachel Ebdus would also have admired Croft’s ass. Likely so.

The boy put the big photo album on the cast-iron patio table and pointed. “That’s your name,” he said inquiringly. Isabel turned, surprised.

The long-ago photographer had in the darkroom burned a row of small white letters at the bottom corner of each of the black-and-white shots of the boats, the harbor, the parties on the lawn: VENDLE’S HARD, SILVER BAY, LAKE GEORGE, NY . The boy pressed his nubby fingertip to Isabel’s family name, and waited for an answer.

Vendle’s Hard. Cranberries soaked in cognac. Emptied bottles rolling in the belly of a skiff. The famous oar, fouled in aquatic vines, that shattered and speared her side, puncturing her lung nearly to the spine. The old injury around which she was so rigidly curled.

“He reads,” said Isabel, allowing herself to be mildly impressed.

“Mmmmh hmm,” said Rachel Ebdus, humming the syllables through the ignition of another cigarette. “He sure does. He reads Abraham’s New York Times.”

“He’ll be with children who’ll never learn,” said Isabel, feeling impulsive and a little cruel. The fact was undeniable. Let Rachel squirm now.

“Maybe he’ll teach them,” Dylan’s mother said easily, then laughed. “It’s a problem for him to solve, school. I did it, so can he.” Cigarette between her fingers pointed to the sky and leaking smoke, she put her hand in Dylan’s hair.

chapter 2

Skully did exist. It was a science more closely related to the Spirograph and the Etch A Sketch than to the spaldeen and Dylan fell on it with gratitude. In fact when it was actually played he lost the game more often than he won but skully was an art that involved the conveyance of a body of knowledge, like the methods of a guild, and by his second summer on the block Dylan had mastered all its peripheral notions and was widely recognized for this mastery. For instance drawing the skully board. The first step involved finding the ideal square of slate and so Dylan’s long communion with the Dean Street sidewalk was rewarded. The slate shouldn’t be flawed by a crack or vein, or tilted, or bowed. Dylan favored a square in front of the blue-painted brownstone, midway between the home of the woman his mother sometimes, laughingly, called Vendlemachine and Henry called the olelady, and Henry’s own house. It was Dylan’s secret that other squares of slate farther down the block were as good or better but that he preferred this one for being nearer his own house and close also to Henry’s, where the kids gathered, and for the way it was shaded by a particular tree—the dynamics of space and sound, the quality of privacy and access, for a whole series of subtle aesthetical distinctions and that he could still hear his mother if she called for him from the stoop of their house—it would have been impossible to express all that went into his selection and so Dylan instead declared it the best square for skully, on the whole. And he was believed. The kids might scratch a skully board into another square from time to time, testing the principle, but after Dylan’s declaration the principle was in place.

Then the chalking of the skully board on the slate. Dylan could draw, though he came to understand this only by the inability of the others to match him. They’d drop their chalk at the sight of his skully boards, and he’d be enlisted by Marilla to draw hopscotch diagrams for the girls who’d otherwise scoffed at his shoes and pants—he wore what they called roachsteppers and highwaters. His skully boards were straight and clean, the four corners numbered elegantly, one, two, three, four, the winner’s zone in the center embellished with a double circle, his own innovation. This, like his choice of slate, became institutional, so much that one day Lonnie and Marilla scoffingly insisted it had always been done that way, and Dylan’s authorship of the double-ringed winner’s circle was permanently obscured.

Other innovations were resisted outright. Dylan one day designed a star-shaped skully board, where players would be expected to shoot their caps from triangular corners into center stage, as in Chinese checkers, a game which Dylan had been taught in his kindergarten class. Nobody understood, nobody played—it wasn’t skully. Dylan wiped the board away but the six heavily chalked points of the star remained etched lightly on the slate to haunt him until the next hard rain.

Then there was the making of the skully caps. Metal bottle tops from soda or beer were the standard, and the slightly heavier tops lined with cork were best, though from time to time a kid would experiment with a plastic cap, or a wide metal one from some other type of jar or bottle, ketchup, even pickles or applesauce. The notion of a monster cap, one which would drive opponents off the board with crushing blows, haunted the institution of skully. But in practice the bigger caps were unwieldy, tended to hang across the boundary lines, and were painful to shoot hard across the board with flicked fingers. You could fool with a big cap before it was filled with wax but then it would skid and slide right off the board too easily, and anyway a cap not filled with wax wasn’t really skully. You wanted wax. Candles could be bought or “boosted”—shoplifted—from Mr. Ramirez’s bodega, or volunteered by Dylan from his mother’s bedside supply. And Dylan became an expert at melting the candles, an operation always performed on the stoop of the abandoned house in the cause of not freaking out either parents or “little kids”—though Dylan and Earl were still the littlest kids around, apart from a couple of mute girls in severe cornrows—with lit matches. Then damping the wax into the cap, so it hardened into a smooth whole without seams or bumps, one which wouldn’t pop out when struck by an opponent’s cap. Like a tiny factory Dylan made rows of perfect skully caps and lined them up along the stoop: vanilla Yoo-Hoo with pink wax, Coke with green, Coco Rico, the cork of the cap still stinking of sugar, with white.

Strangely, after Dylan’s rapid rise to chief alchemist and philosopher of skully, nobody seemed to want to play the game anymore. Dylan presided over an ideal slate which was persistently shirked, deserted in favor of just about anything including standing around Henry’s front yard with hands in pockets, kicking at one another’s ankles and saying, “Fuck you, motherfucker.” Perhaps the Dean Street kids had never really been able to keep their attention on skully but only on the attendant crafts, on puzzling out the tradition. So much easier to tell a younger boy that he didn’t know to play skully than to have to play him to take his caps away, and what good were the caps anyway? Everybody lost their caps or even perversely threw them at the passing bus to watch them ding harmlessly and go wheeling into the gutter. Maybe skully sucked. Maybe to perfect a thing was to destroy it.

The Solver girls moved away. That was the first surprise. One day they were gone. Isabel Vendle peered out her window and saw the van, the movers tramping down the stoop with liquor-store boxes loaded with books and glassware, the girls on the sidewalk in the skates that seemed to grow from their ankles, whirling untouchable as ever, one final taunting pirouette. The girls’ parents hadn’t paid Isabel the courtesy of saying a word, hadn’t apparently known they were lines in a blueprint drawn by Isabel, founding participants in her Boerum Hill. So at the very start the circle shrank.

It didn’t matter much to Dylan, though. The Solver girls had gone to Saint Ann’s for school that first year, had vanished into Brooklyn Heights. They didn’t live on Dean Street, they floated above it. Dylan had gone to first grade at Public School 38 on the next block, real school, according to Rachel, public school. “He’s one of three white children in the whole school,” he’d overheard her boasting on the phone. “Not his class, not his grade—the whole school.”

She made it sound important. Dylan didn’t want to disillusion Rachel, but in fact each day his time in the classroom at P.S. 38 was only a prelude to affairs on the block. Kids in school didn’t look at each other, they looked at the teacher. Nobody Dylan knew from the street was in his class except Earl and one of the silent girls from Marilla’s yard. Henry and Alberto and the others were older and though they were presumably at the same school might as well have been in some other galaxy during the hours Dylan spent listening to Miss Lupnick teach the alphabet or how to tell time or what were the major holidays, hours Dylan spent reading the classroom’s small collection of tattered picture books over and over until he’d memorized them, hours spent abstracted, scribbling his pencil, drawing utopian skully boards with ten, twenty, fifty corners, drawing rectangles like frames of his father’s painted film and filling them in until they were entirely black. The alphabet Miss Lupnick taught was represented on the wall above her head by a series of personified cartoonlike letters—Mr. A, Eating an Apple; Mrs. B, Buying a Broom; and so on—and something insipid about the parade of grinning letters defeated Dylan’s will utterly. He sensed that no narrative could be constructed that would make Mr. A and Mrs. B do anything other than Eat an Apple or Buy a Broom and he couldn’t bear to drag his eyes along the row of letters atop the chalkboard to discover what it was that Mr. L or Mrs. T were doomed to do. Miss Lupnick read stories, so slowly it was agony. Miss Lupnick played records, songs about crossing the street and how different men had different jobs. Was someone trying to entertain him? Dylan had never learned less in his life. He glanced from side to side but the other kids sat blank-eyed in invisible cages at his left and right, legs tangled in the chair-desks, fingers up their noses. Some of them might be learning the alphabet, you couldn’t say from their faces. Some were from the projects. One girl was Chinese, which was strange if you thought about it. Whatever, they were helpless to assist or communicate with one another. Older kids picked up the first graders after class and led them away as though retarded, shaking their heads. What had the first graders done all day in class? Nobody could really say. The teacher talked to them like they were a dog all day and by three o’clock it was like leading a dog home.

The kids in your first-grade class might be in your second-grade class or you might never see them again. It might not matter. Even the ones you knew from the block you didn’t know in school. Dylan tried to touch his nose with his tongue until someone told him to stop. One or two kids didn’t ask to go to the bathroom until it was too late and they’d peed in their chair. One kid scratched his ear until it started bleeding. Sometimes Dylan could barely recall first grade seconds after bursting out onto Dean Street again.

The strange and unfortunate Abraham Ebdus might actually be on to something, she admitted privately. Time was indeed a series of days, and the film of the block’s changing was as static as a series of hand-painted frames, considered singly. The New York Times had put her new name for the neighborhood into print, Boerum Hill —that was something. But Isabel Vendle wished to see the film in motion now, the frames run together, trees hurrying in the wind instead of dying in the humid stillness, the abandoned house unbricked and rescued. Growth, process, renovation. The only thing that moved on the block were the boys in the traffic, like insects skating on the surface of a still pond, the one white skimming among the black. The incinerator at the Wyckoff Houses housing project was on fire every other day, or so it seemed, a plume rose which the air refused to dissolve. A single man had bought the house with the terrible blue siding and threatened to renovate so slowly that it might as well be never. He lived in one room near the back and renovated from the inside out so that no one could tell the house wasn’t a ruin. It was a ruin, the block was hopeless, and Pacific Street was progressing more quickly than Dean. Isabel wished she could tear away the blue siding with her own hands, an idiotic thought, but nevertheless: she wished she could paste money over the blue siding which stung her eyes like ointment, wished she could slather money over Dean Street entirely, could bribe the man with the car with the painted flames to polish it on Pacific or Nevins instead or just to drive it into the Gowanus Canal. She didn’t actually have so much money as that. She had white paper and envelopes and stamps and days which refused to end—a thunderstorm might break the heat and an hour afterward the humidity clamped itself over the block again as though no thunder had struck. She wrote to Croft, who’d gotten another woman on the commune pregnant, I’m running out of days, Croft, or maybe not. I can’t tell if I’m any older than I was forty-seven years ago when as a mere girl the oar pierced my side and Croft you’re a fool. Croft to her was becoming a character in Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter or The Comedians, Croft ought to be made to swelter on some imperial island, he ought to be brought up on charges by outraged local authorities.

It was hard to say when Robert Woolfolk began hanging around. He was from somewhere down Nevins Street, maybe the projects, maybe not. One day he was there on the stoop of the abandoned house, another day he sat on Henry’s low wall and looked at the girls. Then he got into a game or two, though he wasn’t really a game player. Robert Woolfolk was taller than Henry and could fling a ball as far but there was something disorganizing in him as a presence that broke games apart, some slangy way of moving his arms and head that could only throw football interceptions or roof a spaldeen. Once he stood a few feet from the implacable surface of the abandoned house, while a catcher waited in the street, and somehow hurled a spaldeen in such a way that it flew directly sideways to smash a parlor window in the house next door. Woolfolk could run, they agreed after that. He’d danced around the corner of Nevins, like Henry after pretending to be hit by the bus, seemingly before the glass rained out of its frame to the garden below, while the ball itself actually penetrated the window to be lost inside the house, an unheard-of accomplishment. The other kids stood gazing in a mixture of astonishment and defiance. They hadn’t been the ones to throw it, after all. Robert Woolfolk didn’t appear again for two weeks after his miraculous aberrant throw, during which time the landlord next door to the abandoned house had replaced the pane with a cardboard patch, then stood every day on his stoop for a week glaring at the afternoon players, who dispersed guiltily into football or tag or just pushing one another off Henry’s low concrete wall, glancing back at the landlord and muttering softly, too softly for the landlord to hear, “Damn, man. What are you looking at?” until the landlord wearied of his symbolic protest and hired a glazier to replace the patch with a new pane. Once the Dean Street kids felt it safe to wield a spaldeen again they spent an afternoon or two trying to reproduce something like the perverse and famous throw but couldn’t, the angle was sheerly impossible. When Robert Woolfolk came peering back around the corner they tried to involve him in the experiment but he refused for days, sulking around the edges of the game. When, finally made curious by their egging, Robert Woolfolk consented to touch a spaldeen again, it had an abrupt dampening effect. The kids scattered before he could approach the wall, traumatized by the possibility that his arm would shoot out again in its hectic way, and Robert Woolfolk was left to pocket their new spaldeen and go home, wherever that was.

Nobody seemed to know where Robert Woolfolk lived.

Robert Woolfolk might live in the projects and just not say.

Likely he did live in the projects.

“He’s got a fucked-up name,” said Henry one day, to nobody in particular.

“Who?”

“Will Fuck.”

“Mother fuck,” added Alberto, sort of generically inspired. No one else spoke.

That was the whole conversation. The words floated away, or so you would have thought. But two days later Robert Woolfolk lurked on Henry’s stoop and everyone sensed the unsavory weight of his vigil there. You could read it in the noncommittal language of the kids staked out at various distances, nobody playing anything specific in the claylike, immovable afternoon. Henry stood especially proud and oblivious, slanting handball shots from inside his yard into the joint of the pavement at his low wall, not looking at Robert Woolfolk.

“Why don’t you come here for a minute?” said Robert. He was leaned back, one knee up, other leg sprawled with toe pointing inward, elbows braced on the stoop, shoulders up around his ears, hands dangling dangerously. He resembled a puppet with live eyes, his strings limp just for a moment.

“I’m right here,” said Henry.

“Why don’t you say my name again?”

The question was what alliance ran invisibly around the corner to Nevins Street, whose voice had found Robert Woolfolk’s ear, and where, and when. Each kid wondered and had to consider the possibility that he alone didn’t know, that the lines of force were visible to the others. The Dean Street kids were widened in that instant, a gasp of breath went in and out of the lung of summer just then. It made you dizzy to taste the new air.

“I never said your name.”

“So say it now.”

“Go home.”

When Robert Woolfolk undraped from the steps and bid at Henry it was like his famous spaldeen throw. You could never have predicted his one bony arm would wrap around Henry’s waist so that they crumpled, knees folding together like spooning lovers, Robert on top, to the pavement of Henry’s yard. Robert didn’t punch until they were on the ground, and then he kneed and punched maniacally, his eyes and mouth and whole face squeezed shut as if he were underwater, boxing a shark. Henry wriggled into a ball. For a moment the combatants were both viewed distantly, through a haze of watery interference. Then the silence broke with a rush, the fight bobbed up from its oceanic depths and the kids pushed in close to watch. How else would they have heard the strange whining sounds, the almost animal keening which came out of both of the bodies in Henry’s yard? You were learning something. That kids fought was understood but your chances to see it were still rare. The same sound might come out of your own body one of these days. It was worth a look, worth holding back a moment from breaking it up no matter what your sympathies, which anyway weren’t so clear. Then you broke it up, shouting “Breakitup! Breakitup!”—words that emerged by fluent instinct though you’d never spoken them before. In this case, Alberto dashed into Henry’s yard and pulled Robert off by his shoulders.

“See, see, see,” said Robert Woolfolk, breathing like a bellows, pointing his finger. Captured by Alberto, arms wrapped, he still raged toward Henry, and his and Alberto’s legs trembled like those of an animal bucking and cringing in its stall. He’d scraped the top of his hand to bleeding on the pavement or perhaps on Henry’s teeth. “See, that’s what you get, see, that’s what you get.” Robert Woolfolk elbowed out of Alberto’s embrace and stalked back to the corner of Nevins. He turned just once at the corner to scream, “See!” Almost as if it was someone’s name he was calling. Then he vanished.

Nevins Street was a river of unhappiness running through the land of Dean Street.

Who cleaned Robert Woolfolk’s clothes, for instance?

He probably wouldn’t come back for a while. He’d probably come back after a while.

Maybe he had a brother or a sister.

Nobody could say.

There wasn’t any way to think about it. No one was accountable. The traffic of cars and the bus rolled past under the shade of Dean Street’s trees, whirring through blobs of light and shadow. The drivers were blinded by the flicker. The men in the doorway of the rooming house advertised disregard in the way they wore their little felt hats even in this weather. They drank discreetly from a sack. Anything they thought to say they said in Spanish or kept to themselves. Probably everybody’s mother was in the kitchen making dinner now—assuming they had a mother. Nobody looked at the kids in Henry’s yard. The old white lady didn’t even look out her window so much these days.

