The Gargoyle Hunters

by John Freeman Gill

  To me, it’s always 1974 in there. At that time—the year of being thirteen, the year before President Ford took one look at our vividly crumbling city and told us all to DROP DEAD—that brownstone started getting mighty crowded. My mother, you see, had adopted another stray, her fifth since my father had left us a few months earlier. This one’s name was Mr. Price, and he was going to share the third floor with me, which meant half my medicine cabinet, all of my toilet seat, and probably even my loofah.

  I just hoped to hell he wasn’t one of those really hairy guys. It was bad enough waiting for some boarder to finish toweling off his privates before you could get in to use your own shower, but if he was one of those molting oldsters who were always leaving hair on the soap, well, that’s when I felt like stomping down to Mom’s room and telling her enough was enough.

  I spied through the spindles of the second-floor banister while Mom blathered with Mr. Price on the first-floor landing. She was holding his wrist, gripping it with her fingers like a nurse who doubted his pulse, and lying cheerfully about how glad Quigley and I were that he was joining “our little jury-rigged family.” He had on a rumpled gray suit with a magnificently pressed hankie, two white peaks rising from his jacket pocket flat and perfect as postcard Alps. He bowed his balding head a lot and called my mother Mrs. Watts in a fussy English accent.

  I wondered what was wrong with him. He seemed reasonably civilized—not too hairy, either—but I didn’t trust this impression, because all of Mom’s boarders were misfits. So after Mr. Price had spent some quality time in my bathroom and had begun puttering around in his new bedroom down the hall, I locked myself in the crapper and started going through all his stuff. Foreign guys like Mr. Price always had these hoity-toity toilet kits made of buttery leather and filled with swanky things like eau de cologne.

  “Griffin!” My mother was banging on the bathroom door. “You in there?”

  I turned on the faucet so she wouldn’t hear Mr. Price’s personal effects jostling around in their case. When I didn’t answer her, Mom gave a couple of follow-up knocks, less confident than before. Her knuckles sounded soft and fleshy, the way the chicken breasts always had when Dad pounded them before dinner with a meat tenderizer shaped like a gavel.

  “Listen, Griffin,” she said through the door, “I’ve made up my mind about the ruin—and it involves you. So as soon as you’re done in there, maybe you could come downstairs and give Mr. Price a little privacy.”

  “Yeah, all right,” I answered. “I understand.”

  That was what I always said when I planned to ignore her. I’d gotten so good at it that I could say, “Yeah, all right, I understand”—in sincere, good-son tones—all while paying so little attention to my mother that the noises she made with her mouth never once registered in my mind as words.

  “You’re not even listening to me, are you?” She sounded pretty irritated.

  “Sure I am. Sure I’m listening.” I quickly replayed in my head our last thirty seconds of conversation. Some people have photographic memory; I’ve always had phonographic memory.

  I cleared my throat. “You’ve…made up your mind about the ruin,” I repeated, “and the thing is, it involves me. So…when I’m finished in here and all, you were sort of thinking that I could come downstairs and maybe give Mr. Price some privacy.” I took a deep breath. “See, I was listening.”

  “That doesn’t count! I used to do that exact regurgitation trick when I was thirteen. Just because you can repeat what I say word for word doesn’t mean you’re listening. You hear what I’m saying?”

  “Well, I’m not sure, but it sounded to me, Mom, like you were basically saying that you used to do that exact regurgitation trick when you were thirteen, and just because I can repeat what you say word for word doesn’t mean I’m listening.”

  “Jesus, you’re exasperating. Just come down to my room when you’re done.”

  “Yeah, all right,” I said. “I understand.”

  After taking pains to put Mr. Price’s things back in order, I turned off the running water. But I didn’t go downstairs right away. There was this lump inside my corduroys that I wanted to handle first.

  Just before Mr. Price had shown up, I’d come across another of those nasty notes my father was always leaving for my mother. I’d been quick to stuff it in my pocket, because I couldn’t stand how upset Dad’s letters made her. Her eyes would get this awful down-in-the-dumps look before she’d read even a sentence or two, and then her whole face would get all twisted and gargoyley from the effort of trying not to cry. It was more than you wanted to see, really, and you pretty much had to get the hell out of the room or risk getting all gargoyley yourself.

