The Fortress of Solitude (6 page)

His old teacher called from the Art Students League, to ask why he wasn’t painting anymore. He said, “I paint every day.”

Second grade was first grade with math. Third grade was second grade with a period in the schoolyard to play kickball, a version of baseball with a giant blubbery ball, dull red and pebbled like a rubber bathmat, which was pitched along the ground toward home plate and that a better kick could get aloft. A fly ball was almost uncatchable, it was bigger than a kid when it was flying through the air. Positioning yourself under a fly was just stupid, and if you reasoned out what happened after the outfielder invariably stepped aside pretty much anything in the air was a home run. You just ran, you didn’t look to see if they were throwing it in. More often, though, you didn’t get it in the air. A mistimed kick scudded back idiotically to the pitcher and you were thrown out at first base.

Still, a home run. If you put the bloated thing in the air half the time everyone on the field fell down. There’d be a kid on his ass at every base as you went by.

Anything you painted, however slapdash, got hung on the wall. The brushes at school, though, were like painting with your elbows if you had any point of comparison. The school paint dried like scabs.

Nobody peed in their chair anymore.

A book report told the story of a book.

Second grade had two Chinese kids, and third grade had three, a soothing presence since they always had their hands up. Where they went after school was a mystery. They weren’t white and they weren’t not, so that was a plus. It prevented things from getting too black and white and Puerto Rican. At the current rate you’d all be Chinese by high school, which come to think of it might solve a few problems.

It wasn’t their fault they were Chinese, and if you asked them about it they’d shrug—they
knew
it wasn’t their fault. Everyone knew. In third grade you were still only just settling into your skin and couldn’t be expected to answer for it. After that was anyone’s guess.

chapter  
3

V
endlemachine lay on her high bed in the parlor. The gray-yellow October light which filtered through the tall curtains swarmed with motes, with writhing flecks that made the slanted light appear as solid as the polished oak spindles of the bed frame and the third-f glasses of water and cognac on the bedside table and the cane leaned against the table and more solid than the faintly stirring limbs of the tiny woman curled on the bed, now groping slowly for the cane without yet turning her light-haloed head from the pillow in which it was buried.

“I fell asleep,” she said distantly.

Dylan Ebdus didn’t speak, but stood not crossing the line into the room filled with the haze and piquancy of the old woman.

“You were long.”

Dylan found his voice. “There was a line.” He’d ferried another clutch of her hand-scratched letters on cream stationery to the post office on Atlantic Avenue and stood waiting for his turn at the Plexiglas window, studying the wanted signs and the posters promoting stamp collecting and literacy, scuffing his sneaker toes at the scraps of paper, the yellow slips and torn government envelopes that layered the floor.

Dylan worked for Isabel Vendle for a dollar an hour each Saturday morning the year of his tenth birthday, the year of fourth grade.
Vendlemachine, Vendlemachine
, Dylan sang in his head, though he’d never said it aloud once beyond his own doorstep, not even whispered it alone in Isabel Vendle’s house on those days when she was away visiting family at Lake George and he used her key and let himself in through the basement door to gather her mail and pour dry food into a dish for the orange cat.

Vendlemachine
was Rachel’s word. Rachel Ebdus awarded secret nicknames to her visitors and to people who lived on Dean Street and Dylan understood they couldn’t be leaked from the house, from Rachel’s kitchen. His mother had instilled this doubleness: there were things Rachel and Dylan could say to one another and then there was the official language of the world, which, though narrowed and artificial, had to be mastered in the cause of the world’s manipulation. Rachel made Dylan know that the world shouldn’t know everything he thought about it. And it certainly shouldn’t know her words—
asshole
,
pothead
,
gay
,
pretentious
,
sexy
,
grass
—nor should the bearers of nicknames know the nicknames:
Mr. Memory
,
Pepe le Peu
,
Susie Cube
,
Captain Vague
,
Vendlemachine
.

His father’s nickname was
The Collector
.