Sometimes the kids didn’t even look at each other. You could argue for hours about who said what or who was really there when something important happened. Pretty often it turned out that someone hadn’t been there in the first place. The girls never confirmed anything for anyone, though you’d supposed they were right there, watching. Marilla might know a given kid’s sister and you’d never hear a word about it. Days were full of gaps, probably because they were too alike. And when something big happened it was impossible to hold it clear. The gaps rushed in even there.

Henry, for his part, revived instantly and disdained any injury, though he had a shiny stripe of blood under his nose. He sucked it back and wiped it away, swallowed. He ran his tongue around his teeth and straightened his limbs, which were on the whole a lot straighter than Robert Woolfolk’s. The fat lip was more an attitude than anything else, an earned sneer.

“Stupid motherfucking shitty bastard.”

“Huh.”

“Bet you he won’t come back.”

“Huh.”

It was suddenly conceivable Henry had been pummeling Robert Woolfolk and not the other way around—from the way he shrugged the fight off and threw several arching stoopball home runs right afterward you had to consider whether you’d misjudged from appearances. You couldn’t always tell the winner by who was on top. They’d all seen how Robert Woolfolk ran off after Alberto pulled the fighters apart, or at least walked quickly in his loping manner, and alone.

Here was the thing about the fight between Henry and Robert Woolfolk: Dylan Ebdus never was able to sort out whether he’d been there and watched it himself or only heard every detail, burnished into legend by the other kids. He just couldn’t work it out, and after a while quit trying.

The film was changing. In the early frames, the first four thousand or so, abstracted cartoonish figures had cavorted against a sort of lakeside, a shore and sky which might also be a desertscape sprouted with weeds. The figures he’d painted with his needle-thin brushes could be cactus or fungus or gas station pumps or gunfighters or charioteers or florid reefs—sometimes in his mind he named them as figures from mythology, though he knew the mythological allusions were a vestige, a literary impulse he should have already purified from his work. Yet without confessing it completely he had scrubbed a tiny golden fleece over the shoulder of one of the figures as it darted and wiggled through two or three hundred frames. He saw the figures dart and wiggle, of course, in his mind’s eye, as though the film were running on its sprockets through a projector. In fact the endless painted film was still, had never been shown. He didn’t want to run it until the end, whenever that would be. He’d been offered a hand-cranked editing device for viewing short sequences of celluloid and refused it. The stillness of the film was part of the project. Each frame bore the weight of this cumulative discretion. Together the frames made a diary of painter’s days, one which would confess its life only at the finish.

Now the figures, the airy dancers, were expunged from the frames. They’d melted into blobs of light. He’d shelved the thinnest brushes, the jeweler’s tools, let them stiffen. The bright forms he painted now, the simpler and more luminous blobs and rectangles of color, hovered against a horizon which had evolved from the reedy, brushy lakeshore of the early frames into a distant blurred horizon, a sunset or storm over a vast and gently reflective plain. The hued forms in the foreground which he painted again and again until he knew them like language, until they moved like words through meaning into nonsense and again into purer meaning—these were beginning to merge with the horizon, to flow in and out of the depths of the tiny celluloid frames. He allowed this. In time, over many days, the forms would become what they wished. By painting them again and again with the minutest variation he would purify them and the story of their purification would be the plot of the film he was painting.

He’d begun looking out the window. One day he loaded a large brush with paint and outlined the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower on the glass pane itself, then filled in the outline so that the painted tower blotted out the tower in the distance.

As in the newer frames of his film, the painted glass flattened distance into proximity.

Each time the boy visited the studio he looked different.

His wife joked that she should have the phone company put a new line into his studio so she could call from the kitchen downstairs. When they fought now he’d forget halfway through what the point was. He knew she could easily spot that moment of surrender, when abstraction washed through his eyes, erasing language. In his mind he’d be painting a frame. His fingers twitched for the brush.

His old teacher called from the Art Students League, to ask why he wasn’t painting anymore. He said, “I paint every day.”

Second grade was first grade with math. Third grade was second grade with a period in the schoolyard to play kickball, a version of baseball with a giant blubbery ball, dull red and pebbled like a rubber bathmat, which was pitched along the ground toward home plate and that a better kick could get aloft. A fly ball was almost uncatchable, it was bigger than a kid when it was flying through the air. Positioning yourself under a fly was just stupid, and if you reasoned out what happened after the outfielder invariably stepped aside pretty much anything in the air was a home run. You just ran, you didn’t look to see if they were throwing it in. More often, though, you didn’t get it in the air. A mistimed kick scudded back idiotically to the pitcher and you were thrown out at first base.

Still, a home run. If you put the bloated thing in the air half the time everyone on the field fell down. There’d be a kid on his ass at every base as you went by.

Anything you painted, however slapdash, got hung on the wall. The brushes at school, though, were like painting with your elbows if you had any point of comparison. The school paint dried like scabs.

Nobody peed in their chair anymore.

A book report told the story of a book.

Second grade had two Chinese kids, and third grade had three, a soothing presence since they always had their hands up. Where they went after school was a mystery. They weren’t white and they weren’t not, so that was a plus. It prevented things from getting too black and white and Puerto Rican. At the current rate you’d all be Chinese by high school, which come to think of it might solve a few problems.

It wasn’t their fault they were Chinese, and if you asked them about it they’d shrug—they knew it wasn’t their fault. Everyone knew. In third grade you were still only just settling into your skin and couldn’t be expected to answer for it. After that was anyone’s guess.

chapter 3

Vendlemachine lay on her high bed in the parlor. The gray-yellow October light which filtered through the tall curtains swarmed with motes, with writhing flecks that made the slanted light appear as solid as the polished oak spindles of the bed frame and the third-full glasses of water and cognac on the bedside table and the cane leaned against the table and more solid than the faintly stirring limbs of the tiny woman curled on the bed, now groping slowly for the cane without yet turning her light-haloed head from the pillow in which it was buried.

“I fell asleep,” she said distantly.

Dylan Ebdus didn’t speak, but stood not crossing the line into the room filled with the haze and piquancy of the old woman.

“You were long.”

Dylan found his voice. “There was a line.” He’d ferried another clutch of her hand-scratched letters on cream stationery to the post office on Atlantic Avenue and stood waiting for his turn at the Plexiglas window, studying the wanted signs and the posters promoting stamp collecting and literacy, scuffing his sneaker toes at the scraps of paper, the yellow slips and torn government envelopes that layered the floor.

Dylan worked for Isabel Vendle for a dollar an hour each Saturday morning the year of his tenth birthday, the year of fourth grade. Vendlemachine, Vendlemachine, Dylan sang in his head, though he’d never said it aloud once beyond his own doorstep, not even whispered it alone in Isabel Vendle’s house on those days when she was away visiting family at Lake George and he used her key and let himself in through the basement door to gather her mail and pour dry food into a dish for the orange cat.

Vendlemachine was Rachel’s word. Rachel Ebdus awarded secret nicknames to her visitors and to people who lived on Dean Street and Dylan understood they couldn’t be leaked from the house, from Rachel’s kitchen. His mother had instilled this doubleness: there were things Rachel and Dylan could say to one another and then there was the official language of the world, which, though narrowed and artificial, had to be mastered in the cause of the world’s manipulation. Rachel made Dylan know that the world shouldn’t know everything he thought about it. And it certainly shouldn’t know her words— asshole, pothead, gay, pretentious, sexy, grass —nor should the bearers of nicknames know the nicknames: Mr. Memory, Pepe le Peu, Susie Cube, Captain Vague, Vendlemachine.

His father’s nickname was The Collector.

Vendlemachine stayed upstairs each Saturday morning while Dylan took out the foul, liquefied garbage in the tall pail in the basement kitchen and lined the pail with a new bag. Isabel couldn’t lift a bag of garbage herself and so the smell massed for seven days, waiting for Dylan to uncork it. Then the silent and massive orange cat would creep downstairs to watch. It had a skull like a Gila monster. Dylan couldn’t know whether the orange cat loathed him or Isabel or was indifferent, couldn’t know what it understood about Dylan’s situation, so it was useless as a witness. It might not even know that Isabel wasn’t meant to be bent the way she was, might instead regard Isabel as a standard for the human form and therefore find Dylan’s shape objectionable. Nevertheless the orange cat was the only witness. It seemed to live for the moment each week when the garbage was transferred and the room inflated with the stink of coffee grinds and orange peels and stale milk.

“I don’t want to work for you anymore,” Dylan Ebdus said to Isabel Vendle now as she swam in the coverings of her bed, in the mustiness and shadow. The orange cat sat in a solitary pool of clean sunlight near the parlor windows, ducking its reptile head rhythmically against its paw.

Isabel moaned softly into the silence.

Dylan waited.

Outside the Dean Street bus breathed down the block, took the pothole which served as home plate with a clunk, then shuddered on.

“I need you to go to the store,” Isabel said at last. “Not Ramirez. Go to Mrs. Bugge’s on Bergen.” Isabel Vendle pronounced the name of the Norwegian immigrant woman Byu-gah. Everyone else on the block called the shop on the corner of Bergen and Bond, the bodega that wasn’t a bodega because instead of Puerto Ricans it was run by a fat white woman with tiny eyes, Buggy’s.

Ho, snap—you lifted some cakes from Buggy’s? I heard Buggy’s German shepherd once bit a kid’s ass off.

Isabel raised her arm from the bed and let her fingertips fall on the side table. Her nails rapped lightly. Dylan came close, crossing the invisible line into the aquarium light of Isabel’s parlor bedroom, to gather the bills which lay there.

“Kraft American slices, Thomas’ muffins, and a quart of milk.” The old woman spoke as if describing a recurrent dream. “Five dollars should be enough.”

Dylan crumpled Isabel’s money into his pocket, wondering now if he’d spoken aloud. “I, don’t, want, to, work—” he began again, softly, carefully, spacing the words.

“Skim milk,” said Isabel.

“Idon’twanttoworkforyou,” Dylan said quickly.

The orange cat blinked up.

“It tastes like water,” Isabel mused. “White water.”

The block was empty except for a couple of teenagers on Alberto’s stoop near the corner. Dylan didn’t know where the kids were. It was October, getting colder, everyone was wearing jackets and ranging away from the block. Henry left to play football in the schoolyard near Smith Street and Earl just didn’t come out. Somebody had left a bottle in a bag on the stoop of the abandoned house. Days before there’d been a guy sleeping on the stoop, one of those drinkers who just nested for a while. A stained paper bag was like a pissed pair of green pants, it was only a matter of where the leak showed. That’s why they called it a leak.

Dylan cornered Bond Street, feeling how irrational a block was, one face so familiar, the housefronts and slate walk a surfaced iceberg, one with Dylan’s own flag planted on it, his chalk skully boards, the ghostly traces of his chasing down a ball or being tagged It. The rest of the block was under water. Dylan for years had clung to this one face, bent over the slates as though they were sheets of Spirograph paper on the floor of his room, not noticing until too late that they were part of an edifice which curled past Bond and Nevins Street, into the unknown. He’d sooner take Isabel’s letters all the way to Atlantic Avenue to the post office than walk around the corner to Buggy’s. He didn’t trust Bergen Street. He could feel the sidewalk tilt there.

Robert Woolfolk sat draped on the stoop beside Buggy’s, leaned back just as he had been on Henry’s the day of the fight, the knuckles of his knees seeming higher than his shoulders though they rested two steps lower. Dylan stopped there before the store, commanded. The sun of the day made a desert of light all around them, and the traffic was still and distant. Dylan could see the bus up near Smith Street, where it seemed to rest at a tilt, fatigued. Dylan heard church bells.

“You work for that old lady?”

Dylan tried to shake his head for a thousand reasons. He thought of Isabel swimming in her bed, the nearest authority for miles. Or there was Buggy and her dog, a pane of glass away, but they were entombed inside a cave of products, rice, bicarbonate, Nestlé’s Quik. The store was so dark inside Dylan imagined Buggy would wilt if she ever stepped out into the sun.

“You got her money in your pocket?”

Dylan was certain he’d said nothing.

“How much you got?”

“I have to buy milk,” Dylan said dumbly.

“How much she pay you for doing her errands, a dollar? You got it on you now?”

“She gives it to my mother,” Dylan lied spontaneously, amazing himself.

Robert only turned his head quizzically, lazily, and swung his hand where it dangled from the step, as though just then discovering his wrist’s capacity for motion. His slung weight didn’t cleave from the stoop.

The two of them were in a rehearsal for something, Dylan sensed. How much of something, and whether it was personal to him and Robert or larger than that, he couldn’t yet say.

So he stood frozen while Robert continued to examine him.

“Go buy milk,” Robert said at last.

Dylan moved for Buggy’s door.

“But if you come around here with that old lady’s money next time I might have to take it off you.”

Dylan recognized this as a sort of philosophical musing. He was grateful for the implied sense of pooled information. He and Robert could move forward together from this point into whatever was required.

“Tell Henry fuck you,” added Robert in a meaningless flourish.

Dylan ducked his head inside the dark, cheese-acrid storefront. Buggy’s German shepherd snapped up to the limit of its chain behind the counter, whining into a single pointed bark, and Buggy floated out of the back like a pale bloated pickle in a jar to hover at the register. When Dylan emerged with the brown sack of groceries Robert was gone.

It was a whole week and Sunday morning again before Dylan found his voice. Abraham was in his high room, Rachel in her garden, Dylan stewing alone in his room as he dressed at noon, the ritual time. Downstairs he paused in the kitchen calculating his defection, then went down the backyard stair. He approached his mother where she kneeled on the cold ground beneath the bare ailanthus, hacking with a trident at a network of unwanted roots, cigarette smoldering from between her lips. The cigarette’s filter was smudged with mud. Rachel wore jeans and an orange denim jacket and a Dodgers cap. Rejected blooms lay heaped in a pile of green and brown that bleached and shrank in the air as Dylan stood watching.

When he opened his mouth Robert Woolfolk was left out of the story.

“Poor old Vendlemachine. So don’t work for her, kiddo.”

“I tried to tell her, though.”

“What do you mean you tried?”

“I said it two times.”

“You’re kidding me, Dylan.”

“She pretended not to listen.”

“Just ignored you?”

Dylan nodded.

“Come on,” she said. She stood and brushed the dirt from her thighs. “We’ll go together.”

Dylan absorbed the thrill of Rachel’s indignation, his breath short. “Maybe you should just call her,” he said as they went into the kitchen.

Rachel scrubbed under her nails at the sink, and slurped from her cooled coffee.

“Let’s see what she has to say,” she said, and Dylan was silent, understanding that his fate was to cross Isabel’s threshold at least once again.

In the yard of the abandoned house the boys who would never be invited to work for Isabel Vendle played running bases: two basemen tossing a spaldeen between two squares designated as bases and four or five base stealers—Earl, Alberto, Lonnie, some other Puerto Rican kid. The runners bunched in between, bobbing and colliding like cartoon mice, while Henry gripped the ball and faked a throw once, twice, three times, wagging the spaldeen, showing it to them like a stuck-out tongue as he threatened the chase with a stomped footfall in their direction, until his bluff became irresistible and in glee and exhaustion the congregated runners surged, loping toward his base as though his hand was empty, and were tagged out one after the other in quick sequence. The base runners lolled their heads, drunk on being fooled, on Henry’s mastery.

Robert Woolfolk wasn’t among them.

Maybe nobody saw Dylan looking. Often a kid was invisible walking with his mother halfway down the block. You didn’t look, you didn’t want to get mixed up in that space between a kid and his parents.

Then Earl waved, but he could have been pointing out a bird or a cloud in the sky. Instead of returning the wave Dylan looked up at the sky himself, pretended he’d seen something move there, a body dart across the cornices, or leap from one side of Dean Street to the other.

“I’m Croft,” said the man who opened Isabel Vendle’s door, amused with himself already. “You’re the kid that works for Isabel, I guess.” He shook Dylan’s hand comically before looking up at Rachel. His cropped black hair was astonishingly equal in length everywhere on his head, including his eyebrows. “You got a girlfriend, huh? Come on in, Isabel’s upstairs. Me and her are drinking Coca-Cola, and there’s plenty.”

It was as if Vendlemachine had calculated the coming affront and defended herself with the visitor. She was supposed to be alone on Sunday mornings, adrift in bed or curled at her desk, moaning, trembling to moisten a stamp with her tongue. She had always waited for Dylan by herself and now she’d cheated him, denied him the chance to show his mother the deathly house he’d been forced to enter. The darkened street-level front room was opened now, the corners only Dylan and the orange cat knew exposed to light, the dusty chairs rearranged to make room for a green plaid sleeping bag and a hiker’s backpack spilling with clothes, T-shirts balled like used tissues, and a stack of paperbacks: God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater ; In Watermelon Sugar ; Sexus. Even the garbage smell was mysteriously gone.

