The Fortress of Solitude (24 page)

Dylan stands at the front edge, as close as he’s stood, then closer. Shifts a toe onto the cornice, bends his knee like George Washington in the prow. He can just see down into the pit of Dean Street, the tops of new-planted trees, the roof grilles of the passing bus, but the feeling’s vertiginous. He steps back. No good staring and daring yourself: the will to fly sours, leaks away. That may have been Aaron Doily’s mistake. It needs a running start, a glorious oblivious leap to the opposite rooftop, not the dying quail of a fall that would surely result from long and woozy contemplation.

Close your eyes, reach out and feel the
air waves
, if there are any. Use the force, Luke.

Okay, okay. Dylan charts with backward steps an invisible runway he’ll retrace. Five steps ought to be enough. He’s retreated to the center of the roof. Anyone watching would think he was cowering, but it’s just the opposite—he’s spring-loaded, expecting to fly. Then, as though smacked by a vast hand from the sky, he crumbles to his knees in terror of the thing he’s proposed for himself. Fingers balled in one doubled fist around the ring, Dylan Ebdus huddles, shivers, and slowly and without resistance pees his pants. The urine runs inside his jeans leg to his ankle, drips into his sock and sneaker and onto the gummy, sun-warmed tar.

Here might be the ring’s only spell, to induce self-pissing.

Got to give it up to the flying man: it’s not that easy to throw yourself off a roof.

The Dean Street bus, unable to slip past the white stretch limousine double-parked in front of Barrett Rude’s place, nestled at its bumper instead, humming like a refrigerator, traffic behind stacking to Bond Street. The bus carried just two passengers, one intermittently asleep, but the thing still had its dumb round to make, its loop. The driver kneaded his horn, bleats cutting the drowsy, humid afternoon. The chauffeur had abandoned the limo, snuck to Ramirez’s for a bottle of Miller and a ham-and-cheese.

So anyone on the block not already eyeballing the limo through parlor or upstairs windows was alerted to the anomaly, the bright unlikely event plopped into their June’s last afternoon. Nobody saw it come, but they’d be damned if they weren’t going to see it go, to learn who’d climb inside. Men on stoops wrinkled new bags open just to the lips of bottles, no farther. Women leaned clubby arms on sills, watching for something to unfold. Behind a basement window grille La-La knit Marilla’s hair in cornrows, jerking her head back with increasing force until Marilla said, “Dang! You got a problem?”

A white man with a rake scraped a day’s new crop of wrappers and bottle caps out of his forsythia, muttering under his Red Sox cap.

Abraham Ebdus daubed gray on a frame of celluloid, totally unaware.

Dylan missed the limousine too. He sat sequestered in ailanthus shade in his backyard, speedily turning the pages of
The Pod Thickens
, a New Belmont Special written by Semi Chellas, cover art by A. Ebdus.

The chauffeur popped out of Old Ramirez’s, sandwich already half unwrapped, then took in the sight of the clogged-up bus and nearly dropped his beer, performed a corny double take with his elbows, sensing his audience. The line of backed-up drivers horn-serenaded him as he fumbled key into ignition, muttering, “Hold up, baby, hold up.” The limo cornered Nevins, loosing the clog.

The street grew calm. For a moment it was as though the watchers had dreamed it, they might be returned to their lives, only mystified. Then the white car rounded Bond, sharklike, and resettled at Barrett Rude’s address. The driver stuck at the wheel now, gnawed his sandwich there, a lazy hand dropping balled butcher paper to the asphalt, then rising to adjust rearview for a spell of toothpicking.

Blobs of yellow-green sun refracted through trees grew elliptical, spanned the white hood, moved on.

The chauffeur was asleep, what a life.

When the door at the top of Barrett Rude’s stoop opened it was like a Sunday newspaper flipped open to the funny pages. The figures poured out one after another, cartoon pimps, Batman villains, outsize mercurial goofs impossible to fix in vision. The Funk Mob, singers, players, and what passed for an entourage, a couple of freakazoid chicks. They’d dropped in to visit Barrett Rude Junior, en route to a promotional appearance at the Fulton Mall and in utmost regalia: mauve feathers, star-frame glasses, padded silver-foil shoulder pads, lightning-bolt headgear, spaceman boots, six-inch heels, King Tut beards, the works.