  I pulled the crumpled ball of paper from my pocket, sat down on the toilet, and flattened it on my knee. It was maybe the ninth or tenth furious Dad-note I’d intercepted since he’d moved out. He was our landlord now (“landlord of all he surveys,” Mom called him), and he was constantly stopping by for surprise inspections my mother could never pass. Over time, his visits had come to resemble an endless series of pop quizzes given by an unfulfilled teacher who wants only to watch you fail so he can feel hurt about how you’ve let him down. Half the times Dad came by, he’d discover something that infuriated him, and when that happened, he would whip out his pen and leave Mom an embittered note in the very spot where he’d been jumped by his anger.

  I spent a certain amount of my free time scouring the house in search of these little cow pies of disgruntlement, hoping to scoop them up before Mom stumbled on them. At one time or another I’d found irate notes from Dad in every one of our boarders’ rooms, as well as in Mom’s underwear drawer, in her closet, and in her artist’s palette, jammed scrollwise into the thumbhole and sealed with a hardened white tadpole of paint.

  The note now resting on my leg, however, had been sitting right by the kitchen phone. Dad’s rage was becoming respectable, a commonplace notation alongside messages from Quig’s theater friends and Mom’s framer:

  Ivy—

  Some unctuous Brit called while I was here checking the stove for gas leaks. He said his name was Price and that he was moving in here this week. I hope you’re at least getting some rent from this one. I asked him what he did for a living, and he just kept saying he was “in newspapers.”

  That last bit, I learned later, was one of Mr. Price’s little jokes on himself. With a pointed vagueness that made listeners suspect he was the lost heir of William Randolph Hearst, Mr. Price was forever telling people he was “in newspapers.” He took private glee in saying so, as he often slept on a park bench with sections of the Daily News stuffed up his pant legs for warmth.

  The rest of the note was scrawled at full tilt, ending with a rant: “At the rate you keep bringing these men under my roof, you’re sure to be too busy giving them all head to raise my kids right.”

  “Griffin!” My mother was hollering again, this time from downstairs. “No one takes that long to go to the bathroom!”

  Memory is a slippery thing, and whenever Quigley and I compare notes about those years growing up in the brownstone, there are inevitably a bunch of little details we disagree on. But one thing we remember the same way is the yelling: everybody was always yelling in that house. This was partly because we were eternally pissed at each other and partly because it was a big old five-story brownstone and the person you wanted to talk to never seemed to be on the same floor as you. We were all experts at escalating a squabble, too. If you pitched your voice down the stairs with just the right amount of put-upon forbearance, you could make it pretty clear that you considered the distance between yourself and your listener not just an inconvenience but a symptom of some hideous flaw in her character.

  I opened the door a crack. “All right already! I’ll be right down!”

  I shut the door and toed the toilet seat upright with one of my red Puma Clydes. Then I ripped Dad’s letter in half and in half and in half until his hostility toward my mom was torn into thirty
-two manageable fragments. These I scattered into the toilet bowl, letting them settle on the blue Sani-Flush water no more than a few seconds before I unzipped my fly and whizzed all over them. It felt good: I was a Pee-51 fighter pilot above the Pacific Basin, raining destruction upon the enemy flotilla. Death from above.

  —

  Mom’s room, as usual, was bathed in shadows. Some months earlier she’d painted the ceiling black and the walls a dusky brick red, which gave the room, at all hours, an air of incipient nightfall. Her curtains, decorated with engravings of timeworn Italian towers, jagged bites chomped from their corners, were always tugged closed. She didn’t want the folks in the tenements behind the brownstone to look in her window.

  “Just thinking about it makes me feel violated,” she said.

  Losing her view of our backyard garden didn’t bother her a bit, though. She was a city girl, a native New Yorker, and I think she found the natural world almost hokey, a lowbrow entertainment for rural folk like my dad.

