The Gargoyle Hunters

by John Freeman Gill

  “You freak!” I yelled out the window. “You crazy freak! You stay right there!”

  I sprinted downstairs to strangle her, but by the time I reached the stoop, Quig was long gone—headed, no doubt, to a pay phone to report the unfortunate damage to Dad: I told those tenement kids not to play ball in front of the brownstone! But no one listens to a girl.

  —

  Dad’s building was the Flying Dutchman of warehouses. It never seemed to be where you left it, and you always had the sense that the only way you could ever find it was if you wandered around the deserted blocks above Chambers Street and stumbled upon it by accident. I’d stuck ten bucks in my sneaker to hide it from muggers (the three dollars of mug money in my pocket should be enough to throw them off the scent) and had taken the IRT from the Gimbels entrance on Eighty-Sixth all the way down to the City Hall stop. I’d been searching for Dad’s studio on foot ever since. As long as I didn’t get there too late, I figured, my mere arrival ought to be enough to thwart Quig’s plan to lure Dad uptown to Mom. This was the Friday he had asked me to come gargoyle hunting with him.

  Quigley was not of sound mind. Truly. Every time you turned around, she had ginned up some new stratagem to reunite our parents. One time she had badgered all our boarders into watching her perform a nonexistent role in a nonexistent Beckett play at a nonexistent interschool theater way out on Staten Island. The instant they were all out of the house, each clutching an elaborate phony map she’d made for them, she jammed her curling iron into a kitchen socket to short out all the lights in the brownstone. When Dad, summoned by Quig, showed up to the dark house to fix the electricity, he found a candlelight Swanson meatloaf TV dinner for two that Quig had prepared in the gas stove, and no one home to share it with him but Mom.

  It was hard to fathom why Quig wanted our father back home so badly. Hard as he’d always been on me, he at least seemed to recognize me as his own. Quig he treated like a bewildering, scarcely acknowledged stranger dropped into his midst. Basically, I just don’t think she was the sort of kid he saw himself as having. She was a lousy student, had trouble paying attention when you talked to her, seemed uninterested in little besides celebrities and clothes. She had the concentration span of a newt, and it drove him crazy to have to reexplain things he’d already told her once or twice. As far back as I could remember, he’d had a pet name for her that only he thought was cute: Dummy.

  TriBeCa was darkening now, growing more foreign every moment. There was no question that I was lost. I kept seeing streets whose listing iron canopies looked familiar, but all the buildings down here had listing iron canopies. It wasn’t until I stumbled onto Duane Park, the small triangular island where Dad had first tailed Mom through the egg market a lifetime ago, that I began to feel a twinge of recognition. Turning right, I found myself walking up a skinny cobbled alley, which was spanned in a gentle arc by an intimate little enclosed footbridge that connected the back of a large old brick building to a smaller one. The bigger building, Dad once told me, had begun its life as the House of Relief, one of the city’s earliest emergency rooms; the smaller structure, built later, housed its laundry and horse-drawn ambulances.

  Quigley’s aim of getting Mom and Dad back together struck me as just about the worst idea ever, the kind of dangerous, cascading mistake you couldn’t control. She just didn’t get it: the trick was to keep our parents conjoined, sure, but at a distance—connected yet separate. The alley I found myself in was called Staple Street, a sign told me, and it seemed to me that its simple, scarcely noticed little bridge was what enabled this pair of time-tilted buildings to continue standing. That bridge looked structural to me, crucial. I imagined that the two buildings it served, the two unequal halves of the House of Relief, were a pair of living organisms that shared a heart, and this heart lay within that small, unlovely, slightly off-kilter bridge. I was that bridge. As long as I could couple my parents’ two households together, both could survive. I needed to keep Dad connected and responsible for us. I needed to keep him flush with gargoyles so the brownstone payments kept coming. But I also needed, at all costs, to keep him safely away from my mother.

  I was the bridge that kept my parents apart. If I could sustain that, I could save the family.

