The Fortress of Solitude (42 page)

“You want to sell the whole thing?”

“Yup.”

“What, uh, what number did you have in mind?”

“Five hundred.”

“You’re insane.”

“Four.”

“I’m not even making an offer unless you put back the
Howard the Ducks
and
Omegas
. Plus
X-Men #97
. I assume that’s what’s under your bed.” Dylan had spotted the plastic sleeves glinting there.

Arthur was impossible to shame. “Sure. Four for everything,
Howard
,
Omega
, whatever.”

“I’ll give you a hundred bucks.”

“You must think I’m a chump.”

“One-fifty.”

“You shitface. When can you get it?”

“I’ve got it with me. But you have to help me carry them home.”

They fished the hidden cache from under the bed, then each hoisted up a crate. They slipped downstairs, to Arthur’s stoop. In the glow of money Arthur would be incautious, boastful. Now would be safe for Dylan to confirm what he suspected, that the trail of funds led to Mingus. As he counted out twenties he said:

“So—funds for what?”

“Gus and Robert and me are gonna buy a quarter kee and cut it up and make some real money. From Barry’s connection.”

“Cocaine?”

Arthur pounced. “No, we thought we’d go into your line—chocolate sprinkles.”

“So you guys are pooling cash.”

“Uh huh.”

“Do you think Mingus would be interested in selling his comics, too?” Dylan asked.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Arthur. “Those comics are
ruined
.” As if the interior pages of his own didn’t feature breast-tracings and Sea-Monkey ads adorned with oversize cock-and-balls. But Dylan let it go.

“Yeah, I know they’re in bad shape but he’s got some titles I’m interested in.” Let Arthur think him crazy, suspect what he liked, he’d never grasp Dylan’s real angle here, behind the blind of the comics. No worry, anyway: dollar signs served in place of Arthur Lomb’s eyes and, behind them, his brain.

“I suppose he’d listen to a reasonable offer.”

Dylan milked it. “I’d have to get some more cash from the bank.”

“That’s an excellent idea, so you can finish the transaction right there.”

“But mention it to him.”

“I’ll do that.”

Only six weeks. Arthur Lomb’s two crates of number ones relocated to his own closet’s depths, Dylan Ebdus in his loft bed stewed in self-contempt, and the only solace was the escape so near he could hear it like a distant throb, a summer boom box on a Puerto Rican patio or a DJ in the Wyckoff Gardens courtyard. He might seem momentarily to have been drawn back into Arthur and Mingus’s morass but it was only to conclude some old business, the thing left undone to earn his vanishing from Dean Street. Six weeks: he could scheme, be craven as Arthur, didn’t matter. He was waving goodbye.

He jerked himself to sleep to thoughts of Arthur’s mom, a tribute he’d owed for years.

Arthur, playing liaison now, set it up for the following night, a Friday. He was pretentiously vague and spooky on the phone, as though Dylan and Mingus couldn’t manage an encounter without his help.

“We’ll meet you on the stoop and let you in. Don’t knock, you’ll wake up Senior.”

“I know Mingus’s grandfather, Arthur.”

“You haven’t seen him lately.”

“No, not lately.”

“Just take my word for it.”

Arthur and Mingus were on the stoop at the appointed time. Mingus greeted Dylan with a hug, butted his head into Dylan’s shoulder, phantom-boxed him. “Dillinger, where you
been
, man? My boy’s done got all grown,
damn
!”

Dylan told himself he’d have returned the hug if he and Mingus were alone. Under Arthur Lomb’s gaze he felt brittle, iced over. Whatever punkish stature Dylan had assembled in Manhattan didn’t register in Arthur’s eyes: reflected there Dylan saw a cone scooper, a
whiteboy
. So in defensiveness he shrugged Mingus off, was all business. Best for now to emphasize the transaction. Anyhow, Dylan had conceived a plan in which this was only a dry run: buy comics now, buy something else later.

Any sentiment could be reserved for the return visit Dylan had projected, one where Arthur would be absent.

“I hear you’re trying to put together some cash,” Dylan said.

“Yeah, yeah, D-Man, you want in on this deal we got going?” Mingus seemed immune to any slight.

“I might take those comics off your hands.”

