The Fortress of Solitude (30 page)

“Take it, man. Do it.”

Dylan bit the pizza’s tip. Chewing open-mouthed to ventilate molten cheese, he sought out the younger kid’s eyes. He felt a peculiar cheer at the animal bewilderment he inspired there. Yes, I am your first
whiteboy
. Gaze on me. You’ll know many before you’re through. Some you’ll be large enough to handle, some you’ll even terrify.

He took a second bite.

“Don’t eat it, I told you,” said Robert, his voice rising. “Take the slice,” he directed again.

“Awww, he’s bitin’ on it,” said Robert’s trainee, misery in his voice.

Robert pointed at the pizza. “Quit now, man, or I’ll fuck you up!”

Dylan swallowed, sank his teeth in again. Robert Woolfolk was hamstrung by his intractable sidekick—if he reached for the pizza himself it was an admission of failure. The slice was dwindling anyway, so the principle was all that remained, if there’d been anything apart from principle in the first place. Dylan understood he functioned as a passing occasion here, object in an obscure ritual which had for once nothing to do with Dylan himself. The young black kid would take the brunt tonight, be bullied through a series of low-end quasi-criminal stunts.

The kid knew it too. He sulked in the background as Dylan’s bites made the slice irretrievable. Robert Woolfolk turned to Dylan now, but was jangled, distracted, with only a minute more to spare, seemingly a bit out of his skin.

Last day before school could get to practically anyone.

“I’m still gonna kill you one day,” Robert Woolfolk said.

Dylan chewed, facing Robert with a dope-eyed, cowlike aspect.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know.”

Dylan shrugged, only certain Robert wasn’t killing him tonight.

“Fuck’s the matter with
yo back
, man?”

“Nothing,” said Dylan between bites.

Robert looked harder. “Lemme see that ring for a minute.”

“It’s a present,” said Dylan. “From my mother.”

“
Fuck
your mother,
motherfucker
.” Now Robert Woolfolk danced as though attacked by invisible insects. The ring, anyway, was clearly off-limits, tainted with Rachel-magic. Robert twitched like a bot moving in circles, his circuits blown.

“Think Gus be gonna proteck you forever?”

No, Aeroman be gonna proteck me forever
, thought Dylan, swallowing unchewed chunks of pizza defiantly.

But Aeroman hadn’t flown tonight, there was no pretending.

Dylan had now gnawed all the way to the ragged crust, which he held at his mouth like a jack-o’-lantern smile.

Robert herky-jerked his arm out and slapped the crust from Dylan’s hand. Like hilltop observers musing on a distant nova they watched it tumble to the gutter, officially ruined. Robert’s worst excess of tension was spent in the act. He could return to his protégé who stood abjectly to one side.

Robert Woolfolk pointed a finger at Dylan as they parted, but his voice was lost, his menace dispelled by the conundrum of this encounter.

On Smith Street alone, ignored by the Puerto Rican social club members in their floral shirts and straw porkpies, the humpbacked, overdressed, and sweating thirteen-year-old turned onto Dean and strolled home along the shadowed slate, weirdly satisfied.

Aeroman had not flown, had remained tucked into Dylan’s sleeves and waistband, in chrysalid form.

Nevertheless, two happenings, incomplete in themselves, somehow clicked puzzle-ishly together to form a whole, the phantom image of a mugging averted, Gotham’s streets made safer.

The running woman on State Street had been the one afraid tonight, not Dylan. That was something, a crack of daylight in the night. Aeroman would slip through that crack, he just wasn’t ready yet.

Eighth grade, right, you could almost grasp the shape now. A given day was a model of the grade in miniature, something to get through. Just perfect one single day and you’d have a method to apply to the whole.

Abraham did his part scraping toast while Dylan worked math problems at the table, a take-home test due in fifteen minutes, first period.

Barrett Rude Senior might be lighting a breakfast cigarette in the well of his basement entrance, stroking white stubble, patrolling the morning.

Ramirez rolling up his gate, moms tugging first graders to P.S. 38.

Henry was in his second year at Aviation in Queens, he’d grown a foot and a half and was the man you saw sometimes on the block who’d high-five with younger kids. Recalling he’d been in a fistfight with Robert Woolfolk was useless. There was no history of kids on a block, such facts you couldn’t impart in a way to make anyone care.

