The Fortress of Solitude (23 page)

Lonnie, Alberto, and Mingus, they’re already inside McCrory’s basement, shifting cans of spray paint from one aisle to another, secreting them in less closely watched sections, behind
IF YOU DON
’
T SEE WHAT YOU WANT
,
ASK
signs and vinyl wood-grain photo albums. The three of them, two black kids and one Puerto Rican, are drawing attention from McCrory’s security staff, plenty. That’s fine: their very presence is a silent alarm going off in the store, meant to be. They’re happy to be spotted picking up Krylon and wandering with it into the other aisles, more careful to be undetected stashing the cans here and there. A few times they even enact an empty-handed pantomime of stuffing paint into their baggy coats, sniggering. This crimeless crime, this game of baiting racist expectation that they’re robbing the place blind, is good value entertainment.

Now comes Dylan, trailing into the basement five minutes later, and doing nothing to acknowledge any connection to the two black kids and the one Puerto Rican. Eyes slitty, he orients himself on the field of play, the bright-lit confusion of aisles, shoppers, guards, plus his homeboys. Inhales the popcorn perfume, gulps. The security staff, mostly enormous Jamaican women, are in their predicted tizzy, trailing Mingus and Lonnie and Alberto deeper into the hardware section, to a high aisle of garbage pails and brooms and rakes, preselected for low visibility. Suck-ahs! Dylan scowls, adjusts his glasses, wanders innocuously into aisles designated the day before. Here’s the scheme’s payoff. Dylan’s the collector. His breath clicking in his throat, he gathers the Krylon from the various stashes in the innocent aisles and, electric fear in his fingertips, plops them into his backpack: Tangerine, Chrome, Surf Blue.

Today you’re a white boy for a reason.

Leave it to Mingus Rude to recuperate their differences for his own purposes, for Robin Hooditry in art’s cause.

Dylan goes for the exit. The cans of Krylon clunk and ping seductively in his knapsack, treasure for sure. Spreading gratuitous confusion now, the other three chart divergent paths through the aisles, leave separately. Mingus, the broadest performer, is halted and frisked by a couple of guards. Alberto screams into the doorway behind him, “
Fuck you!
” No reason, just because he can.

Back on Fulton they regather in the shade of the parking garage, all out of breath before they’ve even begun their run, hearts thrilled. The paint is quickly weighed, shaken to reveal the shuttle’s promising clatter, then parceled out to coat pockets, stuffed in sleeves. Let some superhuman guard chase them, he’ll never catch all four. They scramble down Hoyt Street, pretending to be pursued, laughing and shouting: “Oh, shit! Book, man! Can’t you run? Something wrong with your legs?”

Animals, Abraham? We can give you animals.

They shared a long walk in silence across Flatbush, up St. Felix, to the red brick hospital wedged against one side of Fort Greene Park. A Saturday afternoon in early April, first blush of heat in the air, the rutting birds and sun-stoned children in the dizzying, near-vertical park screaming in unison, bombarding the hospital windows with a shrill hail of sound. The flung-open windows couldn’t decant the detox ward’s deep linoleum-urine rot, an air of body poisons overlaid with disinfectant and sharp wafting farts from the recently destarved. No fear a bird would fly into the hospital. They’d be knocked back by a wall of odor as though butting a glass pane.

Dylan hung in the doorway. A Jamaican nurse stood beside him, one eyebrow cocked. Abraham went to the bed. The man was a draped hulk, wrists buckled into cloth restraints to the aluminum bed frame, hands hanging below, pitiful and large. One scabby foot was flung past the bed’s lip, the other curled inward like a dancer’s, tucked beneath the sheeted bulk of knee. His left cheek and brow were knit in a petrified wink. An intravenous line dripped something green-yellow into his arm, something that had also made a green-yellow stain on the sheet. Spills were his nature, even here. Hard to fathom he’d negotiated the sky.

Abraham frowned at the bound wrists, the crust at the IV’s point of connection, the unsavory smell. This care wasn’t good, not good enough. Perhaps Abraham was compensating: nothing could be good enough for the man in the bed. He needed to be treated like a human being, not a bum or a scoundrel, for by still breathing when he should have been dead he’d become a symbol of possible atonement. The Jamaican nurse stood in the corner and watched. She frowned too, showing her disagreement with Abraham Ebdus’s implication that the hospital wasn’t doing its job with this drunk fool, who was killing himself like many thousands of others and deserved no particular special notice for having happened to be checked into this ward by a white man.