  This afternoon, astonishingly enough, Mom was not sitting on her bed, the spot where she spent most of her waking hours reading, chatting on the phone, or carving woodcuts on a blue gingham picnic blanket. So I nearly jumped out of my tube socks when I heard her voice from the other side of the room: “Mr. Price’s toiletries in order?”

  She was standing near the window, wearing a brick-red turtleneck that blended her into the wall. A breeze came up, parting the curtains slightly and opening a thin fissure of light in the belly of an Italian rampart.

  “Any reason they shouldn’t be?” I answered.

  She didn’t pursue it. “Listen,” she said instead, “your father’s still refusing to pay anyone to tear down the outhouse, so I was hoping you could take care of it for me.” She picked at a scab on her thumb, worrying it with an elegant maroon fingernail. “I mean, it’s such a wreck, and I’m really trying to get things straightened up around here.”

  She pulled back the Italian ruin to reveal the New York ruin behind it. The invading sunlight made me blink, but for a rare moment I saw what she saw.

  That ruined outhouse had always been with us. At the edge of the yard it stood, shafts of light slicing through the rotten slats of its walls. Older than even the brownstone, it had supposedly been put up to serve the wood-frame cottage that originally stood on the spot the brownstone now occupied, in what was then the country village of Yorkville. Dad surmised that they’d left the outhouse up for the workers to use while they built the brownstone (which had indoor plumbing), and then for some reason—cost or maybe inertia—the old thing was never taken down.

  After the brownstone was finished in 1887, the outhouse was abandoned, sealed shut, left alone. Nothing entered or exited. Except, that is, for a single stealthy tree, whose seed blew through the bars of the window and through the hole in the seat, fertilizing itself in the human waste. In time, the tree grew thick and coarse, shooting upward and heading back out the window in search of light. It was hard to guess how long its jailbreak had taken, but there was no missing the violence of its escape. The moment was preserved within the window frame, the tree thrusting through the thin iron bars, shoving them aside like a great knotted fist emerging from the abdomen of a guitar. A tree, unlike a person, cannot hide its past.

  “Okay, I’ll bust up the outhouse if you want,” I said. “But you’ve gotta make me breakfast tomorrow in exchange—an omelet.”

  “An omelet?” Mom had been sleeping through breakfast for years, leaving Quig and me to fend for ourselves.

  “I mean, if you know how. Jelly, maybe. Or whatever. I don’t really care.”

  “No, I can do jelly. Jelly omelet it is.”

  “You want me to set an alarm for you?” I asked. “Or rent you a rooster or something?”

  She gave me a grudging half smile. “And you’ll cut down that tree branch, too, of course.”

  I knew the branch she meant. It was an uncontrolled outgrowth of the filth tree, a misshapen, veiny bark forearm that stretched across the garden, coming to rest a couple feet below her window.

  Ever since Dad had taken off, Mom had been on a rampage of order. Cleaning, whitewashing, throwing things out. But since she was intimidated by any job involving machinery or tools, she’d been after me for months to cut down that limb. It had no leaves, never bloomed. It was ugly.

  It irked me (that was my new favorite word) the way she always assumed I would do all the “man’s jobs” that Dad refused to perform now that he was her landlord instead of her husband.

  “What do you mean, ‘of course’ I’ll cut it down?” I gave my voice that edge. It was an old edge, but it had a new name: my irked edge.

  “Well, you said you’d do the ruin, and they’re connected, aren’t they?”

  “Lots of things are connected, Mom. My fingers and fingernails are connected, but that doesn’t mean if you tell me to clip my nails I’m gonna go ker-chunking my thumb off with a pair of bolt cutters just to please you.”

  “Don’t be fresh. I’m just asking you to saw off a branch.”

  “I’m not your gardener, Mom, so stop vexing me.” (Vex meant irk; it sounded cooler, though, ’cause it had an x in it.) “I mean, you’re really being vexatiously irksome.”

  She looked at me. Her face had a twinge of gargoyle in it. “You’re a very unpleasant boy.”

  “Maybe, but I’m the boy who decides whether that tree gets pruned, because we both know you don’t exactly have a bunch of extra cash lying around to hire someone to do it.”

