Nevins Street was a river of unhappiness running through the land of Dean Street.
Who cleaned Robert Woolfolk’s clothes, for instance?
He probably wouldn’t come back for a while. He’d probably come back after a while.
Maybe he had a brother or a sister.
Nobody could say.
There wasn’t any way to think about it. No one was accountable. The traffic of cars and the bus rolled past under the shade of Dean Street ’s trees, whirring through blobs of light and shadow. The drivers were blinded by the flicker. The men in the doorway of the rooming house advertised disregard in the way they wore their little felt hats even in this weather. They drank discreetly from a sack. Anything they thought to say they said in Spanish or kept to themselves. Probably everybody’s mother was in the kitchen making dinner now-assuming they had a mother. Nobody looked at the kids in Henry’s yard. The old white lady didn’t even look out her window so much these days.
Sometimes the kids didn’t even look at each other. You could argue for hours about who said what or who was really there when something important happened. Pretty often it turned out that someone hadn’t been there in the first place. The girls never confirmed anything for anyone, though you’d supposed they were right there, watching. Marilla might know a given kid’s sister and you’d never hear a word about it. Days were full of gaps, probably because they were too alike. And when something big happened it was impossible to hold it clear. The gaps rushed in even there.
Henry, for his part, revived instantly and disdained any injury, though he had a shiny stripe of blood under his nose. He sucked it back and wiped it away, swallowed. He ran his tongue around his teeth and straightened his limbs, which were on the whole a lot straighter than Robert Woolfolk’s. The fat lip was more an attitude than anything else, an earned sneer.
“Stupid motherfucking shitty bastard.”
“Huh.”
“Bet you he won’t come back.”
“Huh.”
It was suddenly conceivable Henry had been pummeling Robert Woolfolk and not the other way around-from the way he shrugged the fight off and threw several arching stoopball home runs right afterward you had to consider whether you’d misjudged from appearances. You couldn’t always tell the winner by who was on top. They’d all seen how Robert Woolfolk ran off after Alberto pulled the fighters apart, or at least walked quickly in his loping manner, and alone.
Here was the thing about the fight between Henry and Robert Woolfolk: Dylan Ebdus never was able to sort out whether he’d been there and watched it himself or only heard every detail, burnished into legend by the other kids. He just couldn’t work it out, and after a while quit trying.
The film was changing. In the early frames, the first four thousand or so, abstracted cartoonish figures had cavorted against a sort of lakeside, a shore and sky which might also be a desertscape sprouted with weeds. The figures he’d painted with his needle-thin brushes could be cactus or fungus or gas station pumps or gunfighters or charioteers or florid reefs-sometimes in his mind he named them as figures from mythology, though he knew the mythological allusions were a vestige, a literary impulse he should have already purified from his work. Yet without confessing it completely he had scrubbed a tiny golden fleece over the shoulder of one of the figures as it darted and wiggled through two or three hundred frames. He saw the figures dart and wiggle, of course, in his mind’s eye, as though the film were running on its sprockets through a projector. In fact the endless painted film was still, had never been shown. He didn’t want to run it until the end, whenever that would be. He’d been offered a hand-cranked editing device for viewing short sequences of celluloid and refused it. The stillness of the film was part of the project. Each frame bore the weight of this cumulative discretion. Together the frames made a diary of painter’s days, one which would confess its life only at the finish.
Now the figures, the airy dancers, were expunged from the frames. They’d melted into blobs of light. He’d shelved the thinnest brushes, the jeweler’s tools, let them stiffen. The bright forms he painted now, the simpler and more luminous blobs and rectangles of color, hovered against a horizon which had evolved from the reedy, brushy lakeshore of the early frames into a distant blurred horizon, a sunset or storm over a vast and gently reflective plain. The hued forms in the foreground which he painted again and again until he knew them like language, until they moved like words through meaning into nonsense and again into purer meaning-these were beginning to merge with the horizon, to flow in and out of the depths of the tiny celluloid frames. He allowed this. In time, over many days, the forms would become what they wished. By painting them again and again with the minutest variation he would purify them and the story of their purification would be the plot of the film he was painting.
He’d begun looking out the window. One day he loaded a large brush with paint and outlined the Williamsburg Savings Bank tower on the glass pane itself, then filled in the outline so that the painted tower blotted out the tower in the distance.
As in the newer frames of his film, the painted glass flattened distance into proximity.
Each time the boy visited the studio he looked different.
His wife joked that she should have the phone company put a new line into his studio so she could call from the kitchen downstairs. When they fought now he’d forget halfway through what the point was. He knew she could easily spot that moment of surrender, when abstraction washed through his eyes, erasing language. In his mind he’d be painting a frame. His fingers twitched for the brush.
His old teacher called from the Art Students League, to ask why he wasn’t painting anymore. He said, “I paint every day.”
Second grade was first grade with math. Third grade was second grade with a period in the schoolyard to play kickball, a version of baseball with a giant blubbery ball, dull red and pebbled like a rubber bathmat, which was pitched along the ground toward home plate and that a better kick could get aloft. A fly ball was almost uncatchable, it was bigger than a kid when it was flying through the air. Positioning yourself under a fly was just stupid, and if you reasoned out what happened after the outfielder invariably stepped aside pretty much anything in the air was a home run. You just ran, you didn’t look to see if they were throwing it in. More often, though, you didn’t get it in the air. A mistimed kick scudded back idiotically to the pitcher and you were thrown out at first base.
Still, a home run. If you put the bloated thing in the air half the time everyone on the field fell down. There’d be a kid on his ass at every base as you went by.
Anything you painted, however slapdash, got hung on the wall. The brushes at school, though, were like painting with your elbows if you had any point of comparison. The school paint dried like scabs.
Nobody peed in their chair anymore.
A book report told the story of a book.
Second grade had two Chinese kids, and third grade had three, a soothing presence since they always had their hands up. Where they went after school was a mystery. They weren’t white and they weren’t not, so that was a plus. It prevented things from getting too black and white and Puerto Rican. At the current rate you’d all be Chinese by high school, which come to think of it might solve a few problems.