The room was a cave, kept dark. Whatever damage the comics had suffered surely wouldn’t include sun-faded inks, but rot was a possibility. Dylan raised his eyes enough to see the shelf over the door had been tugged down, its hardware scarring the plaster. No football helmet or anything else. He averted from the rest, the sprayed walls and ceiling, didn’t care to take it in. Then someone in the shadows moved, shifted, hitched trousers from knees and tugged at crotch in sitting up straight. Robert Woolfolk.
The party of the third part
, it only figured. Robert nodded, barely. Dylan back. Mingus recranked the volume once the door was shut, some pulsing funk. Arthur scraped and tapped with a razor blade at a jagged chunk of mirror, its sharp edges rimmed in black electrical tape. He sniffed a line and offered the rolled dollar to Dylan.

Dylan shook his head.

“Good stuff.”

“No thanks.”

Arthur handed the dollar to Robert, who tipped his upper half out of shadow and over the mirror.

“You know Robert, right?” said Arthur coolly, tauntingly.

“Sure,” said Dylan. “He stole my bike once.” He’d grant nothing after: no Rachel, no pizza slice, no East Village ambush. Let Arthur and Mingus each muse on the allusion to the block’s prehistory. Robert wouldn’t contradict him. Dylan was certain of the bargain of silence they’d struck locking eyes in the gay dealer’s apartment or even earlier, the lifelong misunderstanding they’d forged in the P.S. 38 schoolyard. Robert Woolfolk wouldn’t contradict Dylan because whatever he might be he wasn’t a liar, or a lion.

“But that was a long time ago,” Dylan added with munificent sarcasm. “How’s it going, Robert?”

“Yo,” said Robert Woolfolk murkily, as he sucked a slush of coke down the back of his throat.

Mingus had quarried the comics from his closet, scooting them into hasty piles. He’d likely not laid eyes on them for years. “I never did get these in no plastic bags,” he said apologetically, dazedly. He flipped open an issue of
Fantastic Four
and grew transfixed in nostalgia. “Dang, I even wrote my
name
in all these, check it out.”

Mingus was talking to himself. His nostalgia was a non sequitur, no one was interested in the comics.

“I’ll give you a hundred and fifty.” Dylan spoke not looking at Mingus but staring bullets at Arthur, who made himself busy with the razor blade.

Robert Woolfolk only reclined in the low chair, grew hooded in shadow.

Mingus frowned in mock deliberation, a performance dying in the thin air of the bullshit transaction. “Well, I guess that would be fair.”

Dylan tossed the money on the mirror. He relied on their understanding how puny the sum was to him. This was a demonstration to all three of them, as representatives of Gowanus, that Dylan was no longer of this place.

In reply, Robert Woolfolk only scooped up the cash, produced a thick-curled roll and layered Dylan’s bills to the outside of it.

“I brought a knapsack,” Dylan said. “I don’t need any help.”

Mingus nodded and blinked, defeated by Dylan’s efficiency. “Okay, then, that’s chill.”

Turning his back to the three of them, Dylan shoveled the marker-tagged, fingerprint-worn comics into the sack. He was tangled in rage, to be there on the floor on his knees. In an irrational gesture he scooped up one of Mingus’s Afro picks too, and pushed it into the mouth of the sack, on top of the comics. Then he remembered his cool, how he’d thrown down the money. He had a larger purpose here, his plan. The comics were only a joke. Dylan was like the garbage man of their entire youth, come at last. He might have been acquiring a collection of roofed spaldeens, or old cum-gummed socks.

“Walk me out,” he said when he’d stood.

“Yeah, yeah, sure.”

Again they tiptoed past Senior’s crypt. At the apartment’s gate Dylan whispered:

“Call me tomorrow. When Lomb and Woolfolk aren’t around.”

Lomb and Woolfolk, like Abraham and Straus or Jeckyll and Hyde, an old association. Dylan almost laughed.

Mingus widened his red eyes, but Dylan left him hanging. Two could play at spurious mystery, or three, or four: anyone could be spooky, bogus street rap was no commodity in Gowanus. Dylan had survived Dean Street when Mingus Rude was a Philadelphia Boy Scout, Arthur Lomb a private-school dork. Only Robert Woolfolk held any real fear, and Rachel Ebdus had taken care of that, Dylan was untouchable. The other two were newcomers and comic-book collectors forever, and if they wanted to play at being players Dylan could play too. He assumed his demonstration was adequate to show it was the one with the fat passbook who held the cards.

Eleven in the morning, heat already gripping the day like a vise, it nearly went wrong right at the start, Abraham walking in as Dylan counted money. “Goodness,” Abraham said.