  Mom went slack. Her neck, her shoulders, lost their shape, as if the picture wire that held up her self-possession had slipped from its hook. My money insult was a low blow. Mom was broke, and according to my parents’ Separation Agreement, a document of near biblical force, Dad owned three-fourths of our house. She was lucky his lawyers let her have even that sliver, she said, because Dad’s name alone had been on all their financial papers during their marriage. He’d always told her it was better for taxes.

  After he moved out, Mom had found part-time work in the art department of Life magazine, the first job she’d had since her time as a gallery assistant in college. During the first couple of issue closings, she came home with hands all blotchy-red from doing battle with the hot wax machine they used for pasting up layouts. (The task was made no easier by her refusal to remove any of her twenty-seven rings.) Though she’d gotten the hang of the whole thing before long—an accomplishment I could see made her proud—the job was only two weeks a month and didn’t seem to pay much.

  I guess Mom and I had been arguing pretty loudly, because Mr. Price poked his head in the door, looking all fidgety and apologetic.

  “Excuse me, folks,” he said, with exaggerated chipperness. “I hope I’m not intruding, but if there’s some household chore that needs performing, I’d be more than happy to be of assistance. I don’t seem to have much scheduled today.” He pronounced scheduled in that snooty English way: “shed-yuled.”

  I turned to Mom. “Look,” I said, trying to sound like the most reasonable boy in the world. “Lemme tear down the ruin first. Then I’ll see how I feel about that tree branch.”

  Mr. Price was still standing at the doorway in his wrinkled suit. He had the look of a baffled understudy, a Masterpiece Theatre butler who couldn’t remember his lines.

  “We don’t need your help,” I said, pushing past him.

  —

  Dad’s toolshed had always been strictly off-limits—he was notoriously secretive about his stuff—so I took great pleasure in poking around inside it against his wishes. Amid the fertilizer bags and clay pots full of color-bled dead stalks was a motley collection of tools: a rusted spade, a trowel, some kind of wide-fingered claw implement. When I moved a bag of topsoil to free the crowbar it was hunched against, things shifted around and a board shook loose from the wall behind a box of bonemeal, revealing the corner of a concealed white plastic case. I freed the case from its hiding place and opened it. Inside, I found a set of thre
e small surgical saws, each resting in an indentation precisely its shape. In the middle, also pressed into the plastic, was one of those medical shields with a pair of snakes twining themselves around a winged staff.

  The gnarliest of the saws had a thin silver handle with an angry-toothed wheel on the end that looked like a morbid version of a pizza cutter. Its curved teeth were covered with a grainy white-gray powder that felt disgusting on my fingertips. I hastily wiped my hand on my jeans, closed the case again, and shoved it back into its hiding place. I couldn’t say why, exactly, but the saws felt like contraband, or worse: objects you might catch something from.

  What on earth my father needed surgical saws for was beyond me, but I tried not to dwell on it. It seemed best just to get to work with that crowbar.

  —

  Rotting and pointless, the ruin stood at the edge of our fenced-in yard, a gloomy gray crate surrounding the base of a big fat tree. Its doorknob had been removed forever ago and a chain looped through the remaining hole and back through a second hole drilled in the wall, fastening the door to its frame. There was no getting through that chain, so I jammed the crowbar into the ancient hinges, the bottom one first, which broke away in a spray of rust. When the top hinge split, the door swung out a foot or so. I pulled it all the way open.

  There in the doorway stood the rough-skinned tree trunk, filling out the doorframe like a truculent fairy-tale troll awakened from a nap. Without meaning to, I found myself moving my hand over the trunk’s harsh bark, my palm coming to rest on a lumpy, wart-like growth the size and shape of a face.

  The ruin, it now turned out, was in even worse shape than it looked. Wherever I rammed the crowbar, the wood split instantly, and I began ferociously attacking the boards: swinging the crowbar like an ax, jamming it like a spear, kicking in the ruin’s front wall while frightening the bejesus out of it with fierce karate cries: kyaawoo-HAA! When at last the roof caved in, sliding down the slanted trunk into the dirt, I jumped back and stood gawking at the odd sight I’d made.