The Fortress of Solitude (19 page)

“Dill-Man, D-Lone, Dillinger,” Mingus chanted. “Diggity Dog, Deputy Dog,
Dillimatic
.”

“I haven’t seen you anywhere,” Dylan said, unable to check the plaint in his voice.

“You all right, man?” Mingus asked. “Everything cool with you?”

Dylan knew precisely what
everything
Mingus meant—all of seventh grade, whatever went on or didn’t inside the building which was apparently no longer Mingus’s problem.

According to Mr. Winegar, science teacher, the universe was reportedly exploding in slow motion, everything falling away from everything else at a fixed rate. It was a good enough explanation for now.

“Everything cool?” Mingus demanded.

They were together and not together, Dylan saw now. Mingus Rude was unreachable, blurred, maybe high. There wasn’t going to be any communing with his core, that vivid happy sadness which called out to Dylan’s own.

Dylan shrugged, said, “Sure.”

“That’s all I want to know, man. You know you’re my main man, Dillinger. D-Train.”

It was a rehearsal and now Dylan learned what for. As they slipped into the park Mingus exaggerated his ordinary lope, raised a hand in dreamy salute. Arrayed at the concrete chessboard tables were three black teenagers in assorted slung poses. One more chaotically slung than the others, a signature geometry of limbs which caused Dylan’s heart to guiltily, madly lurch. Nevertheless he strolled beside Mingus into the thick of it, accepted whatever was meant to unfold in the park from within his own sleepwalker’s daze, which, perfected at the new school, covered even the resurrection of Robert Woolfolk as a presence in his life.

“Yo,” said Mingus Rude, lazily slapping at hands, humming swallowed syllables which might be names.

“What’s goin’ on, G?” said Robert Woolfolk.

Robert Woolfolk called Mingus
G
, for Gus, Dylan supposed. Did it mean he’d also met Barrett Rude Junior?

Then Robert Woolfolk recognized Dylan. He flinched with his whole face, his sour-lemon features hiding nothing, yet didn’t alter the arrangement of his limbs an inch.

The park was full of little white kids with bowl haircuts, maybe second or third graders from Packer Institute or Saint Ann’s. They ran and screamed past the chessboard tables, dressed in Garanimals, arms loaded with plastic toys, G.I. Joes, water pistols, Wiffle balls. For all they inhabited the same world as Dylan and Mingus and Robert Woolfolk they might as well have been animated Disney bluebirds, twittering harmlessly around the head of the Wicked Witch as she coated an apple with poison.

“Shit,” said Robert Woolfolk and now he smiled. “You know this dude, G?”

“This my man
D-Lone
,” said Mingus. “He’s cool. We go back, he’s my boy from around the block.”

Robert looked at Dylan a long while before he spoke.

“I know your boy,” he said. “I seen him from before you were even around, G.” He flicked his eyes at Dylan. “What up, Dylan man? Don’t say you don’t remember me because I know you do.”

“Sure,” said Dylan.

“Shit, I even know this dude’s
mother
,” said Robert Woolfolk.

“Oh, yeah?” said Mingus, carefully blasé, downplaying any further speculations. “So you down, right? You cool with my man Dylan.”

Robert Woolfolk laughed. “What you need me to say, man? You can hang with your white boy, don’t mean shit to me.”

At that the thin, worthless pretense of Robert Woolfolk’s fondness for Dylan was shattered in hilarity. The other two black teenagers snorted, slapped each other five for the words
white boy
, as ever a transport to hear said aloud. “Ho,
snap
,” said one, shaking his head in wonderment like he’d just seen a good stunt in a movie, a car flipped over or a body crumpled in a hail of blood-spurting bullet thwips.

Dylan stood frozen in his stupid backpack and unpersuasive Pro Keds in the innocent afternoon, his arms numb, blinking his eyes at Mingus.

Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.

“We going down to bomb some trains or we sit here all day talking ’bout this and that?” said Robert Woolfolk.

“Let’s go,” said Mingus Rude softly.

“You bringing your homeboy here?”

Suddenly a woman stepped into the thick of them. Out of nowhere she made herself present where they sat and stood around the tables. It was a shock, as though she’d ruptured a bubble, disturbed a force field Dylan hadn’t thought was permeable, one where their talk, no matter how many times the word
fuck
was included, was sealed in a glaze of distant car horns and bird tweets and the younger kids’ sweet yells.