“Does he eat?” asked Abraham finally.

The nurse rolled her eyes. “He eat if he want to. He spit in da meal at breakfast. We can no make anybody eat you know.”

“I want to speak to a doctor,” Abraham concluded peremptorily.

“Doctor come at four o’clock, no here now.” She budged Abraham aside to fuss with the dial regulating the IV’s drip, showing her command. “Is no need of a doctor here.”

“Your supervisor, then.”

The nurse clucked, said nothing. She and Abraham Ebdus went together into the hall, the nurse’s white sneakers shrieking on the tile. Dylan was left alone with the man in the bed.

Abraham might be this man’s champion, but he’d never done more than groan a curse or two at Abraham. Dylan he knew, and seemed to sense now; they’d spoken before. His bruised lids fluttered open.

“Little white boy.”

Was Dylan going to be asked to surrender his spare change? What use could the captive flying man have for fifty cents or a dollar here in the hospital, strapped to a bed frame? Instinctively Dylan felt in his pockets, didn’t find anything.

“Get up here. Cain’t see.”

Dylan obeyed.

“You seen me.”

No question, but Dylan nodded.

“Hah. Hah. Go in that drawer.” Not unscrewing his screwed-up eye, he nodded at the small cabinet beside the bed, where flowers would be set if anyone were setting flowers. “Yass, that drawer, get
in
it!”

Dylan tugged at the drawer, fearing to find some hellish hypodermic the flying man would want stuck in his arm.

Only a corroded plastic wallet, thin like a bus-pass holder. Driver’s license, issued in Columbus, Ohio, 1952, to Aaron X. Doily.

And the silver ring the flying man had worn on his pinky.

“Thassit, thassit.”

“The ring?”

“I’m done, I’m
through
, man. Cain’t fight the
air waves
.”

“You want—?”

“Take it, man.”

By the time Abraham Ebdus and the nurse ran back to the room the man in the bed was deep into his screaming throes of withdrawal or D.T.’s or whatever, sweat broken everywhere on his body, contortions wrenching the bed frame. The bounds held, so that body and bed became one shape rattling, shivering in agony. He found the IV pole and knocked it to the floor, bag bursting yellow spill everywhere. The kid was pressed to the far wall, but not panicked, watching coolly. Nurse harrumphed to broadcast her unsurprise: this only went to show and was all in a day’s etcetera. Abraham, having achieved no satisfaction from the higher-ups at the nurses’ station in the corridor, gathers the poor kid, who’s been punished enough by now you’d have to think, gets him out of there. The man’s bellowing is insane. It’s frankly hard to take.

Dylan Ebdus with a ring gripped in his first, the fist buried deep in his pants pocket, the ring itself pulsing in his sweaty fingers as though it were a token, a tiny fragment of the mad paroxysm of the man in the hospital bed, now borne covertly away into the breezy Fort Greene afternoon.

“What was he saying?” Abraham asked his son gently, once they’d gone a few blocks, the yellow insanity of the hospital receding into dream.

Dylan Ebdus just shrugged. The flying man, he’d said a lot of things.

The last—it couldn’t actually have been “
Fight evil!
” could it?

chapter  
10

S
ummer’s start, 1977: various persons are sprung, various terms and sentences completed. For instance here’s Barrett Rude Senior, six years served on a ten-to-fifteen, now paroled on good behavior, dressed in the green sharkskin suit and worn wingtips he’d been tried in, at a Greyhound’s window seat as it courses a circular ramp into the guts of Port Authority, midtown towers doubled in the smoked glass’s reflections and dancing with the engine’s vibration. His only baggage, a hard leather briefcase tucked upright between his ankles, contains legal papers, a certificate of ministry in the Church of the Parlor of God, and a pair of photographs—teenage Barrett Junior and his then-thirtyish, now-late mother in one, fifth-grade school head shot of Mingus grinning in a mortarboard and tassel the other—in a frame constructed of ingeniously woven cigarette packages, Parliament emblem alternated with Marlboro. Plus mother-of-pearl cufflinks, rolled tie, and gilt-leather Bible. Mingus Rude’s been sent to meet this bus, to guide his grandfather to a cab, and by cab to Dean Street. He’ll offer to carry the briefcase and be refused. No offense, little man, but Reverend Barrett Rude Senior can handle his own stuff.

