The Fortress of Solitude (10 page)

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.