The ring wasn’t helping him win chess games with Arthur Lomb, that much was for certain. He toppled his king in surrender three times an hour, the two of them hunched on the stoop in sunlight, lizards on a rock. Dylan prayed for Arthur to ferry down the red juice and turkey sandwiches and raisin cookies his mother wrapped in wax paper and packed into the refrigerator each day before leaving for work. Their lunch break, which was the only relief from Arthur’s bearing down with his phalanx of pawns, and behind them his thuggish rooks ready to surge and crush Dylan’s limp knights, dozy bishops, naked king, spirit. Arthur’s mother figured on Dylan’s presence, made double sets of sandwiches now. It was pitiably easy to fall into a routine with a kid when you were his only friend and his mother knew it. Dylan suspected the sandwiches and cookies were a bribe. Perhaps Arthur suspected it too, perhaps that was why he chewed them with a morbid gnashing intensity which resembled his chess. As if Arthur were trying to pulverize the mornings and afternoons of the new summer into crumbs, defeated pawns to be swept away.
The problem was he never actually did sweep the pawns away, only set them up again as quickly as he’d crushed them, flogging Dylan to the next match, and the next. Arthur, as ever both slavish and sadistic, always reorganized both their chessmen. If the Yankees or Mets had a day game afternoons were more tolerable, Arthur’s transistor tuned to Lindsey Nelson or Phil Rizzuto, the Mets going nowhere, the Yankees stacked with hired guns and bound for glory. Otherwise it was another tight rotation of “Afternoon Delight” and “Right Back Where We Started From” on one of the Top 40 AM stations which were Arthur’s fixation.
“This is really quite an interesting song,” said Arthur whenever “Convoy” played. He never explained. The ritual comment was intended as self-evident.
Dylan didn’t ask, didn’t fall for it, just fiddled with the ring on his hand. He was immune, off elsewhere in his mind, in diving flight.
Arthur began saying breast for check. “Breast. Breast. Breast mate.”
For relief they scored the latest Fantastic Four and Defenders and Ghost Rider from the newsstand on the traffic island on Flatbush. They read them in five minutes, then Arthur put them in plastic and began setting up the pieces again.
The day Dylan began to hallucinate that Arthur’s furrowed, sweat-beaded brow was actually ticking like a bomb, he toppled his king and said, “Let’s go see if Mingus is home.”
Arthur stared up from the board. “Did I hear you correctly?”
“Sure.”
“You’ll introduce me to Mingus Rude?”
Arthur’s expression mingled astonishment and gloat. It was as if the entire dull ten-day stand of chess demolitions had been intended to produce this one specific result.
“Why not?” said Dylan.
“You won’t hear any objection from me,” said Arthur.
Dylan shrugged, not wanting to suggest in his response that he’d given anything valuable away. In fact he’d vowed never to bring Arthur Lomb around to Dean Street, at least never when any of the Dean Street kids, such as remained hanging around the block, would possibly see. Hell, it was only another promise to himself broken, nobody else would ever know. If the Dean Street kids confused Dylan with Arthur Lomb at this late date it was hopeless anyway. Arthur’s whiteness couldn’t rub off on Dylan, couldn’t make him any whiter than he was. The taboo was pointless.
Anything, anyway, not to see his decimated pawns clapped back on their squares.
Mingus was home. In fact he was sitting on his own stoop, halfway up to catch the shade thrown by the house, staring dazedly at what he held between his two hands like a treasure, or perhaps a small live thing which required his protection: a fresh spaldeen, its pink flesh unscuffed, as though it had never had contact with the street, as though every latent bounce remained sealed inside it, pure potential.
He looked up when Dylan and Arthur approached and Dylan understood instantly that Mingus had been into Barrett Rude Junior’s freezer pot stash, had gotten deeply stoned, a solo afternoon jaunt. His eyes were dewy with it.
“I found it,” he pronounced, raising up the spaldeen.
“This is Arthur,” said Dylan lightly, making the introduction he’d never meant to make, but tossing it off. “From Pacific.”
Mingus snapped to exaggerated attention, reached to shake Arthur Lomb’s hand. “Yo, Arthur, how you doin’?”
“Okay,” said Arthur sheepishly.
“Pa- cif -ic,” said Mingus, measuring it with his dope-thickened tongue, tasting the syllables. “You got your own homeboys up around Pacific, Arthur?”
“There, uh, aren’t any other kids my age on my block.”
“Oh yeah?” Mingus looked impressed. “All right, I think I know what you mean, yeah. So, what you think-some little kid lost this ball, man?”
“I guess that’s most likely,” said Arthur. He looked stymied to be interviewed by Mingus Rude, pushed out of his ordinary range of operation. He might fear himself on the verge of a stupid answer to a snappy question, that was what his eyes seemed to say.
“You think we ought to play stoopball?”
Arthur made a helpless face, looked at Dylan.
“What you think, D-Man?”
“If you even remember how,” said Dylan. He savored a certain hard-boiled flavor in his reply, pleased to assert before Arthur Lomb the deep and weary history between himself and Mingus Rude, a history extensive in ways Arthur couldn’t begin to imagine.
“I’ll throw a home run on your ass, boy.”
“Let’s see you,” said Dylan.
Maybe the summer was only waiting for them to resume their places, the light and heat waiting to gel around them. The block was like an open-air museum of their former days, the slate cracked and skewed in all the usual places, the abandoned house still theirs any time they wanted to reclaim it. It had taken Arthur Lomb’s presence, though, to rouse the effort. They’d silently partnered to show him what Dean Street meant, the old essential traces. If it had been only Dylan and Mingus they would have been off tagging DOSE on lampposts, away from headquarters on some undercover operation.
Arthur Lomb, and the beacon of the fresh spaldeen. It had something to do as well with the pink ball which appeared in Mingus’s hands like a problem unsolved, an old itch.
There were only the three of them at first. Mingus at the abandoned stoop, turned sideways as he wound up to slam the ball high off the steps. Dylan on the opposite sidewalk, beyond the parked cars, playing the outfield. Arthur Lomb placed between, in the street, under the canopy of trees, to play infield and flatten himself to one side to make way for the rare car.
“Mother fucker!” Mingus shouted when Dylan made a perfect catch. Consoling himself, he rattled a double up the middle, chattering too-late encouragement: “Block it with your body, Artie, Arthur Fonzarelli, Fonzie, A-Boy.”
Dean Street ’s kids were drawn out-of-doors, or back to the block from some other place by magnetism, a weird call. Nobody knew they were nostalgic until they saw Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude in the golden leaf-light that covered the middle of the block, a dream of a summer ago, ripened into history while nobody noticed. Plus here’s this new gawky grim-faced white boy in the street, knees tangling as he tried to stop the screaming rifle-shot grounders and line drives Mingus kept winging off the stoop.
Irresistible not to look. And then to wander over.
“King Arthur, man, you done fell down!”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t sorry me, son! Sorry is for snakes. Catch the damn ball!”
Mingus arched one high over the parked cars, destined for number 233 Dean’s sunken concrete yard, the shallow where a stoop had been demolished. Dylan leaped to intercept, found the spaldeen cool in his palm, transmitted from Mingus’s hand to his by way of the stoop and the air. He tossed it back casually, over Arthur. Mingus shook his head, medium-impressed, unwilling to exaggerate.