The Fortress of Solitude (32 page)

When the door flew open Dylan and Mingus were caught Vaseline-fisted, their pants irretrievably down, bunched like mufflers over their Pumas. There wasn’t remotely time to do anything but stare back at Mingus’s father as he stood in the doorway barefoot in his blue satin bell-bottoms and a white designer T cut wide on his shoulders like a girl’s blouse. Barrett Rude Junior dressed more and more like a man who never left the house, his whole parlor floor a sort of self-harem, a region of pajamas. Mingus and Dylan might have been termites or mole-men who’d burrowed underneath the Playboy mansion and now were caught, a spade breaking into their burrow, filling it with daylight. Pants down, they were still more dressed than Junior, Mingus in his jacket, Dylan in his sweater, both in their street shoes. They’d only have to jerk the pants back over their bared thighs and be out on the street again, in motion, rats scurrying, street beings. They pulled them up. Dylan looked at the floor.

“Turn that music down, Gus, man.”

Mingus rolled the dial until it was tinny, faint like Junior’s own music now heard arguing through the ceiling.

Mingus’s father regarded them with narrow, sleepy eyes, smacked lips in slow motion, scratched goatee with one blunt finger’s untrimmed nail. His nostrils flared, perhaps sniffing the medicinal goo on their hands and dicks. He lingered, seeming to wait for the right beat to come in on, not from the stereo but instead following his own inner music. When he spoke again it was low, tossed-off, melodic.

“I don’t really care what you motherfuckers get up to down here, but you got to keep it down, man.”

His weary delivery implied encompassing knowledge of anything they might bother to think they’d invented for themselves, along with a smidgen of affectionate distaste for their clumsy disarray, their poorly upholstered love nest. Maybe Dylan and Mingus ought to have lit incense and worn purple dressing gowns—whatever, it was none of his business. He took the door handle.

“You best know you one lucky soul, Gus, it was me not someone else walked in here. Get a lock for this goddamn door, man.”

Then he was gone.

His few sentences might have been the kindest words Dylan had heard spoken in his life.

“Shit,” said Mingus softly to the closed door, mildly disgusted with his father’s presumption once he could afford to be.

Dylan only watched Mingus and waited. Perhaps he bugged his eyes a little.

“Don’t worry, Junior won’t say anything to your pops. I walked in on him doing way more wack shit than this and he knows it.”

“Really?”

“Don’t
even
ask.”

That was the end of it, it was as if they’d never been discovered. Mingus flipped the record over, defiantly tweaked the volume upward.

Ten minutes later, sputtering into one another’s fists while Sly’s whole band groaned
Que sera, sera, the future’s not ours to see
, Dylan was flushed with new understanding: he and Mingus were restored. They had secrets again, ones shored by risked accusations of faggotry, secrets from Arthur Lomb and Robert Woolfolk, absolute secrets from anyone. Even Barrett Rude Junior’s complicity was consoling, they were sealed by it as a lump of wax seals an envelope. Not faggots, of course: best friends, discoverers. Dylan could trust Mingus, they were again sole and extraordinary. Dylan had kept a secret and been poisoned by that secret, he now understood. But it was safe, it was okay: he could tell Mingus about the ring. He could show him the costume.

A lone figure on the pavement, a white kid, makes nervous tracks along the block of Atlantic Avenue between Court Street and Boerum Place. It’s a chilly April Tuesday night, just past twelve. In isolation and seeming undersized, a puppet on a human stage, the boy casts shrinking and again lengthening shadows as he moves through streetlight pools. The natural question: What’s he doing there? This block’s bounded on the Court side by Atlantic’s Arabic shops, at Boerum by St. Vincent’s Home for Boys. Across Boerum looms the glass-brick monolith of the Brooklyn House of Detention. The block where he walks is a nullity, though: only a parking garage, a concrete embankment of ramps four levels high. On the other side of the street a Mobil station, closed.

The boy strolls to the garage’s one corner, then the other, as though penned, a gerbil in an invisible Habitrail. What he’s doing there’s really inexplicable, the longer you consider it, which no one does. The block’s a lousy choice for a midnight stroll, something bad is bound to happen.

Exactly the point.

To the corner and back again: hurry up and happen already.