Vendlemachine sat at her patio table, scowling, her grip crackling the real estate section of the Sunday Times. The table was littered with sections of newspaper and the promised Coca-Cola and a scattering of violently colorful comic books. “Isabel’s Sunday paper was stolen this morning,” began Croft, as though he felt generally destined to explain everything and accepted the assignment with good humor. He might next start explaining that he was young and Isabel Vendle was old, or that they sat in a backyard in Brooklyn.

“Again,” said Isabel Vendle.

“I had to walk all the way up to Flatbush Avenue and Atlantic to buy a replacement,” Croft said. “I found that newsstand on the traffic island. There were all these great comics, you never know where you’re going to find them. The Fantastic Four, Dr. Doom, Doctor Strange, you know.”

Dylan wasn’t clear whom Croft was talking to until Rachel Ebdus grabbed one of the comic books and looked at the cover. “Jack Kirby’s a god,” she said.

“Oh, yeah, you’re into this stuff? You know the Silver Surfer?”

“Everyone’s got Peter Max posters but I think Jack Kirby’s about ten times more psychedelic.”

A Rachel word.

“Yeah, sure,” said Croft. “But who do you like? Silver Surfer? Thor? What about Kirby’s DC stuff? You know Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth ?”

Dylan’s gaze scattered against the comic-book covers. A man of stone, a man of fire, a man of rubber, a man of iron, a brown dog the size of a hippopotamus, wearing a mask. That was all Dylan saw before his sight blurred in the sun and shadow and the figures were liquefied into blobs like Abraham Ebdus’s abstractions.

“Black Bolt,” said Rachel, tapping to point out a figure on the cover of one of the comic books. “You know, the Inhumans. The leader of the Inhumans.” Rachel seemed tangled in herself, seemed bewildered as Dylan to find herself in this conversation. The force of Dylan and his mother’s arrival at Isabel Vendle’s, the arrow of Rachel’s intention flying down the block, had been captured and utterly redirected by Croft and his comic books.

“Sure, the strong silent type,” said Croft, grinning. “I get it.”

“Croft, you are in irresponsible man,” said Isabel Vendle with weary affection.

“Sweet Aunt Petunia,” said Croft obscurely.

“Yes you are,” Isabel went on. “And now an irresponsible boy has brought his mother here to tell me he doesn’t want to visit me anymore on Saturdays. We know this because the boy isn’t interested in your comic books, Croft. He’s staring at me, isn’t he?” She flapped her newspaper so it bowed over her hands, then glared over the tented top. “Do you find me evil, Dylan? Or boring?”

I find you psychedelic, Dylan wanted to say.

“You know there probably isn’t any difference, Aunt Isabel. Not to the kid.”

“You knew he wanted to quit, Isabel,” said Rachel, faintly recalling her purpose. “He tried to tell you.” She half stood in her chair to work her cigarettes out of her front pocket, then offered one to Croft, who shook his head.

“Oh, I felt him working up to it,” said Isabel. “I’d imagined I might get another few weeks out of him.”

“It’s a coming-of-age thing,” said Croft. “Running away from scary old ladies. I had to do it myself.”

“Shut up, Croft.”

That was the end of the discussion and the end of Dylan’s working for Vendlemachine. Croft went into the kitchen and returned with more glasses and they sat in the mottled sunlight squeezing lemon into Coca-Cola and turning the pages of his comic books, Dylan and Rachel and Croft, while Isabel Vendle stained her fingertips nearly to black with the ink of the Times. The Human Torch was the Invisible Girl’s younger brother, and the Invisible Girl was married to Mr. Fantastic, and Ben Grimm was The Thing and Alicia was his blind girlfriend, a sculptress who could honestly appreciate his hideous but monumental body, and the Silver Surfer was Galactus’s emissary and Galactus ate planets but the Silver Surfer had helped the Fantastic Four protect Earth, and Black Bolt couldn’t open his mouth because a single syllable of his speech was so powerful it might crack the world apart—Croft and his mother explained it all to Dylan, word balloons in the bright panels on the pale yellow paper, while Vendlemachine moved her lips silently and eventually dozed in her chair, and the late-October Sunday afternoon collapsed to evening, Abraham in his studio darkening squares of celluloid with brushstrokes, the nudes in the parlor below with no light to make them glow, the backyard window boxes and fire escapes black against the ruddy streaked sky, the street too dark to judge a throw properly so the spaldeen hit a kid in the face and anyway it was time for dinner. Dylan fell asleep in his chair for just a minute and for that minute he and Isabel had the exact same dream but when they awoke neither of them remembered.

“Let me see it for a minute.”

Let me see it : you saw a basketball or a pack of baseball cards or a plastic water gun by taking it into your hands, and what happened after that was in doubt. Ownership depended on mostly not letting anyone see anything. If you let a kid see a bottle of Yoo-Hoo for a minute he’d drink what was left in it.

“Let me see it, let me check it out. I only want to take it for a ride.”

Dylan gripped the handlebars. Abraham had pried off the training wheels the day before, and Dylan still wobbled, still scuffed with his sneakers groping away from the pedals to steady and brake against the sidewalk. “Only if you stay on the block,” Dylan said, miserably.

“You afraid I’m gonna take it? I just want a ride. You get it back after that, you got it all day, man. Just let me go around the block.”

It was a trap or puzzle, the way Robert Woolfolk already knew to work Dylan’s guiltiness. And the empty block conspired to leave Dylan alone to solve it. Robert Woolfolk carried a vacuum around with him, or revealed by his presence the vacuum on Dean Street, the expanse of moments when no one saw and no one knew what happened in plain sight, when all of the block was shrouded in daylight like the abandoned house was shrouded in leaf shade.

Old Ramirez stood in front of his store and sipped a Manhattan Special and squinted at them from under his fisherman’s hat. He was beyond appeal, watching them like television.

Robert Woolfolk added his hands to the bars beside Dylan’s and tugged gently at the bike.

“Stay on the block.”

“Around once, that’s all.”

“No, I mean stay in front of the house.”

“What, you think I’m not coming back? Just around the block.”

What came out of Robert Woolfolk’s mouth was petition and chant, irresistible in its illogic. His eyes, meanwhile, were hard, a little bored.

“Just once around.”

Robert Woolfolk’s legs were too long to unfold in the span between seat and pedals, so he rode with his knees doubled and knobbing up near the handlebars, like a clown on a tricycle. Then he changed his approach, elevated his hips above the seat to stand on the pedals and pump side to side, elbows flaring. The bike teetered, annexed to Robert Woolfolk’s stretching limbs. Like that, a vanishing pile of elbows, he took the bike around Nevins.

When Dylan used the word block he didn’t mean Bergen Street, the other side.

How long did it take to go around the block?

How long was twice as long as that?

The tonguelike latch of Dylan’s black ironwork gate rattled with the vibration of the bus going by. Though there were no trees on the Nevins end of Dean Street red fallen leaves had blown into the gutter from somewhere. The plastic milk cartons in front of the bodega claimed you could be fined or go to jail for not returning them to May Creek Farm, Incorporated, a fairly unlikely destination if you gave it any thought.

The afternoon withered like a balloon around Dylan on his stoop, waiting for Robert Woolfolk to return. Old Ramirez wasn’t watching, there was nothing to watch. Dylan stood naked in the minutes as they accumulated, as they stacked up indifferently on the distant face of the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower clock. The day was like an unanswered telephone, the mute slate ringing. The call of Dylan’s arm-swinging vigil went unreplied.

Nevins Street might as well have been a canyon into which Robert Woolfolk had vanished like a cartoon coyote, wordlessly, trailing puffs of dust. When Lonnie wandered up bouncing a Super Ball and asked what Dylan was doing Dylan said he wasn’t doing anything. It was pretty much as if there had never been a bike.

Abraham Ebdus lost a day to finding the boy’s bicycle. He stalked Wyckoff and Bergen and Nevins, thinking unavoidably that Rachel would have found it herself in the first half hour. She knew Brooklyn in ways he didn’t. He walked the periphery of Wyckoff Gardens, not crossing into the grounds, the maze of walkways and hedge and low Cyclone fence, not knowing where to start if he did. Light soured in the shade of the graffitied white brick of the projects. They seemed designed as future ruins. He put his head into a Puerto Rican social club on Bond Street, a small hangar full of cardplayers. Before he ducked out he registered a tiny pool table, blue carpeted walls, the tang of malt-stale cork. Nobody spoke to him.

But by the end of the afternoon word was out, somehow. A woman with a baby stepped out of her door, seemingly angry at him for wandering. Abraham’s family was possibly famous for being white, fools. She passed the child back inside and led Abraham around to a vacant lot on Baltic, a fenced yard filled with debris shot through with ailanthus sprouts, the mongrel trees which grew as fast as a crack in a windshield spread under pressure of a fingertip. The heap of crushed baby carriages and rotted lath with clinging bits of plaster and torn tin ceiling made a pattern with which Abraham Ebdus refused to permit his eye to become fascinated. The bicycle was on top of the pile, above his head, flung there who-knew-how, its blue curved fender twisted like a splintered wing. Give it another day and the ailanthus might have shot through the spokes. He had to climb the fence and ended up tossing the bike to the ground to free his hands. No one was inclined to help, though some watched. He wasn’t sure it mattered to rescue the bicycle. If it had been stolen for use by another child, maybe. But this, this gratuitous trashing, was just the street’s incomprehension, its resistance. That shadows stood sipping from paper bags as he struggled down to join the bicycle on the pavement was only appropriate, matched his mood. The bicycle was defeated, and Abraham Ebdus wondered why he’d taught the boy a useless skill. He knew Rachel required he bring the bicycle home for repair but suspected the boy would never choose to ride it outside of the dirt of their backyard.

Marilla and another girl were waiting, playing jacks at the base of Dylan Ebdus’s stoop.

Marilla sang in crazy falsetto The prob-lem is you ain’t been loved like you sho-huh-hood, what I got will sure-nuff do you good—

The other girl—Dylan recalled that Marilla called her La-La, wondered if that could really be her name—scooped jacks between ball bounces, counting with a slurred inrush of breath whoosies, whreesies, whorsies, whivesies. The game was splayed beneath his bottom step so he couldn’t pass. He sat on the third step from the bottom and watched.

“Robert Woolfolk says he didn’t take your bike and if you say he did he’s gonna mess you up,” Marilla announced suddenly.

“What?”

“Robert said don’t go saying he took your bike since he didn’t even.”

“He said he’d fuck you up,” clarified La-La. Her hand darted in distraction to fumble eightsies, the jacks scattering.

“I didn’t say—” he began, thinking he hadn’t, hadn’t said a thing.

The bicycle was in Abraham Ebdus’s studio, its fender straightened and decorated now with Dylan’s name in his father’s brushwork hand. Soon it would be downstairs again, leaning in the hallway like a stuffed animal, a blind chrome elk loaded with his parents’ expectation and Dylan’s dread.

Marilla shrugged. “I’m just saying.” Squatted like she was peeing, her ass an inch above the slate, she seized the tiny red ball and swept the jacks up, and sang You refuse to put anything before your pri-hi-hide—what I got will knock all that—uh—pride aside!

“Robert told you to say it?”

“Nobody told me nothing, I’m just saying what I heard. You got a dollar for some candy, Dylan?”

Who was on the block? Was Henry in his yard? Was Robert Woolfolk there?

Dylan Ebdus’s head twitched, trying not to look. His fingers clenched the two quarters in his pocket. He’d meant to buy a spaldeen, a fresh ticket of entry in pink rubber. Maybe practice taking shots off the face of the abandoned house until a game built up around him. Dylan had a knack for making catches only when no one was looking, in private rehearsal, but any day now that knack might translate into Henry’s genius. Though come to think of it you couldn’t say when the last time was anyone played wallball, it might be another lost art. Forgotten games stacked up like the grievances of the losers of wars, unrecorded in the street’s history.

You didn’t think of who got money from where. Every kid kept the change when their mom sent them to buy milk. Alberto bought Schlitz for his cousin. Old Ramirez knew who it was for, so he let a kid buy beer, also cigarettes.

Word had gone around that on Halloween the kids from the projects threw, no, hurled with bruising force, eggs. It was a holiday but you still had to go to school, a bad deal, a bad situation, every kid for himself, scattering once the bell rang at three o’clock, and more likely to be hit if he bunched with another kid, let alone tried to protect him. You couldn’t protect anyone from a thrown egg or much else.

What if everything changed? Probably it had. It had before.

You and what army ?

You and your so-called friends.

Yo mama.

From his bedroom Dylan Ebdus heard like a dog’s inaudible whistle the lonely call of the Spirograph: the pins, the toothed cogs, the skipping red pens. “No,” he said to Marilla, terrified. “I don’t have any money.”

“You scared of Robert?” Marilla dashed the jacks across the slate in a crazily wide swathe, and frowned at the result.

“I don’t know.”

“He got a razor.”

“Tell me something good! ” screamed La-La, then Marilla dropped the red ball which dribbled under Rachel’s forsythia and the two girls stood away from the array of paint-chipped jacks and danced, knees bowed, eyes slitted, cheeks blowing out as they chanted Ooh ah, ooh-ooh ah, ooh ah, ooh-ooh ah—

The elongated rectangular grid of these streets, these rows of narrow houses, seen from above, at dusk in late October: imagine the perspective of a flying man. What sense would he make of the figures below, a white woman with her black hair whirling as she struck with the flat of her hand at the shoulders and back of a black teenager on the corner of Nevins and Bergen? Is this a mugging ? Should he swoop down, intervene ?

Who does this flying man think he is anyway—Batman? Black man?

These streets always make room for two or three figures alone in struggle, as in a forest, unheard. The stoops lean away from the street, the distance between row houses widens to a mute canyon. Our lone figure above flies on, needing a drink more than anything, and the woman’s beating of the boy continues.

The day after Halloween the pavement outside school was stained with egg, bombs that had missed their targets, streaks of browning yolk studded with grains of shell, so distended by velocity they seemed to speak of the Earth’s rotation on its axis, as though not gravity but centrifugal force had smeared them lengthwise across the planet. The ones who’d worn home an omelet drying in their corduroys, borne a throbbing red oval punched onto their thigh, they’d deny it until you saw tears mass in the edges of their eyes. Any kid honest with himself was sobered, though, by the glimpse of whatever raged inside the bullies from Intermediate School 293, the berserkers just a grade or two ahead. The egg throwers had worn cartoon-smooth, store-bought masks—Casper, Frankenstein, Spider-Man—so they resembled Symbionese bank robbers or chainsaw killers, figures from nightmares fueled by stolen looks at television news and The Late Movie.

Everyone moved at a fixed rate toward the same undiscussable destinations.

No one could push the concept of a razor blade or a heroin-filled hypodermic stuck into an apple completely out of their heads.

There were days when no kid came out of his house without looking around. The week after Halloween had a quality both hungover and ominous, the light pitched, the sky smashed against the rooftops.

No Vember.

“Go deep,” Henry commanded. Now he wagged a football, the latest enticement. Four kids were like yo-yos strung to his hand, running to jump in a cluster when he finally spiraled the football half the length of the block. No matter what happened, whichever hands the ball came down in or eluded, Henry’s expression was sour. There was something inelegant or compromised in the ball’s descent from the air where he’d placed it.

Dylan Ebdus waited on Henry’s stoop in a bubble of silence, seeing he made six, wondering if they’d call him into the street to even the sides for a game. He’d detected in himself a certain translucency today, a talent for being ignored. Rachel had flushed him from a four-day hide in his room, from a retrenchment into the secret power of his books and pencils, into the mysteries of eavesdropping on Abraham’s footfalls and Rachel’s clangor on the telephone, into the dreary conundrums of the Etch A Sketch and the Spirograph, and something in his conjured solitude had followed him out onto the street, then reversed itself to drape all over him anywhere he sat still.

Gaze long enough into Dean Street and Dean Street will gaze into you.

Hands in pockets, Dylan went into the street and leaned against a car. Then, as if tide-swept from a beach, he began to sway with the others toward the place the ball descended, making no show of trying to catch it, just drawn to the site, taking air through his mouth, silently emulating play.

“You seen Robert Woolfolk?” said Alberto casually.

Dylan wasn’t surprised. He felt the irresistible relevance of Robert’s name. He shook his head.

They stopped playing. Henry tried to dribble the football. Two or three times it actually came back to him instead of twisting away across their shoe tops. The ball was scarred with grease where it had lodged under a car and been scraped down the block.

“He got beat up,” said Alberto reverently.

