“Came out of your house, man, naked like a witch. Don’t lie. They put her in a police truck and took her away.”
Now Dylan was baffled. Had Robert Woolfolk seen something Dylan hadn’t? He couldn’t really be confusing paintings with a person, art handlers with police.
At the same time a glow of fear rose in him, knowing that however muddled, Robert Woolfolk grasped that Rachel was no longer around to kick his ass.
Robert went on, in a reasonable tone of commiseration. “Threw her in jail, I expeck. Locked her up for being too motherfuckin’ loud and crazy.”
“She wasn’t naked,” Dylan defended, laps behind. “Those were paintings.”
“She weren’t wearing no paintings when I saw her. She was hanging out all over the street for anyone to see. Ask somebody if you think I’m a lion.”
“A liar?” In dizziness Dylan wanted to lead Robert Woolfolk back to his home, to show him the trails of dust and shadows of faded housepaint on the parlor walls marking where the nudes had hung, missing pictures of a missing woman, ghosts of ghosts.
“Don’t call me no fuckin’ lion, man. I’ll fuck up your white ass before I’m done. Show me your hand.”
“What?”
“Your hand. Right here. Let me show you something.” Robert encircled Dylan’s wrist with his long fingers and turned it downward-Dylan watching in fascination as though from a vast distance-then curled it in one sharp motion toward Dylan’s shoulder blade, so Dylan doubled at the waist, following the line of force. Dylan’s knapsack tumbled over his head, notebook pages spilling to the concrete in view between his knees. His face flooded with blood and breath.
“See, don’t let nobody get you like that,” said Robert. “You do anything they want, they get you arm twisted back. I’m just telling you for your own good. Pick up your shit and clear out of here now.”
None of this was tellable. As they sat in the winter-squeezed light of Mingus Rude’s backyard window, Barrett Rude Junior upstairs, strains of the Average White Band and his slippered footfalls trickling through the hardwood, Dylan and Mingus downstairs with their two heads bent together, leafing through the new issues of Luke Cage, Hero for Hire and Warlock, Dylan couldn’t ask Mingus whether he’d also seen the art handlers loading their truck or whether he’d instead somehow witnessed Robert Woolfolk’s imaginary police. It was outside speech. To begin with, Rachel’s disappearance didn’t want to be given a name, a form to etch it in Dean Street history. And if Mingus had seen that parade of fleshy canvases, Dylan didn’t want to know. Too, he couldn’t describe how the balance of terror Rachel had struck in Robert Woolfolk was now tipped, because he felt a queasy instinct that Mingus and Robert should be kept ignorant of each other. If they were destined to meet Dylan didn’t want to be the one who introduced them, and if they were already familiar it was another thing Dylan was in no hurry to learn. Finally, Dylan couldn’t ask Mingus Rude if black people called liars lions because Mingus Rude was black. Sort of.
So silence and comic-book word balloons and the bass thump of the stereo upstairs.
One December afternoon Mingus tossed down his loose-leaf binder, bowed cardboard pressed with blue fabric, fraying at the corners, and Dylan saw that on every surface surrounding Mingus’s old Philadelphia Flyers sticker the binder was laced with ballpoint scrawlings, lines dug in repetition like Spirograph ovals, gestures toward some perfect, elusive form. Here was the scribble from schoolyard walls, now carried home to Dean Street and plopped on Dylan’s stoop.
“That’s my tag,” said Mingus when he caught Dylan studying the cloud of visual noise. “Here.” He tore out a page and, holding his pen with fingers close to the point, tongue curling against his cheek in concentration, wrote DOSE in angled block letters. Then he drew it again in a clumsy balloon font, the D and O barely distinguishable, the E swollen so its three digits overlapped-faint mimicry, it seemed to Dylan, of a Marvel Comics sound-effect panel.
“What’s it mean?”
“It’s my tag, Dose. It’s what I write.”
It was a new given. Anyone might have a tag. Dylan might have one himself any day now. Further explanations were or weren’t coming. The narrowed hours of winter light were a form of patience themselves, a stoic reply to no question. Rachel had vacated a certain hysteria from the house, replaced it with the telephone and assorted other ringing tones. A day had a hum like a seashell. Dylan watched television, watched the mails, watched his father trudge upstairs to his studio. He listened to his mother’s abandoned records at low volume, Carly Simon, Miriam Makeba, Delaney & Bonnie. From the barred window of his second-floor classroom he watched janitors trudge through a thin carpet of snow to Dumpsters, which were covered with the newly visible scribble. Dylan had begun to pick out names, layers in the mess. Most things had happened some time before Dylan came along, that’s why taking them for granted was so crucial. You could dial up any example in reruns, Room 222, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, The Mod Squad. All was exemplary of daily life, the undertow of the normal.
Things occurred in one another’s company that Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude might never discuss. They watched the Super Bowl in Mingus Rude’s parlor, first sealing a five-dollar bet in whispers in the basement room, Mingus taking the Pittsburgh Steelers, Dylan, on helmet aesthetics, the Minnesota Vikings. Then they’d tiptoed upstairs, under the eye of the gold records. The parlor was rearranged, the water bed hidden, the couch and a tremendous Barcalounger arrayed around a mammoth color television. Barrett Rude Junior sat enthroned before the screen in blue satin pants and an unsashed silk robe, his thick arms fallen to either side, palms open, legs sprawled halfway to the television. Coils of black-and-white hair were like false starts, unfinished cursives on the flat brown page of his chest. He cinched his head halfway from the pregame show to consider Dylan, squinted through his granny glasses, his goatee warping wryly as he pursed immense lips.
“This your friend, huh?”
Mingus ignored the question, sat on the couch.
“What’s your name?”
“Dylan.”
“Dylan? I met that cat, man. Who you like in the game, Little Dylan?”
“Huh?”
“Who you like in the game?”
“He likes the Vikings,” said Mingus, distantly, fallen into some trancelike state induced by his father and the immense, pulsing screen.
“Vikings lose,” said Barrett Rude Junior, so flatly that Dylan was momentarily confused-weren’t they all here to find out who won? The game wasn’t a rerun.
“You know the Dolphins?” said Barrett Rude.
Dylan lied yes.
“I worked out with them, summer of ’71. Get the picture, Gus.”
Mingus rose from the couch and slid into his father’s carpeted bedroom, returned with a framed color photograph, worm’s-eye, showing Barrett Rude Junior in a football uniform, ball curled to his chest, dreaming eyes fixed worlds beyond the lens.
“Mercury Morris said I’d make the cut as a second-string wideout, never got the chance, though. Damm record company put the kibosh, thought I couldn’t protect myself. Cost me a Super Bowl ring, man.”
Barrett Rude Junior wound down, his voice purring to nobody in particular. The game itself, when it began, turned out to be a long green flattening: of huffing, robotic men, and of Dylan’s interest. Football was an arrangement of failures, a proving how unlikely most things were. Mingus kept his betting stake private, just rooted maniacally for anyone to put it in the air. Dylan chanted silently along with the commercials, I’d like to buy the world a Coke. Indi-gestion. Barrett Rude Junior twitched his fingers, beating some tune on the Barcalounger’s arm.