“Gus, get me a Colt from the fridge, man.”
The yellow forty-ounce bottle sweated beads in the radiator-dry apartment. Barrett Rude wiped his fingers on his blue silk knee after each sip, dark wipes which evaporated but left puckered signatures, trails.
“Halftime y’all take ten dollars, get us some sandwich makings. Go round to Buggy’s, get me some of that Swedish cheese I like. I hate that Puerto Rican cheese they got at Ramirez, man.” Barrett Rude Junior said Buggy’s like the rest of the block, it didn’t matter that he never went out. Names were known indoors. The block was one thing, whole, it was proven again. The brownstones had ears, minds ticking away.
Y’all was a couple of yos walking together.
Dylan and Mingus wrapped themselves in their coats and jammed their hats to their eyes. Wind ripped around the corner of Bond Street, flaying their bony legs, whistling in the vents of their Keds. Fists balled in pockets, palms sweaty, knuckles frozen. Prying Buggy’s door against the wind. She and her German shepherd loomed as apparitions, creatures from Mars peering through glass. A black kid and a white kid buying cheese and mustard. Buggy might not know it was the Super Bowl, might even think the word was toilet-related, a blue dusty item lining her top shelf, which nobody bought.
Mingus and Dylan assembled sandwiches and the three of them ate, Barrett Rude Junior raving about the taste of the hot mustard, licking his fingers, muttering, punishing a second bottle of malt liquor. The third quarter was a floodlit desert, men piled in disarray, time desolately stretched. Somewhere ice-laden planes might be crashing, Manhattan might have snapped in two and drifted out to sea. Brooklyn was the winter island. Outside it was black as night. You’d never have guessed the Super Bowl was so grim and insistent. A shot from a drifting blimp alleviated nothing. Mingus kept his vigil, closed into himself, father-struck, father-stilled. Dylan scooted on his knees and picked through Barrett Rude Junior’s record collection, which filled the far corner beneath the mantel. Dylan flipped them forward and back, the Main Ingredient’s Afrodisiac, Esther Phillips’s Black-Eyed Blues, Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s The Inflated Tear, the Young Holt Trio’s Wack Wack, the names and cover art windows to some distant world as embedded with irretrievable meaning as any single issue of Marvel Comics.
“You don’t need to be looking at that stuff now,” said Barrett Rude Junior, distantly annoyed. “Sit up and watch the game.” He squinted, seemed to consider Dylan’s entirety for the first time.
The whiteness of the boy in the black man’s house.
“Your mother know you’re here?” Barrett Rude Junior asked.
“Dylan’s mother’s gone,” volunteered Mingus from the couch.
“Your mother’s gone?”
Dylan nodded.
Barrett Rude Junior weighed it. Dylan’s presence in his room was explained, that might have been his first conclusion. Then, in slow motion, something else dawned. Dylan sensed in Barrett Rude’s heavy-lidded gaze a flare of tenderness, felt it like a headlight’s beam turning to enclose him.
“Mother’s gone, but the boy is keeping it together.” Barrett Rude Junior spoke the sentence twice. In the first rendition the words emerged thick, deliberate, tongue-mashed. The second was a lilting echo of the first, the line now a song of admonition, a beguilement. “Mu-tha’s gone, but the boy is keeping it together.”
Dylan nodded again, dumb.
Mingus Rude’s father still gripped the blunt yellow bottle at its base. He waved it in a circle, toasting an invisible table. “That’s cool. You’re cool. Now, check out the long-players another time, Little Dylan. Sit and watch the game.”
Did Barrett Rude Junior remind him of Rachel? Or was this only the longest the word mother had been strung in the air since Rachel’s vanishing? Dylan felt that she’d drifted into the room, a mist or cloud, a formation. Mingus Rude squirmed on the couch, wouldn’t meet Dylan’s eye-seemingly he felt her too, Rachel Ebdus or some other mother, pressing on him like a force from above, like weather. Then she drifted out of sight, the camera angle switched to the struggle of inches, runners writhing on shredded ground, a helmet hugged like a baby on the sidelines, the long wait for a measuring chain to come upfield.
When at the end Mingus Rude put a fist in the air and said, “I won,” his father said, “What you win?”
“Me and Dylan had a bet.”
“How much?”
“Five dollars.”
“Don’t play your friend like that. Any fool knows the Vikings can’t win no Super Bowl. Come here. Come here.” When Mingus stood near enough Barrett Rude reached out with his wide hand, robe spilling forward, exposing a nipple weirdly soft and large, and cuffed his son on the cheek with his palm. It might have been affectionate if Barrett Rude’s voice, the theatrical summoning, hadn’t marked it as something else. Dylan watched Mingus rock delicately on his sneaker heels in expectation of another, stronger blow. But Barrett Rude grew absent, examined his own hand front and back, as though for something written there. Then he said, “Want money, don’t steal from your friend.” He extended an arm to the mantel and peeled off a twenty from the roll which lay there, shoved it at Mingus. “Put your hat back on and walk Little Dylan home now. And when you get back take a pick to your nappy-ass head, don’t make me keep telling you.”
Winter days were static glimpsed between channel flips. Rotting snow like black diseased gums in the street. The projects were sealed up, the kids didn’t come out. Henry could be seen slinging a football into the sky, basket-catching it himself. Alberto had abandoned him, shifted into new, more Puerto Rican friendships. It was shocking how Henry was diminished, how much his stature had depended on Alberto after all. Mingus appeared on the block before nightfall or was elusive for weeks. Comics got weird, were thrown down in disgust. Warlock was canceled, they’d never know how his battle with Thanatos turned out. Jack “King” Kirby’s return to Marvel, from his exile at DC, was still building steam. Dylan pictured Kirby in a laboratory leaching the Superman toxins from his body, recovering from kryptonite poisoning.
A guy jumped from the fifth floor of the halfway house on Nevins and impaled himself on the spiked iron gate, which had to be cut out in a section and moved with him to the Brooklyn Hospital surgery room. Kids took trips to see the fence, until the telltale spikes were capped by a new steel bar running along their tops. You hadn’t known it was a halfway house until someone jumped out, then it turned out everybody knew. As with the Brooklyn House of Detention on Atlantic, you’d avoided that block on communal instinct, knowledge you couldn’t have guessed you already had.
Dylan and Abraham stayed up late to see Saturday Night Live but after ten minutes Abraham declared he didn’t get it, and rummaged angrily for a misplaced Lenny Bruce record. Time was running backward, said Abraham. Things used to matter and be funny. Dylan took it on faith. One day Dylan found Earl slamming a spaldeen high off the face of the abandoned house, his teeth gritted as he said, over and over, “I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not! ” Earl was furious, disconsolate, nobody’s friend at the moment. For anybody, ballplaying was now explicitly nostalgic. If a few kids formed a game they were like the Puerto Ricans at the corner on milk crates, recounting the past, grumbling in ritual. Ball games broke like false fevers, passed like moods. Marilla and La-La sang, nearly screaming, Got my sunroof down, got my diamond in the back, put on your shaggy wig woman, if you don’t I ain’t comin’ back, oh, shame, shame, shame, sha-ay-ame, shame on you! If you can’t dance too!