Whacking off was a new organizing principle, the rare thing completely under your own command. You might get hard on the way home from school, clutch it in your pocket, anticipating an afternoon session.

Aeroman’s new outfit-in-progress was simpler, cape lighter and shorter and secured at the shoulders, sleeves tight at the wrists.

It progressed slowly, stitch by stitch, no hurry this time.

When the weather cooled Dylan and Arthur took the A to Canal Street. They browsed bins full of lucite knobs, drank egg creams at Dave’s Famous, then made their way to the army surplus store. With money for coats they’d cadged off Arthur’s mom and Abraham they purchased green fatigues like Mingus Rude’s, jackets with heavy vented pockets, strange loops for military knives or rounds of ammunition, who knew. Maybe dudes in Nam had died in the jackets, you couldn’t exclude it, though they lacked telling bullet holes.

Returning to the subway they paused to flip through some worn Beatles LPs for sale on the sidewalk,
Let It Be
,
Abbey Road
. Dylan found a name he recognized. The name was superimposed on a photograph of four grinning, beardless black men in peach suits and ruffled shirts seated on stools of various heights, backlit in blue and arranged like a bouquet in a photographer’s studio:
The Deceptively Simple Sounds of the Subtle Distinctions
.

Dylan showed it to Arthur. “That’s Gus’s dad.”

Arthur looked unimpressed. Dylan bought the record and took it home, but it was scratched, unplayable.

For a week Dylan and Arthur wore the jackets to school pristine. Then one day Arthur appeared with his jacket glamorously ruined with gold and silver paint, sleeves laminated in Krylon, burner scars, evidence. Arthur smirked, Dylan said nothing. That night he retired his virginal jacket before Mingus caught him in it.

Mingus himself was a random factor, a shade or rumor now, only glimpsed. He’d vanish for weeks, then you’d meet up, get high in his basement, and go to the Rex on Court Street to take in a Charles Bronson double feature, sit in darkness for hours not speaking a word apart from
dang
and
ho snap
.

Mingus was flush erratically, blew cash in a hurry. Later you’d catch him fluffing cushions for change, palming pennies from the dish Abraham kept at the front door, scraping up enough for a nickel bag.

Nobody took fifty cents or a dollar from Dylan that he didn’t see coming a mile off. One day in the basement Dylan applied Abraham’s hacksaw to a couple of quarters, then strolled with fragments jingling, waiting for the inevitable frisk. When with a dumb grin Dylan offered the sawed half-quarters and quarter-quarters the Gowanus kids who’d cornered him walked off shaking heads, pained, as if he’d spoken Chinese or wriggled an antenna.

You knew this game of days like the back of your hand, if the back of your hand was changing like a werewolf’s.

One day Dylan came home to find Abraham with a package on the kitchen table, an upright bundle wrapped in layers of butcher paper and twine. Abraham shredded at it with a steak knife, freeing the hidden object, unpeeling onion layers of newspaper insulation like Humphrey Bogart unpacking the Maltese Falcon. Dylan imagined it might be something from Rachel, perhaps a statuette depicting
A Crab, Running
. Then Abraham exposed the top of the prize inside: the gleaming golden nose of a 1950s-style rocketship.

“Don’t worry, I won it fair and square,” said Abraham. “Sidney accepted on my behalf.”

Words on the gilded rocket’s base explained, at least partly.
HUGO AWARD
,
BEST NEW ARTIST
,
1976
,
ABRAHAM EBDUS
.

“Recognition creeps up on one,” said Abraham darkly.

Dylan hefted the thing, scowled.

“You want it for a doorstop?”

Dylan considered, nodded.

“Just don’t say I never gave you anything.”