Lonnie nodded his head, Alberto nodded, Earl and Carlton nodded. They gathered wide-eyed as though warming at a campfire of their own awe. Dylan waited. Henry slapped the football against the ground and Alberto and the others stared as though it was Dylan who should explain Robert Woolfolk’s beating to them. Then Henry flicked them away, as easily as flicking a drop of water from his hand, by muttering “End zone,” and dropping back, the ball hidden behind his knee, to roll his eyes at the sky. The four scuttled to the place where Henry’s glance promised to deliver the ball, each yearning to be the kid made pure by the perfect catch. Henry turned away the instant the ball was aloft, uninterested. He gestured to Dylan and the two of them crossed to the abandoned house. The bus thumped past, giving cover.

“Your mother kicked his ass, right out on Bergen Street,” Henry said. “He was crying and everything.”

Dylan was silent.

“I guess nobody told you,” said Henry.

Could there be a distant island or hidden room where your life took place without your knowing? Dylan tried to picture the incident on Bergen Street, the lunatic collision between Rachel Ebdus and Robert Woolfolk, but the spotlight of his wondering slipped to the invisible floating room in the dark of the house at night where through the walls as he lay awake in bed he heard his mother’s rhythmic whimpering or his father’s urgent, angry whisper. I guess nobody told you, Henry said, and Dylan began to drown in the stuff he dammed with silence at the brink of sleep.

Did Abraham beat Rachel, to bring those moans?

Who was kicking whose ass?

Of course that fury would slip out of the house to hammer some kid on the street. At least it was Robert Woolfolk who’d taken it.

It suddenly seemed that Henry and every kid on the block might know the sound of Abraham and Rachel fucking and fighting at night, that only Dylan was protected and blind.

“Your mother’s crazy,” said Henry. He didn’t say it as a snap, like Yo mama’s so ugly bigfoot takes her picture, but instead with admiration and goofy horror in his voice.

Dylan saw now that it wasn’t strict invisibility that had cloaked his presence on the street, had kept him wavering like a mummy on the sidelines, but instead his mother’s hidden act hovering over him, a force field, a pale blur of shame. Who told Rachel about Robert Woolfolk? Had he betrayed himself, wept and murmured in his sleep about a razor?

Dylan wanted to tell Henry he’d already known, but couldn’t voice the lie. Alberto reappeared with the football, rushing ahead of the others, and flipped it into the air. The ball rose out of the canopy of leaf-bare twigs between the frame of cornices and found a backdrop of low clouds against which it was illuminated like a bomb. Henry stretched back and snared it with his fingertips, then in his downward motion plumped it to Dylan, a sneak play. Dylan hugged the ball to his shoulder like a pledge of allegiance. The thing ticked with cold, its skin impossibly tight.

chapter 4

Nixon quit, and NIXON QUITS read the full front page of the Daily News, a guilty pleasure tacked to the wall of her study. The block words suited her that summer, her seventy-eighth, fifty-second since the oar, and she imagined her own headline: VENDLE QUITS . She felt her coming quit like the stone of a sour plum in her mouth, felt it graze her teeth as it nestled there but couldn’t tell whether it wanted to be spit out or swallowed: quit, quit, quit. Swallowing hurt. Her hand hurt where it met the cane, her grip slipping, wrist crimping. Her eyes hurt where they met the page of a book. The words hurt. One day she thrilled, almost drunkenly, to scratch with a ballpoint pen in the pages of Anthony Powell’s Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, breaking a taboo of seventy-eight years: she heard her father’s voice then, a shred of memory, commanding her reverence for the leather-lined vault of his library. There might be nothing worse than defacing a book, but now she felt the urge to drop them, half read, from her deck into her overgrown garden. She would only need to turn her wrist, let her grip slip once more. She knew she’d quit, one way or another, drop the book or simply die, before finishing the twelve volumes of Powell’s novel, his Dance to the Goddamn Music of Time. Powell had written too much, taken too much of her time already, and she punished him by scribbling in his book, a wavering row of lines, like some hieroglyphic tide. Was it Lake George she wished to return to? Was it waves she’d miss, at the end? The rocking and thump of waves against the swollen planks, a kiss in a skiff in the minutes just before her spearing by the oar?

Grips slipped. Hers had from every surface. She’d shaped nothing after all, only been crushed and reshaped. No wonder she felt for the brownstones, the cripples, now filling chaotically with no regard for her plan. Take for example the black singer who’d taken the house between hers and the Ebdus’s. Was that progress? He had money but looked stoned. The singer’s mulatto son stood each afternoon that August in the middle of the weedy backyard next door, dressed in a full Boy Scout uniform, gazing up boldly at Isabel on her deck, saluting her as though she were his troop master. Dean Street had produced its own weird spore, and she couldn’t track or account for what bloomed now. Homosexuals colonized Pacific Street; a collective of naïve communists spilled from a row house on Hoyt Street, pasted signs on streetlamps announcing a slide show on Red China or a fund-raiser for squatters in Loisada. She’d founded a Bohemian grove. They won’t have Isabel Vendle to kick around anymore. But then they wouldn’t even know it was she who’d gathered them here.

They walked together to Pintchik on Flatbush Avenue at Bergen, a complex of interconnected shops selling paint and furnishings and hardware and plumbing, a business likely once a single storefront, now infiltrated through a block of fronts, and lodged below row houses painted schoolbus yellow with PINTCHIK emblazoned in red, brownstones turned into a street-long billboard, brownstones wearing clown makeup. Something in Pintchik’s unmistakable age and specificity, its indifference, made Dylan ache. Apparently Brooklyn needn’t always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan, as on Dean Street, on Bergen, on Pacific. Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self. Pintchik pointed only into Pintchik for provenance. It was a lair, a warren, and the hairy men selling dust-layered shower-curtain rings and glass doorknobs, the tangible stuff of renovation instead of the idea of renovation, from behind cash registers thick with newspaper clippings, they were rabbits like Bugs Bunny or the March Hare, smug into their hole and only amused or impatient that you might tumble in. Pintchik was a white Brooklyn unimagined by Isabel Vendle.

On the walk to Pintchik Rachel had taught him the word gentrification. This was a Nixon word, uncool. “If someone asks you say you live in Gowanus,” she said. “Don’t be ashamed. Boerum Hill is pretentious bullshit.” Today Rachel was talking and Dylan was listening, listening. She sprayed language as the hydrant opened by the Puerto Rican kids around the corner on Nevins on the hottest days that year sprayed water, unstoppered, gushing. You might scrape the bottom of a tin can until it was open at both ends, then use the can to direct the water momentarily through the window of a passing car, but the force of the spray would win in the end. When Dylan had tried it the pillar of water captured the can from his hands and sent it spinning across the street to clatter under a parked car. His mother’s flow he wouldn’t dare try to direct. “Never let me hear you say the word nigger,” she said, whispering it heavily, lusciously. “That’s the only word you can’t ever say, not even to yourself. In Brooklyn Heights they call them animals, they call the projects a zoo. Those uptight reactionaries deserve the break-ins. They ought to lose their quadraphonic stereos. We’re here to live. Gowanus Canal, Gowanus Houses, Gowanus people. The Creature from the Gowanus Lagoon!” She inflated her cheeks and curled her fingers and attacked him at the entrance to Pintchik.

What would Dylan find if he walked across Flatbush, past its shops selling dashikis, and T-shirts which read I’M PROUD OF MY AFRICAN HERITAGE, past Triangle Sports, past Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips, past Pintchik itself? Who knew. His world found its limit there, under the narrowed shoulders of the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower. Dylan knew Manhattan, knew David Copperfields’s London, knew even Narnia better than he’d ever know Brooklyn north of Flatbush Avenue.

“We don’t live in a box, we don’t live in a little square box, I don’t care what anyone says we don’t live in a sixteen-millimeter frame!” She flew like the Red Queen in Through the Looking-Glass through Pintchik, whispering madly to him. “He can’t put us inside, we’ll break out, we’ll bust out of the frame. He can’t paint us in a little celluloid box. We’ll run out in the streets! We’ll paper him into his studio!”

Inside, Rachel led him to a room full of wallpaper rolls. He was meant to choose a replacement for the jungle animals hiding in palm leaves, that children’s-book design, too young for him now. The samples in the room were furred with velvet, decorated with orange Day-Glo peace symbols and Peter Max sunsets and silver-foil-stripes and lime paisley—Pintchik might be implacable and timeless but it hosted wallpaper that looked like the newest candy wrappers, Wacky Wafers or Big Buddy. Dylan felt embarrassed for the wallpaper. It had the bad taste to be passing through and not know it. Dylan preferred Pintchik itself, its yellow-and-red painted-brick scheme, its cigar-glazed walls.

“I’ll pry him out of his studio the way I drive you out to play, let him get a job instead of living on his mountaintop like Meher Baba—”

Now Dylan was startled to find a roll of his jungle among the Pintchik swatches. Here it was no better than paisley or Day-Glo. The jungle he gazed into while falling asleep had no age at all, was flat and empty, corrupt as advertising. Abraham would never have had wallpaper in his studio.

Dylan wanted wallpaper as old as slate, profound and murky as his father’s painted frames. He wanted to scratch a skully board on his wall, wanted to live in the abandoned house. Or Pintchik.

Brooklyn was simple compared to his mother.

“A gang from the Gowanus Houses picked up a fifth grader after school and took him into the park and they had a knife and they were daring each other and they cut off his balls. He didn’t fight or scream or anything. It’s not too soon for you to know, my profound child, the world is nuttier than a fruitcake. Run if you can’t fight, run and scream fire or rape, be wilder than they are, wear flames in your hair, that’s my recommendation.”

They walked home from Pintchik along Bergen, Rachel filling his ear. His mother never mentioned Robert Woolfolk, never once, but as they passed the corner of Nevins and Bergen, the site where she’d kicked Robert’s ass right out on the street Dylan felt the shaming thrill of it again, felt it in her as well as in himself. Rachel wasn’t responsible for what she said, he knew. She was afraid too. Dylan’s role was to unravel what Rachel said and ignore ninety percent of it, to solve her.

“That beautiful black man who moved in next to Isabel Vendle is Barrett Rude Junior, he’s a singer, he was in the Distinctions, he’s got this amazing voice, he sounds just like Sam Cooke. I actually saw them once, opening for the Stones. His son is your age. He’s going to be your new best friend, that’s my prediction.”

It was Rachel’s last setup.

“You don’t want any kind of wallpaper, we’ll tear it off and paint, whatever. It’s your room. I love you, Dylan, you know that. Come on, race me home.”

Dylan put his confusion into his running, tried to put his mother somewhere behind him.

“Okay, can it, your mother’s out of breath. You run too fast.”

His sneaker-slapping footfalls petered at the corner of Nevins and Dean, where he waited for Rachel to catch up, and crooked his head up to gulp air. In that instant Dylan was sure he’d seen it again: the ragged figure arching from the roof of Public School 38 to the tops of the ramshackle storefronts on Nevins, to disappear then under the sky. The impossible leaper. He looked like a bum.

Dylan didn’t ask his mother if she’d seen. She was lighting a cigarette.

“You’re not only beautiful and a genius but you’ve got a pair of legs. I wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true. You’re growing up, kid.”

Merit badges were cryptograms, blips of unlikely information from another planet of boyhood, and Mingus Rude, though in principle showing off, seemed to regard them with an anthropological detachment not so different from Dylan’s. “Swimming, fire, tying, compass,” he mouth-breathed as he ran his thumbs over them, talismanic evidence of the Philadelphia suburbs, flotsam from a dead world.

Mingus Rude made Dylan wait in the empty, weedy backyard while he dressed himself in the full Scout uniform, then stood before Dylan and they both considered the non sequitur of it, sleeves and legs already too short, yellow scarf stained with a slug trail of snot. He went inside again and came out in a green-and-white hockey uniform with his name pressed across the shoulders in glossy, slightly crooked iron-on letters. He held a splintered stick with black electrical tape wound around the handle. Dylan absorbed it silently. Then Mingus again vanished, to return in a crimson football uniform, with helmet reading MANAYUNK MOHAWKS . Together they peeled back the ventilated nylon jersey to examine the foam-and-plastic shoulder pads that gave Mingus Rude the outline of a superhero. The pads smelled of sweat and rot, of dizzy, inaccessible afternoons. But can you catch a spaldeen? Can you roof one? Dylan wondered bitterly. Mingus Rude would soon know that Dylan Ebdus could not.

Dylan was torn between wanting to claim to possess merit badges in skully, Etch A Sketch, sneaking down creaky stairs, and drawing “Skippy” and a desire to protect Mingus Rude from mockery, theft, incomprehension. He could already hear Yo, let me see it, let me check it out, what—you don’t trust me? He wished to protect them both by commanding the new boy never to bring any of these madly fertile and irrelevant possessions out onto the block for any other kid to see.

Dylan tangled in silence. There in the high-fenced sanctuary of the backyard he wanted to heap the various uniforms in a bonfire, like the one Henry and Alberto had once set on the stoop of the abandoned house, igniting smoldering newspapers and dried dog shit and the stinky green late-summer ailanthus branches which had fallen to litter the street everywhere. Dylan wanted Mingus Rude and himself to build a fire and smother the uniforms in damp smoke until the plastic blackened and melted, until the numbers and names, the evidence, was destroyed. A Dean Street fire, no merit badges involved. Instead he watched as Mingus Rude somberly packed the uniforms into the bottom of his closet.

“You like comics?” said Mingus Rude.

“Sure,” said Dylan unsure. My mother likes them, he almost said.

Mingus Rude excavated four comic books from the closet floor: Daredevil #77, Black Panther #4, Doctor Strange #12, The Incredible Hulk #115. They’d been tenderly handled to death, corners rounded, paper browned by hot attentive breath, pages chewed by eyes. MINGUS RUDE was written in slanted ballpoint capitals on each first interior page. Mingus read certain panels aloud, incanting them, shaping Dylan’s attention, shaping his own. Dylan felt himself permeated by some ray of attention, moved so that he felt an uncanny warmth in the half of his chest that was turned toward Mingus. He wanted to put his hand in Mingus Rude’s crispy-looking hair.

“You know what they say now? Doctor Strange could take the Incredible Hulk by making some kind of mystical cage but he couldn’t take Thor because Thor’s a godlike figure, as long as he doesn’t lose his hammer. If he loses his hammer dude’s nothing better than a cripple.”

“Who’s Thor?”

“You’ll see. You know where to buy comics?”

“Uh, yeah.” Dylan thought of Croft, that afternoon on Isabel Vendle’s deck, the newsstand on the traffic island at Flatbush Avenue and Atlantic. The Fantastic Four.

Could Doctor Strange “take” the Fantastic Four? he wondered.

“Ever steal comics?”

“No.”

“It’s no big thing. You go to camp this year?”

“No.” No year, Dylan almost said. He’d found an artifact on Mingus’s dresser, a sort of tuning fork.

“That’s a pick,” said Mingus.

“Oh.”

“Like a comb, for black hair. It ain’t nothing. Want to see a gold record?”

Dylan nodded mutely, dropped the pick. Mingus Rude was a world, an exploding bomb of possibilities.

Dylan wondered how long he’d be able to keep him to himself.

They crept upstairs. His father had abandoned to Mingus Rude the spectacular gift of the entire basement level: two rooms to himself, and possession of the magically blank backyard. Mingus Rude’s father lived on the parlor floor. Like Isabel Vendle, Barrett Rude Junior slept in a bed opposite the heavily ornate marble mantelpiece, behind the shaded light of the tall windows, the showpiece windows meant for front parlors filled with pianos and upholstery, eighteenth-century Bibles on stands, who knew what else. But unlike Isabel Vendle’s, Barrett Rude Junior’s bed, which lay on the floor there under the scrolled Dutch ceiling, was a wide flat bag filled, as Mingus Rude demonstrated in passing with a neat two-palmed shove, with actual water, an undulating sea trapped in slick sheets. The two gold records were, oddly, just what their name promised, gold records, 45s, glued to white matting and framed in stained aluminum, not up on the bare walls but propped on the crowded mantel beside balled dollar bills and half-filled glasses and empty packs of Kools. “(NO WAY TO HELP YOU) EASE YOUR MIND” (B. RUDE, A. DEEHORN, M. BROWN), THE SUBTLE DISTINCTIONS, ATCO, CERTIFIED GOLD MAY 28, 1970,was the legend on one, and “BOTHERED BLUE” (B. RUDE), THE SUBTLE DISTINCTIONS, ATCO, CERTIFIED GOLD FEBRUARY 19, 1972,the other.

“Downstairs,” said Mingus Rude. They left the gold records behind. Dylan walked ahead on the stairs, feeling strangely formal as he gripped the banister, imagining Mingus Rude’s gaze on his back.

