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.
“I’m Croft,” said the man who opened Isabel Vendle’s door, amused with himself already. “You’re the kid that works for Isabel, I guess.” He shook Dylan’s hand comically before looking up at Rachel. His cropped black hair was astonishingly equal in length everywhere on his head, including his eyebrows. “You got a girlfriend, huh? Come on in, Isabel’s upstairs. Me and her are drinking Coca-Cola, and there’s plenty.”
It was as if Vendlemachine had calculated the coming affront and defended herself with the visitor. She was supposed to be alone on Sunday mornings, adrift in bed or curled at her desk, moaning, trembling to moisten a stamp with her tongue. She had always waited for Dylan by herself and now she’d cheated him, denied him the chance to show his mother the deathly house he’d been forced to enter. The darkened street-level front room was opened now, the corners only Dylan and the orange cat knew exposed to light, the dusty chairs rearranged to make room for a green plaid sleeping bag and a hiker’s backpack spilling with clothes, T-shirts balled like used tissues, and a stack of paperbacks: God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; In Watermelon Sugar; Sexus. Even the garbage smell was mysteriously gone.
Vendlemachine sat at her patio table, scowling, her grip crackling the real estate section of the Sunday Times. The table was littered with sections of newspaper and the promised Coca-Cola and a scattering of violently colorful comic books. “Isabel’s Sunday paper was stolen this morning,” began Croft, as though he felt generally destined to explain everything and accepted the assignment with good humor. He might next start explaining that he was young and Isabel Vendle was old, or that they sat in a backyard in Brooklyn.
“Again,” said Isabel Vendle.
“I had to walk all the way up to Flatbush Avenue and Atlantic to buy a replacement,” Croft said. “I found that newsstand on the traffic island. There were all these great comics, you never know where you’re going to find them. The Fantastic Four, Dr. Doom, Doctor Strange, you know.”
Dylan wasn’t clear whom Croft was talking to until Rachel Ebdus grabbed one of the comic books and looked at the cover. “Jack Kirby’s a god,” she said.
“Oh, yeah, you’re into this stuff? You know the Silver Surfer?”
“Everyone’s got Peter Max posters but I think Jack Kirby’s about ten times more psychedelic.”
A Rachel word.
“Yeah, sure,” said Croft. “But who do you like? Silver Surfer? Thor? What about Kirby’s DC stuff? You know Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth?”
Dylan’s gaze scattered against the comic-book covers. A man of stone, a man of fire, a man of rubber, a man of iron, a brown dog the size of a hippopotamus, wearing a mask. That was all Dylan saw before his sight blurred in the sun and shadow and the figures were liquefied into blobs like Abraham Ebdus’s abstractions.
“Black Bolt,” said Rachel, tapping to point out a figure on the cover of one of the comic books. “You know, the Inhumans. The leader of the Inhumans.” Rachel seemed tangled in herself, seemed bewildered as Dylan to find herself in this conversation. The force of Dylan and his mother’s arrival at Isabel Vendle’s, the arrow of Rachel’s intention flying down the block, had been captured and utterly redirected by Croft and his comic books.
“Sure, the strong silent type,” said Croft, grinning. “I get it.”
“Croft, you are in irresponsible man,” said Isabel Vendle with weary affection.
“Sweet Aunt Petunia,” said Croft obscurely.
“Yes you are,” Isabel went on. “And now an irresponsible boy has brought his mother here to tell me he doesn’t want to visit me anymore on Saturdays. We know this because the boy isn’t interested in your comic books, Croft. He’s staring at me, isn’t he?” She flapped her newspaper so it bowed over her hands, then glared over the tented top. “Do you find me evil, Dylan? Or boring?”
I find you psychedelic, Dylan wanted to say.
“You know there probably isn’t any difference, Aunt Isabel. Not to the kid.”
“You knew he wanted to quit, Isabel,” said Rachel, faintly recalling her purpose. “He tried to tell you.” She half stood in her chair to work her cigarettes out of her front pocket, then offered one to Croft, who shook his head.
“Oh, I felt him working up to it,” said Isabel. “I’d imagined I might get another few weeks out of him.”
“It’s a coming-of-age thing,” said Croft. “Running away from scary old ladies. I had to do it myself.”
“Shut up, Croft.”
That was the end of the discussion and the end of Dylan’s working for Vendlemachine. Croft went into the kitchen and returned with more glasses and they sat in the mottled sunlight squeezing lemon into Coca-Cola and turning the pages of his comic books, Dylan and Rachel and Croft, while Isabel Vendle stained her fingertips nearly to black with the ink of the Times. The Human Torch was the Invisible Girl’s younger brother, and the Invisible Girl was married to Mr. Fantastic, and Ben Grimm was The Thing and Alicia was his blind girlfriend, a sculptress who could honestly appreciate his hideous but monumental body, and the Silver Surfer was Galactus’s emissary and Galactus ate planets but the Silver Surfer had helped the Fantastic Four protect Earth, and Black Bolt couldn’t open his mouth because a single syllable of his speech was so powerful it might crack the world apart-Croft and his mother explained it all to Dylan, word balloons in the bright panels on the pale yellow paper, while Vendlemachine moved her lips silently and eventually dozed in her chair, and the late-October Sunday afternoon collapsed to evening, Abraham in his studio darkening squares of celluloid with brushstrokes, the nudes in the parlor below with no light to make them glow, the backyard window boxes and fire escapes black against the ruddy streaked sky, the street too dark to judge a throw properly so the spaldeen hit a kid in the face and anyway it was time for dinner. Dylan fell asleep in his chair for just a minute and for that minute he and Isabel had the exact same dream but when they awoke neither of them remembered.