Now it does. Attackers come in their expected fashion, two black teenagers, one tall and one stubby, each wearing a net of stocking wrapped on their thin-shaved skulls—a
doo-rag
, that’s the term—a pair out of central casting for their part in this tableau. They’re roaming down Boerum Place after who-knows-what diversion up in the Fulton Mall, maybe a late movie at the Duffield or the Albee, or maybe they’ve just scored a nickel bag at one of the pot stores on Myrtle-otherwise-know-as-Murder Avenue. Anyway, their whiteboy radar’s operative tonight. Tonight’s dish is served up a bit too rare to be believed: under the shadow of the vast garage they can afford to take their time, have some fun. There’s really no one around for miles. White boy this stupid deserves whatever comes, only hope he’s not some retard who starts crying too quick.

“Yo, let me talk to you for a minute.”

The white boy only blinks. The two are strangers, unknown to him from school. This is a first encounter. It ought to be one they’ll remember.

“What, you don’t hear him talkin’ to you, man?”

“Nigger’s deaf or some shit.”

“Maybe he don’t like the color of your skin, man, maybe that’s the problem.”

Then’s when it comes out of the night sky, the blur in cape and mask. The leap begins three stories above, on the roof of the garage, and for the first moment looks to be nothing better than a headfirst plummet, a suicidal drop. The black teenager wearing the home-stitched outfit and with the ring on his finger has been practicing for weeks, in backyards and on roofs—this is the first time, though, he’s taken it to the street.

No problem, he’s a natural. Whatever it is flying requires—balance, poise, unhesitation, an organ for sensing
air waves
—he’s apparently got. His swoop begins just below the garage’s second story, two balled fists leading the charge as he curves from the expected collision with the pavement, first falling aslant, then unmistakably horizontal. By the time he collides with the white boy’s would-be yokers he’s rocketing upward, back toward the sky. The flying boy batters at shoulders and doo-ragged crowns with his fist and again with his knees and lastly with his sneaker toes as he soars over—a perfect and bewildering assault from the sky. The two victims stumble cowering to the ground, incredulous, swearing, caressing their bruised noggins.

“Fuck was
that
?”

“Shit, man, you clocked me!”

“I didn’t touch you, man, fuck you talkin’ ’bout?”

The flying boy rolls in air, soars down again, leading with his knuckles. His white cape flutters and flaps dramatically at the elbows of his Spirograph-decorated long-sleeve T. He’s wearing a sewn white mask too, one tied behind his ears and open at the top to vent his Afro to the air, like Marvel’s
Black Goliath
.

“Book, man, let’s get out of here!”

“Go!”

Seconds later they’ve vanished, fled down Boerum Place, toward Bergen, home to the Gowanus Houses most likely. The costumed boy lands beside the white boy on the pavement and yells at the departing shadows: “Run, motherfuckers! That’s right! You don’t mess with Arrowman!”

“
Aer
-o-man,” corrects the white boy.

“That’s what I said—Arrowman.”

chapter  
14

S
omeone had painted the interior walls here a lush medical pink in semigloss, a shade like Kaopectate, or the representation of a suffering brain before its relief by a headache pill. On this dirty, leak-warped surface was pinned bank-giveaway calendar, mimeographed schedule, yellowed fifties-vintage Alcoholics Anonymous recruitment flyer, not much else—nothing, say, like a placard reading
YOU DON
’
T HAVE TO BE CRAZY TO WORK HERE BUT IT HELPS
, certainly no snapshots of wives or pets or children. The wooden desk on either side of which the two men sat showed coffee-steam rings, paperclip scars, thirty years of gouges in its cherry-blond veneer: it had been reassigned from a nearby public school for its use here. On the side of the desk which faced the door of the pink office the desk bore a few nervous tags, graffiti or scratchiti accomplished with ballpoint or key tip or pocketknife at discreet knee level, where resentful hands could be hidden from their questioner’s view while an earnest listening expression was maintained on the face above.

A folder lay open on the desk between the two men.

It was July 1978. Each wore a tie: the thirtyish white man over a white, short-sleeve shirt with no jacket, the tie a fat powder-blue number, color like an inflamed nerve in the pink brain of the office. The elderly black man wore an unfashionably thin black tie, clipped neatly inside the vest of his newly thrift-store-purchased gray pinstripe three-piece, a banker’s suit except for clownishly wide lapels. The vest’s five buttons were done up, sealing thin torso like a sausage in casing. No air-conditioning here, so a lace-embroidered handkerchief got some use blotting brow, nose tip, and corded well of throat, visible just above the firm knot of the tie.