In the backyard they winged rocks into the sky, let them plop into the Puerto Ricans’ yard. Mostly Mingus, Dylan watching. It was August 29, 1974. The air smelled like somebody’s arm up close. You could hear the steady ding of a Mister Softee truck on Bergen Street, probably with a string of the usual kids hanging on it.

“My grandpop’s a preacher,” said Mingus Rude.

“Really?”

“Barrett Rude Senior. That’s where my daddy started singing, in his church. But he doesn’t have a church anymore.”

“Why not?”

“He’s in jail.”

“Oh.”

“I guess you know my mother’s white,” said Mingus Rude.

“Sure.”

“White women like black men, you heard that, right?”

“Uh, sure.”

“My father don’t talk to that lying bitch no more.” He followed this with a sharp laugh of self-surprise.

Dylan didn’t say anything.

“He paid a million dollars for me. That’s what he had to pay to get me back, a million cold. You can ask him if you think I’m lying.”

“I believe you.”

“I don’t care if you believe me, it’s true.”

Dylan looked at Mingus Rude’s lips and eyes, his exact brownness, took it in. Dylan wanted to read Mingus Rude like a language, wanted to know if the new kid had changed Dean Street or only changed Dylan himself by arriving here. Mingus Rude breathed through his mouth and his tongue curled out of one side of his mouth with the effort of a throw. Mingus was black but lighter, a combination. The palms of his hands were as white as Dylan’s. He wore corduroys. Anything was possible, really.

A million-dollar kid doesn’t belong on Dean Street, Dylan wanted to say. The word million, even.

Mingus Rude might be insane, Dylan didn’t mind.

Two days later he was already playing, standing in the street, a catcher in stoopball, taking a lean on a parked car to let the bus go by. Like he’d been there all along. He caught laconically, perfectly. He might be the Henry of his own block, now transported here—he might be a Henry of the mind, recognizable anywhere. Dylan crept up and sat on Henry’s wall and watched, with Earl and a couple girls, younger kids. Mingus Rude was viable, apparently. He’d been folded into the ongoing game while Dylan wasn’t looking.

Robert Woolfolk wasn’t around. Otherwise the last splendid day had shucked every verifiable kid out onto Dean Street. Two girls turned a rope with three others inside, their knees shining like a bunch of grapes. The empty, blue-tiled school, Public School 38, hummed, just down the block. Nobody looked at it, nobody cared.

“D-Man.”

“John Dillinger.”

“D-Lone. Lonely D.”

Dylan didn’t know what Mingus Rude was yelling about, didn’t recognize himself in the nicknames.

“Yo, Dylan, you deaf?”

Captaincy was an essence lurking in Henry above all. But one captain needed another, even if inferior, a stooge. Someone had to step up. Dylan had seen Alberto assume it, Lonnie too, once even Robert Woolfolk, to make a lopsided game of punchball, fast dissolved in scowls and a faked limp. Now, at the bright weary end of summer, Henry and Mingus Rude were stickball captains, unexplained.

Mingus chose Dylan first, over Alberto, Lonnie, Earl, anyone.

“He can’t hit,” said Henry. It was a reasonably sympathetic diagnosis. Dylan was any captain’s problem, a communal drag.

“I got Dillinger,” said Mingus Rude coolly. He wrapped and rewrapped the wrist fastener of a Philadelphia Phillies batting glove, teasing reminder of the motherlode of outfits buried in his closet. “Take your man.”

That last August afternoon before school began was something like those heartbreaking, dazzling glimpses of the opening credits for Star Trek or Mission Impossible, before you were commanded to switch the television off and go to bed: it was going to haunt you, play inside your eyelids, after the door was closed, the light extinguished, your pounding rib cage calmed. A summer was unfinished, broken off at the end, a bad splice. Now, Mingus Rude’s arrival promised the possibility of another summer, hinged to this one like a door you couldn’t look beyond.

The palm-sweaty broomstick was wrapped with new black tape, like the hockey-stick handle.

“Lead off, Dill.”

The names, Dylan began to understand, conveyed that he and Mingus were to be one thing to each other indoors, off the street, and entirely another outside. On the block.

Inside, outside, a distinction Dylan understood. Could work with.

Henry pitched. Dylan waved at something barely seen, like a bee overhead. “Ball one,” said Mingus Rude, captain, umpire, announcer.

“Ball one?” scoffed Henry. “Dude chased it.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Mingus. “Too high.” To Dylan he said: “Don’t swing at that shit.” To Henry: “Strike zone.” Then back to Dylan, he whispered. “Don’t close your eyes.”

You evolved in full view and secretly at once, grew bony and hairy, twisted out a baby tooth and spat blood and kept playing, claimed to know certain words the first time you heard them. A day came when you made contact, stung it somewhere not foul, rounded first before the bat clattered to stillness in the street. It was no big thing, you weren’t looking for congratulations. Dylan danced off on the manhole cover, second base, daring the throw, the next order of business. Reward for trickling the ball between Alberto’s feet. Leading off, batting one thousand.

Any private thrill was like peeing your pants. Dylan knew to be ashamed of the relief.

He scored on Mingus Rude’s own home run. Struck out hyperventilating his next time up. But. Five kids in a batting order and no defense to speak of, you’d get up a hundred times on a night like this. Strike out ninety. Lace it off a lamppost and call it a triple, didn’t matter—you could bunt a triple in the dark. The close of this day you’d resist like sleep, like sickness. One kid’s mom yelled for half an hour and even then nobody else paid attention, nobody went inside.

Rachel Ebdus didn’t call from the stoop. Dylan Ebdus wondered if Rachel and Abraham were taking the opportunity to kick each other’s ass in one form or another.

Given that he was outside at this particular moment, Dylan didn’t care.

Didn’t give a shit.

Fuck you know about it, anyway?

If. Mingus Rude was a scant four months older than Dylan Ebdus, but those four months hit the calendar such that Mingus was a grade ahead, had finished fifth grade in Manayunk, Pennsylvania. Like Henry and Alberto, Mingus Rude would start sixth this year, at the Intermediate School 293 annex, on Butler Street between Smith and Hoyt, in the turf of the Gowanus Houses. No-man’s-land.

“Dill- icious,” Mingus called him once as he stood at the plate.

I.S. 293 was a hidden sun drawing kids screaming out of Dean Street’s orbit, one by one. If Mingus Rude was four months younger, if Mingus Rude and Dylan Ebdus had been headed to grade five together, if. Then Dylan could have watched out for him, maybe. Kept an eye.

A grade of school was a bridge in mist. No way to picture where it touched land again, or who you’d be when it did.

One stickball game was your whole career, your whole life to this point.

These weren’t innings, they were dreams of innings. You couldn’t remember who got the last out, you could barely recall the batting order until it was just two guys, Mingus and Dylan. Gus and D-Man. Another kid quit and Henry had to pitch from the outfield. You could do just so much, trap a grounder with your body like a grenade, fish it from behind a tire and lash it toward home base, maybe hit the ass of the guy who’d scored. The pink spaldeen turned black, like a piece of night. Some Puerto Rican guy reparked third base, pissed off at fingerprints. The spaces between outs were like summers themselves.

Public School 38 was on fire. No it wasn’t.

If. If Mingus Rude could be kept in this place, kept somehow in Dylan’s pocket, in his stinging, smudgy hands, then summer wouldn’t give way to whatever came after. If. If. Fat chance. Summer on Dean Street had lasted one day and that day was over, it was dark out, had been for hours. The Williamsburg Savings Bank tower clock read nine-thirty in red-and-blue neon. Final score, a million to nothing. The million-dollar kid.

Your school wasn’t on fire, you were.

— and now Major Amberson was engaged in the profoundest thinking of his life she found herself quoting in her hospital bed at Long Island College Hospital on Henry Street, where the television bolted to the ceiling showing Ryan’s Hope and The Gong Show had to stand for a hearth, brutally angry and brutally fat Jamaican nurses for her lonely company, her vigil. She’d die in Brooklyn Heights instead of Boerum Hill because Boerum Hill had a jail instead of a hospital— and Major Amberson realized that everything which had worried or delighted him during this lifetime, all this buying and building —and not in her bed beneath her parlor ceiling because the oar had dented her, crushed her, folded her like a letter into the envelope of herself, unread for fifty-two years. Unreadable medically now, at the end: she’d watched the interns puzzling at her X rays—how can this be nestled beside this ? How can old Vendle fit into herself, how’d she do it, all these years? Her body was Boerum Hill, just as King Arthur’s body had been England. She was all of Boerum Hill’s contradictions crushed together: she was the Schlitz can in the brown paper sack sitting in the plaster-and-marble nook for turning coffins in the curve of stairwell in the nineteenth-century town house. She was a jail in the shadow of which boys frolicked. Everything which had delighted him, all this buying and building, that it was all trifling and wasted, for the Major knew—

Two visitors had come. Croft, of course, who’d stayed a week in her basement room and visited the hospital every day, plaguing her with small packages of inedible curative food, ferrying in Temporary Kings and Hearing Secret Harmonies, the last volumes of the Powell, drawing glares from the furious Jamaicans for rinsing her bedpan in the bathroom and for his earnest, pointless questions regarding her care. Then, at her request, he’d taken the orange cat with him to Indiana. She wished the orange cat luck. It might perhaps serve as conscience for the rural commune, its missing moral center. Croft had shaven or grown a beard—Isabel couldn’t focus except on her own irritation, centering somewhere around his mouth. Croft would get the house. He’d sell it, she didn’t want to conjecture to whom. Isabel found she couldn’t read the Powell now, couldn’t make it work, couldn’t operate the sentences. She watched The Gong Show instead. There was an act, a comic with a paper bag on his head, whom she rather liked: Take that, Anthony Powell!

Isabel’s second visitor, Rachel Ebdus, had also brought a book, which Isabel regarded in astonishment: Woman on the Edge of Time. Really, imagine calling oneself “Marge Piercy”! Isabel had smiled and turned her wrist as she was learning to do—that small slackening, that relinquishing, rehearsal for the deeper operation—turned her wrist and let the book drop to the floor, then whispered more faintly than was required that Rachel should put it on the bedside table. She enjoyed playing at dying while she was dying. You fool, she’d wanted to say, I don’t read women authors.

Rachel Ebdus had been crying. She and her recluse filmmaker were surely fighting again. The woman had something she wanted to say but Isabel Vendle decided to invoke the petty majesty of the near-dead and prevent her saying it. It’s enough that you’ll inherit my Dean Street, beatnik child. Don’t come here to inter your woes in my dying heart.

Rachel Ebdus was talking but it was as distant to Isabel Vendle as footprints on the moon.

“I might go,” she heard the young woman say.

“Yes,” Isabel said. “That’s best. Go.” If Rachel Ebdus were on television singing this song of woe Isabel would have long since “gonged” her— the Major knew that now he had to plan how to enter an unknown country, one where he was not even sure of being recognized as an Amberson —

Then she was alone, Rachel Ebdus discouraged, Croft scooted back to Indiana. Boerum Hill was what it was—partial, recalcitrant, corrupt—and whatever it would next become it could manage without Isabel Vendle’s help. Let it be carved up, let it be forgotten, let it be forgiven. We must be of the sun, she thought, irritated at herself for continuing to quote, so late in the game, there wasn’t anything here but the sun in the first place, the earth came out of the sun, we came out of the earth —in her last dream Simon Boerum, the old drunk, came to her and rowed her to the shore of Vendle’s Hard, both oars secure in his hand, so whatever we are, we must come from the sun —

Gong!

Fifth grade was fourth grade with something wrong. Nothing changed outright. Instead it teetered. You’d pushed futility at Public School 38 so long by then you expected the building itself would be embarrassed and quit. The ones who couldn’t read still couldn’t, the teachers were teaching the same thing for the fifth time now and refusing to meet your eyes, some kids had been left back twice and were the size of janitors. The place was a cage for growing, nothing else. School lunch turned out to be the five-year plan, the going concern. You couldn’t be left back from fish sticks and sloppy joes. You’d retain at the least two thousand half-pint containers of vitamin D–enriched chocolate milk.

Two black guys from the projects, twins, were actually named Ronald and Donald MacDonald. The twins themselves only shrugged, couldn’t be made to agree it was incredible.

Chinese kids wouldn’t go to the bathroom all day, they lived that much in their own world.

At home, Rachel Ebdus’s telephone was ringing unanswered.

You met zones everywhere. The schoolyard was neighborhoods: black, black girl, Puerto Rican, basketball, handball, left behind. Through the Cyclone fence someone had brushed the word FLAMBOYAN in white paint on the stone wall, along with a square box for a strike zone.

Bruce Lee was famous now that he was dead.

A game of tap-it-in took place above the ground, in moments. Between jumps you weren’t playing. You were inert, copping an attitude.

Black girls had a language of partial words, chants harder to learn than anything in class. There was a general noise at the edges you’d begun to detect, akin to indecipherable ballpoint desktop-gougings. A scribbled voice.

The first few times someone said Hey, white boy it sounded like a mistake. You had to be guided into the new relation by the girls, the boys were actually a little shy about it.

Wrong sneakers, wrong shoes, wrong length of pants. Highwaters.

Where’s the flood?

What you laughin’ at, fool?

Dang. Boy’s laughin’ at his own self.

From I.S. 293 or from nowhere, from the projects, older kids bunched at the school entrances and in corners of the yard. Previous fifth graders had been a layer between. Now you were the layer. Robert Woolfolk was among one of those regular bunches, the precocious paper-bag drinkers. Even standing in one place Robert Woolfolk moved like a sprained knee, like he was forever angling a too-small bike around the corner of Nevins. He flashed a smile like a torn photograph, his voice crept around corners in the air. Dylan Ebdus saw in Robert Woolfolk’s eyes that same scribbled quality.

Red Hook, Fort Greene, Atlantic Terminals.

You built up associations, which would pass for understanding. Nobody was explaining anything. Fifth grade was an abstract art, painted one frame at a time.

Dylan could still hear the telephone ring from the kitchen while he sat on his stoop, waiting, watching, afternoons sliding to twilight, air chilling so the bodega sitters left their milk crates, shaking their heads, pinching their cold noses, leaving Old Ramirez alone. Dylan and Ramirez were paired in their two doorways, keeping watch, ignoring each other. Dylan watched the traffic trickle down Nevins, watched the mothers walking kindergartners home from the YWCA, counted the buses which drifted like humming loaves to the stoplight, waited, drifted on. Henry’s yard was empty, Marilla’s yard was empty, somebody saw a rat in the yard of the abandoned house. Bruce Lee and Isabel Vendle were dead and Nixon was strolling on a beach. Nobody moved, nobody played, strange kids walked the block in groups. It was a season of vanishing, of a silence like raw stupidity, like the unbearable ticking silence of a teacher expecting an answer from a kid everyone knew couldn’t even say his own name right.

Let Abraham answer the phone, if he could even hear it. Let Abraham say she’s not here.

Most days Dylan waited alone until Abraham called him in for dinner. Mingus Rude had other places to go, sixth-grader places, I.S. 293 places—other friends, Dylan guessed, then kept his own guessing hidden from himself. One or two afternoons a week Mingus would lope down the block and raise his hand. His coat was brown corduroy with a sheepskin collar, not the shiny plastic-stuffed bubblecoats every other kid wore. Mingus Rude carried his notebook and textbooks loose under his arm, no bag, and he’d clatter them on the stoop carelessly, expressing something less than utter disdain and more than total mastery.

The comic books Mingus Rude treated as a presence delicately alive, some piece of still-beating flesh he and Dylan might be capable of healing by their absolute fixity of attention, by their reverence. The overlapping storylines were a field of expertise, skully again, all fine print and ritual. Dylan was really horrified to learn he’d let so much time slip past, so much essential cultural history. Forget what you thought you knew. The Silver Surfer, for example, was a situation you couldn’t really understand if you came in too late. Mingus only shook his head. You didn’t want to try to explain something so tragic and mystical.

New comics arrived at newsstands on Tuesdays. Mingus Rude would have an armload, bought or stolen, Dylan didn’t ask. Some were bimonthly, some monthly, you learned by reading the letters page, you built up anticipation for special issues, too, oversized Annuals and one-time special events like the Avengers-Defenders Wars or Origins. In Origins you learned how superheroes got started, the answer generally being: radiation. In the Annuals and Wars you satisfied, at least provisionally, questions of who could take who. Hulk and Iron Man would face-off for a page or two, always vowing to settle it for good another time.

Spider-Man’s girlfriend, Gwen, had been killed by the Goblin, it wasn’t funny in the least. That’s why Spider-Man was so depressed all the time.

Captain Marvel wasn’t Shazam, it was confusing. He’d been revived to assert a copyright on the name, and nobody could say whether he really fit into the Marvel Universe all that well. DC Comics, Marvel Comics’ antithesis, presented a laughable, flattened reality—Superman and Batman were jokes, ruined by television.

