by Laura Tucker
Usually on Saturdays, I’d tell my dad that we were going to the park, and he’d ask me if I had any requests for dinner. He’d give me pizza money, and extra if he needed me to pick up something from C-Town on my way home: three pork chops, maybe, or a pound of green beans.
Of course, my dad wasn’t there.
I looked at the closed doors leading into my mom’s room. The little faucets were still in my sweatshirt pocket, but I liked their soft weight and decided to hold on to them for a bit. The night before, my mom hadn’t even opened her eyes when I’d dropped off her stuff and the leftovers from Hwa Yuan. I could give her the faucets when I got home from the park.
Alex was still lying out there on the fire escape, one leg crossed over the other, eyes closed against the sun like he was taking a nap. I found this so annoying that I didn’t knock on the glass or anything to tell him I was done; I just left. Still, by the time I got downstairs, he was sitting on the loading dock with one leg swinging like he’d been waiting down there the whole time. I honestly don’t know how he gets down. I’ve never been fast enough to see him do it.
“What took you so long?” he asked, like he was curious. I balled my hands into fists and kept walking.
At the corner of Greene and Prince, though, I couldn’t stop myself from looking back at the front of the building he’d climbed.
He’d Spider-Manned his way up the front, cramming his fingers and toes into cracks too small to see, and then leaned out to grab the metal ladder coming down from the fire escape like he was catching a trapeze—a trapeze with no net, twenty-five feet off the ground.
If she knew, his mom would kill him for sure.
To be honest, it made my stomach float, too. Alex acted it like it was nothing, but it was something—and that something was a long way down.
THE LAST OF THE HEROES
Alex caught up to me at the corner of Spring Street and held out half of the peanut butter on health bread that Linda puts in his pocket for lunch, even though we always get pizza.
I was hungry enough to forgive him.
“Protein,” he said. That was his way of making fun of Linda, because protein is pretty much her favorite topic of conversation. Linda drives both of us nuts. Still, I sometimes wondered if I would mind having the kind of mom who worried about what you ate.
There’s a playground closer to our house, but we always go to the one in Washington Square Park because of the Terrorpole. The Terrorpole is a tall platform in the playground, with rungs up the side so you can climb it. Richard and I call it the Terrorpole because it’s surrounded by concrete, and if you fall off one of the little stands on the way up, you will become splatter. But Alex loves it so much he should marry it.
I finished the sandwich and wiped my hands on my jeans.
“After Bobby Sands died,” I said as we crossed Houston, “a hundred thousand people lined the streets for his funeral.” The sentence came out sticky. There is not enough spit in the world for peanut butter on health bread.
“I thought you didn’t want to talk about Bobby Sands,” Alex said, also stickily, without looking at me. I guess he was still a little bit mad.
“I didn’t.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know.”
Of course, I did know: The bad feeling I got from knowing about Bobby Sands made the bad feeling I had about everything else a little worse.
I kept my head down as we passed through Richard’s courtyard. There’s a statue there, with a lady with both eyes on one side of her face like two sunny-side up eggs. I’m not crazy about it, even if it is a Picasso.
Outside of Richard’s building, I sat down while Alex jumped up onto his pet ledge.
When Alex gets obsessed with a trick, he does it over and over and over again until he’s mastered it, and then he finds something harder, and does that over and over again. He’d been practicing this one move for a while: jumping up onto a step from a standstill, keeping his legs together the whole time. He’d gotten so he could jump up a hundred times in a row on a regular stair, but a ledge was higher and hard even for Alex. (I couldn’t do it at all.) This meant that we were spending a lot of time outside Richard’s building, though, because there was a ledge there that was precisely the right height.
On the way over, he’d set himself a goal of thirty. It was hard to do, so he had to go slow. I took out my notebook; we were going to be there for a while.
I started to draw him silhouetted against the sun, the tight curve of his neck as he gathered himself to jump. But the pebbly sand-colored stone was warm and rough against my back, and the pencil felt fat in my fingers, so I leaned back on my elbows and basked instead, listening to Alex’s breathing get heavier as he jumped up and jumped down.
I guess I dozed off. I hadn’t slept that well the night before, what with worrying about my mom and my dad and poor dead Bobby Sands and all the rest of it. I woke up to the nap taste in my mouth, and something velvety and wet licking at my ankles.
I held very still and squinted one eye open.
Richard had come downstairs while I was asleep. He was sitting quietly next to me, looking through his own notebook, a huge scrapbook of monsters that he calls the Taxonomy. He did not seem to be alarmed. Alex was standing near his pet ledge, the sweat dripping off him to make dark spots on the concrete between his feet.
He was talking to Joyce Walker, who lives with her husband Peter above the gallery that she runs on Wooster Street. Mystery solved: Joyce’s chunky yellow Labrador retriever, Saint Fall, was diligently using her tongue to cover every exposed inch between my rolled-up jeans and my sneakers, like someone had hired her to clean my ankles.
It wasn’t a completely unpleasant feeling, to be honest.
Alex towered over Joyce, who looked like a plump little bird next to him. “Am I shrinking?” she asked with a funny old-lady hunch, then nudged Richard over on the ledge so she could sit down next to him.