Vendlemachine stayed upstairs each Saturday morning while Dylan took out the foul, liquefied garbage in the tall pail in the basement kitchen and lined the pail with a new bag. Isabel couldn’t lift a bag of garbage herself and so the smell massed for seven days, waiting for Dylan to uncork it. Then the silent and massive orange cat would creep downstairs to watch. It had a skull like a Gila monster. Dylan couldn’t know whether the orange cat loathed him or Isabel or was indifferent, couldn’t know what it understood about Dylan’s situation, so it was useless as a witness. It might not even know that Isabel wasn’t meant to be bent the way she was, might instead regard Isabel as a standard for the human form and therefore find Dylan’s shape objectionable. Nevertheless the orange cat was the only witness. It seemed to live for the moment each week when the garbage was transferred and the room inflated with the stink of coffee grinds and orange peels and stale milk.

“I don’t want to work for you anymore,” Dylan Ebdus said to Isabel Vendle now as she swam in the coverings of her bed, in the mustiness and shadow. The orange cat sat in a solitary pool of clean sunlight near the parlor windows, ducking its reptile head rhythmically against its paw.

Isabel moaned softly into the silence.

Dylan waited.

Outside the Dean Street bus breathed down the block, took the pothole which served as home plate with a clunk, then shuddered on.

“I need you to go to the store,” Isabel said at last. “Not Ramirez. Go to Mrs. Bugge’s on Bergen.” Isabel Vendle pronounced the name of the Norwegian immigrant woman
Byu-gah
. Everyone else on the block called the shop on the corner of Bergen and Bond, the bodega that wasn’t a bodega because instead of Puerto Ricans it was run by a fat white woman with tiny eyes, Buggy’s.

Ho, snap—you lifted some cakes from Buggy’s? I heard Buggy’s German shepherd once bit a kid’s ass off.

Isabel raised her arm from the bed and let her fingertips fall on the side table. Her nails rapped lightly. Dylan came close, crossing the invisible line into the aquarium light of Isabel’s parlor bedroom, to gather the bills which lay there.

“Kraft American slices, Thomas’ muffins, and a quart of milk.” The old woman spoke as if describing a recurrent dream. “Five dollars should be enough.”

Dylan crumpled Isabel’s money into his pocket, wondering now if he’d spoken aloud. “I, don’t, want, to, work—” he began again, softly, carefully, spacing the words.

“
Skim
milk,” said Isabel.

“Idon’twanttoworkforyou,” Dylan said quickly.

The orange cat blinked up.

“It tastes like water,” Isabel mused. “White water.”

The block was empty except for a couple of teenagers on Alberto’s stoop near the corner. Dylan didn’t know where the kids were. It was October, getting colder, everyone was wearing jackets and ranging away from the block. Henry left to play football in the schoolyard near Smith Street and Earl just didn’t come out. Somebody had left a bottle in a bag on the stoop of the abandoned house. Days before there’d been a guy sleeping on the stoop, one of those drinkers who just nested for a while. A stained paper bag was like a pissed pair of green pants, it was only a matter of where the leak showed. That’s why they called it a leak.

Dylan cornered Bond Street, feeling how irrational a block was, one face so familiar, the housefronts and slate walk a surfaced iceberg, one with Dylan’s own flag planted on it, his chalk skully boards, the ghostly traces of his chasing down a ball or being tagged
It
. The rest of the block was under water. Dylan for years had clung to this one face, bent over the slates as though they were sheets of Spirograph paper on the floor of his room, not noticing until too late that they were part of an edifice which curled past Bond and Nevins Street, into the unknown. He’d sooner take Isabel’s letters all the way to Atlantic Avenue to the post office than walk around the corner to Buggy’s. He didn’t trust Bergen Street. He could feel the sidewalk tilt there.

Robert Woolfolk sat draped on the stoop beside Buggy’s, leaned back just as he had been on Henry’s the day of the fight, the knuckles of his knees seeming higher than his shoulders though they rested two steps lower. Dylan stopped there before the store, commanded. The sun of the day made a desert of light all around them, and the traffic was still and distant. Dylan could see the bus up near Smith Street, where it seemed to rest at a tilt, fatigued. Dylan heard church bells.

“You work for that old lady?”

