“Let me see it for a minute.”

Let me see it: you saw a basketball or a pack of baseball cards or a plastic water gun by taking it into your hands, and what happened after that was in doubt. Ownership depended on mostly not letting anyone see anything. If you let a kid see a bottle of Yoo-Hoo for a minute he’d drink what was left in it.

“Let me see it, let me check it out. I only want to take it for a ride.”

Dylan gripped the handlebars. Abraham had pried off the training wheels the day before, and Dylan still wobbled, still scuffed with his sneakers groping away from the pedals to steady and brake against the sidewalk. “Only if you stay on the block,” Dylan said, miserably.

“You afraid I’m gonna take it? I just want a ride. You get it back after that, you got it all day, man. Just let me go around the block.”

It was a trap or puzzle, the way Robert Woolfolk already knew to work Dylan’s guiltiness. And the empty block conspired to leave Dylan alone to solve it. Robert Woolfolk carried a vacuum around with him, or revealed by his presence the vacuum on Dean Street, the expanse of moments when no one saw and no one knew what happened in plain sight, when all of the block was shrouded in daylight like the abandoned house was shrouded in leaf shade.

Old Ramirez stood in front of his store and sipped a Manhattan Special and squinted at them from under his fisherman’s hat. He was beyond appeal, watching them like television.

Robert Woolfolk added his hands to the bars beside Dylan’s and tugged gently at the bike.

“Stay on the block.”

“Around once, that’s all.”

“No, I mean stay in front of the house.”

“What, you think I’m not coming back? Just around the block.”

What came out of Robert Woolfolk’s mouth was petition and chant, irresistible in its illogic. His eyes, meanwhile, were hard, a little bored.

“Just once around.”

Robert Woolfolk’s legs were too long to unfold in the span between seat and pedals, so he rode with his knees doubled and knobbing up near the handlebars, like a clown on a tricycle. Then he changed his approach, elevated his hips above the seat to stand on the pedals and pump side to side, elbows flaring. The bike teetered, annexed to Robert Woolfolk’s stretching limbs. Like that, a vanishing pile of elbows, he took the bike around Nevins.

When Dylan used the word block he didn’t mean Bergen Street, the other side.

How long did it take to go around the block?

How long was twice as long as that?

The tonguelike latch of Dylan’s black ironwork gate rattled with the vibration of the bus going by. Though there were no trees on the Nevins end of Dean Street red fallen leaves had blown into the gutter from somewhere. The plastic milk cartons in front of the bodega claimed you could be fined or go to jail for not returning them to May Creek Farm, Incorporated, a fairly unlikely destination if you gave it any thought.

The afternoon withered like a balloon around Dylan on his stoop, waiting for Robert Woolfolk to return. Old Ramirez wasn’t watching, there was nothing to watch. Dylan stood naked in the minutes as they accumulated, as they stacked up indifferently on the distant face of the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower clock. The day was like an unanswered telephone, the mute slate ringing. The call of Dylan’s arm-swinging vigil went unreplied.

Nevins Street might as well have been a canyon into which Robert Woolfolk had vanished like a cartoon coyote, wordlessly, trailing puffs of dust. When Lonnie wandered up bouncing a Super Ball and asked what Dylan was doing Dylan said he wasn’t doing anything. It was pretty much as if there had never been a bike.

Abraham Ebdus lost a day to finding the boy’s bicycle. He stalked Wyckoff and Bergen and Nevins, thinking unavoidably that Rachel would have found it herself in the first half hour. She knew Brooklyn in ways he didn’t. He walked the periphery of Wyckoff Gardens, not crossing into the grounds, the maze of walkways and hedge and low Cyclone fence, not knowing where to start if he did. Light soured in the shade of the graffitied white brick of the projects. They seemed designed as future ruins. He put his head into a Puerto Rican social club on Bond Street, a small hangar full of cardplayers. Before he ducked out he registered a tiny pool table, blue carpeted walls, the tang of malt-stale cork. Nobody spoke to him.

But by the end of the afternoon word was out, somehow. A woman with a baby stepped out of her door, seemingly angry at him for wandering. Abraham’s family was possibly famous for being white, fools. She passed the child back inside and led Abraham around to a vacant lot on Baltic, a fenced yard filled with debris shot through with ailanthus sprouts, the mongrel trees which grew as fast as a crack in a windshield spread under pressure of a fingertip. The heap of crushed baby carriages and rotted lath with clinging bits of plaster and torn tin ceiling made a pattern with which Abraham Ebdus refused to permit his eye to become fascinated. The bicycle was on top of the pile, above his head, flung there who-knew-how, its blue curved fender twisted like a splintered wing. Give it another day and the ailanthus might have shot through the spokes. He had to climb the fence and ended up tossing the bike to the ground to free his hands. No one was inclined to help, though some watched. He wasn’t sure it mattered to rescue the bicycle. If it had been stolen for use by another child, maybe. But this, this gratuitous trashing, was just the street’s incomprehension, its resistance. That shadows stood sipping from paper bags as he struggled down to join the bicycle on the pavement was only appropriate, matched his mood. The bicycle was defeated, and Abraham Ebdus wondered why he’d taught the boy a useless skill. He knew Rachel required he bring the bicycle home for repair but suspected the boy would never choose to ride it outside of the dirt of their backyard.

Marilla and another girl were waiting, playing jacks at the base of Dylan Ebdus’s stoop.

Marilla sang in crazy falsetto The prob-lem is you ain’t been loved like you sho-huh-hood, what I got will sure-nuff do you good-

The other girl-Dylan recalled that Marilla called her La-La, wondered if that could really be her name-scooped jacks between ball bounces, counting with a slurred inrush of breath whoosies, whreesies, whorsies, whivesies. The game was splayed beneath his bottom step so he couldn’t pass. He sat on the third step from the bottom and watched.

“Robert Woolfolk says he didn’t take your bike and if you say he did he’s gonna mess you up,” Marilla announced suddenly.

“What?”

“Robert said don’t go saying he took your bike since he didn’t even.”

“He said he’d fuck you up,” clarified La-La. Her hand darted in distraction to fumble eightsies, the jacks scattering.

“I didn’t say-” he began, thinking he hadn’t, hadn’t said a thing.

The bicycle was in Abraham Ebdus’s studio, its fender straightened and decorated now with Dylan’s name in his father’s brushwork hand. Soon it would be downstairs again, leaning in the hallway like a stuffed animal, a blind chrome elk loaded with his parents’ expectation and Dylan’s dread.

Marilla shrugged. “I’m just saying.” Squatted like she was peeing, her ass an inch above the slate, she seized the tiny red ball and swept the jacks up, and sang You refuse to put anything before your pri-hi-hide-what I got will knock all that-uh-pride aside!

“Robert told you to say it?”

“Nobody told me nothing, I’m just saying what I heard. You got a dollar for some candy, Dylan?”

Who was on the block? Was Henry in his yard? Was Robert Woolfolk there?