My dad says that Joyce learned everything she needed to know about working with artists from having four boys who were all teenagers at the same time. Her kids are grown up now, so she likes to visit with us. That’s what she calls it: visiting.
“I’ve done quite a lot of work on the Taxonomy since I last saw you,” Richard volunteered, spinning it around on his lap so Joyce could see.
The Taxonomy is an enormous scrapbook with pictures and detailed descriptions of every monster Richard knows about, organized by their characteristics. Is the monster humanoid, mammalian, or reptilian? Does it walk on two feet, or four? Is it little or big? Is it slimy or scaly? Where does it live? What does it eat? (Mostly they eat people, as far as I can tell.) How does it kill what it eats? Then all the monsters are cross-referenced with one another across their categories.
Joyce thinks the Taxonomy has the makings of a really interesting art project, but Richard thinks of it as a science project, even if monsters aren’t real. Richard is probably going to be a scientist when he grows up. My dad says he was put on earth to make monster movies, but his mom wants him to get a real job.
Alex is going to be a stunt man, so he can get thrown out of windows and dangle from helicopters and balance on top of speeding cars like he’s surfing. I’m going to be an artist. I don’t know what I’m going to do for money.
Joyce turned the page, and Richard pointed to one of the drawings: “Ollie drew that for me.”
There are a lot of my drawings in the Taxonomy. When Richard started it, most of the monsters were ones that he’d seen at the movies, cut out from the monster magazines he buys. More recently, though, he’d started researching monsters from other countries at the library, and making some other ones up. He’d gotten pretty good at telling me what he saw in his head.
Joyce leaned in close to look and nodded, and I flushed with pleasure. I’d seen her look at art with my dad enough to know that nod was a compliment.
I didn’t mention that I’d based the grainy texture of the monster’s yellowing fangs on Saint Fall’s teeth. But seeing the way I’d made the monster’s spit hang down in thick ropy strings like snot made me pull my soggy ankles up out of the old dog’s reach. Insulted, she sniffed at the rubber bottoms of my shoes for a bit, then lay down with a satisfied grunt and closed her eyes. She knew she’d done a good job.
Joyce was still looking at the drawing I’d done. On the opposite page was a picture of the monster from Alien that Richard had cut out from People magazine. He must have opened the Taxonomy up to the Mucus section.
“You’re getting good, Olympia,” was all she said, and my chest hummed.
Richard turned the huge book around and started flipping through the pages excitedly.
“I need a whole new section now, on Transformations. People and other animals turning into monsters, monsters turning into other monsters, bizarre mutations. Werewolves, selkies, the fox people that the Japanese call kitsune. It will require a substantial amount of work.” He looked about as happy as I’ve ever seen him.
Joyce leaned over to pick up Saint Fall’s worn leather leash. “Transformation is a subject worthy of you, Richard.”
She turned to me then, the leash dangling down slack to the slumbering dog.
“Speaking of change, Ollie, how you holding up?”
She was looking at me the way I’d seen her look at an artist who’d delivered a pathetic excuse for being late to turn in work for a show. I thought she might somehow know about my mom, so I stood there, not saying anything, as the question changed on her face with every second I didn’t speak.
Then I realized she was asking about my dad.
“It’s okay, I guess,” I said. “I miss his cooking, for sure.” And then, like it was no big deal: “Are you in touch with him at all?”
“No, ma’am; I am not,” she said, the South in her voice chewier than usual, and I believed her.
“I left a couple of messages for your mama, but she hasn’t rung me back,” Joyce said.
I looked down at Saint Fall stretched out on her side, the occasional snore escaping her loose black lips. “I think she’s working pretty hard. You know she’s got that show in the fall?”
Joyce nodded, her lips pursed. This was a sore subject: Joyce had represented my mom before she’d gone with the fancy gallery uptown.
She started to say something else, then stopped, angling her head to one side like a parakeet.
“Did your dad say anything to you, the night he left?”
That startled me. There had been a bunch of people at our house that night, coming down from the studio in a steady stream, even after I’d brushed my teeth and gone to bed. They’d come to see the Head, a small piece of painted wooden statuary my dad and Apollo had been hired to restore. Joyce had been there, too.
The Head was a big job for my dad and Apollo, and unusual—it was much, much older than the pieces they usually worked on, for one thing. The client was the Dortmunder Collection, a small museum in a mansion uptown that had once been some rich guy’s private collection.
Apollo hadn’t been happy about the Head, even though she should have been right up his alley. But my dad had been really excited. In fact, the first time he’d showed her to me, I’d had the feeling that he was a little bit in love with her.
Later, when I knew more, I thought it was probably his feelings about Vouley Voo spilling over. But the weirdest thing is that I wouldn’t have blamed him if he had been in love with the Head. Because she was beautiful. Not pretty like a movie star, but the kind of beautiful that comes from never thinking anything mean, even if it’s funny. I couldn’t stop drawing her, trying to figure out what exactly the artist had done to make her radiate goodness the way she did—whether it was the gentle slope of her cheek or her melancholy smile, or the sweet way she was looking down.
