You, you were a million miles from any such procedure.
More in the market for a case of fake asthma.
The day after Dylan Ebdus and Arthur Lomb spoke of the Blue Beetle in the library, Mingus Rude resurfaced. At three o’clock, the hour when the doors were thrown open and the school exploded onto the October-bright pavement, when Court Street shopkeepers stood arms-crossed in doorways, their jaws chewing gum or nothing at all, just chewing under narrowed eyes. Dylan used the Butler Street entrance, looking to be lost in the flow of anonymous faces as he left the building, hoping to be carried a distance down Court Street disguised in a clot of anybodies before exposing himself as a solitary white boy. Today he stopped. Mingus sat cross-legged on the rise of a mailbox on the corner of Court and Butler, regarding the manic outflow of kids with a Buddha’s calm, as though from an even greater height than the mailbox, another planet maybe. He might have been sitting there placidly for hours, unnoticed by the school security guards or the older Italian teenagers who roamed Court, that’s how it felt. Dylan understood at once that not only hadn’t Mingus been inside the school today, he’d never crossed its doors since summer, since the start of his eighth-grade year.
“Yo, Dill-man!” said Mingus, laughing. “I was looking for you, man. Where you been?”
Mingus unfolded his legs and slid off the mailbox, pulled Dylan sideways out of the crowd, like there was never a question they left school together, like they’d done it every day for three weeks. They crossed Court, into Cobble Hill, Dylan hitching his backpack high on his shoulders and trotting to keep up. Mingus led him up Clinton Street to Atlantic Avenue, kids from I.S. 293 all left instantly behind. There the neighborhood opened out, the shipyards visible under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the avenue tilting down to the yellow-glinting water. It was as though Mingus knew paths from the school Dylan in his stupefaction couldn’t have plotted for himself.
“I haven’t seen you-” Dylan began.
“Whenever you call me, I’ll be there,” Mingus sang. “Whenever you need me, I’ll be there – I been a-round! Here.” He crumpled a couple of dollars into Dylan’s hands and nodded him to the Arab newsstand on the corner of Clinton. “Get me a pack of Kools, Super-D.” He tipped his head again. “I’ll be over here.”
“I can’t buy cigarettes.”
“Say it’s for your mom, say she always comes in there. He’ll sell it to you, don’t worry. Better let me hold your backpack.”
Dylan tried not to turn his head at the rack of comics as he stepped into the narrow, darkened corridor of a shop.
“Uh, pack of Kools. It’s for my mother.”
The operation unfolded precisely as scripted. The guy raised an eyebrow at the word mother, then slid the Kools across the linoleum counter with nothing besides a grunt.
Back outside, Mingus stashed both cigarettes and change in his jacket-of-mystery, then led Dylan back along Clinton, toward the park on Amity Street.
“Dill-Man, D-Lone, Dillinger,” Mingus chanted. “Diggity Dog, Deputy Dog, Dillimatic.”
“I haven’t seen you anywhere,” Dylan said, unable to check the plaint in his voice.
“You all right, man?” Mingus asked. “Everything cool with you?”
Dylan knew precisely what everything Mingus meant-all of seventh grade, whatever went on or didn’t inside the building which was apparently no longer Mingus’s problem.
According to Mr. Winegar, science teacher, the universe was reportedly exploding in slow motion, everything falling away from everything else at a fixed rate. It was a good enough explanation for now.
“Everything cool?” Mingus demanded.
They were together and not together, Dylan saw now. Mingus Rude was unreachable, blurred, maybe high. There wasn’t going to be any communing with his core, that vivid happy sadness which called out to Dylan’s own.
Dylan shrugged, said, “Sure.”
“That’s all I want to know, man. You know you’re my main man, Dillinger. D-Train.”
It was a rehearsal and now Dylan learned what for. As they slipped into the park Mingus exaggerated his ordinary lope, raised a hand in dreamy salute. Arrayed at the concrete chessboard tables were three black teenagers in assorted slung poses. One more chaotically slung than the others, a signature geometry of limbs which caused Dylan’s heart to guiltily, madly lurch. Nevertheless he strolled beside Mingus into the thick of it, accepted whatever was meant to unfold in the park from within his own sleepwalker’s daze, which, perfected at the new school, covered even the resurrection of Robert Woolfolk as a presence in his life.
“Yo,” said Mingus Rude, lazily slapping at hands, humming swallowed syllables which might be names.
“What’s goin’ on, G?” said Robert Woolfolk.
Robert Woolfolk called Mingus G, for Gus, Dylan supposed. Did it mean he’d also met Barrett Rude Junior?
Then Robert Woolfolk recognized Dylan. He flinched with his whole face, his sour-lemon features hiding nothing, yet didn’t alter the arrangement of his limbs an inch.
The park was full of little white kids with bowl haircuts, maybe second or third graders from Packer Institute or Saint Ann ’s. They ran and screamed past the chessboard tables, dressed in Garanimals, arms loaded with plastic toys, G.I. Joes, water pistols, Wiffle balls. For all they inhabited the same world as Dylan and Mingus and Robert Woolfolk they might as well have been animated Disney bluebirds, twittering harmlessly around the head of the Wicked Witch as she coated an apple with poison.
“Shit,” said Robert Woolfolk and now he smiled. “You know this dude, G?”
“This my man D-Lone,” said Mingus. “He’s cool. We go back, he’s my boy from around the block.”
Robert looked at Dylan a long while before he spoke.
“I know your boy,” he said. “I seen him from before you were even around, G.” He flicked his eyes at Dylan. “What up, Dylan man? Don’t say you don’t remember me because I know you do.”
“Sure,” said Dylan.
“Shit, I even know this dude’s mother,” said Robert Woolfolk.
“Oh, yeah?” said Mingus, carefully blasé, downplaying any further speculations. “So you down, right? You cool with my man Dylan.”
Robert Woolfolk laughed. “What you need me to say, man? You can hang with your white boy, don’t mean shit to me.”
At that the thin, worthless pretense of Robert Woolfolk’s fondness for Dylan was shattered in hilarity. The other two black teenagers snorted, slapped each other five for the words white boy, as ever a transport to hear said aloud. “Ho, snap,” said one, shaking his head in wonderment like he’d just seen a good stunt in a movie, a car flipped over or a body crumpled in a hail of blood-spurting bullet thwips.
Dylan stood frozen in his stupid backpack and unpersuasive Pro Keds in the innocent afternoon, his arms numb, blinking his eyes at Mingus.
Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.
“We going down to bomb some trains or we sit here all day talking ’bout this and that?” said Robert Woolfolk.
“Let’s go,” said Mingus Rude softly.
“You bringing your homeboy here?”
Suddenly a woman stepped into the thick of them. Out of nowhere she made herself present where they sat and stood around the tables. It was a shock, as though she’d ruptured a bubble, disturbed a force field Dylan hadn’t thought was permeable, one where their talk, no matter how many times the word fuck was included, was sealed in a glaze of distant car horns and bird tweets and the younger kids’ sweet yells.
The woman was a mom, surely, one of the running kids had to be hers. She was maybe twenty-five or thirty, with blond hair, matching blue-jean jacket and bell-bottoms, and granny glasses-she might have been familiar from one of Rachel’s parties. Dylan could see her now, waving a joint around, making some passionate digression about Altman or Szechuan, aggravating men accustomed to holding the floor. Or Dylan might have been kidding himself. There were probably a million like her, false Rachels who’d never known his.