The woman was a mom, surely, one of the running kids had to be hers. She was maybe twenty-five or thirty, with blond hair, matching blue-jean jacket and bell-bottoms, and granny glasses—she might have been familiar from one of Rachel’s parties. Dylan could see her now, waving a joint around, making some passionate digression about Altman or Szechuan, aggravating men accustomed to holding the floor. Or Dylan might have been kidding himself. There were probably a million like her, false Rachels who’d never known his.

“You okay, kid?”

She spoke to Dylan alone, there was no mistaking. The rest of them, Mingus included, were one thing in her eyes, Dylan another. Dylan felt Robert Woolfolk had somehow called the nearest thing to Rachel into being, as though white women everywhere were charged with bearing Rachel’s one crucial intervention however far into the future it needed to go.

Of all times, it would have to be now. Dylan had wished what felt like a million times for an adult to step up, for a teacher or a friend of his mom’s to turn a corner on Bergen or Hoyt and collide with one of his unnameable disasters, to break it open with a simple question like
You okay, kid?
But not now. This disaster sealed his status as
white boy
with Robert Woolfolk forever, precisely when Mingus had been working to change it.

Mingus, it was clear, had been communicating a message to Dylan by his three-week vanishing act, his elusiveness: that at the new school Dylan was on his own. Nobody
had his back
. It simply wasn’t possible. It had taken every day of those three weeks for Dylan to abandon the fantasy that Mingus would float him through seventh and eighth grades. Mingus cannily showed himself only after the message was sunk in:
I can’t carry you, son, it’s beyond my power
. Then, in a compensatory statement of equal clarity, he’d guided Dylan into Cobble Hill to the park on Amity Street to meet and make a pact of
being down
with Robert Woolfolk in order to say,
Where I can help, I will. I’m not actually blind or indifferent here, Dylan. I’m
looking out.

“Hey, kid? Something wrong?”

Dylan had turned to her, helpless, gaping. There was no way to tell her how right and wrong she was at once, no way to make her evaporate. All the worse that she was beautiful, gleaming like the cover of one of Rachel’s
MS.
magazines which stacked up scorned by Abraham in the living room for Dylan’s eventual guilty perusal of illustrated features on bralessness. Dylan wanted to protect the blond woman from Robert Woolfolk’s eyes. She shouldn’t have popped out of the other world, the Cobble Hill world of private-school kids and their caretakers, it was a misunderstanding. He wanted to send her home to entice Abraham from his studio, that was where she might have done some good.

Of course, Robert Woolfolk didn’t really matter. He was only an enemy, finally. The worst thing the woman had done was humiliate him with Mingus.

“They’re my friends,” Dylan said feebly. As it was out of his mouth it occurred to him he’d failed another test, another where the correct answer was
Fuck you lookin’ at?
That phrase, robustly applied, might have actually transported them all back in time to a moment before Robert Woolfolk had said the words
white boy
. Dylan might have then been invited to trail the others to a transit yard or wherever else they were going in order to
bomb some trains
, a richly terrifying prospect. Dylan craved to bomb some trains as fiercely as if he’d heard that phrase for years instead of just once, moments ago. And he had the El Marko in his backpack to bomb them with, if he’d only get a chance to produce it.

No one else piped up to say
Lady, mind your own fuckin’ business
and Dylan saw that Robert Woolfolk and his two companions, Robert’s laugh track, were missing. Gone. Dylan had slipped a gear in staring perplexedly at the blond woman, lost a moment in dreaming, and in that moment Robert Woolfolk had shunted away, out of the blithe park which seemed intended to contain anything but him. As though making a silent confession of whatever it was the woman suspected was going on. Only Mingus remained, and he stood apart from the table where the others had sat, and from Dylan.

“Do you want me to walk you home?” asked the woman. “Where do you live?”

“Yo, Dylan man, I’ll check you later,” said Mingus. He wasn’t fearful, only uninterested in contending with the blond woman and anything she thought she knew. Dylan felt her irrelevance to Mingus. Mingus’s own mother having been cleanly bought off with a million-dollar payment, he was immune to echoes. “Be cool,” Mingus said. He held out his hand, waiting for Dylan to tap it with his fingertips. “I’ll check you on the block, D.”

