It’s flying how far that remains to be seen.
Today, first day of freedom, he’s keeping a date with himself. Abraham’s out so Dylan’s free to climb the ladder out of the painting studio, unhook the hatch to their roof and push it aside, crawl out across the mushy tar paper into the new summer’s morning.
Dylan wouldn’t have said he feared heights, but the brownstone’s roof has always made him dizzy, not so much the view to the ground as the view across rooftops, out to Coney Island and beyond. Easier if you gaze on Manhattan’s towers. Those place you, fix you in a firm relation of puniness and awe. Easier still to kneel at the roof’s edge, hands gripping the ankle-high rim of masonry, and stare down at the contents of your own yard: ailanthus, brick pile, shoots of weed, a dirty spaldeen you can just make out like a speck of flesh. The grainy reality is reassuring.
What’s unsettling is to put Manhattan at your back and face the borough. Up from the canyon floor, out of the deep well of streets, gazing out into the Brooklyn Beyond is like standing in a Kansas prairie contemplating distance. Every rooftop for miles in every direction is level with that where you stand. The rooftops form a flotilla of rafts, a potential chessboard for your knight-hops, interrupted only by the promontory of the Wyckoff housing projects, the skeletal Eagle Clothing sign, the rise of the F-train platform where it elevates past the Gowanus Canal. Manhattan’s topped, but Brooklyn’s an open-face sandwich in the light, bare parts picked over by pigeons and gulls.
A sky full of pigeons and gulls and you standing there with a flying man’s ring on your finger.
Dylan stands at the front edge, as close as he’s stood, then closer. Shifts a toe onto the cornice, bends his knee like George Washington in the prow. He can just see down into the pit of Dean Street, the tops of new-planted trees, the roof grilles of the passing bus, but the feeling’s vertiginous. He steps back. No good staring and daring yourself: the will to fly sours, leaks away. That may have been Aaron Doily’s mistake. It needs a running start, a glorious oblivious leap to the opposite rooftop, not the dying quail of a fall that would surely result from long and woozy contemplation.
Close your eyes, reach out and feel the air waves, if there are any. Use the force, Luke.
Okay, okay. Dylan charts with backward steps an invisible runway he’ll retrace. Five steps ought to be enough. He’s retreated to the center of the roof. Anyone watching would think he was cowering, but it’s just the opposite-he’s spring-loaded, expecting to fly. Then, as though smacked by a vast hand from the sky, he crumbles to his knees in terror of the thing he’s proposed for himself. Fingers balled in one doubled fist around the ring, Dylan Ebdus huddles, shivers, and slowly and without resistance pees his pants. The urine runs inside his jeans leg to his ankle, drips into his sock and sneaker and onto the gummy, sun-warmed tar.
Here might be the ring’s only spell, to induce self-pissing.
Got to give it up to the flying man: it’s not that easy to throw yourself off a roof.
The Dean Street bus, unable to slip past the white stretch limousine double-parked in front of Barrett Rude’s place, nestled at its bumper instead, humming like a refrigerator, traffic behind stacking to Bond Street. The bus carried just two passengers, one intermittently asleep, but the thing still had its dumb round to make, its loop. The driver kneaded his horn, bleats cutting the drowsy, humid afternoon. The chauffeur had abandoned the limo, snuck to Ramirez’s for a bottle of Miller and a ham-and-cheese.
So anyone on the block not already eyeballing the limo through parlor or upstairs windows was alerted to the anomaly, the bright unlikely event plopped into their June’s last afternoon. Nobody saw it come, but they’d be damned if they weren’t going to see it go, to learn who’d climb inside. Men on stoops wrinkled new bags open just to the lips of bottles, no farther. Women leaned clubby arms on sills, watching for something to unfold. Behind a basement window grille La-La knit Marilla’s hair in cornrows, jerking her head back with increasing force until Marilla said, “Dang! You got a problem?”
A white man with a rake scraped a day’s new crop of wrappers and bottle caps out of his forsythia, muttering under his Red Sox cap.
Abraham Ebdus daubed gray on a frame of celluloid, totally unaware.