They burst out of the house loud and happy and moving with zany grace, a Ralph Bakshi cel in the open air, high on Barrett Rude’s hospitality and cocaine, both powdered and cooked into base. To Dean Street they resembled nothing so much as a slice of human graffiti, a masterpiece in motion like a train car gone before you could check it out. This vision, too, quickly evaporated, each band member hand-slapping Barrett Rude farewell where he stood in his boxing robe and satin pants at his door, then piling into the back of that clown-car-in-reverse. The smooth white container swallowed the whole chaos of glints and textures and jiving walks behind tinted windows. The chauffeur rubbed his eyes, turned the key, revved the engine. The limo coursed down the block, gone.

Barrett Rude Junior stood in his robe on the top of the stoop, chuckling, shaking his head, kneading at his coke-frozen nose and lips with the back of his hand. He might have basked for a second or two in Dean Street’s eyes on him: Shouldn’t they know he was a star? Damn, time they learned. Problem with being in a group, no one ever knew your name, just the group, the Distinctions, like White Castle or Oldsmobile.

White and Puerto Rican motherfuckers around here probably never even heard his million-selling songs, probably thought he was a pimp or gangster coming in buying up a house on renovator’s row, right in their faces.

He stood, hands on hips, for a long assertive minute, grinding his jaw, staring at nothing, taking the pulse of the block before he turned and went inside.

It was after his door had shut, Dean Street at last absented of limousine and costumes and singers in satin robes, that eyes might have found the figure below, in the well of the basement entrance under the stoop, one foot and knee propped out in late sunlight, the rest of him in shadow, watching. An old man with coiled salt-and-pepper beard on grave-lined cheeks, arms ropy in a sleeveless white T-shirt, gold Star of David on a chain hung to his sternum: Barrett Rude Senior. It had been hearsay up until now that a third generation was arrived in the Rude house. This was the first sighting. Only, Senior had been watching the whole time, watching for days already, peering through the half-sunken basement windows, seated in a low chair beside the paint-chipped radiator, eyes level with the knees of passersby on Dean’s slate. He’d been watching Marilla and La-La across the street, watching the new wave of ballplayers who’d inherited Henry’s stoop, watching dog walkers furtively toe piles of shit to the gutter. He’d watched the Funk Mob come and go, heard their hoots of laughter through the ceiling. Now he watched Dean Street watching him, fine with it, as willing to be seen, in his half-seen way, as his son.

The ring wasn’t helping him win chess games with Arthur Lomb, that much was for certain. He toppled his king in surrender three times an hour, the two of them hunched on the stoop in sunlight, lizards on a rock. Dylan prayed for Arthur to ferry down the red juice and turkey sandwiches and raisin cookies his mother wrapped in wax paper and packed into the refrigerator each day before leaving for work. Their lunch break, which was the only relief from Arthur’s bearing down with his phalanx of pawns, and behind them his thuggish rooks ready to surge and crush Dylan’s limp knights, dozy bishops, naked king, spirit. Arthur’s mother figured on Dylan’s presence, made double sets of sandwiches now. It was pitiably easy to fall into a routine with a kid when you were his only friend and his mother knew it. Dylan suspected the sandwiches and cookies were a bribe. Perhaps Arthur suspected it too, perhaps that was why he chewed them with a morbid gnashing intensity which resembled his chess. As if Arthur were trying to pulverize the mornings and afternoons of the new summer into crumbs, defeated pawns to be swept away.

The problem was he never actually did sweep the pawns away, only set them up again as quickly as he’d crushed them, flogging Dylan to the next match, and the next. Arthur, as ever both slavish and sadistic, always reorganized both their chessmen. If the Yankees or Mets had a day game afternoons were more tolerable, Arthur’s transistor tuned to Lindsey Nelson or Phil Rizzuto, the Mets going nowhere, the Yankees stacked with hired guns and bound for glory. Otherwise it was another tight rotation of “Afternoon Delight” and “Right Back Where We Started From” on one of the Top 40 AM stations which were Arthur’s fixation.

“This is really quite an interesting song,” said Arthur whenever “Convoy” played. He never explained. The ritual comment was intended as self-evident.

Dylan didn’t ask, didn’t fall for it, just fiddled with the ring on his hand. He was immune, off elsewhere in his mind, in diving flight.

Arthur began saying
breast
for
check
. “Breast. Breast. Breast
mate
.”

For relief they scored the latest
Fantastic Four
and
Defenders
and
Ghost Rider
from the newsstand on the traffic island on Flatbush. They read them in five minutes, then Arthur put them in plastic and began setting up the pieces again.

