The Fortress of Solitude (43 page)

“Damn straight.”

“Who knows about the ring?” asked Dylan. He’d only waited all of high school to ask it. Now he’d paid for the right.

Mingus turned away.

“You told Arthur?”

“Nah.”

Of course not, who would? “Robert?”

Silence.

“Motherfucker, you told Robert.”

“He was with me when I jumped the cop at Walt Whitman,” said Mingus. “I had to give it to him to get it off me when they took me in.”

“Did he ever—try?”

Mingus shrugged. “He was like you.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Means he
tried
.”

Of course. The ring was not a neutral tool. It judged its wearer: Aaron Doily flew drunkenly, and Dylan flew like a coward, only when it didn’t matter, at the Windles’ pond. So it had attuned to Robert Woolfolk’s chaos.

“Don’t tell me,” said Dylan. “He flew sideways.”

Mingus left it vague. He’d always made it his habit to protect their honor against one another—Dylan, Arthur, Robert. To say nothing.

Dylan stood and placed two hundred dollars on the stained sheet. Mingus frowned at it.

“Looks light to me,” he said coldly.

It was a moment before Dylan understood.

“What do you want?” he asked, his voice a husk.

Mingus almost smiled. “Let me see what you got on you.” The phrase was a cue from a yoking script—
let me see it, let me hold it for a minute, I’ll give it back, man, you know I wouldn’t take nothing from you
—the stony authority over whiteboys Mingus never exercised. Mingus had let him hear it: their difference, finally.

For the first time Dylan considered all Mingus might have spared him. His cheeks flushed as he felt for the remaining three hundred in a pocket which might as well have been made of glass. Just because the ring never bestowed X-ray vision that didn’t disprove X-ray vision’s existence.

Sweat had broken everywhere on Dylan’s body. Now it trickled into his eyes.

“All right.” Mingus yanked a dresser drawer and added Dylan’s bills to a heap of money there. Perhaps it was Robert Woolfolk’s roll, perhaps another supply, impossible to say. Mingus left the drawer open, expressing indifference, perhaps daring Dylan to risk pilfering his college funds back.

All through Gowanus fortunes were being massed by enterprising young men, who knew?

Isabel Vendle would have been proud. She’d always told Dylan to put every dollar into a drawer and see what grew.

“I have to get it from upstairs,” said Mingus.

“Upstairs?”

“It’s hid in Barrett’s stash,” said Mingus. “Don’t bug out, it’s safe. Anyway, Barrett wants to see you, I told him you were coming around. He’s always asking why you never come around.” Then, unable to keep from twisting the knife, he added: “You see anything else ’round here you want? But then I guess you out of folding money.”

They went upstairs.

The gold records were gone from the wall, leaving faded rectangles topped with nail holes. Little else had changed, only been worn, neglected. Barrett Rude Junior stood behind the counter pouring Tropicana into a wide tumbler and the lip of the tumbler was chipped in three places and the tiles of the counter were loose in crumbled grout, crunching where he set the carton. His silk robe was thready, wide sweat stains under each arm. It hung on him too loosely. He’d shrunk, his bulk gone. His beard was still trimmed into boxy chops but they were asymmetrical, gray-coiled. His fingernails and toenails were thick and yellow as claws. The skin below his eyes had retreated, sunk in.

A fan whirred in the bedroom. There was no music apart from what leaked with the dead air from the street.

“Little Dylan, damn.”

Dylan was stunned, dumb.

If Abraham was going to grow this old he didn’t want to know.

“Been too long, man. I don’t even recognize you, big man. Look at you.”

“Hey, Barry,” Dylan managed.

“Good to see your skinny ass, boy. I see your father all the time, I
never
see your ass. Day’s shaping up hot like a motherfucker, ain’t it? Y’all want some cold juice?”

“Nah, I’m good,” said Mingus.

“No thanks,” said Dylan.

“Need to drink OJ, Gus, restore your
vitamins
. See you don’t get all depleted, boy. Sit down, you both making me nervous. Look like a couple of cats on a
mission
.”

“I need something from your room,” said Mingus.