In truth, Superman in his Fortress of Solitude reminded you all too much of Abraham in his high studio, brooding over nothing.

Swamp Thing was a rip-off of Man-Thing, or vice versa.

An uneasiness hung over certain titles. Different artists drew the same characters different ways—you could hurt your eyes trying to account for it, to grant continuity to these hobbled stories. Weaker superheroes were propped up with guest appearances by Spider-Man or the Hulk, confusing chronology terribly. An Einstein could lose his mind trying to explain how the Fantastic Four had helped the Inhumans fight the Mole Men when by clear testimony of their own magazine they were trapped in the Negative Zone the whole time.

The Incredible Hulk, if you followed him closely over time, lost the use of pronouns.

Two afternoons a week, sitting in the dimming light on Dylan’s stoop, never discussing fifth or sixth grade, stuff too basic and mysterious to mention. Instead just paging through, shoulders hunched to protect the flimsy covers from the wind, puzzling out the last dram, the last square inch of information, the credits, the letters page, the copyright, the Sea-Monkeys ads, the insult that made a man out of Mac. Then, just when you thought you were alone, Dean Street came back to life, Mingus Rude knowing everyone, saying Yo to a million different kids coming out of Ramirez’s store with a Yoo-Hoo or a Pixy Stix, to Alberto fetching Schlitz and Marlboros for his older brother and his older brother’s girlfriend. The block an island of time, school a million miles away, mothers calling kids inside, the bus lit inside now, fat ladies coming home from offices at the Board of Education on Livingston Street, their weary shapes like black teeth inside the glowing mouth of the bus, Marilla strolling by a million times singing It’s true, hah, sometimes you rilly do abuse me, you get me in a crowd of high-class pee-pul, then you act real rude to me, the light fading anxiously, streetlights buzzing as they lit, their arched poles decorated with boomeranged-up sneakers, and Mingus Rude saying, one dying afternoon, eyes never ungluing from a panel in Marvel’s Greatest Comics in which Mr. Fantastic had balled himself into an orb the size of a baseball, his tiny face including signature gray temple hair still visible in incredible wrinkled detail, in order to be shot from a bazooka into the vulnerable mouth of an otherwise impervious fifty-foot-tall robot named Toomazooma, the Living Totem, “Your moms is still gone?”

“Yeah.”

“Dang, man. That’s fucked up.”

chapter 5

After five weeks he was ready to sell the nudes. They nagged at his mind, they spoke to each other from opposite walls in distorted whispers, they reflected him back to himself like fun-house mirrors, they, along with the ringing telephone, the abandoned kitchen counter, the stale unemptied ashtrays, made the parlor floor of the brownstone seem a skull lacking a brain, an empty skull decorated with memories, déjà vu. She wasn’t coming back, and his knowledge of it throbbed from the canvases like heat traces.

Erlan Hagopian, an Armenian collector who lived on the Upper East Side, had looked at the paintings two years before. He’d asked to see them after one had been hung in a group show on Prince Street, at Abraham Ebdus’s old teacher’s request—a request Abraham should have refused, a vanity, a mistake. Hagopian and the Prince Street dealer had come around to Dean Street wanting to see the paintings and also wanting to see the studio. Abraham had refused them that, protecting the film, protecting his secret work, and inadvertently extending the confusion that the nudes were recent, or that his work on canvas continued. It didn’t. His larger brushes rotted, not even properly cleaned the last time he’d touched them. That day Erlan Hagopian had made a production of asking the price of the whole roomful, of wanting to be told the number which would need to be written on a check to rob the parlor of its fleshy insulation in one grand gesture. Confident, surely, that it would be denied—the Armenian had read Abraham Ebdus’s diffidence at least that well. Perhaps not so well, though, that he’d expected what he got: being refused even one of the paintings. Abraham Ebdus’s reward was the sorry, grumbling shake of the Prince Street dealer’s sunglass-bearing, golden-maned head. That look was worth any number on a check.

Now, two years later, Ebdus phoned Hagopian directly, knowing that to circumvent the dealer—a secret that wouldn’t keep for a so-called New York minute if Hagopian actually purchased any art—was to burn a bridge to his old career, a bridge to SoHo, to Manhattan. Abraham Ebdus would be perfectly glad if the bridge was gone. He’d turned his back on the city which lay across that river and was stalking off in the opposite direction, into a desert of his own making, a desert of celluloid.

Erlan Hagopian, for his own purring reasons, didn’t hesitate. He seemed to recognize the logic of Abraham Ebdus’s capitulation: Having asked you to set your price for a roomful of paintings you refuse to sell me even one—and in that overcompensating gesture, that childish underestimation of money’s force, is the seed of the moment to come, when you will inevitably come begging to sell me the roomful. Naturally.

Perhaps Erlan Hagopian had always wanted to buy a whole roomful of nudes, and now would be able to say he had. Perhaps he bought roomfuls of nudes every week. Perhaps he’d intuited the death of Abraham’s career in painting and knew he was collecting a luminous mass tombstone, perhaps Rachel Ebdus was now his mistress, captive in luxury in a Park Avenue penthouse, and the paintings were only the seal on an invisible deal Abraham Ebdus couldn’t sense he was making. Anyway, Erlan Hagopian didn’t ask to see the paintings a second time. He sent a check, and a truck.

Dylan Ebdus’s friendship with Mingus Rude lived in brief windows of time, punctuation to the unspoken sentences of their days. There was no single story: for all he knew Mingus might be off fighting the Mole Men at the I. S. 293 annex, where sixth graders went, while Dylan, in fifth grade, was still trapped in the Negative Zone—it didn’t matter, didn’t contradict, they weren’t the Fantastic Four, after all, just a couple of kids. By the time Dylan saw Mingus again what had happened in between was too much to explain, for either of them. For Dylan sensed that Mingus had his own secret burden, his own changed world beating away under the silence. There was nothing to do but pick up where they’d left off, pool what they still had in common. What was new in the other you pretended to take for granted, a bargain instinctively struck to ensure your own coping on the other end.

In between anything could happen and was beginning to. One example: the day Robert Woolfolk effortlessly corralled Dylan in the schoolyard, by gesturing with his slanted shoulders and saying, “Yo, Dylan, man, let me see you for a minute.” See you, like Dylan himself was now a bottle of Yoo-Hoo to be gulped or a bicycle to steer around the block forever. Dylan had stepped once, twice in Robert Woolfolk’s direction, not understanding how to refuse, and found himself alone with him.

Robert said, sleepily, “I saw them take yo mama outside the house naked.”

Dylan said, “What?”

“In the truck. They wrapped her all in blankets but they fell off. I saw her hanging out all over the street like a ho.”

Dylan calculated distances between the spot where they stood and the four exits from the schoolyard, despairing at the emptiness of a November afternoon that had succumbed to the Woolfolk Principle of human desertion. “That wasn’t my mother,” was what came out of his mouth. It wasn’t half an answer to Robert’s craziness.

“Came out of your house, man, naked like a witch. Don’t lie. They put her in a police truck and took her away.”

Now Dylan was baffled. Had Robert Woolfolk seen something Dylan hadn’t? He couldn’t really be confusing paintings with a person, art handlers with police.

At the same time a glow of fear rose in him, knowing that however muddled, Robert Woolfolk grasped that Rachel was no longer around to kick his ass.

Robert went on, in a reasonable tone of commiseration. “Threw her in jail, I expeck. Locked her up for being too motherfuckin’ loud and crazy.”

“She wasn’t naked,” Dylan defended, laps behind. “Those were paintings.”

“She weren’t wearing no paintings when I saw her. She was hanging out all over the street for anyone to see. Ask somebody if you think I’m a lion.”

“A liar?” In dizziness Dylan wanted to lead Robert Woolfolk back to his home, to show him the trails of dust and shadows of faded housepaint on the parlor walls marking where the nudes had hung, missing pictures of a missing woman, ghosts of ghosts.

“Don’t call me no fuckin’ lion, man. I’ll fuck up your white ass before I’m done. Show me your hand.”

“What?”

“Your hand. Right here. Let me show you something.” Robert encircled Dylan’s wrist with his long fingers and turned it downward—Dylan watching in fascination as though from a vast distance—then curled it in one sharp motion toward Dylan’s shoulder blade, so Dylan doubled at the waist, following the line of force. Dylan’s knapsack tumbled over his head, notebook pages spilling to the concrete in view between his knees. His face flooded with blood and breath.

“See, don’t let nobody get you like that,” said Robert. “You do anything they want, they get you arm twisted back. I’m just telling you for your own good. Pick up your shit and clear out of here now.”

None of this was tellable. As they sat in the winter-squeezed light of Mingus Rude’s backyard window, Barrett Rude Junior upstairs, strains of the Average White Band and his slippered footfalls trickling through the hardwood, Dylan and Mingus downstairs with their two heads bent together, leafing through the new issues of Luke Cage, Hero for Hire and Warlock, Dylan couldn’t ask Mingus whether he’d also seen the art handlers loading their truck or whether he’d instead somehow witnessed Robert Woolfolk’s imaginary police. It was outside speech. To begin with, Rachel’s disappearance didn’t want to be given a name, a form to etch it in Dean Street history. And if Mingus had seen that parade of fleshy canvases, Dylan didn’t want to know. Too, he couldn’t describe how the balance of terror Rachel had struck in Robert Woolfolk was now tipped, because he felt a queasy instinct that Mingus and Robert should be kept ignorant of each other. If they were destined to meet Dylan didn’t want to be the one who introduced them, and if they were already familiar it was another thing Dylan was in no hurry to learn. Finally, Dylan couldn’t ask Mingus Rude if black people called liars lions because Mingus Rude was black. Sort of.

So silence and comic-book word balloons and the bass thump of the stereo upstairs.

One December afternoon Mingus tossed down his loose-leaf binder, bowed cardboard pressed with blue fabric, fraying at the corners, and Dylan saw that on every surface surrounding Mingus’s old Philadelphia Flyers sticker the binder was laced with ballpoint scrawlings, lines dug in repetition like Spirograph ovals, gestures toward some perfect, elusive form. Here was the scribble from schoolyard walls, now carried home to Dean Street and plopped on Dylan’s stoop.

“That’s my tag,” said Mingus when he caught Dylan studying the cloud of visual noise. “Here.” He tore out a page and, holding his pen with fingers close to the point, tongue curling against his cheek in concentration, wrote DOSE in angled block letters. Then he drew it again in a clumsy balloon font, the D and O barely distinguishable, the E swollen so its three digits overlapped—faint mimicry, it seemed to Dylan, of a Marvel Comics sound-effect panel.

“What’s it mean?”

“It’s my tag, Dose. It’s what I write.”

It was a new given. Anyone might have a tag. Dylan might have one himself any day now. Further explanations were or weren’t coming. The narrowed hours of winter light were a form of patience themselves, a stoic reply to no question. Rachel had vacated a certain hysteria from the house, replaced it with the telephone and assorted other ringing tones. A day had a hum like a seashell. Dylan watched television, watched the mails, watched his father trudge upstairs to his studio. He listened to his mother’s abandoned records at low volume, Carly Simon, Miriam Makeba, Delaney & Bonnie. From the barred window of his second-floor classroom he watched janitors trudge through a thin carpet of snow to Dumpsters, which were covered with the newly visible scribble. Dylan had begun to pick out names, layers in the mess. Most things had happened some time before Dylan came along, that’s why taking them for granted was so crucial. You could dial up any example in reruns, Room 222, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, The Mod Squad. All was exemplary of daily life, the undertow of the normal.

Things occurred in one another’s company that Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude might never discuss. They watched the Super Bowl in Mingus Rude’s parlor, first sealing a five-dollar bet in whispers in the basement room, Mingus taking the Pittsburgh Steelers, Dylan, on helmet aesthetics, the Minnesota Vikings. Then they’d tiptoed upstairs, under the eye of the gold records. The parlor was rearranged, the water bed hidden, the couch and a tremendous Barcalounger arrayed around a mammoth color television. Barrett Rude Junior sat enthroned before the screen in blue satin pants and an unsashed silk robe, his thick arms fallen to either side, palms open, legs sprawled halfway to the television. Coils of black-and-white hair were like false starts, unfinished cursives on the flat brown page of his chest. He cinched his head halfway from the pregame show to consider Dylan, squinted through his granny glasses, his goatee warping wryly as he pursed immense lips.

“This your friend, huh?”

Mingus ignored the question, sat on the couch.

“What’s your name?”

“Dylan.”

“Dylan? I met that cat, man. Who you like in the game, Little Dylan?”

“Huh?”

“Who you like in the game?”

“He likes the Vikings,” said Mingus, distantly, fallen into some trancelike state induced by his father and the immense, pulsing screen.

“Vikings lose,” said Barrett Rude Junior, so flatly that Dylan was momentarily confused—weren’t they all here to find out who won? The game wasn’t a rerun.

“You know the Dolphins?” said Barrett Rude.

Dylan lied yes.

“I worked out with them, summer of ’71. Get the picture, Gus.”

Mingus rose from the couch and slid into his father’s carpeted bedroom, returned with a framed color photograph, worm’s-eye, showing Barrett Rude Junior in a football uniform, ball curled to his chest, dreaming eyes fixed worlds beyond the lens.

“Mercury Morris said I’d make the cut as a second-string wideout, never got the chance, though. Damm record company put the kibosh, thought I couldn’t protect myself. Cost me a Super Bowl ring, man.”

Barrett Rude Junior wound down, his voice purring to nobody in particular. The game itself, when it began, turned out to be a long green flattening: of huffing, robotic men, and of Dylan’s interest. Football was an arrangement of failures, a proving how unlikely most things were. Mingus kept his betting stake private, just rooted maniacally for anyone to put it in the air. Dylan chanted silently along with the commercials, I’d like to buy the world a Coke. Indi-gestion. Barrett Rude Junior twitched his fingers, beating some tune on the Barcalounger’s arm.

“Gus, get me a Colt from the fridge, man.”

The yellow forty-ounce bottle sweated beads in the radiator-dry apartment. Barrett Rude wiped his fingers on his blue silk knee after each sip, dark wipes which evaporated but left puckered signatures, trails.

“Halftime y’all take ten dollars, get us some sandwich makings. Go round to Buggy’s, get me some of that Swedish cheese I like. I hate that Puerto Rican cheese they got at Ramirez, man.” Barrett Rude Junior said Buggy’s like the rest of the block, it didn’t matter that he never went out. Names were known indoors. The block was one thing, whole, it was proven again. The brownstones had ears, minds ticking away.

Y’all was a couple of yos walking together.

Dylan and Mingus wrapped themselves in their coats and jammed their hats to their eyes. Wind ripped around the corner of Bond Street, flaying their bony legs, whistling in the vents of their Keds. Fists balled in pockets, palms sweaty, knuckles frozen. Prying Buggy’s door against the wind. She and her German shepherd loomed as apparitions, creatures from Mars peering through glass. A black kid and a white kid buying cheese and mustard. Buggy might not know it was the Super Bowl, might even think the word was toilet-related, a blue dusty item lining her top shelf, which nobody bought.

Mingus and Dylan assembled sandwiches and the three of them ate, Barrett Rude Junior raving about the taste of the hot mustard, licking his fingers, muttering, punishing a second bottle of malt liquor. The third quarter was a floodlit desert, men piled in disarray, time desolately stretched. Somewhere ice-laden planes might be crashing, Manhattan might have snapped in two and drifted out to sea. Brooklyn was the winter island. Outside it was black as night. You’d never have guessed the Super Bowl was so grim and insistent. A shot from a drifting blimp alleviated nothing. Mingus kept his vigil, closed into himself, father-struck, father-stilled. Dylan scooted on his knees and picked through Barrett Rude Junior’s record collection, which filled the far corner beneath the mantel. Dylan flipped them forward and back, the Main Ingredient’s Afrodisiac, Esther Phillips’s Black-Eyed Blues, Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s The Inflated Tear, the Young Holt Trio’s Wack Wack, the names and cover art windows to some distant world as embedded with irretrievable meaning as any single issue of Marvel Comics.

“You don’t need to be looking at that stuff now,” said Barrett Rude Junior, distantly annoyed. “Sit up and watch the game.” He squinted, seemed to consider Dylan’s entirety for the first time.

The whiteness of the boy in the black man’s house.

“Your mother know you’re here?” Barrett Rude Junior asked.

“Dylan’s mother’s gone,” volunteered Mingus from the couch.

“Your mother’s gone?”

Dylan nodded.

Barrett Rude Junior weighed it. Dylan’s presence in his room was explained, that might have been his first conclusion. Then, in slow motion, something else dawned. Dylan sensed in Barrett Rude’s heavy-lidded gaze a flare of tenderness, felt it like a headlight’s beam turning to enclose him.