Dylan missed the limousine too. He sat sequestered in ailanthus shade in his backyard, speedily turning the pages of The Pod Thickens, a New Belmont Special written by Semi Chellas, cover art by A. Ebdus.
The chauffeur popped out of Old Ramirez’s, sandwich already half unwrapped, then took in the sight of the clogged-up bus and nearly dropped his beer, performed a corny double take with his elbows, sensing his audience. The line of backed-up drivers horn-serenaded him as he fumbled key into ignition, muttering, “Hold up, baby, hold up.” The limo cornered Nevins, loosing the clog.
The street grew calm. For a moment it was as though the watchers had dreamed it, they might be returned to their lives, only mystified. Then the white car rounded Bond, sharklike, and resettled at Barrett Rude’s address. The driver stuck at the wheel now, gnawed his sandwich there, a lazy hand dropping balled butcher paper to the asphalt, then rising to adjust rearview for a spell of toothpicking.
Blobs of yellow-green sun refracted through trees grew elliptical, spanned the white hood, moved on.
The chauffeur was asleep, what a life.
When the door at the top of Barrett Rude’s stoop opened it was like a Sunday newspaper flipped open to the funny pages. The figures poured out one after another, cartoon pimps, Batman villains, outsize mercurial goofs impossible to fix in vision. The Funk Mob, singers, players, and what passed for an entourage, a couple of freakazoid chicks. They’d dropped in to visit Barrett Rude Junior, en route to a promotional appearance at the Fulton Mall and in utmost regalia: mauve feathers, star-frame glasses, padded silver-foil shoulder pads, lightning-bolt headgear, spaceman boots, six-inch heels, King Tut beards, the works.
They burst out of the house loud and happy and moving with zany grace, a Ralph Bakshi cel in the open air, high on Barrett Rude’s hospitality and cocaine, both powdered and cooked into base. To Dean Street they resembled nothing so much as a slice of human graffiti, a masterpiece in motion like a train car gone before you could check it out. This vision, too, quickly evaporated, each band member hand-slapping Barrett Rude farewell where he stood in his boxing robe and satin pants at his door, then piling into the back of that clown-car-in-reverse. The smooth white container swallowed the whole chaos of glints and textures and jiving walks behind tinted windows. The chauffeur rubbed his eyes, turned the key, revved the engine. The limo coursed down the block, gone.
Barrett Rude Junior stood in his robe on the top of the stoop, chuckling, shaking his head, kneading at his coke-frozen nose and lips with the back of his hand. He might have basked for a second or two in Dean Street ’s eyes on him: Shouldn’t they know he was a star? Damn, time they learned. Problem with being in a group, no one ever knew your name, just the group, the Distinctions, like White Castle or Oldsmobile.
White and Puerto Rican motherfuckers around here probably never even heard his million-selling songs, probably thought he was a pimp or gangster coming in buying up a house on renovator’s row, right in their faces.
He stood, hands on hips, for a long assertive minute, grinding his jaw, staring at nothing, taking the pulse of the block before he turned and went inside.
It was after his door had shut, Dean Street at last absented of limousine and costumes and singers in satin robes, that eyes might have found the figure below, in the well of the basement entrance under the stoop, one foot and knee propped out in late sunlight, the rest of him in shadow, watching. An old man with coiled salt-and-pepper beard on grave-lined cheeks, arms ropy in a sleeveless white T-shirt, gold Star of David on a chain hung to his sternum: Barrett Rude Senior. It had been hearsay up until now that a third generation was arrived in the Rude house. This was the first sighting. Only, Senior had been watching the whole time, watching for days already, peering through the half-sunken basement windows, seated in a low chair beside the paint-chipped radiator, eyes level with the knees of passersby on Dean’s slate. He’d been watching Marilla and La-La across the street, watching the new wave of ballplayers who’d inherited Henry’s stoop, watching dog walkers furtively toe piles of shit to the gutter. He’d watched the Funk Mob come and go, heard their hoots of laughter through the ceiling. Now he watched Dean Street watching him, fine with it, as willing to be seen, in his half-seen way, as his son.