“Downstairs,” said Mingus Rude. They left the gold records behind. Dylan walked ahead on the stairs, feeling strangely formal as he gripped the banister, imagining Mingus Rude’s gaze on his back.

In the backyard they winged rocks into the sky, let them plop into the Puerto Ricans’ yard. Mostly Mingus, Dylan watching. It was August 29, 1974. The air smelled like somebody’s arm up close. You could hear the steady ding of a Mister Softee truck on Bergen Street, probably with a string of the usual kids hanging on it.

“My grandpop’s a preacher,” said Mingus Rude.

“Really?”

“Barrett Rude Senior. That’s where my daddy started singing, in his church. But he doesn’t have a church anymore.”

“Why not?”

“He’s in jail.”

“Oh.”

“I guess you know my mother’s white,” said Mingus Rude.

“Sure.”

“White women like black men, you heard that, right?”

“Uh, sure.”

“My father don’t talk to that lying bitch no more.” He followed this with a sharp laugh of self-surprise.

Dylan didn’t say anything.

“He paid a million dollars for me. That’s what he had to pay to get me back, a million cold. You can ask him if you think I’m lying.”

“I believe you.”

“I don’t care if you believe me, it’s true.”

Dylan looked at Mingus Rude’s lips and eyes, his exact brownness, took it in. Dylan wanted to read Mingus Rude like a language, wanted to know if the new kid had changed Dean Street or only changed Dylan himself by arriving here. Mingus Rude breathed through his mouth and his tongue curled out of one side of his mouth with the effort of a throw. Mingus was black but lighter, a combination. The palms of his hands were as white as Dylan’s. He wore corduroys. Anything was possible, really.

A million-dollar kid doesn’t belong on Dean Street, Dylan wanted to say. The word million, even.

Mingus Rude might be insane, Dylan didn’t mind.

Two days later he was already playing, standing in the street, a catcher in stoopball, taking a lean on a parked car to let the bus go by. Like he’d been there all along. He caught laconically, perfectly. He might be the Henry of his own block, now transported here-he might be a Henry of the mind, recognizable anywhere. Dylan crept up and sat on Henry’s wall and watched, with Earl and a couple girls, younger kids. Mingus Rude was viable, apparently. He’d been folded into the ongoing game while Dylan wasn’t looking.

Robert Woolfolk wasn’t around. Otherwise the last splendid day had shucked every verifiable kid out onto Dean Street. Two girls turned a rope with three others inside, their knees shining like a bunch of grapes. The empty, blue-tiled school, Public School 38, hummed, just down the block. Nobody looked at it, nobody cared.

“D-Man.”

“John Dillinger.”

“D-Lone. Lonely D.”

Dylan didn’t know what Mingus Rude was yelling about, didn’t recognize himself in the nicknames.

“Yo, Dylan, you deaf?”

Captaincy was an essence lurking in Henry above all. But one captain needed another, even if inferior, a stooge. Someone had to step up. Dylan had seen Alberto assume it, Lonnie too, once even Robert Woolfolk, to make a lopsided game of punchball, fast dissolved in scowls and a faked limp. Now, at the bright weary end of summer, Henry and Mingus Rude were stickball captains, unexplained.

Mingus chose Dylan first, over Alberto, Lonnie, Earl, anyone.

“He can’t hit,” said Henry. It was a reasonably sympathetic diagnosis. Dylan was any captain’s problem, a communal drag.

“I got Dillinger,” said Mingus Rude coolly. He wrapped and rewrapped the wrist fastener of a Philadelphia Phillies batting glove, teasing reminder of the motherlode of outfits buried in his closet. “Take your man.”

That last August afternoon before school began was something like those heartbreaking, dazzling glimpses of the opening credits for Star Trek or Mission Impossible, before you were commanded to switch the television off and go to bed: it was going to haunt you, play inside your eyelids, after the door was closed, the light extinguished, your pounding rib cage calmed. A summer was unfinished, broken off at the end, a bad splice. Now, Mingus Rude’s arrival promised the possibility of another summer, hinged to this one like a door you couldn’t look beyond.

The palm-sweaty broomstick was wrapped with new black tape, like the hockey-stick handle.

“Lead off, Dill.”

The names, Dylan began to understand, conveyed that he and Mingus were to be one thing to each other indoors, off the street, and entirely another outside. On the block.

Inside, outside, a distinction Dylan understood. Could work with.

Henry pitched. Dylan waved at something barely seen, like a bee overhead. “Ball one,” said Mingus Rude, captain, umpire, announcer.

“Ball one?” scoffed Henry. “Dude chased it.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Mingus. “Too high.” To Dylan he said: “Don’t swing at that shit.” To Henry: “Strike zone.” Then back to Dylan, he whispered. “Don’t close your eyes.”

You evolved in full view and secretly at once, grew bony and hairy, twisted out a baby tooth and spat blood and kept playing, claimed to know certain words the first time you heard them. A day came when you made contact, stung it somewhere not foul, rounded first before the bat clattered to stillness in the street. It was no big thing, you weren’t looking for congratulations. Dylan danced off on the manhole cover, second base, daring the throw, the next order of business. Reward for trickling the ball between Alberto’s feet. Leading off, batting one thousand.

Any private thrill was like peeing your pants. Dylan knew to be ashamed of the relief.

He scored on Mingus Rude’s own home run. Struck out hyperventilating his next time up. But. Five kids in a batting order and no defense to speak of, you’d get up a hundred times on a night like this. Strike out ninety. Lace it off a lamppost and call it a triple, didn’t matter-you could bunt a triple in the dark. The close of this day you’d resist like sleep, like sickness. One kid’s mom yelled for half an hour and even then nobody else paid attention, nobody went inside.

Rachel Ebdus didn’t call from the stoop. Dylan Ebdus wondered if Rachel and Abraham were taking the opportunity to kick each other’s ass in one form or another.

Given that he was outside at this particular moment, Dylan didn’t care.

Didn’t give a shit.

Fuck you know about it, anyway?

If. Mingus Rude was a scant four months older than Dylan Ebdus, but those four months hit the calendar such that Mingus was a grade ahead, had finished fifth grade in Manayunk, Pennsylvania. Like Henry and Alberto, Mingus Rude would start sixth this year, at the Intermediate School 293 annex, on Butler Street between Smith and Hoyt, in the turf of the Gowanus Houses. No-man’s-land.

“Dill- icious,” Mingus called him once as he stood at the plate.

I.S. 293 was a hidden sun drawing kids screaming out of Dean Street ’s orbit, one by one. If Mingus Rude was four months younger, if Mingus Rude and Dylan Ebdus had been headed to grade five together, if. Then Dylan could have watched out for him, maybe. Kept an eye.

A grade of school was a bridge in mist. No way to picture where it touched land again, or who you’d be when it did.

One stickball game was your whole career, your whole life to this point.

These weren’t innings, they were dreams of innings. You couldn’t remember who got the last out, you could barely recall the batting order until it was just two guys, Mingus and Dylan. Gus and D-Man. Another kid quit and Henry had to pitch from the outfield. You could do just so much, trap a grounder with your body like a grenade, fish it from behind a tire and lash it toward home base, maybe hit the ass of the guy who’d scored. The pink spaldeen turned black, like a piece of night. Some Puerto Rican guy reparked third base, pissed off at fingerprints. The spaces between outs were like summers themselves.