“Mother’s gone, but the boy is keeping it together.” Barrett Rude Junior spoke the sentence twice. In the first rendition the words emerged thick, deliberate, tongue-mashed. The second was a lilting echo of the first, the line now a song of admonition, a beguilement. “Mu-tha’s gone, but the boy is keeping it together.”

Dylan nodded again, dumb.

Mingus Rude’s father still gripped the blunt yellow bottle at its base. He waved it in a circle, toasting an invisible table. “That’s cool. You’re cool. Now, check out the long-players another time, Little Dylan. Sit and watch the game.”

Did Barrett Rude Junior remind him of Rachel? Or was this only the longest the word mother had been strung in the air since Rachel’s vanishing? Dylan felt that she’d drifted into the room, a mist or cloud, a formation. Mingus Rude squirmed on the couch, wouldn’t meet Dylan’s eye—seemingly he felt her too, Rachel Ebdus or some other mother, pressing on him like a force from above, like weather. Then she drifted out of sight, the camera angle switched to the struggle of inches, runners writhing on shredded ground, a helmet hugged like a baby on the sidelines, the long wait for a measuring chain to come upfield.

When at the end Mingus Rude put a fist in the air and said, “I won,” his father said, “What you win?”

“Me and Dylan had a bet.”

“How much?”

“Five dollars.”

“Don’t play your friend like that. Any fool knows the Vikings can’t win no Super Bowl. Come here. Come here.” When Mingus stood near enough Barrett Rude reached out with his wide hand, robe spilling forward, exposing a nipple weirdly soft and large, and cuffed his son on the cheek with his palm. It might have been affectionate if Barrett Rude’s voice, the theatrical summoning, hadn’t marked it as something else. Dylan watched Mingus rock delicately on his sneaker heels in expectation of another, stronger blow. But Barrett Rude grew absent, examined his own hand front and back, as though for something written there. Then he said, “Want money, don’t steal from your friend.” He extended an arm to the mantel and peeled off a twenty from the roll which lay there, shoved it at Mingus. “Put your hat back on and walk Little Dylan home now. And when you get back take a pick to your nappy-ass head, don’t make me keep telling you.”

Winter days were static glimpsed between channel flips. Rotting snow like black diseased gums in the street. The projects were sealed up, the kids didn’t come out. Henry could be seen slinging a football into the sky, basket-catching it himself. Alberto had abandoned him, shifted into new, more Puerto Rican friendships. It was shocking how Henry was diminished, how much his stature had depended on Alberto after all. Mingus appeared on the block before nightfall or was elusive for weeks. Comics got weird, were thrown down in disgust. Warlock was canceled, they’d never know how his battle with Thanatos turned out. Jack “King” Kirby’s return to Marvel, from his exile at DC, was still building steam. Dylan pictured Kirby in a laboratory leaching the Superman toxins from his body, recovering from kryptonite poisoning.

A guy jumped from the fifth floor of the halfway house on Nevins and impaled himself on the spiked iron gate, which had to be cut out in a section and moved with him to the Brooklyn Hospital surgery room. Kids took trips to see the fence, until the telltale spikes were capped by a new steel bar running along their tops. You hadn’t known it was a halfway house until someone jumped out, then it turned out everybody knew. As with the Brooklyn House of Detention on Atlantic, you’d avoided that block on communal instinct, knowledge you couldn’t have guessed you already had.

Dylan and Abraham stayed up late to see Saturday Night Live but after ten minutes Abraham declared he didn’t get it, and rummaged angrily for a misplaced Lenny Bruce record. Time was running backward, said Abraham. Things used to matter and be funny. Dylan took it on faith. One day Dylan found Earl slamming a spaldeen high off the face of the abandoned house, his teeth gritted as he said, over and over, “I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not! ” Earl was furious, disconsolate, nobody’s friend at the moment. For anybody, ballplaying was now explicitly nostalgic. If a few kids formed a game they were like the Puerto Ricans at the corner on milk crates, recounting the past, grumbling in ritual. Ball games broke like false fevers, passed like moods. Marilla and La-La sang, nearly screaming, Got my sunroof down, got my diamond in the back, put on your shaggy wig woman, if you don’t I ain’t comin’ back, oh, shame, shame, shame, sha-ay-ame, shame on you! If you can’t dance too!

One thawing Saturday in March Dylan met Mingus at noon to walk up Court Street, through the scrap-strewn park that stretched beyond Borough Hall, on a solemn mission Dylan didn’t understand. In the park they bought hot dogs and knishes in greasy wax paper from a steaming cart, Mingus producing a balled-up five from his coat pocket. Mingus rewrapped half his knish and put it where the money had been, stash for the unknown destination. Just past the war monument the park tilted toward Brooklyn’s edge, the crumpled waterfront: parking lots, garbage scows, city scrap yards. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway was a vibrating shadow, beneath it the streets still showed cobblestone in places, elsewhere old trolley tracks lay half buried in the new tar.

Mingus showed the way. They circled under the on-ramp to find stone stairs up into the sunlight of the bridge’s walkway, then started across, over the river, traffic howling in cages at their feet, the gray clotted sky clinging to the bridge’s veins, Manhattan’s dinosaur spine rotating into view as they mounted the great curve above the river. The walkway’s slats were uneven, some rotten. Just an armature of bolted wire lay between Mingus’s and Dylan’s sneaker tips and the pulsing, glittering water. The bridge was an argument or plea with space.

They halted two-thirds across. On the vast tower planted at Manhattan’s mouth were two lavish word-paintings, red and white and green and yellow sprayed fantastically high on the rough stone, edges bled in geological texture. The first read MONO , the second LEE , syllables drained of meaning, like Mingus’s DOSE .

Dylan understood what Mingus wanted him to see. The painted names had conquered the bridge, pinned it to the secret street, claimed it for Brooklyn. The distance between Mono’s and Lee’s blaring, blurry, timeless ten-foot letters and the binder-scribble and wall-scribble, the gnomic marks everywhere, might be traceable, step by step. Tags and their invisible authors were the next skully or Marvel superheroes, the hidden lore. Mingus Rude pulled out his half-eaten knish and nibbled it and the two of them stood in awe, apes at a monolith, glimpsing if not understanding their future. The cars rushing below knew nothing. People in cars weren’t New Yorkers anyway, they’d suffered some basic misunderstanding. The two boys on the walkway, apparently standing still: they were moving faster than the cars.

Nineteen seventy-five.

Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude in the spring of 1975, walking home along Dean Street studying marker tags in black and purple ink, on mailboxes and lampposts, DMD and FMD, DINE II andSCAR 56 , trying to break the code, mouthing syllables to themselves. Dylan and Mingus together and alone, in windows of time, punctuation. One crossing Nevins to dodge a clump of kids from the projects, keeping his white face hidden in a jacket hood; one hanging in loose gangs of black kids after school, then walking alone to Dean Street. The two of them, a fifth and a sixth grader, stranded in zones, in selves. White kid, black kid, Captain America and Falcon, Iron Fist and Luke Cage. In windows of time, returning from different schools to the same block, two brownstones, two fathers, Abraham Ebdus and Barrett Rude Junior each wrinkling back foil edges on TV dinners to discover peas and carrots that had invaded the mashed potatoes and Salisbury steak, setting them on the table in dour silence. Dinner in silence or to the sound of the television drowned by the baying of sirens, Nevins Street a fire lane, a path of destruction, the projects flaring up again, an apartment on the eighteenth floor with a smoldering mattress pushed halfway out the window, stuck. The grid of zones, the huddled brownstone streets between prison and projects, Wyckoff Gardens, Gowanus Houses. The whores on Nevins and Pacific. The high-school kids pouring out of Sarah J. Hale all afternoon, black girls already bigger than yo mama, Third Avenue another no-man’s-land, the empty lot where they raped that girl. The halfway house. It was all halfway, you walked out of your halfway school and tried to chart a course through your halfway neighborhood to make it back to your own halfway house, your half-empty house. Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude like figures stepping through mists of silence every few weeks to read a comic book or fool around with tags in ballpoint, dry runs, rehearsals for something else.

His old teacher’s office was unchanged, so it might all be a dream, a mistake. He might be cutting out on a City College lecture at 135th Street to visit the Art Students League on 57th Street in 1961, might be again the Columbus Avenue kid gawking like he wasn’t even a New Yorker, like he was some hick loosed in hipsters’ paradise, positive he saw de Kooning around every corner, airing his fresh goatee and praying nobody would call him on the bluff, banish him back uptown. Back then Brooklyn had been unknown to him, apart from Coney Island, that distant faded Wonderland where, at seventeen and high on Coca-Cola, under the squeaking boardwalk, in bands of sun and shadow, he’d unclasped his first brassiere, Sasha Koster’s, and, balls aching, jetted spontaneously into his binding underwear. He should have known that by spilling seed there, in the cold littered sand of Brooklyn, he’d doomed himself. That though MacDougal and Bleecker Streets seemed his future he would instead marry a life-drawing model from Williamsburg, a Hunter dropout, a chain-smoker and pot-smoker, a hippie before there were hippies, and end up raising their child alone in a row house five blocks from the Gowanus Canal. By venting Sasha Koster’s breasts to the salt air he’d sworn himself to the borough.

His office was unchanged and Perry Kandel was unchanged, still genially shabby in an elbow-patched sweater, teeth and skin still gray as an erased charcoal sketch, hair wild like a New Yorker cartoon of a shrink. Kandel tipped his stolid middle over his desk to shake hands and wave at a chair, then sat back and spoke as if resuming pursuit of a conversational point to which he’d been building for half his life but wouldn’t reach if he lived twice.

“Thinkers aren’t thinking, Abraham, teachers aren’t teaching. The writers don’t write, they stand onstage and play with themselves instead, emulating Mailer and Ginsberg. We’ve lost a generation. Young men walk into my office and declare their intention to live in a geodesic dome and tend bees, or compose choral music in Esperanto. To do happenings. Tradition’s kaput. Nothing’s good enough, not since Warhol, that schmuck with earlaps. It isn’t interesting enough to be merely a man or a woman, even. I went to see a so-called film at the Quad and in three hours learned only that David Bowie is without a penis. Him, he can’t even play with himself. Me, I have a smaller ambition, to keep painters painting, a few, anyway. You, Abe, you’re a grave disappointment.”

“You said a job, Perry. Don’t torture me.”

“I regard it as an act of despair. You weren’t selling when you sold to Hagopian, you were burying the evidence like a guilty animal. You’re ashamed of paint, it embarrasses you. What, you’re surprised? You think word doesn’t reach me?”

“Has word of my wrecked marriage reached you?” Abraham Ebdus spoke the words he hadn’t to this point, and looked his old teacher in the eye, wanting to shock and silence him. In fact, he’d shocked only himself. Perry Kandel didn’t even pause for breath.

“There’s a problem nobody’s solved. A painter leaves a trail of wrecked marriages should he be so lucky to get laid in the first place, but, but, but—essentially he persists in covering canvas with rabbit-skin glue and pigment. That’s how he earns the right to go on wrecking them.”

Abraham wasn’t going to descend to mentioning son, or mortgage. “If what you told me on the telephone was just to get me here for a lecture—”

“Listen, it’s a job. Whether it’s for you, you’ll decide. It would involve the application of paint with a brush, but only for purely tasteless and reprehensible ends, so relax. Your renunciation of your talent should remain uncompromised.”

“I appreciate the concern.”

“It’s nothing. An editor acquaintance, a clever man to whom I frequently lose sums at the poker table, he asked if I knew any young painters with both a figurative and an abstract bent, and with a sense of color. I said sure, a couple. He presides over a line of science-fiction paperbacks, which he wants to market with an eye on adults for a change, the college crowd, god knows what he imagines that is. For this he wants someone outside the usual hack commercial painters. He used the word upscale. Personally, I hear that word, I tremble. I wouldn’t want it applied to myself.”

Though certain to resume his galactic harangue before long, Perry Kandel paused now to savor his own last rhetorical flourish like he was sucking on an invisible cigar. Then, price extracted—Abraham Ebdus was more than usually conscious this day that every single thing in the world had its price—his old teacher scribbled a name and a phone number on the pink duplicate copy of a student evaluation form and pushed it across the desk.

chapter 6

Rabbit-furred parka hood laced tight around his neck, tunnel vision further reduced by his bowed head, the boy’s narrowed view consists only of his own ribbed Converse sneaker toes shooting forward in alternation through a fur-lined oval window of rushing-past pavement. He walks this way along Atlantic Avenue to Flatbush and Fourth, hands plunged in pockets, winter giving a certain minimal cover, a chance to mask hands, face, all whiteness. Crossing Fourth he’s forced to lift the furred viewfinder, turn it right and left, searching for the right moment to cross the lanes of heavy traffic to the newsstand on the triangular island. Seen through the windshields of the steaming cars at the red light on Fourth, or through the dusty windows of the Doray Tavern or the Triangle Pawn Shop, the boy might resemble a mole or rat on two legs, gray hood tugged into a shape that resembles a darting, questing nose, one which sniffs air for danger.

The mole-figure now scurries across the intersection to the shelter of the newsstand. There he looks up again, turns the nose anxiously full circle, perhaps suspecting he’s been followed. Finally, satisfied, the mole crouches, under the indifferent eyes of the newsstand’s proprietor, a bearded Arab who warms his hands over the portable heater wedged at his feet in the narrow cubicle lined with People, Diario, The Amsterdam News. The mole kneels, peels up his pants leg, wrinkles down his orange-striped tube sock. Tucked moistly against his ankle is a paper dollar and three twenty-five-cent coins. It’s Tuesday. The mole-boy pushes the dollar and one of the quarters forward on the smooth-worn wooden lip of the newsstand, then gently works the freshly arrived comic books out of the cold metal racks. One each of The Avengers #138 and Marvel Team-Up #43, featuring Spider-Man and Doctor Doom, and three copies of the debut issue of Omega the Unknown, an instant collector’s item, as promised by months of buildup in the “Marvel Bullpen Bulletins” columns in other titles. The proprietor glances, nods glazed consent. The mole-boy’s parka is opened for a dangerous instant, the comics slid ever so carefully into the waistline of his pants. The mole-boy closes his coat, relaxes his arms, tests to see that he’s walking normally, that the presence of the comics is concealed, but also that the precious #1s are uncrumpled. The remaining two quarters are now shifted to the coat pocket. They’re to travel with him, gripped in a clenched, sweaty fist, for offering up at the first opportunity, the slightest confrontation. Mugging money. Walk these streets with pockets empty, you’re an idiot, asking for it.

This creature of pure fear waddles home, tiny steps to be sure the comics don’t slip.

Once indoors the mole-boy sheds his protective cover. The Avengers and Team-Up are put aside, afterthoughts. Two copies of Omega the Unknown are tucked in sober plastic, the plastic is taped shut, the sealed bags moved to a high shelf, archived. The last copy, that’s for reading.

The heralded Omega? He turns out to be a mute superhero from another planet, pretty much Black Bolt mated with Superman, if you allowed the comparison. The comic is weird, worse than unsatisfying. Omega, it turns out, isn’t the main point of the thing. The majority of pages are given over to another character, a twelve-year-old kid with an unexplained psychic connection to Omega, a bullied, orphaned kid who’s going to a public junior high in Hell’s Kitchen.

Hey, maybe even the geniuses up at Marvel Comics knew you were in hell. Didn’t matter, didn’t help, because you weren’t allowed to know it yourself, not really. There wasn’t any connection between you and the poor, helpless kid in Omega the Unknown, not that you could permit yourself to see.

That kid? He just didn’t have any street smarts.

Sixth grade. The year of the headlock, the year of the yoke, Dylan’s heat-flushed cheeks wedged into one or another black kid’s elbow, book bag skidding to the gutter, pockets rapidly, easily frisked for lunch money or a bus pass. On Hoyt Street, on Bergen, on Wyckoff if he was stupid enough to walk on Wyckoff. On Dean Street, even, one block from home, before the dead eyes of the brownstones, in the shadow of the humming, implacable hospital. Adults, teachers, they were as remote as Manhattan was to Brooklyn, blind indifferent towers. Dylan, he was a bug on a grid of slate, white boy walking.

“Yoke him, man,” they’d say, exhorting. He was the object, the occasion, it was irrelevant what he overheard. “Yoke the white boy. Do it, nigger.”

He might be yoked low, bent over, hugged to someone’s hip then spun on release like a human top, legs buckling, crossing at the ankles. Or from behind, never sure by whom once the headlock popped loose and three or four guys stood around, witnesses with hard eyes, shaking their heads at the sheer dumb luck of being white. It was routine as laughter. Yoking erupted spontaneously, a joke of fear, a piece of kidding.