  —

  The streets were pretty quiet as I walked around to the front of the main House of Relief building on Hudson Street. Though the full-figured blond lady flouncing up the block toward me looked vaguely familiar, it wasn’t until she clicked past in those knee-high Naugahyde boots that I recognized her as the woman my father had been peeping at the last time I was down here. I’d’ve known those knockers anywhere.

  I crossed Hudson and nearly bumped right into Dad, binoculars around his neck, as he turned the corner from Worth. He seemed delighted to see me.

  “Big guy!” he said, giving me an awkward clap on the shoulder. “I knew I could count on you. Let’s go get some Chinese.”

  Dad’s favorite Chinatown restaurant bore the unusual name Me and My Egg Roll. When we’d polished off their deliciously sweet spare ribs, leaving our fingers sticky and the table piled high with tooth-scoured bones, the waiter brought us two complimentary glasses of plum wine.

  “Instant headache,” Dad called the stuff, sliding his glass away with comically exaggerated distaste as he got up to go pee. I loved being with him when he was silly like that.

  While he was in the can, I guzzled down both wines, which tasted like a mixture of duck sauce and Robitussin, then slipped the empty glasses into the greasy gray busboy tray when the waiters weren’t looking. The wine made my throat warm and my head foggy, which may have been why I was so mesmerized by the movie we saw in the Village afterward, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.

  It was a gritty New York thriller in which Mr. Blue, a rootless out-of-towner with a false mustache, hijacks a subway train for ransom, performs a bunch of desperate acts with his three confederates, then intentionally electrocutes himself on the third rail when he’s cornered by a dogged and smart-alecky transit detective played by Walter Matthau. In Mr. Blue’s final moments, standing there sizzling in the train tunnel, actual smoke wafted up from inside his trench coat and wreathed his dumbstruck red face.

  What I admired most about the out-of-towner was his mastery of New York’s secret processes. I’d always had a feeling that the real life of the city, the things that drove the world above the streets, lay hidden. Before seeing that movie, I’d thought of these inner workings as coggy-looking engine parts or scrolled diagrams stacked in underground wine racks adapted for the purpose. Now I pictured a snaky sort of electricity vibrating all through the city’s innards. Beneath every sidewalk and building, beneath Lamston’s and Papaya King and the cracked concrete Children’s Zoo whale whose mouth you could stand in, ran a deadly silver rail, twitching with lightning.

  8

  ZEV, THE FIDGETY HIPPIE from Dad’s studio, was waiting for us outside the movie exit in the Good Humor truck. It was dark now, nearly midnight, the truck’s phantom Popsicle only just visible by the light spilling from the old theater’s double doors. Dad motioned me around to the passenger side and Zev scooched into the middle. I half expected the truck to give out a child-enticing carnival jingle as Dad drove us downtown, but the only noise it made was the sickly rumble of its old engine, the sound I’d thought was a refrigeration unit when I first heard it.

  “That’s our cast-iron baby right there,” he said a few minutes later. Slowing by a streetlamp so I could get a good look, he pointed past me at a rust-streaked, five-story white loft building. I leaned out the window and recognized the building as the one where I’d first seen the zaftig blond lady. All the building’s windows, even the lady’s top-floor one, were dark.

  “You see how the entire façade is made up of those really graceful two-story window bays,” Dad said, “each with that nice arch at the top?”

  “Yeah?”

  “And you see how each of these bays is framed by those striking two-story-
high columns?”

  I said I did.

  “Well, they call this a sperm-candle façade. That’s because, to the men who put up that building a hundred years ago, those columns looked like the slender candles made from sperm-whale oil. But never mind what it’s called—I just wanted you to see how stunning it is. It’s basically a Venetian palazzo cast in iron.”

  I nodded. I didn’t get how you could cast a castle, and the whole sperm thing was sort of gross, but I inspected the building more closely anyhow. It really was something, when you thought about it. An Italian palace right smack in the middle of our city. And perfectly at home here, too, somehow. A manhole moon hung above it, perfectly round and grayed-over by clouds.

