And so on.
Dylan had turned bright red. “Can I take this?”
“Sure, sure.” Abraham spread his hands. “Why not?”
The kid hustled the folded newspaper into his knapsack and swept in a mad rush from the table, nearly upsetting his abandoned glass of OJ and his unfinished Cheerios floating in a half-bowl of milk, with face averted, ears blazing like taillights.
“Bye!” he shouted from the hall.
And was out the door.
Questions? Sure, Abraham had questions. Do you know something about this, son? Is there anything you might like to share with me? Just where do you and Mingus Rude go all day and all night, anyway?
For that matter, is Brooklyn itself a geographical form of insanity?
Are we, do you happen perhaps to know, my darling boy, cursed by God?
But who in this day and age got answers to his questions?
He did what he never did: cut school. And a thing he hadn’t done for years: searched Mingus out instead of relying on chance to bring them together. First, though, he squirmed through morning classes, knowing Mingus wouldn’t necessarily even be out of bed before ten, unwilling to risk waking Barrett Rude Junior, and not wanting policemen, truant officers, security guards, gangs, whomever, to draw an absolute bead on him as he imagined they would if he went straight to Mingus’s school, whiteboy with a knapsack on the curb outside Sarah J. Hale after morning bell, nine in the morning. So he rode the train to Stuyvesant and agonized in his seat, swallowed anxiety through French and physics and history, slid the folded newspaper out of his binder for horrified reconfirmation, yes, it happened, Aeroman was arrested, perhaps a hundred, perhaps a thousand times. At least they’d gotten the name right! At lunch period he split, took the IRT back to Brooklyn and prowled the blasted land of Sarah J. Hale ’s sidewalk and schoolyard seeking after Mingus Rude. His reward was about what his guilty, panicked heart might have felt it deserved: Robert Woolfolk.
Robert and a couple of his homies occupied a Pacific Street stoop across from Sarah J. Hale. All three had tallboys of beer concealed in their sleeves for furtive slugs when the coast was clear-just another Wednesday afternoon in late-spring glare, life was sweet. The block was vacant, no guards, cops, gangs, no vibrations from within the building, Robert Woolfolk still the human neutron bomb of Gowanus. Dylan got a blissful crooked smile out of Robert as he approached. The scene was the opposite of what Dylan had imagined, Sarah J.’s sidewalks teeming with cutters like the park across from Stuyvesant. Instead Pacific Street was like a cartoon desert, Dylan crawling across the expanse with cartoon buzzards overhead, Robert and his crew like a batch of cartoon banditos you met on your knees.
We don’t need no stinking badges.
Dylan halted on the sidewalk, but Robert didn’t move. Nobody seemed much impressed at what had bumbled into their laps. This crew might find motivation another time to resume careers as criminals or at least harassers, menaces, inspirers of fear: this day they’d got a thirty-year head start on the men who sat on rooming-house stoops or in the entranceway of the Colony South Brooklyn Daycare Center on Nevins, mellow lackadaisical observers of life’s passing streams, Thoreaus at Walden. They were drunk off their asses.
Life’s passing streams might be urine trails from doorways to the curb, but never mind.
“Hey, Robert?” said Dylan.
“Yo,” said Robert Woolfolk, his eyes glazed. He didn’t object to being addressed by Dylan, not today: We’re on the same planet, might as well admit I know you.
“Have you seen Mingus?”
Robert tilted his head back and to the side, Ali ducking a jab. Or possibly he mimed a braying laugh, but no laugh came out.
One of his homeboys extended a hand to slap and Robert Woolfolk slapped it. Dylan had stepped into some slow sculpture, a frieze in motion. Though he’d penetrated the frieze’s reality, barely, he nonetheless couldn’t hurry it along.
“Have you seen him?” he asked again, helpless, his morning’s panic only mounting.
“You lookin’ for Arrowman?” said Robert Woolfolk.
He made it sound like errorman.
Dylan didn’t offer a correction.
Now came braying laughter, in triplicate. Robert’s cohorts squirmed in their spots as though brutally tickled, immediately gasping for air, begging for release from the excess of hilarity. Hands were again slapped, Robert accepting congratulations for his rapier wit.
“Ho, shit,” said one of Robert’s homeboys, shaking his head as he recovered.
“Nah, man, G ain’t come around here today,” said Robert. “You want me to tell him something for you?”
“That’s okay.”
“I’ll tell him a message, man. What, you don’t trust me?”
“Just that I came around looking for him, I guess.”
“Aight. You was lookin’ for him, cool.”
Dylan mumbled thanks.
“Yo, Dylan, wait up man. You got a dollar you could lend me?” No one budged from slanted attitudes on the stoop. Someone drained a bag-sheathed tallboy, tossed it aside. Robert Woolfolk might have been addressing the sky, Dylan wasn’t worth settling eyes on. “Because you know I’m good with you, man. These dudes don’t know you, I had to stop them coming down throw a yoke on you. I told them you were my man, we practilly grew up together, you’s like my little brother.”
The logic was airtight. Certainly Robert’s homeboys weren’t saying otherwise, though neither looked inclined at this moment to yoke anything larger than a cat. Dylan emptied his pockets, his despair absolute, the dollars negligible for passage out of here.
One thing transfer of funds always did accomplish was a turning of the page.
He walked to the Heights, knowing he couldn’t risk being seen on Dean Street before three, figuring no authority would doubt the legitimacy of a white kid with a knapsack in Brooklyn Heights being home early from school. There he took up station on a bench at the south end of the Promenade, sat chin-propped, pancaked between sky and the truck traffic roaring underfoot, the exhaust-flooded Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. He abandoned himself gazing into the bay, ferries slugging across to Staten Island and the Statue, garbage scows loaded up for Fresh Kills, the whole watery mouth of the city. Every reeling gull was Mingus Rude tumbling from the bridge again, white wings like cape ends tipped to the water, Dylan’s eye fooled a thousand times.
The sky was full of Aeroman, except it wasn’t.
Dylan had never flown in Brooklyn, if the ring was gone. They’d meant to swap it back and forth, the changing from black to white one of Aeroman’s mystifying aspects, another level of secret identity, but it had always been Mingus in the costume, always Dylan crouched behind a parked car or dangled as bait while Mingus flew. Now this, Mingus heroing into the projects on the far side of Flatbush Avenue, where Dylan would never go. Dylan had sewn Rachel’s scraps together and told a story and then clothed in those tatters Mingus had launched himself onto a cop in a drug deal. If the newspaper was to be believed. Of course it had to be understood before it could be believed.
There was something in the story not to understand.
Or maybe something you didn’t want to know.
What did Aeroman care about a drug deal?
Two black kids found Dylan there at the end of the bench faced out to the island and the water and the sky. Lodge in any one place long enough and they’d find you, drawn like flies. These were just about as problematic as flies, too small to yoke him, fifth or sixth graders probably, a couple of mugging Robins lacking a Batman to back them up. If they’d roamed to the Heights from wherever, I.S. 293 probably, it had to be after three, school out.