He was dismissed from it as from an episode of light street theater. “Nobody hurt you, man. It ain’t for real. You know we was just fooling with you, right?” They’d spring away, leave him tottering, hyperventilating, while they high-fived, more like amazed spectators than perpetrators. If Dylan choked or whined they were perplexed and slightly disappointed at the white boy’s too-ready hysteria. Dylan didn’t quite get it, hadn’t learned his role. On those occasions they’d pick up his books or hat and press them on him, tuck him back together. A ghost of fondness lived in a headlock’s shadow. Yoker and yokee had forged a funny compact.

You regularly promised your enemies that what you did together had no name.

Dylan leaked saliva, tears. On a cold day a nostril path of snot. Once, pee. He’d bite his tongue and taste the seepage, the tang of humiliation swallowed back. They made faces, rolled eyes. Dylan was hopeless, stained with shame. They’d try to overlook it.

“Boy bleeds you touch him, dang.”

“Nah, man, he all right. Let him alone, man.”

“You ain’t gonna say nothin’, right? Cuz you know we just messin’ around. We wouldn’t never do nothin’ to you, man.”

He’d nod, collect himself, not open his mouth. Wait to be congratulated for gulping back a clog of tears, for exhibiting silence.

“See? You pretty cool, for a white boy. Get outta here now.”

White boy was his name. He’d grown into it, crossed a line, become visible. He shined like free money. The price of the name was whatever was in his pockets at the time, fifty cents or a dollar.

“White boy, lemme talk to you for a minute.” Head tipped sideways, too lazy to take hands from pockets to summon him. One black kid, two, three. One near a bunch, maybe, you couldn’t say who was with who. Eyes rolled, laughing. The whole event a quotation of itself, a little boring, nearly an indignity to perform.

If he ignored it, tried to keep walking: “Yo, white boy ! I’m talking to you, man.”

“What’s the matter, you can’t hear ?”

No. Yes.

“You don’t like me, man?”

Helpless.

The fact of it: he’d cross the street to have his pockets emptied. The outcome was obvious anyway. He’d cross magnetized in disgrace, under the sway of an implicit yoking, so no one was forced to say See now I got to fuck you up, cuz you don’t listen, man. It was a dance, steps traced in yokes gone by. Call me white boy and I’ll hand you a dollar spontaneously, I’m good at this now.

“Just come here for a minute, man, I ain’t gonna hurt you. What you gotta be afraid for? Dang, man. You think I’m gonna hurt you?”

No. Yes.

The logic was insane, except as a polyrhythm of fear and reassurance, a seduction. “What you afraid of? You a racist, man?”

Me?

We yoke you for thinking that we might: in your eyes we see that you come pre-yoked.

Your fear makes it our duty to prove you right.

He was caged on street corners, stranded anywhere. A pair of kids made a human jail, a box of disaster waiting on the innocent sunlit pavement, as though he’d climbed into the legendary abandoned refrigerator.

Two voices made paradoxical, unanswerable music. Their performance for one another’s sakes, not his. The pleasure was in counterpoint, no place for a third voice.

“Who you looking for? Ain’t nobody gonna help you, man.”

“Nah, man, chill out. This white boy’s all right, he’s cool. You don’t got to fuck with him.”

“Fuck he starin’ at me for, then? Yo, man, you a racist motherfucker? I might have to fuck up your stupid ass, just for that.”

“Nah, man, shut up, he’s cool. You cool, right man? Hey, you got a dollar you could loan me?”

The distillation, the question at the core of the puzzle, asked a million times, a million ways:

“What you lookin’ at?”

“Fuck you lookin’ at, man?”

“Don’t look at me, white boy. I’ll slap you, motherfucker.”

Here was what Robert Woolfolk had prepared him for. He’d awarded Dylan the gift of his own shame, his mummy’s silence, for use on a daily basis. Each encounter bore Robert’s signature—glancing pain and tilted logic, interrogations spinning nowhere. Ritual assurance that nothing had actually happened. And the guilt of Dylan’s whiteness excusing everything, covering it all.

What

the

fuck

looking

at?

If mole-boy ever lifted his darty eyes from the pavement he might have been casting around for a grownup, or maybe some older kid he knew, someone to bail him out. Mingus Rude, say, not that he was clear he’d want Mingus to see him this way, cowering at the prospect of a yoke, white boy with cheeks hate-red. Hey, I’m not racist, my best friend is black! This wasn’t halfway sayable. Nobody had ever said who was whose best friend. Mingus Rude likely had a million of them, seventh graders, black, white, who knew. And the mole-boy could have said black aloud about as easily as Fucking looking at motherfucking YOU, man! Anyway, Mingus Rude was nowhere near. The seventh and eighth graders were housed in the main building on Court Street, while Dylan was alone in the annex, one block and a million years, a million terrified footsteps, and one million-dollar kid away.

Abraham Ebdus handled the stack of postcards just as he had the slices of burned toast, loosely, nearly dropping them, and frowning as though they had ruined something or were ruined themselves. He stared at his fingers after he’d scattered them on the breakfast table. Perhaps the postcards had left a scent or a smudge of something on his fingertips. Maybe they’d be improved by being scraped clean, or smeared with butter and orange jelly. Really they wanted to be tossed out. He let the kid have them instead.

“Someone you know in Indiana?”

The boy had come to breakfast with his backpack on, running late, as always. They were like old men at the YMCA, the two of them waking to their two alarm clocks in their two bedrooms and meeting for breakfast. Dylan’s a clock radio tuned to an all-news station which leaked through Abraham’s wall a blaring theme of trumpets and teletype sound effects, a voice boasting “The newswatch never stops,” like being driven out of sleep by a newsreel headache. The kid lived in an anxious world. His nervous system seemed tuned like a robot’s. Now he edged up to the table with the backpack humped up onto the back of his chair and blinked at the postcards while he gulped orange juice.

“The first one came a month ago,” said Abraham. “The one with the crab.”

Abraham Ebdus saw the kid needed new shoes. Dylan crushed his shoe backs by cramming into them with the laces tied, and carved away the inner rim of the heels with his pigeon-toed walk which corrective soles left uncorrected. He wanted to wear sneakers every day, certain sneakers which every kid desired. He’d spoken angrily and Abraham had understood that at stake was less status than a certain bottom line of humiliation, the survival of the kid’s willingness to even keep braving school every day. He’d bought him the sneakers but still insisted on the brown corrective shoes which looked like 1950s boaters. Sneakers two days out of five was the rule.

The boy fingered the postcards but didn’t comment. “Toast is burned,” he said instead, head ducked down. He turned the postcard with the picture of the crab over twice, reading the lines, then scowling again at the Technicolor-hued photograph of the red crab on tan sand. His glasses slipped downward and he shoved them back quickly with his thumb, an occult gesture performed with a fugitive’s deftness. The kid was a hider.

“Give me your glasses,” said Abraham.

Dylan didn’t speak, just handed them over. Abraham fished out of a kitchen drawer a tiny screwdriver and cinched the hinge screws on the kid’s plastic frames. The glasses were shit, made of shit, part of the contemporary ocean of plastic. Abraham frowned at them and did what he could, tightened the screws, doing his miniaturist’s work. This was the level at which things could be improved. He wished now he’d taken the strange, inadequate postcards to his studio and altered them, forged the typist’s Courier font with his delicate brushes, fixed the stupid, enigmatic words to make them mean something more than they did, repainted the fire-engine-red crabshell a natural green and brown. As though crabs were bright red before you cooked them, idiots.

Abraham Ebdus had studied the crab postcard for an hour the day it arrived, five weeks ago, in fact. Dylan’s name was typed in full on the back, the address was typed, the message too, all with a manual typewriter that had a misaligned ribbon which ornamented each of the wobbly-struck letters with a faint under-halo of red. Close inspection revealed too a miniature trail of oily gear marks made by the grinding of the postcard along the typewriter barrel’s right edge. The postage stamp was a reproduction of LOVE by Robert Indiana—that charlatan—and the message, which included no capitals or punctuation, read:

this crab runs sideways west

out of the pot

but not out of potluck

pacific ocean mermaid dreams

be good d and you’ll see one

Unsigned. Postmarked Bloomington, Indiana, which to Abraham could hardly mean less. Three more postcards came in the following weeks. The second showed the same Indiana postmark, followed by two boasting an erratic trail west, Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Phoenix, Arizona. All stamped with LOVE and all equally gnomic, only now the typist had given attribution, still in type, at the foot of the flighty poems, capitalized to show it was the author’s name: Running Crab. Abraham Ebdus had read Running Crab’s subsequent messages with a fury that blurred the dopey words so they swam in his vision. Anyhow, they weren’t addressed to him.

Now he again asked his son, “Got a friend in Indiana?” He was fishing, couldn’t help himself.

Dylan didn’t reply, just scooped the postcards together like a deck of cards and shoved them into his backpack without reading them. Saving them for later. He seemed quite unsurprised.

“I should have given them to you when they came,” said Abraham. “I will from now on. If more come.”

Dylan stared up at him for an instant, adjusting the placement of his tightened frames on his nose.

“I already got two,” Dylan said. “They came on Saturday.”

Now Abraham was silenced.

Outside, at the bottom step of his stoop, the boy looked back to be sure Abraham wasn’t watching through the parlor window, then slung his knapsack off his shoulders and unsnapped the top. Inside were his sneakers, Pro Ked 69ers in navy blue canvas, with the red-and-blue rubber stripes on the sole as thick and satisfying badges of legitimacy. Under the prodding of a fingernail the rubber stripes had the chewy, resistant texture of a fresh spaldeen. Today nobody would hound him singing Rejects, they make your feet feel fine, rejects, they cost a dollar ninety-nine, because these sneakers indisputably weren’t rejects. Few things were as clear. While the knapsack was open the boy stashed his glasses, pushing them into the corner beside the six Running Crab postcards, the two he’d retrieved from the mail himself, the four new ones, three unread, which he’d study later. His interest in the postcards was clinical. The missives from Running Crab were amusing but had nothing to do with his life, like a dated and essentially forgettable television show you watched a lot anyway, but disdainfully, priding yourself on how seldom you laughed or even cracked a smile, Gilligan’s Island or Mister Ed.

He changed his brown corrective shoes for the Pro Keds, but the shoes didn’t go in the knapsack. They didn’t go anywhere near school, not anymore. The shoes had a place under Rachel Ebdus’s overgrown forsythia plot in the yard to the left of the stoop, a cranny the boy had scooped out where they could nest with the earth and the bugs and the twigs until the boy came home from school and retrieved them. The shoes were an artifact from the fitful past, fossil shoes, and they belonged in the ground. Everyone knew to call them roachstompers because they associated them, properly, with their ancient cousins. That their survival into the present was uncanny didn’t make it any less embarrassing. The shoes ought to adapt, grow wings and disguise themselves as present-day birds, like the dinosaurs had. Or return to the ocean, become turtles. Until they burrowed back into the past where they belonged they could live in the earth, nestled in the cool forsythia roots which would never again be thinned or trimmed, and there they would be denied the sunlight which embarrassed them. It was for their own good. If Running Crab sent a postcard with a return address maybe he’d send her the shoes in the mail. Crab and shoes could run together, could scuttle into the sea. Dylan, he’d stick with Pro Keds.

Near the finish of that desultory sixth-grade spring they found each other again, like it was the most normal thing in the world, like they hadn’t missed half a year of afternoons. Mingus wore a military-green jacket though it was too warm for a jacket, and the jacket clanked, full of some metallic something which had been pushed through torn pockets to nestle in the lining. The jacket’s back panel bore Mingus’s tag, DOSE , elaborately surrounded by asterisklike stars and swooping punctuation. All went unremarked. Dylan pushed his schoolbag just inside Mingus’s basement door and they slouched their way together down Dean Street, the block which had become so useless now, no skully, no ball games, any kid you could think of off in some cluster or gang, like survivalist cells. Just Marilla and La-La, but they didn’t even seem to recognize you now as they sang to each other I’m eightee-een with a bullet, got my finger on the trigger, I’m gonna pull it, yeah —

They crept wordlessly into Brooklyn Heights, away from Dean Street, putting the Gowanus Houses and the Wyckoff Gardens at their backs, leaving Court Street and I.S. 293 skirted entirely. By way of Schermerhorn Street they slipped past the shadow of the Brooklyn House of Detention into the preserve of the Heights. There they fell with relief to perfect invisibility on the silent, shady streets—Remsen and Henry and Joralemon—ancient brownstone blocks like placid opening shots, scenes never to be disturbed by any action. Remsen in particular resembled an arboretum, a diorama of perfect row houses beneath a canopy of trees, their underlit parlor ceilings glowing through curtains like sculpted butter, brass doorknockers and doorknobs like the features of gleaming masks, street numbers etched in silver and gold leaf on beveled-glass transoms. Here was Brooklyn prime, the condition to which Boerum Hill lamely aspired. Here, stoops were castle stairs. No one went in or out that Dylan saw.

They were pretty much invisible too in the throngs on Montague Street, the three o’clock flood of private-school kids from Packer Institute and Saint Ann’s and Brooklyn Friends. The Heights kids clustered around the Burger King and the Baskin-Robbins in giddy crowds, boys mixed with girls, all in Lacoste shirts and corduroys, suede jacket sleeves knotted at their waists, flutes and clarinets in leather cases heaped carelessly with backpacks at their feet, senses so bound up in a private cosmos of flirtation that Dylan and Mingus passed through them like an X ray.

Then a blond girl with an intricate mouthful of braces stepped out of her gaggle of look-alikes and called them over. Eyes wild with her own daring, she showed a cigarette.

“Got a light?”

Her friends busted up at the self-conscious comedy of it, but apparently Mingus didn’t care, could live inside the quote, make it real. He dug in his jacket lining and pulled out a bright blue lighter, like a PEZ container that blurted a curl of fire. How she’d known he’d have it Dylan couldn’t fathom. The tone of the scene switched again, the girl leaned in, eyes narrowed ferally now, thrilled and wary, tilted her head, scooped her hair around her ear to protect it from the flame. She turned her back the moment the cigarette was lit and Dylan and Mingus moved on, dismissed.

The Heights kids were rich most of all with each other.

The Heights Promenade was a rim of park cantilevered over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the shipyards, Brooklyn’s sulky lip. Old men and women pecked forward like pigeons on cobblestone, or sat arrayed, frozen with clutched newspapers on benches in the face of Manhattan’s tedious spires, the skyline a channel no one watched that played anyway, like an anthem, like famous static. Beyond it spilled the garbagey bay, yellow Jersey smoke clung over inching ferries, over the trinketlike Statue. Dylan and Mingus were detectives, not really here. They followed clues. The trail was legible in gushy, streaked font on lamppost bases and mail deposit boxes, fire-alarm poles, garage doors, finger-traced in dust on the panels of trucks.

ROTO I, BEL I , DEAL , BUSTER NSA , SUPER STRUT , FMD .

“Non-Stop Action,” translated Mingus. He was hushed by the knowledge, his eyes unfocused. “Flow Master Dancers.” Tags were no different from anything else: codes in layers, ready to be peeled away or overwritten.

Roto and Bel and Deal were in DMD Crew, a new outfit, jokers from Atlantic Terminals, a housing project across Flatbush Avenue.

Super Strut was old school, he went way back. The style might look funny now, but you wouldn’t disrespect it.

The syllable TOY was written in mockery over certain tags, disrespect for a writer who was a toy.

Write TOY on a DMD tag, get your ass kicked.

Mingus fished in his lining for his El Marko, a Magic Marker consisting of a puglike glass bottle stoppered with a fat wick of felt. Purple ink sloshed inside the tiny screw-top bottle, staining the glass in curtains of color. Mingus drew out a safety pin and stuck the felt in a dozen places, pinning it out he called it, until the ink bled so freely it stained the light skin at his palm, then the green cuff of his oversize jacket. Dylan felt a quiver of the pleasure he associated with his father’s tiny brushes, with Spirograph cogs and skully caps.

DOSEwent up on a lamppost, Mingus’s hand moving in studied arcs.

A tag was a reply, a call to those who heard, like a dog’s bark understood across fences. A reply in moist purple. The letters dripped and stunk thrillingly. Every time they went up Mingus hustled Dylan away, the El Marko clanking back in his jacket lining against the blue lighter and whatever else. Mingus pushing at Dylan’s elbow, the two boys crossed the street diagonally, ducking pursuers who weren’t necessarily real. Their path was a zigzag sentence consisting of a single word, DOSE , written in blank spots found everywhere.

Under oblivious eyes, the invisible autographed the world.

The long path of the Promenade curled at the end in a small abandoned playground, two swings, a slide. Mingus took a minute to tag DOSE on the heel-dented mercury sheen of the slide, a particularly juicy rendition with a dripping halo.

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