  Around the corner and just behind that same building, we backed into a narrow, dead-end alley blasted with graffiti and reeking of urine. Rising above us on either side were the back walls of two loft buildings. Both were of dirty yellow brick, with double-height steel doors at street level and three rows of windows above, sealed tight with rust-splotched iron shutters. The wall on the left was in especially rough shape. A paint-peeling black fire escape clung to it, descending in the usual lumbering zigzag from the fifth story to the second, where its ladder poked down through a hole cut in a sorry-looking corrugated-plastic awning someone had rigged to protect deliverymen from the rain. A long crack rode the waves of the awning’s surface.

  With a boost from Zev, Dad grabbed the fire escape ladder’s bottom rung and hauled himself up. I followed, Dad reaching down to lift me off Zev’s shoulders and away from his tobacco-sweat smell. Still unclear about what we were up to, I crouched on the fire escape beside my father and watched the operation unfold.

  At the foot of the building opposite us, Zev kicked aside some flattened cardboard refrigerator boxes to reveal a plank, which he fed up to Dad through the hole in the plastic awning. The plank had to be a good fifteen feet long.

  “Okay, Griffin, this is where you come in,” he said. “Or rather, that is where you go in.”

  He pointed across the alley—over the flimsy plastic awning, over the chasm beyond it—to a window on the far wall. For the first time, I noticed that one of the two shutters on that window, alone in the entire alley, was open just a touch, no more than a foot, with a thin iron arm running from frame to shutter to hold it in place. Dad had scoped out the single chink in the building’s armor.

  “Once you get inside,” he said, “you’ll just go down the stairs to the back entrance there and let us in. Easy as pie.”

  At Dad’s urging, I inched my way onto the plastic awning. It shuddered at this new burden, and I could feel the cracked plastic sagging under my knees as I crawled across it. When I reached the awning’s edge in the middle of the alley, nothing beyond it but a fifteen-foot drop to the cobbles, Dad began sliding the plank across the awning into my hands.

  “Aim it for that window opening across the way,” he whispered. “Slow. Slowww.”

  The plank got heavier and tippier the farther I poked it into the gap between the two buildings. Around the time it began to seesaw off the awning’s edge, way too heavy for me to hang on to, it suddenly grew steadier and lighter in my grip. Puzzled, I peered down to see Zev holding some kind of homemade contraption, essentially a square of plywood nailed atop a long two-by-four. He was using this thing to support the plank, which he gingerly walked across the alley, with me feeding it horizontally above him. As the plank’s front end approached the partially open window, Zev stopped and whisper-shouted up at me: “On three!” When he completed the count, we both gave a shove—me forward, him up—and I’ll be damned if that plank didn’t slide right onto our target window ledge.

  “Go on!” Dad whispered when I looked back at him. He gave a little shoo motion with his hands.

  What he was asking me to do—crawl a dozen feet on a skinny plank supported by a shitty plastic awning on one end and about three inches of hundred-year-old window molding on the other—was pretty preposterous. I could hear my heart blood-drumming in my ears. But when I looked back at Dad, hoping he might experience a spasm of common sense, there were those flicky hands again: Shoo!

  So I made a game out of it. These looming walls were the ribbed flanks of two great sailing ships, rows of concealed cannon behind their shutters. And here was I—the plucky runaway street urchin, having signed on to a pirate ship to see the world—crawling across a gangplank to board a sleeping vessel at anchor. What I would do once I got in there, whether slit the captain’s throat or ravish his sleeping daughter on her satin sheets, I wasn’t quite sure. First I had to survive the passage.

  What I did was grip that gangplank with my hands, then kind of ease myself onto it, my knees pressed against each other so I wouldn’t fall off. By kneeing forward just an inch or two at a time, I found I could keep myself relatively steady. But as I reached the plank’s middle, it began to sag disturbingly, and that cracked awning didn’t like all this strain one bit; it kept creaking with an insistent, kvetchy urgency that scared the hell out of me.

  Glancing down into the terrifying open space of the alley, I saw Zev, his cheeks ballooned with exertion, struggling to support the plank beneath me with his wooden contraption.

  “Go already!” he grunted. “Go!”