Cut to Aaron X. Doily, passing through this same bus station a week later. He’s got a bus ticket for Syracuse pinned into the breast pocket of one of Abraham Ebdus’s old herringbone jackets, one Abraham wore to Franz Kline’s last one-man show during Kline’s lifetime, as it happens, and this jacket is stretched tight as a canvas and near to splitting across Aaron Doily’s shoulders. In Syracuse he’ll be met by the local Salvation Army and installed in a shelter, given three squares and a bunk on the guarantee of his attendance at the local Alcoholics Anonymous, where among the hard-bitten, laid-off-lathe-operator types he’ll be the sole black face. That’s if he gets aboard the Syracuse bus; see him now, eyeing the ticket counter, knowing he could probably cash the ticket. Bottle of Colt’s in five minute’s reach, easy. But let’s not truck in false suspense: Aaron Doily finds strength to bypass this possibility, boards the bus. Sits blinking atop the humming engines in the dark garage, absently twisting with his right thumb and forefinger a phantom ring on his left pinky. He’s uncertain how and when he lost the ring but figures it might be just as well gone. Let’s leave him, he’s no mysterious flying man anymore, just an incomprehensibly lonely alcoholic with a funny name, risen from pavement in spring to find himself restored to the daily world, sponge-bathed clean and tagged with a plastic wristband, now pointed out of town.

Peek ahead further, another two weeks: there’s Dylan Ebdus himself climbing aboard a bus, destination sign reading
SAINT JOHNSBURY
,
VERMONT
. Abraham Ebdus nodding goodbye through the tinted pane. Abraham’s got a grudge against the city these days, and a new penchant for exiling those he wishes to protect, first the detoxified Doily and now his own son, to the north, to New England’s countryside. Dylan’s signed up to be a Fresh Air Fund kid this summer. What was good enough for Rachel, a Fund-ee back in the fifties, ought to be good enough for Dylan. This scheme she would have approved; father and son both sense it, impossible not to. Abraham’s hunch will seem brilliant after the July blackout, the subsequent looting and mayhem which comes as near as Ramirez’s bodega, whose sprays of smashed shopwindow will be kicked up and down Dean’s slate for days after, and the spree and capture of Berkowitz. These give that season an air of disaster, and Dylan, safe in his idyll, will miss it.

But wait, Dylan’s not bound for Vermont, not yet. He’s not even thinking about it. Today’s the first morning after the last afternoon of seventh grade. Spring is sprung, and so is he. I.S. 293 is behind Dylan Ebdus for now, he can go three months not crossing Smith Street if he likes. Eighth grade’s a distant rumor, a tabled issue, and Dylan knows from experience that the summer between might change anything, everything. He and Mingus Rude too and even Arthur Lomb for that matter are released from the paint-by-numbers page of their schooldays, from their preformatted roles as truant or victim, freed to an unspoiled summer, that inviting medium for doodling in self-transformation. Who knows how it’ll come out, what they’ll resemble by the end of it? All Dylan knows is he’s giddy, loosed, flying.

It’s
flying how far
that remains to be seen.

Today, first day of freedom, he’s keeping a date with himself. Abraham’s out so Dylan’s free to climb the ladder out of the painting studio, unhook the hatch to their roof and push it aside, crawl out across the mushy tar paper into the new summer’s morning.

Dylan wouldn’t have said he feared heights, but the brownstone’s roof has always made him dizzy, not so much the view to the ground as the view across rooftops, out to Coney Island and beyond. Easier if you gaze on Manhattan’s towers. Those place you, fix you in a firm relation of puniness and awe. Easier still to kneel at the roof’s edge, hands gripping the ankle-high rim of masonry, and stare down at the contents of your own yard: ailanthus, brick pile, shoots of weed, a dirty spaldeen you can just make out like a speck of flesh. The grainy reality is reassuring.

What’s unsettling is to put Manhattan at your back and face the borough. Up from the canyon floor, out of the deep well of streets, gazing out into the Brooklyn Beyond is like standing in a Kansas prairie contemplating distance. Every rooftop for miles in every direction is level with that where you stand. The rooftops form a flotilla of rafts, a potential chessboard for your knight-hops, interrupted only by the promontory of the Wyckoff housing projects, the skeletal Eagle Clothing sign, the rise of the F-train platform where it elevates past the Gowanus Canal. Manhattan’s topped, but Brooklyn’s an open-face sandwich in the light, bare parts picked over by pigeons and gulls.

A sky full of pigeons and gulls and you standing there with a flying man’s ring on your finger.