With that Mingus hunched his arms around his jacket pockets as though leaning into a strong wind and ambled into the sun-blobbed trees in the far corner of the park, toward Henry Street, the BQE, the shipyards, wherever he was going where Dylan wasn’t going to be swept along now. His gait was mock-infirm, a quotation of something amusing and profound you’d seen somewhere but couldn’t place, Mickey Rivers or Weird Harold or Meadowlark Lemon. He seemed a figure cut out of one kind of day and plopped into another, a cartoon squiggle or bass line come to life.

That’s my best friend, Dylan wanted to tell the blond woman, who the longer he didn’t reply to her offer was more and more squinting at Dylan like she might have miscalculated, like he might be a thing spoiled by the company she’d found him in, a misfit, not a kid worth her rescue in the first place.

And that’s what he wanted to be to her, spoiled, stained with blackness.

Racist bitch.

Where do I live? In his fantasy Dylan replied,
I live in the Wyckoff Gardens, the housing projects on Nevins and Third, that’s where. You know the ones, they’re always on fire. If you want to walk me home, lady, let’s go.

Arthur Lomb and his mother lived on Pacific Street between Hoyt and Bond, the far side of the hospital. Arthur’s block was eerie, kidless, no bus, the hospital’s laundry stack cascading silent white steam to the sky, the bodega on the corner another sidewalk congregation of old men on milk crates but graver, less amused, less musical than Old Ramirez’s bunch. On Pacific the men grumbled in some middle distance, leathery fingers shifting dominoes across felt. Everything on Pacific including a gray cat darting across the street seemed farther away and more pensive. The block might have been the Bermuda Triangle of Boerum Hill, a space arranged the precise distance from the Gowanus Houses, the Brooklyn House of Detention, and Intermediate School 293 to fall under no domain whatsoever. Not a long-term solution to anything, Arthur Lomb’s stoop nevertheless formed a kind of oasis on certain October afternoons when he and Dylan would tiptoe there unharassed and set out a chessboard under the furling shadow of the hospital’s steam.

“You’re in Winegar’s science class, huh? I feel sorry for you. He’s a worm. You see the way he toys with his mustache when he’s talking to the Puerto Rican girls with developed breasts? It makes me want to vomit. Doesn’t matter, pretend you like him. Science teacher’s your ticket out of here, that’s my view. Don’t move that bishop, it’s the only thing keeping me from crushing you. I told you a thousand times, link your pawns.”

Arthur Lomb sat with one leg folded under his body like a kindergartner. His monologues were all brow-furrowed and lip-pursed, craven machinations cut with philosophical asides and vice versa. His jabber had a glottal, chanted quality, seemingly designed to guide you past the territory where you might wish to tell him to shut up already or even to strike him, into a realm of baffled wonderment as you considered the white noise of a nerd’s id in full song. Arthur Lomb had been at Saint Ann’s until the day his parents divorced and his mother could no longer afford the private school. Now he was intent on getting into one of the specialized public high schools, one of those with academic requirements, entrance exams. Arthur Lomb never pined for the lost school behind him, for the company of other white children whom Dylan could only surmise had loathed him in their way as acutely as the black kids at 293. He was all grim necessity, a soldier in open ground casting for his next foxhole.

“Only thing that matters is the test for Stuyvesant. Just math and science. Flunk English, who gives? The whole report card thing’s a joke, always was. I haven’t gone to gym class once. You know Jesus Maldonado? He said he’d break my arm like a Pixy Stix if he caught me alone in the locker room. Gym’s suicide, frankly. I’m not stripping down to my underwear anywhere inside the four walls of this school, I’m just not. If I have to BM, I hold it until after school.”

Arthur Lomb and his mother lived in an apartment on the top floor of a brownstone and Arthur Lomb had the back bedroom. His comics were stacked on low shelves in neat piles, all in plastic. He handled them with somber disdain, and radiated disapproval when Dylan turned pages too quickly to have read certain essential thought balloons. Though carefully archived, his comics bore faint marks where Arthur Lomb had placed thin paper over the pages and traced the breasts of the Wasp and Valkyrie with a ballpoint pen. The resultant page of blue parenthetical breasts was stashed like secret Chinese writing in Arthur Lomb’s desk drawer. There Dylan found it one day while Arthur Lomb prepared a plate of graham crackers.