The Fortress of Solitude (14 page)

What

the

fuck

am

I

looking

at?

If mole-boy ever lifted his darty eyes from the pavement he might have been casting around for a grownup, or maybe some older kid he knew, someone to bail him out. Mingus Rude, say, not that he was clear he’d want Mingus to see him this way, cowering at the prospect of a yoke, white boy with cheeks hate-red.
Hey, I’m not racist, my best friend is black!
This wasn’t halfway sayable. Nobody had ever said who was whose best friend. Mingus Rude likely had a million of them, seventh graders, black, white, who knew. And the mole-boy could have said
black
aloud about as easily as
Fucking looking at motherfucking YOU, man!
Anyway, Mingus Rude was nowhere near. The seventh and eighth graders were housed in the main building on Court Street, while Dylan was alone in the annex, one block and a million years, a million terrified footsteps, and one million-dollar kid away.

Abraham Ebdus handled the stack of postcards just as he had the slices of burned toast, loosely, nearly dropping them, and frowning as though they had ruined something or were ruined themselves. He stared at his fingers after he’d scattered them on the breakfast table. Perhaps the postcards had left a scent or a smudge of something on his fingertips. Maybe they’d be improved by being scraped clean, or smeared with butter and orange jelly. Really they wanted to be tossed out. He let the kid have them instead.

“Someone you know in Indiana?”

The boy had come to breakfast with his backpack on, running late, as always. They were like old men at the YMCA, the two of them waking to their two alarm clocks in their two bedrooms and meeting for breakfast. Dylan’s a clock radio tuned to an all-news station which leaked through Abraham’s wall a blaring theme of trumpets and teletype sound effects, a voice boasting “The newswatch never stops,” like being driven out of sleep by a newsreel headache. The kid lived in an anxious world. His nervous system seemed tuned like a robot’s. Now he edged up to the table with the backpack humped up onto the back of his chair and blinked at the postcards while he gulped orange juice.

“The first one came a month ago,” said Abraham. “The one with the crab.”

Abraham Ebdus saw the kid needed new shoes. Dylan crushed his shoe backs by cramming into them with the laces tied, and carved away the inner rim of the heels with his pigeon-toed walk which corrective soles left uncorrected. He wanted to wear sneakers every day, certain sneakers which every kid desired. He’d spoken angrily and Abraham had understood that at stake was less status than a certain bottom line of humiliation, the survival of the kid’s willingness to even keep braving school every day. He’d bought him the sneakers but still insisted on the brown corrective shoes which looked like 1950s boaters. Sneakers two days out of five was the rule.

The boy fingered the postcards but didn’t comment. “Toast is burned,” he said instead, head ducked down. He turned the postcard with the picture of the crab over twice, reading the lines, then scowling again at the Technicolor-hued photograph of the red crab on tan sand. His glasses slipped downward and he shoved them back quickly with his thumb, an occult gesture performed with a fugitive’s deftness. The kid was a hider.

“Give me your glasses,” said Abraham.

Dylan didn’t speak, just handed them over. Abraham fished out of a kitchen drawer a tiny screwdriver and cinched the hinge screws on the kid’s plastic frames. The glasses were shit, made of shit, part of the contemporary ocean of plastic. Abraham frowned at them and did what he could, tightened the screws, doing his miniaturist’s work. This was the level at which things could be improved. He wished now he’d taken the strange, inadequate postcards to his studio and altered them, forged the typist’s Courier font with his delicate brushes, fixed the stupid, enigmatic words to make them mean something more than they did, repainted the fire-engine-red crabshell a natural green and brown. As though crabs were bright red before you cooked them, idiots.