Dylan shuffled it into the pocket of his yellow-checked shorts,
Ska
-wear for the concrete jungle.

“How much have you got there?” said Abraham.

“Three hundred,” Dylan lied.

“Doesn’t it belong in the bank?”

“It’s none of your business.”

Abraham grew consternated, and tried to formulate a stern reply, an effort Dylan always pitied.

“I’d say it is my business, Dylan. What’s the money for?”

“I need to lend it to Mingus,” said Dylan lamely, landing too near the truth.

“Why does Mingus need three hundred dollars?”

“I don’t know.” Dylan moved to the door.

“Dylan?”

“Treat me like a grown-up, Abraham,” said Dylan coldly. “I told you how much I’d contribute at the end of the summer, and it’s not the end of the summer yet.”

Not summer’s end, no: summer’s
crotch
. Yoo-Hoo, Rheingold, Manhattan Special, everywhere bottle caps were massaged irretrievably into caramel tar by inching cars with gauges in red. Coming up Nevins passenger-siders jerked windows to block tin-can vented streams: some vigilante had again wrenched a hydrant open to belch the city’s supply, and nobody rallied heatstruck brains to summon cops or firemen. By noon every house, every window was jammed open to suck air from the street. Pointless, though. The air was dead.

With five hundred in his pocket, his final offer determined in advance, Dylan Ebdus strolled to Mingus Rude’s, casual as shit, sweating bullets.

Arthur Lomb and Robert Woolfolk weren’t among the creatures slugging at minimal speeds along the heat-watery sidewalk. Dylan recognized nobody, his eyes walled.

Sunday, Senior was at the Parlor of God Ministry on Myrtle Avenue, so Mingus had the basement to himself, doors all flung open.

Dylan followed the music inside.

Mingus lay tumbled in baggy shorts and a grayed undershirt on his bed, sheets kicked to the foot, pillow doubled under his neck, dozing in daylight and loud funk. Possibly he’d started his day two or three times and lagged back, nothing on the agenda until Dylan arrived, sleeping off a night or series of nights, still sleeping off high school. The mirror was stowed somewhere, the room in midday light unmysterious, just a room. The walls and ceiling had been rolled black, maybe the only shade which would cover silver Krylon and Garvey Violet.

Mingus rubbed his eyes with balled fists like a newborn.

“Yo, D.”

Dylan replied self-consciously, “Yo.”

“So, my boy wants in the deal after all.”

“Maybe.”

Mingus swung his feet from the bed, gestured Dylan to sit down, kneaded his muzzle and smacked his lips.

“Master Dillinger has concerns,” Mingus said, mock-pompous. “Things he
needs to know
. He’s operating on a
need-to-know
basis.”

Dylan didn’t speak.

“I keep trying to make you bust a smile, D-Man. What? You afraid Robert wants to mess with you? Because you know I’m looking out.”

“I’m not afraid of Robert.”

“Aight, cool. I didn’t mean to say you were.”

Dylan wanted to get to business. “How much are you short for the deal?”

“We could be short nothing. The question is how much you want to come in?”

“Two hundred.”

“Two hundred.” Mingus ruminated. “Right. I see no problem with that.” Antenna up now, he waited for the kicker. “We can cut you in for two bills, that’s not that big a deal one way the other.”

“But I want something else.”

“Ah, something else.”

“The ring.”

“Ho, shit.” Mingus covered his face with his fingers, laughed grimacing behind them, shaking his head. “Dude come round here talking about
this
and
that
, whole time he wants the
ring
back.”

“You still have it?”

“So we on
that
basis. You had me thinking this was about, I don’t know,
comic books
, or a
drug
deal, or some shit.”

Mingus’s laughter was bitter. It was as if Dylan had asked to buy their friendship back, all their secrets with it, Aeroman and the bridge and things which had no right name. As if on six or seven summers he’d put a price tag of two hundred dollars, eight twenties, the wage of a week spent shaving pistachio and butter pecan curls out of frosted tubs. Perhaps he had.

Pushing off with hands on bare knees Mingus stood, stumbled out into the hallway without a word. Through open doors pee bombed into porcelain.

“I still got it, yeah,” he said when he returned. “You know, you only had to ask me for it back.”

“Okay, give it back.”

“What, now you ain’t gonna pay me?”

There was a terrifying satisfaction in hearing Mingus’s anger, at last. “No, I appreciate your keeping it for me,” said Dylan, voice still cold, face growing hot. “I’m glad to pay.”