Dylan tried to shake his head for a thousand reasons. He thought of Isabel swimming in her bed, the nearest authority for miles. Or there was Buggy and her dog, a pane of glass away, but they were entombed inside a cave of products, rice, bicarbonate, Nestlé’s Quik. The store was so dark inside Dylan imagined Buggy would wilt if she ever stepped out into the sun.

“You got her money in your pocket?”

Dylan was certain he’d said nothing.

“How much you got?”

“I have to buy milk,” Dylan said dumbly.

“How much she pay you for doing her errands, a dollar? You got it on you now?”

“She gives it to my mother,” Dylan lied spontaneously, amazing himself.

Robert only turned his head quizzically, lazily, and swung his hand where it dangled from the step, as though just then discovering his wrist’s capacity for motion. His slung weight didn’t cleave from the stoop.

The two of them were in a rehearsal for something, Dylan sensed. How much of something, and whether it was personal to him and Robert or larger than that, he couldn’t yet say.

So he stood frozen while Robert continued to examine him.

“Go buy milk,” Robert said at last.

Dylan moved for Buggy’s door.

“But if you come around here with that old lady’s money next time I might have to take it off you.”

Dylan recognized this as a sort of philosophical musing. He was grateful for the implied sense of pooled information. He and Robert could move forward together from this point into whatever was required.

“Tell Henry fuck you,” added Robert in a meaningless flourish.

Dylan ducked his head inside the dark, cheese-acrid storefront. Buggy’s German shepherd snapped up to the limit of its chain behind the counter, whining into a single pointed bark, and Buggy floated out of the back like a pale bloated pickle in a jar to hover at the register. When Dylan emerged with the brown sack of groceries Robert was gone.

It was a whole week and Sunday morning again before Dylan found his voice. Abraham was in his high room, Rachel in her garden, Dylan stewing alone in his room as he dressed at noon, the ritual time. Downstairs he paused in the kitchen calculating his defection, then went down the backyard stair. He approached his mother where she kneeled on the cold ground beneath the bare ailanthus, hacking with a trident at a network of unwanted roots, cigarette smoldering from between her lips. The cigarette’s filter was smudged with mud. Rachel wore jeans and an orange denim jacket and a Dodgers cap. Rejected blooms lay heaped in a pile of green and brown that bleached and shrank in the air as Dylan stood watching.

When he opened his mouth Robert Woolfolk was left out of the story.

“Poor old Vendlemachine. So don’t work for her, kiddo.”

“I tried to tell her, though.”

“What do you mean you tried?”

“I said it two times.”

“You’re kidding me, Dylan.”

“She pretended not to listen.”

“Just ignored you?”

Dylan nodded.

“Come on,” she said. She stood and brushed the dirt from her thighs. “We’ll go together.”

Dylan absorbed the thrill of Rachel’s indignation, his breath short. “Maybe you should just call her,” he said as they went into the kitchen.

Rachel scrubbed under her nails at the sink, and slurped from her cooled coffee.

“Let’s see what she has to say,” she said, and Dylan was silent, understanding that his fate was to cross Isabel’s threshold at least once again.

In the yard of the abandoned house the boys who would never be invited to work for Isabel Vendle played running bases: two basemen tossing a spaldeen between two squares designated as bases and four or five base stealers—Earl, Alberto, Lonnie, some other Puerto Rican kid. The runners bunched in between, bobbing and colliding like cartoon mice, while Henry gripped the ball and faked a throw once, twice, three times, wagging the spaldeen, showing it to them like a stuck-out tongue as he threatened the chase with a stomped footfall in their direction, until his bluff became irresistible and in glee and exhaustion the congregated runners surged, loping toward his base as though his hand was empty, and were tagged out one after the other in quick sequence. The base runners lolled their heads, drunk on being fooled, on Henry’s mastery.

Robert Woolfolk wasn’t among them.

Maybe nobody saw Dylan looking. Often a kid was invisible walking with his mother halfway down the block. You didn’t look, you didn’t want to get mixed up in that space between a kid and his parents.

Then Earl waved, but he could have been pointing out a bird or a cloud in the sky. Instead of returning the wave Dylan looked up at the sky himself, pretended he’d seen something move there, a body dart across the cornices, or leap from one side of Dean Street to the other.