The day Dylan began to hallucinate that Arthur’s furrowed, sweat-beaded brow was actually ticking like a bomb, he toppled his king and said, “Let’s go see if Mingus is home.”

Arthur stared up from the board. “Did I hear you correctly?”

“Sure.”

“You’ll introduce me to Mingus Rude?”

Arthur’s expression mingled astonishment and gloat. It was as if the entire dull ten-day stand of chess demolitions had been intended to produce this one specific result.

“Why not?” said Dylan.

“You won’t hear any objection from me,” said Arthur.

Dylan shrugged, not wanting to suggest in his response that he’d given anything valuable away. In fact he’d vowed never to bring Arthur Lomb around to Dean Street, at least never when any of the Dean Street kids, such as remained hanging around the block, would possibly see. Hell, it was only another promise to himself broken, nobody else would ever know. If the Dean Street kids confused Dylan with Arthur Lomb at this late date it was hopeless anyway. Arthur’s whiteness couldn’t rub off on Dylan, couldn’t make him any whiter than he was. The taboo was pointless.

Anything, anyway, not to see his decimated pawns clapped back on their squares.

Mingus was home. In fact he was sitting on his own stoop, halfway up to catch the shade thrown by the house, staring dazedly at what he held between his two hands like a treasure, or perhaps a small live thing which required his protection: a fresh spaldeen, its pink flesh unscuffed, as though it had never had contact with the street, as though every latent bounce remained sealed inside it, pure potential.

He looked up when Dylan and Arthur approached and Dylan understood instantly that Mingus had been into Barrett Rude Junior’s freezer pot stash, had gotten deeply stoned, a solo afternoon jaunt. His eyes were dewy with it.

“I
found
it,” he pronounced, raising up the spaldeen.

“This is Arthur,” said Dylan lightly, making the introduction he’d never meant to make, but tossing it off. “From Pacific.”

Mingus snapped to exaggerated attention, reached to shake Arthur Lomb’s hand. “Yo, Arthur, how you doin’?”

“Okay,” said Arthur sheepishly.

“Pa-
cif
-ic,” said Mingus, measuring it with his dope-thickened tongue, tasting the syllables. “You got your own homeboys up around
Pacific
, Arthur?”

“There, uh, aren’t any other kids my age on my block.”

“Oh yeah?” Mingus looked impressed. “All right, I think I know what you mean, yeah. So, what you think—some little kid lost this ball, man?”

“I guess that’s most likely,” said Arthur. He looked stymied to be interviewed by Mingus Rude, pushed out of his ordinary range of operation. He might fear himself on the verge of
a stupid answer
to
a snappy question
, that was what his eyes seemed to say.

“You think we ought to play stoopball?”

Arthur made a helpless face, looked at Dylan.

“What you think, D-Man?”

“If you even remember
how
,” said Dylan. He savored a certain hard-boiled flavor in his reply, pleased to assert before Arthur Lomb the deep and weary history between himself and Mingus Rude, a history extensive in ways Arthur couldn’t begin to imagine.

“I’ll throw a home run on your ass, boy.”

“Let’s see you,” said Dylan.

Maybe the summer was only waiting for them to resume their places, the light and heat waiting to gel around them. The block was like an open-air museum of their former days, the slate cracked and skewed in all the usual places, the abandoned house still theirs any time they wanted to reclaim it. It had taken Arthur Lomb’s presence, though, to rouse the effort. They’d silently partnered to show him what Dean Street meant, the old essential traces. If it had been only Dylan and Mingus they would have been off tagging
DOSE
on lampposts, away from headquarters on some undercover operation.

Arthur Lomb, and the beacon of the fresh spaldeen. It had something to do as well with the pink ball which appeared in Mingus’s hands like a problem unsolved, an old itch.

There were only the three of them at first. Mingus at the abandoned stoop, turned sideways as he wound up to slam the ball high off the steps. Dylan on the opposite sidewalk, beyond the parked cars, playing the outfield. Arthur Lomb placed between, in the street, under the canopy of trees, to play infield and flatten himself to one side to make way for the rare car.

“Mother
fucker
!” Mingus shouted when Dylan made a perfect catch. Consoling himself, he rattled a double up the middle, chattering too-late encouragement: “Block it with your body, Artie, Arthur Fonzarelli, Fonzie,
A-Boy
.”