Abraham Ebdus had studied the crab postcard for an hour the day it arrived, five weeks ago, in fact. Dylan’s name was typed in full on the back, the address was typed, the message too, all with a manual typewriter that had a misaligned ribbon which ornamented each of the wobbly-struck letters with a faint under-halo of red. Close inspection revealed too a miniature trail of oily gear marks made by the grinding of the postcard along the typewriter barrel’s right edge. The postage stamp was a reproduction of
LOVE
by Robert Indiana—that charlatan—and the message, which included no capitals or punctuation, read:

this crab runs sideways west

out of the pot

but not out of potluck

pacific ocean mermaid dreams

be good d and you’ll see one

Unsigned. Postmarked Bloomington, Indiana, which to Abraham could hardly mean less. Three more postcards came in the following weeks. The second showed the same Indiana postmark, followed by two boasting an erratic trail west, Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Phoenix, Arizona. All stamped with
LOVE
and all equally gnomic, only now the typist had given attribution, still in type, at the foot of the flighty poems, capitalized to show it was the author’s name:
Running Crab
. Abraham Ebdus had read Running Crab’s subsequent messages with a fury that blurred the dopey words so they swam in his vision. Anyhow, they weren’t addressed to him.

Now he again asked his son, “Got a friend in Indiana?” He was fishing, couldn’t help himself.

Dylan didn’t reply, just scooped the postcards together like a deck of cards and shoved them into his backpack without reading them. Saving them for later. He seemed quite unsurprised.

“I should have given them to you when they came,” said Abraham. “I will from now on. If more come.”

Dylan stared up at him for an instant, adjusting the placement of his tightened frames on his nose.

“I already got two,” Dylan said. “They came on Saturday.”

Now Abraham was silenced.

Outside, at the bottom step of his stoop, the boy looked back to be sure Abraham wasn’t watching through the parlor window, then slung his knapsack off his shoulders and unsnapped the top. Inside were his sneakers, Pro Ked 69ers in navy blue canvas, with the red-and-blue rubber stripes on the sole as thick and satisfying badges of legitimacy. Under the prodding of a fingernail the rubber stripes had the chewy, resistant texture of a fresh spaldeen. Today nobody would hound him singing
Rejects, they make your feet feel fine, rejects, they cost a dollar ninety-nine
, because these sneakers indisputably weren’t rejects. Few things were as clear. While the knapsack was open the boy stashed his glasses, pushing them into the corner beside the six Running Crab postcards, the two he’d retrieved from the mail himself, the four new ones, three unread, which he’d study later. His interest in the postcards was clinical. The missives from Running Crab were amusing but had nothing to do with his life, like a dated and essentially forgettable television show you watched a lot anyway, but disdainfully, priding yourself on how seldom you laughed or even cracked a smile,
Gilligan’s Island
or
Mister Ed
.

He changed his brown corrective shoes for the Pro Keds, but the shoes didn’t go in the knapsack. They didn’t go anywhere near school, not anymore. The shoes had a place under Rachel Ebdus’s overgrown forsythia plot in the yard to the left of the stoop, a cranny the boy had scooped out where they could nest with the earth and the bugs and the twigs until the boy came home from school and retrieved them. The shoes were an artifact from the fitful past, fossil shoes, and they belonged in the ground. Everyone knew to call them roachstompers because they associated them, properly, with their ancient cousins. That their survival into the present was uncanny didn’t make it any less embarrassing. The shoes ought to adapt, grow wings and disguise themselves as present-day birds, like the dinosaurs had. Or return to the ocean, become turtles. Until they burrowed back into the past where they belonged they could live in the earth, nestled in the cool forsythia roots which would never again be thinned or trimmed, and there they would be denied the sunlight which embarrassed them. It was for their own good. If Running Crab sent a postcard with a return address maybe he’d send her the shoes in the mail. Crab and shoes could run together, could scuttle into the sea. Dylan, he’d stick with Pro Keds.

Near the finish of that desultory sixth-grade spring they found each other again, like it was the most normal thing in the world, like they hadn’t missed half a year of afternoons. Mingus wore a military-green jacket though it was too warm for a jacket, and the jacket clanked, full of some metallic something which had been pushed through torn pockets to nestle in the lining. The jacket’s back panel bore Mingus’s tag,
DOSE
, elaborately surrounded by asterisklike stars and swooping punctuation. All went unremarked. Dylan pushed his schoolbag just inside Mingus’s basement door and they slouched their way together down Dean Street, the block which had become so useless now, no skully, no ball games, any kid you could think of off in some cluster or gang, like survivalist cells. Just Marilla and La-La, but they didn’t even seem to recognize you now as they sang to each other
I’m eightee-een with a bullet, got my finger on the trigger, I’m gonna pull it, yeah
—