“I tell you, there’s goings-on in that house,” said Barrett Rude Senior.

“Why make it your business?”

“A man of God is duty bound.”

“This man of God ought to make three years clear of the girls on Pacific before he gets on anyone else’s ass,” said the man behind the desk. “Just because some rookie took pity and didn’t book you doesn’t mean the write-up didn’t find its way to my desk. Don’t play like you’re getting over, Barry, don’t think for a minute I don’t know what goes down.”

The man behind the desk might have seemed young to speak this way to the elder Rude, or to anyone: his hard-boiled tone a tad unearned, street dialect feigned. If so, explanation for his arrogance wasn’t in the pistol holstered on his ankle, evident as he hitched his pants to cross one leg over the other, nor in the handcuffs which dangled from his belt; really, these were all symptoms of one thing, all indicative of a type of person likely to fall to this particular line of work. An incarcerated man would call the type a
cowboy
. Like bail-bounty hunters or prison guards, cowboys were the type of men too sadistic or willful to make the conventional police force. Among parole officers the scattering of do-gooding Serpico types are a tiny minority; cowboys are the norm. To them busting your balls is daily static, nothing remarkable.

If the halfway house and rehab center and DMV weren’t sufficient to explain a certain thuggish vibe on Nevins between Flatbush and State, here’s the secret: a parole office carefully unadvertised on the second floor of a building on the corner of Schermerhorn Street, six offices off a waiting room, kitchen converted to a lab for on-the-spot urinalysis, windows of one back room heavily barred for use as an impromptu holding cell. Barrett Rude Senior had been making his weekly trudge to this place since the morning he first reported, the day after getting off the Greyhound at Port Authority, never less than impeccably decked out. His officer didn’t return the favor, dressing with his shirt untucked, beard stubble unshaved, with redolent sandwich wrappings unfurled on his desk.

“You misunderestimate an old man,” said Barrett Rude Senior. “I was attempting to bring those girls the blessings of Jesus.”

“You and Jesus keep your blessings off Pacific Street at one
A
.
M
., that’s my advice. You got a signature for me?”

Barrett Rude Senior was made to produce an autographed sheet, certifying hours of community service under supervision of Pastor Gib at the Myrtle Avenue Parlor of God Ministry. In lieu of employment a parolee needed some clock to punch; this was his, personally selected. He nonetheless felt it as a humiliation. Each week a bolt of rage split his countenance as he fished with skeletal fingers in his breast pocket for the required proof.

“I go out walking,” he said, rigid with damaged pride, not letting the point go. “Spend too much time in that house I got to air out my mind.”

“Take afternoon walks, not midnight. Feed the ducks.”

“Sounds come through the ceiling nobody should hear because nobody should be making.”

“What am I supposed to say, Barry? Wear earmuffs.” The parole officer glanced at the page and handed it back.

“I got to be relocated out of that house because the devil is making trouble in my mind. Knowing that boy’s getting warped up and not doing anything.”

“Terms of your transfer up from Carolina were habitation in your son’s apartment.” He spoke as though reciting some dull recipe: two parts water to one part rice. “We can talk about sending your file back to the Raleigh office and you with it, if that’s what you want. Your being in New York City where miniskirts walk the streets all night depends on maintaining current residence and you know it.”

“I’m going on the record as it’s not good for my rehabilitation to be around hard narcotics and funk music. Write it down.”

“C’mon, Barry. Be straight with me.”

“I regret to say my only son is courting Satan. Put it in your report. He and I will come to blows or worse. I’m asking a relocation for the good of everyone involved and you’re responsible. I’d take the child with me but he’s already half a man himself and will have to fight through it on his own. I pray nightly, when I can hear myself over the bellows and groans and the crackle of the pipe.”

“We’re concerned here with you keeping together what you need to keep together and you’re not talking to me. I’ve heard this stuff before, it’s old tunes. I’m not going to have your son arrested and I’m not a religious man, so far as I can hear you haven’t said a word yet.”