“Get it then, what’s the problem? Dylan, sit down. Take some juice with ice, don’t say that don’t sound good in this heat. Check out the Yankee game? Five minutes, Ron Guidry, man. Best pitcher in the world.”

Mingus went into the back. Dylan sat on the couch, behind the coffee table. Barrett Rude Junior’s mirror was maybe the only unbroken surface in the room, powder splayed like a galaxy. A plastic straw lay to one side.

Barrett Rude Junior caught him staring at this pinwheel of dust, said, “Don’t be shy.”

“Oh, no, thanks.”

“Don’t be
thanking
me, baby, help yourself.”

“Go ahead,” said Mingus, emerging from the bedroom. “Do a line, D.”

“It’s all right.”

“What, you never got high before, man?”

“Leave him alone, Gus. Little Dylan can do what he wants. He’s my boy, he’s going to college,
damn
, I can’t believe how the time goes, can you
believe
it, Gus? Little Dylan’s taking off to college, the boy can’t get high because he’s
keeping his shit together
.”

While Barrett Rude Junior improved this lyric, a variation on the old song—call it “Little Dylan Is the Man, Part 2”—Mingus Rude plopped beside Dylan on the couch, knees touching as they sank together to the middle, and without saying a word opened his hand, so that Aaron X. Doily’s ring clanked gently into a clear spot on the cokey mirror.

Barrett Rude Junior set down two tumblers of orange juice, with half-moon ice drifting like bellied fish.

“What’s that?” Junior asked.

“Just something I was keeping for Dylan in your floorboard. He’s taking it with him to Ver-
mont
, where the girls go swimming without any clothes and niggers work in gas stations.”

“Oh.” This was lost on Junior. He arranged himself in the butterfly chair, his robe curtaining to show boxing trunks and wasted chest, his sternum like a tent pole.

A mansion of a man had been scooped out, done in as if by termites.

Dylan palmed the ring, got it into his pocket. Half thinking, he lifted his fingers to his nose, sniffed where they’d skimmed the glass.

“There you go,” said Junior. “Cool you right out.”

“See, he wants it,” said Mingus, “he just doesn’t know he wants it.”

Ring safe in his pocket, Dylan suddenly heard his own song, the one he’d been humming to himself all summer, “Little Dylan’s Almost Gone.” He recalled his basic condition: Not In Jail, Just Visiting. Let Mingus lead him one more new place before he ejection-seated to Camden College, Camden, Vermont. He’d dropped acid, popped a quaalude in a bowling alley, mushroomed at Jones Beach, so what’s this hesitation? Arthur wasn’t here to witness, to call him on the bluff. He’d get away with taking a sniff of the cocaine. Only recall the routine, pretend it wasn’t your first time.

Dylan moved the straw from the mirror to his nose and sucked like he’d seen.

And Mingus Rude did a line.

And Barrett Rude Junior did a line.

And they all did another line and Dylan Ebdus was doing coke with Gus and Junior, just another summer afternoon on Dean Street, no biggie. It was like a visit to an alternate life, one where he’d never abandoned the block, never quit visiting this house. The drug rained through Dylan and streamlined the illusion, scoured away doubt.

Your body could be cooled from inside, sweating like an iced glass.

A bass line never sounded so profound as when Barrett Rude Junior dropped a needle on Bunny Sigler’s
Let Me Party with You
, and orange juice loosened the slushy trickle in the back of the throat surprisingly well.

“You like that?” said Junior. His bearded skull spread in a smile. Dylan might be getting used to it.

“Yeah,” said Dylan honestly, his eyes open.

“That’s nice stuff, right?” said Mingus. His tone softened, as though he’d only wanted Dylan to join him all this time, only wanted his oldest and best friend to ratify him in the medium of cocaine.

“Yeah,” said Dylan again.

Maybe it was possible to be forgiven. Maybe you’d misunderstood and everything was actually completely cool. The ring was in your pocket now. You were hanging out with Mingus and Junior and you were also just weeks, days away from leaving for the most expensive college in the world. The two weren’t mutually exclusive, your fear was wrong.

Maybe everything was perfect but even as you thought it Barrett Rude Senior came up the stairs and popped into the room, astonishing them all, no one more than himself.

