Dylan Ebdus’s head twitched, trying not to look. His fingers clenched the two quarters in his pocket. He’d meant to buy a spaldeen, a fresh ticket of entry in pink rubber. Maybe practice taking shots off the face of the abandoned house until a game built up around him. Dylan had a knack for making catches only when no one was looking, in private rehearsal, but any day now that knack might translate into Henry’s genius. Though come to think of it you couldn’t say when the last time was anyone played wallball, it might be another lost art. Forgotten games stacked up like the grievances of the losers of wars, unrecorded in the street’s history.
You didn’t think of who got money from where. Every kid kept the change when their mom sent them to buy milk. Alberto bought Schlitz for his cousin. Old Ramirez knew who it was for, so he let a kid buy beer, also cigarettes.
Word had gone around that on Halloween the kids from the projects threw, no, hurled with bruising force, eggs. It was a holiday but you still had to go to school, a bad deal, a bad situation, every kid for himself, scattering once the bell rang at three o’clock, and more likely to be hit if he bunched with another kid, let alone tried to protect him. You couldn’t protect anyone from a thrown egg or much else.
What if everything changed? Probably it had. It had before.
You and what army?
You and your so-called friends.
Yo mama.
From his bedroom Dylan Ebdus heard like a dog’s inaudible whistle the lonely call of the Spirograph: the pins, the toothed cogs, the skipping red pens. “No,” he said to Marilla, terrified. “I don’t have any money.”
“You scared of Robert?” Marilla dashed the jacks across the slate in a crazily wide swathe, and frowned at the result.
“I don’t know.”
“He got a razor.”
“Tell me something good! ” screamed La-La, then Marilla dropped the red ball which dribbled under Rachel’s forsythia and the two girls stood away from the array of paint-chipped jacks and danced, knees bowed, eyes slitted, cheeks blowing out as they chanted Ooh ah, ooh-ooh ah, ooh ah, ooh-ooh ah-
The elongated rectangular grid of these streets, these rows of narrow houses, seen from above, at dusk in late October: imagine the perspective of a flying man. What sense would he make of the figures below, a white woman with her black hair whirling as she struck with the flat of her hand at the shoulders and back of a black teenager on the corner of Nevins and Bergen? Is this a mugging? Should he swoop down, intervene?
Who does this flying man think he is anyway-Batman? Black man?
These streets always make room for two or three figures alone in struggle, as in a forest, unheard. The stoops lean away from the street, the distance between row houses widens to a mute canyon. Our lone figure above flies on, needing a drink more than anything, and the woman’s beating of the boy continues.
The day after Halloween the pavement outside school was stained with egg, bombs that had missed their targets, streaks of browning yolk studded with grains of shell, so distended by velocity they seemed to speak of the Earth’s rotation on its axis, as though not gravity but centrifugal force had smeared them lengthwise across the planet. The ones who’d worn home an omelet drying in their corduroys, borne a throbbing red oval punched onto their thigh, they’d deny it until you saw tears mass in the edges of their eyes. Any kid honest with himself was sobered, though, by the glimpse of whatever raged inside the bullies from Intermediate School 293, the berserkers just a grade or two ahead. The egg throwers had worn cartoon-smooth, store-bought masks- Casper, Frankenstein, Spider-Man-so they resembled Symbionese bank robbers or chainsaw killers, figures from nightmares fueled by stolen looks at television news and The Late Movie.
Everyone moved at a fixed rate toward the same undiscussable destinations.
No one could push the concept of a razor blade or a heroin-filled hypodermic stuck into an apple completely out of their heads.
There were days when no kid came out of his house without looking around. The week after Halloween had a quality both hungover and ominous, the light pitched, the sky smashed against the rooftops.
No Vember.
“Go deep,” Henry commanded. Now he wagged a football, the latest enticement. Four kids were like yo-yos strung to his hand, running to jump in a cluster when he finally spiraled the football half the length of the block. No matter what happened, whichever hands the ball came down in or eluded, Henry’s expression was sour. There was something inelegant or compromised in the ball’s descent from the air where he’d placed it.
Dylan Ebdus waited on Henry’s stoop in a bubble of silence, seeing he made six, wondering if they’d call him into the street to even the sides for a game. He’d detected in himself a certain translucency today, a talent for being ignored. Rachel had flushed him from a four-day hide in his room, from a retrenchment into the secret power of his books and pencils, into the mysteries of eavesdropping on Abraham’s footfalls and Rachel’s clangor on the telephone, into the dreary conundrums of the Etch A Sketch and the Spirograph, and something in his conjured solitude had followed him out onto the street, then reversed itself to drape all over him anywhere he sat still.
Gaze long enough into Dean Street and Dean Street will gaze into you.
Hands in pockets, Dylan went into the street and leaned against a car. Then, as if tide-swept from a beach, he began to sway with the others toward the place the ball descended, making no show of trying to catch it, just drawn to the site, taking air through his mouth, silently emulating play.
“You seen Robert Woolfolk?” said Alberto casually.
Dylan wasn’t surprised. He felt the irresistible relevance of Robert’s name. He shook his head.
They stopped playing. Henry tried to dribble the football. Two or three times it actually came back to him instead of twisting away across their shoe tops. The ball was scarred with grease where it had lodged under a car and been scraped down the block.
“He got beat up,” said Alberto reverently.
Lonnie nodded his head, Alberto nodded, Earl and Carlton nodded. They gathered wide-eyed as though warming at a campfire of their own awe. Dylan waited. Henry slapped the football against the ground and Alberto and the others stared as though it was Dylan who should explain Robert Woolfolk’s beating to them. Then Henry flicked them away, as easily as flicking a drop of water from his hand, by muttering “End zone,” and dropping back, the ball hidden behind his knee, to roll his eyes at the sky. The four scuttled to the place where Henry’s glance promised to deliver the ball, each yearning to be the kid made pure by the perfect catch. Henry turned away the instant the ball was aloft, uninterested. He gestured to Dylan and the two of them crossed to the abandoned house. The bus thumped past, giving cover.
“Your mother kicked his ass, right out on Bergen Street,” Henry said. “He was crying and everything.”
Dylan was silent.
“I guess nobody told you,” said Henry.
Could there be a distant island or hidden room where your life took place without your knowing? Dylan tried to picture the incident on Bergen Street, the lunatic collision between Rachel Ebdus and Robert Woolfolk, but the spotlight of his wondering slipped to the invisible floating room in the dark of the house at night where through the walls as he lay awake in bed he heard his mother’s rhythmic whimpering or his father’s urgent, angry whisper. I guess nobody told you, Henry said, and Dylan began to drown in the stuff he dammed with silence at the brink of sleep.