They crept wordlessly into Brooklyn Heights, away from Dean Street, putting the Gowanus Houses and the Wyckoff Gardens at their backs, leaving Court Street and I.S. 293 skirted entirely. By way of Schermerhorn Street they slipped past the shadow of the Brooklyn House of Detention into the preserve of the Heights. There they fell with relief to perfect invisibility on the silent, shady streets—Remsen and Henry and Joralemon—ancient brownstone blocks like placid opening shots, scenes never to be disturbed by any action. Remsen in particular resembled an arboretum, a diorama of perfect row houses beneath a canopy of trees, their underlit parlor ceilings glowing through curtains like sculpted butter, brass doorknockers and doorknobs like the features of gleaming masks, street numbers etched in silver and gold leaf on beveled-glass transoms. Here was
Brooklyn prime
, the condition to which Boerum Hill lamely aspired. Here, stoops were castle stairs. No one went in or out that Dylan saw.

They were pretty much invisible too in the throngs on Montague Street, the three o’clock flood of private-school kids from Packer Institute and Saint Ann’s and Brooklyn Friends. The Heights kids clustered around the Burger King and the Baskin-Robbins in giddy crowds, boys mixed with girls, all in Lacoste shirts and corduroys, suede jacket sleeves knotted at their waists, flutes and clarinets in leather cases heaped carelessly with backpacks at their feet, senses so bound up in a private cosmos of flirtation that Dylan and Mingus passed through them like an X ray.

Then a blond girl with an intricate mouthful of braces stepped out of her gaggle of look-alikes and called them over. Eyes wild with her own daring, she showed a cigarette.

“Got a light?”

Her friends busted up at the self-conscious comedy of it, but apparently Mingus didn’t care, could live inside the quote, make it real. He dug in his jacket lining and pulled out a bright blue lighter, like a PEZ container that blurted a curl of fire. How she’d known he’d have it Dylan couldn’t fathom. The tone of the scene switched again, the girl leaned in, eyes narrowed ferally now, thrilled and wary, tilted her head, scooped her hair around her ear to protect it from the flame. She turned her back the moment the cigarette was lit and Dylan and Mingus moved on, dismissed.

The Heights kids were rich most of all with each other.

The Heights Promenade was a rim of park cantilevered over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the shipyards, Brooklyn’s sulky lip. Old men and women pecked forward like pigeons on cobblestone, or sat arrayed, frozen with clutched newspapers on benches in the face of Manhattan’s tedious spires, the skyline a channel no one watched that played anyway, like an anthem, like famous static. Beyond it spilled the garbagey bay, yellow Jersey smoke clung over inching ferries, over the trinketlike Statue. Dylan and Mingus were detectives, not really here. They followed clues. The trail was legible in gushy, streaked font on lamppost bases and mail deposit boxes, fire-alarm poles, garage doors, finger-traced in dust on the panels of trucks.

ROTO I
,
BEL I
,
DEAL
,
BUSTER NSA
,
SUPER STRUT
,
FMD
.

“Non-Stop Action,” translated Mingus. He was hushed by the knowledge, his eyes unfocused. “Flow Master Dancers.” Tags were no different from anything else: codes in layers, ready to be peeled away or overwritten.

Roto and Bel and Deal were in DMD Crew, a new outfit, jokers from Atlantic Terminals, a housing project across Flatbush Avenue.

Super Strut was old school, he went way back. The style might look funny now, but you wouldn’t disrespect it.

The syllable
TOY
was written in mockery over certain tags, disrespect for a writer who was a toy.

Write
TOY
on a
DMD
tag, get your
ass kicked
.

Mingus fished in his lining for his El Marko, a Magic Marker consisting of a puglike glass bottle stoppered with a fat wick of felt. Purple ink sloshed inside the tiny screw-top bottle, staining the glass in curtains of color. Mingus drew out a safety pin and stuck the felt in a dozen places,
pinning it out
he called it, until the ink bled so freely it stained the light skin at his palm, then the green cuff of his oversize jacket. Dylan felt a quiver of the pleasure he associated with his father’s tiny brushes, with Spirograph cogs and skully caps.