Even though I filled whole pads with those sketches, I never got close to capturing her beauty, or that look. The Head was just perfect—right up until you got to the bottom of her, to the raw, ugly scar where she’d been ripped from her body.
Every time, it was a shock to follow the flowing lines of her face down to that violent stump of splintered wood. It changed the way you looked at her, as if the soft sadness in her face had come from suspecting that someone would eventually do something so horrible.
Restoring the Head should have been a good job for Apollo and my dad, but she’d caused a lot of problems. I’d heard my dad and my mom fighting about her, late at night when they thought I was asleep. My dad and Apollo had fought about her, too. Apollo was the one who had called Vouley Voo in the first place. She was an old friend of his, a visiting conservator at the Met, and he’d thought they’d needed her help. That had caused another fight, although I guess my dad and Vouley Voo had worked it out in the end.
Anyway, the night he left, right after I’d fallen asleep, my dad had come into my room to kiss me goodnight.
“Take care of your mama, Ollie,” he’d whispered. “I’ve got to take the lady home.”
I’d thought he was talking about Joyce. He always walked her back to her house after dinner if Peter didn’t come, even though she always told him not to bother, that nobody in their right mind was going to bother with a tough old bag like her. But that night, he must have meant that he was taking Vouley Voo back to France, because that was where my mother, eyes tight and tired over her mug of tea the next morning, had told me he’d gone.
And I’d felt a clutch of sadness, because even though I’d swum up through my dreams to meet his kiss and the familiar leather and coffee smell of him, I hadn’t made myself wake up all the way, the way I would have if I’d known we were saying goodbye.
“He said he was going to take somebody home,” I told Joyce. “I thought he was talking about you.”
Joyce shook her head quickly. When she looked back at me, she was chewing on the inside of her cheek, like she was trying to figure out how much to say. Then she looked back up at the sky between the buildings and said, “Never one to pass up a grand gesture, your dad. The last of the heroes.”
Alex looked over, panting slightly; he’s interested in heroes. I looked at Joyce, too, curious how she’d meant it, but she was looking down at Saint Fall, heroically chasing squirrels in her dreams.
Joyce jangled the leash a little to wake her and said, “It’s time, old friend.” In the same tone of voice, she said to me, “Listen, you don’t hesitate to call me or Peter if you need anything, you hear?”
Peter is a great cook. He runs a framing business from their loft above Joyce’s gallery, and Apollo and my dad always call him if they have a complicated engineering puzzle to solve. Everyone knows that Joyce has a great eye for new work and that she’s good at helping young artists to stop acting like idiots. But if they didn’t know how to get in touch with my dad, then I couldn’t imagine anything I would call them for.
I nodded again anyway. “Thanks. I will.”
“Now, Nana,” she said to Saint Fall, and this time it was clearly a command.
The old dog got to her feet with a wheeze and one last regretful sniff in the general direction of my dampened ankles. She’s a good sport, but she doesn’t really enjoy the exercise part of a walk anymore.
I turned back to my friends. Alex had gone back to his ledge, and Richard was lost in the Taxonomy. I sat down next to him again, Joyce’s words buzzing around my brain.
The last of the heroes.
I had no idea what she’d meant.
REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE
Sweaty and triumphant, Alex finally finished his jumps, and the three of us walked over to Washington Square.
As we were coming up on the park, Richard stopped short.
“Guys, I almost forgot. My mother invited the two of you for dinner,” he said. “Can you come? She asked me to t
ell her before noon so she can shop.”
I nodded yes, with feeling. I love going to dinner at Richard’s house.
Alex had to ask, so he went over to the payphones at the edge of the park to call Linda. I went, too, even though I didn’t have anybody to call. Richard went in and found a bench near the playground so he could start planning out the Transformation section of the Taxonomy. Richard never minds being left behind, which is one of the comfortable things about him. Too many people take it personally when you want to do something different from what they want to do.
While Alex was digging through his pockets for change, I told him about dinner with Apollo. He was jealous we’d gone to Hwa Yuan. Linda doesn’t like Chinatown. She lives and works down here, but she’s not really a downtown kind of person. I told him about Egyptian brown, too, but he wasn’t anywhere near as freaked out as I had been by it.
As he dialed, he asked me if I’d heard from my dad yet. That was rich, coming from Alex: His dad travelled so much for work, we had thought LaGuardia was some kind of magical city until we were most of the way through third grade. “My dad’s flying out of LaGuardia tonight,” Alex would tell us, reverent and hushed, so that we could practically see the jacketed doorman hailing a cab while his dad waited under a heated marquee, beautiful globe lights reflecting off rain-slicked roads.
Then someone figured out that LaGuardia was just an airport in Queens.
As he waited for Linda to answer, Alex bounced up onto his toes, held it for a second, then touched down quickly before lifting up onto his toes again. This is supposed to make his legs less scrawny.
I’m not sure it’s working.
Up, down. Up, down. “What I don’t get is why your dad had to, like, disappear.”
The snaky metal cord on the payphone next to him had been twisted until it kinked. I took the receiver off the hook and dropped it, letting it spin out, the silver cable uncoiling as it fell.