Despite the day he was in his black suit, his gold tie clip and cufflinks, white handkerchief.

He smelled heavily of flowers, of roses.

Mingus was the one caught with his face to the mirror. He dropped the straw and smoothed at his nose with a finger.

“This what goes on any chance I’m out the door,” said Senior, his voice quavering. “Corrupting the morals of another neighbor child.”

“Get downstairs, old man,” said Junior simply, not looking at his father.

“Messing with the white folks’ child you’ll bring down cataclysm on this house.”

Dylan failed to recognize himself or anything he knew about Gowanus or the world in this. It was suddenly so funny he almost guffawed. Mingus elbowed him.

“Why you home early on a Sunday anyway?” said Junior. “Sister Pauletta finally kick you out for taking a pinch on one of her flower girls?”

“Lord forgive the twisted soul who was formerly my little boy.”

Barrett Rude Junior rose, pulled his robe tight, went past his father to the sink. “I
came
twisted, old man. The twist got handed down. So why don’t you take a load off, baby. Loosen your tie, day’s too hot. You want some blow, help yourself.”

“I praise God every day your mother never lived to see it.”

Barrett Rude Junior turned and said softly, “You praise God, is that right? Over the name of my
mother
?”

“I do.”

“And what’s God say back to you, old man? When that name comes up?”

Mingus said quietly, “Go to your room and pray, Granddaddy.”

“Each day and night I pray beneath the feet of sinners,” said Senior. “One fine morning I’m coming out of my hiding to say what I’ve seen.”

“Go now,” said Mingus, pleading.

“I’ll cry it to the hills.”

Dylan didn’t know how it was possible for Barrett Rude Junior to cross the room as quickly as he did, and gather his father’s suit lapels in his two fists to slam him back against the stairwell’s wall. A sigh came out of them both, Junior and Senior, seemingly one sound. Then Senior was gone, down the stairs, and Junior had again turned his back to the couch, was running water at the sink.

Dylan bowed in guilty silence at seeing it. Mingus just shook his head and returned to the straw and the mirror.

Dylan felt his pulse beating everywhere in his skin: the drug, probably.

The music went on playing and for a moment it was as if nothing had happened. One moment, then the room refilled with the scent of roses, Senior was at the top of the stairs again and it was instead as if he’d never gone and the moment of peace had been an eye blink. Except Senior had made a trip to the basement apartment: proof was in what he’d retrieved there and now displayed in his two hands. The left gripped a bouquet of twenties, which he immediately flung before him so they twirled to the carpet. The right was filled with a gun.

From the speakers Bunny Sigler sang on, oblivious.

“You don’t lay hands on your father,” said Barrett Rude Senior to his son. “It says so in the book. Now I got the evidence you been using children for your dealing ways. The boy’s room is full of your dirty money. You got no shame, I got to teach it to you, boy.”

“Mingus has his own money,” said Junior quietly, watching the gun waver in his father’s hand.

“You teach sinning ways and you got to pay for laying a hand on your own father.”

“Lay down the gun, old man.”

“Call me father, now. The gun’s to put some fear in you.”

“
You got to ad-mit, you an old man.
” It was another of Barry’s impromptu melodies, the last Dylan would hear.

Mingus hurdled from the couch, and ran to his father’s doorway. He turned, before vanishing into the back, and shouted, “Go
home
, Dylan!” Protecting him still.

Dylan Ebdus never would remember getting from the couch to the door, from door to stoop, stoop to gate, to the sidewalk. A part of him was still inside, beating like a pulse behind eyes staring at the faces, at the gun, at Mingus framed for an instant in the doorway before turning away, moving inside his father’s bedroom. Dylan Ebdus still heard the music and felt the scuff in his nostril, still puzzled at the missing gold records on the wall, the missing flesh in Barrett Rude Junior’s face. So the blazing day into which he’d been ejected made no impression. Still, he was outside. Mingus shouted at him to go and he’d gone and he was intact, ring in pocket, five hundred college dollars scattered from Barrett Rude Senior’s fist to the floor, mission accomplished. He wasn’t inside. He was on Dean Street, teetering on a square of slate, when he heard the shot.