chapter  
13

T
he song could be heard on New York radio for a week or two, mid-February 1978, not yet charting high but
picked to click
, scored on the R&B chart at number eighty-four with a bullet—it was asserted to be
with a bullet
each time that discouraging number was mentioned aloud—and slipped into rotation between Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Serpentine Fire” and Con Funk Shun’s “Ffun”: “(Did You Press Your) Bump Suit” by Doofus Funkstrong, a three-minute, forty-second single edited out of the sprawling eighteen-minute jam that covered side two of the band’s Warner Brothers debut,
Double-Breasted Rump
. DJs solicited phone calls weighing in—bold or cold, smash or trash, funk or junk? A few dozen requests could still tip a song up regional charts and push it toward a national breakout. Anyone trusting their ears knew Doofus Funkstrong was a disguise for the legally hamstrung, hence recording-under-pseudonyms Funk Mob—for those less sure, a look at the psychedelic Pedro Bell jacket art did the trick. Fewer ears would place the name of the vocalist whose melismas decorated just the last thirty-eight seconds of the single edit, credited on the album jacket, as according to plan, as Pee-Brain Rooster: under his own name Barrett Rude Junior was a voice from radio’s middle distance, years out of rotation, not yet an oldie. If a few formed the question
Ain’t that the singer from the Distinctions?
it was only a passing thought—how likely, anyway, that the tenor voice of the smooth and mellow Distinctions should show up riding the crest of that distorted synth bass line?

Then the song died. No explanation was called for—certainly none was given. Songs die, this one did. Figure it freakish that it charted at all, with refrains like
Up jumped the globster, caught her with a mobster!
and
Goof a wedgie up your rump pocket!
There are limits. So it died; call Doofus Funkstrong an
album-oriented act
, euphemism for
Who cares?
Performance royalties trickled through a legal maze, never enough to fight over should Pee-Brain Rooster choose to consult a lawyer. For a few weeks you heard the song or you didn’t, while nerd connoisseurs were left to savor it later, to champion or slag it in their endless tinny dialogue. History, basically, wasn’t made. Marilla and La-La would never be heard chanting this song in their front yard, not skipping rope nor braiding hair nor teasing boys with their fresh-grown hips. That test it couldn’t pass: the song, musicianship aside, lacked a hook.

When Mr. Winegar asked him to remain after class he sat imagining that he’d somehow become known, that the science teacher had taken it upon himself as gravity’s local spokesman to pronounce on the matter:
Young man, human flight is sheerly impossible! Renounce it at once!
Instead Mr. Winegar took a letter from his drawer and handed it across his desk, sat twisting the end of his mustache as he watched Dylan Ebdus absorb its contents: test scores permitting entrance to Stuyvesant.

Outside it snowed, jigsaw chunks which piled on the ledge, clotted the grate which covered the window. The school had poured out into the white-muffled afternoon. Staying late Dylan had lost his chance to sneak across Smith in a protective mob of bodies in motion, would instead be snowball target prime for anyone prowling near the school.

“Only kid in the school to make it,” said Winegar. “But then only six even tried the test. I requested the chance to tell you in person, don’t mind saying I’m proud of how you’ve applied yourself.”

Winegar’s mustache-torturing and puzzled gaze contradicted this potted speech: he’d retained the letter in order to glimpse the freak, the reverse-retard who’d surfaced unexpectedly in the ocean of screaming, proto-criminal souls that made up Dylan’s classmates, made up for that matter all five periods of science teaching in his day’s schedule—made up, come to think of it, his entire blighted career.
If I’d known you’d pull this I’d have flattered myself by noticing you sooner.

But caretaking Winegar’s astonishment wasn’t one of Dylan’s priorities.

“What about my friend Arthur Lomb?”

Winegar frowned. “I shouldn’t discuss anyone else’s results with you.”

It could only mean one thing. Dylan found himself pained for Arthur, felt an unexpected throb of empathy.

“He must of gotten into Bronx Science, though,” he suggested to the teacher.

Winegar looked hurt. “Certain persons—” he began, and broke off. Dylan understood: not Bronx Science, not even Brooklyn Tech. Arthur Lomb, chess demolitionist, whiz mimic, master strategist of escape, hadn’t honored his own advice and studied for the test. Perhaps he thought a last-minute asthmatic seizure would carry the day, perhaps proudly held a bowel movement through the test period, perhaps thrown a few
yos
their way. All useless in the teeth of algebra. Houdini had drowned inside his padlocked cabinet.

From Winegar’s tone it was plain Arthur had bragged to the teacher in advance, worked up expectations with a series of snappy answers and arch asides.

“Well, Sarah Hale is right by my house,” said Dylan, impulsively sadistic. He adopted a moronic, grating monotone, tribute to Arthur Lomb, fallen soldier. “I mean, it does seem like all my friends are going there.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I only took the test to see how I’d do. I might not go.”