  No pirate boy worth his salt would plummet into the piss-briny sea this close to an enemy vessel, so I willed myself toward the window’s skinny opening, scrambling the remaining few feet and angling my upper body awkwardly around the open steel shutter that jutted diagonally against the right side of the plank. This threw me off-balance, my left knee slipping right off the plank. As I began to fall, I lunged forward, got my arm inside the window up to the shoulder, worked my other arm inside, too, and hung there from the window ledge, helpless, my legs so heavy it felt like the gulf of darkness below me was pulling them down. Huffing desperately, I worked my right knee back up onto the plank, pulled myself clumsily into the dark room, and rolled onto its dusty floor, bumping my forehead as I went over.

  For a long while I lay there on my back in a wedge of moonlight, sucking air into my lungs, waiting for my heartbeat to slow. But when I tried to locate my fear, I was surprised to discover that I couldn’t find it. It was still there, that’s for damn sure, but it had gone into hiding. And it would be a very long time before I allowed myself to look straight at it again. To do so would mean questioning whether the tasks my father had in mind for me were reasonable things for a grown man to ask of a thirteen-year-old boy who wanted only to get close to him.

  —

  Dad and Zev, duffels over their shoulders, slipped inside through the alleyway door when I opened it, followed by a short, sturdy black guy I’d never seen before. He was carrying a DECARLO FUNERAL HOME & CREMATORY cooler.

  “I knew you’d make it, son,” Dad said. He slapped me on the shoulder a little too hard. “I could tell that you didn’t know it, but I did. This here’s Curtis. Curtis, meet Griffin.”

  The black guy grinned at me, revealing a mouth in need of some serious dental attention. One of his front teeth was missing, and the rest looked like they were fighting one another.

  We made our way up the broad staircase, Dad’s and Zev’s flashlight beams gliding into each other and apart again, chopstick-fashion. Curtis followed just behind them, with me bringing up the rear. I’m not sure I understood at the time what a transformation breaking into that loft building had worked on me. There was more to it than just the terror I’d managed to stuff back inside me. The main thing was that crossing that crazy gangplank had gained me access to Dad’s inner circle. Joining this company of men was like getting a promotion in my father’s affection, or so I hoped. I do remember being unusually aware of my body as we climbed those stairs. The thing about not being fully grown is that, along with the anxiety over how big or tall you might eventually get, you do still have the sense of possibility. Though to this day my shoulders are not as broad as I’d like, on that night I had the sense that they were going to be, that I was
finally starting to fill out.

  On the top story, Dad picked a lock and led us through a door into the biggest private space I’d ever seen, a vast loft illuminated by arches of organized moonlight coming through a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows.

  Curtis put down the funeral home cooler beside an unmade bed. “You sure that artist lady gone all night?”

  “Yup,” Dad told him. “Hasn’t been here on a weekend in the six weeks I’ve been watching her.”

  “Then let’s do what we come here for. Hit it and quit it.” Curtis led the way up a tall metal ladder and out a square hatch in the ceiling.

  The roof was an expanse of tar littered with the forgotten equipment of summer: An inside-out beach umbrella ensnared in the undergirding of a water tower. A pair of Adirondack chairs turned conspiratorially toward each other. A sodden copy of I’m OK—You’re OK, facedown and bloated like an animal carcass.

  While Curtis and Zev unpacked tools from the duffels, Dad took me to the parapet facing the street. It was chilly up here, windy.

  “I want you to lean over and tell me what you see,” he said. “Down on the cornice.” He entwined the fingers of his two hands to form a sort of stirrup. I stepped in, and he boosted me up to the flat top of the parapet.

  “I got you,” Dad said into the wind. He worked the fingers of one hand around my belt in the back and held my right ankle with the other, just above my bunched sock. “Just hang over and trust me.”

  I rested my hands on the street edge of the parapet and Dad tipped me forward over the street, the way you might handle a gravy boat. I went with it, too disoriented to object, pushing out from the parapet edge and looking back at the topsy-turvy building as he lowered me. My belt pulled tight across my midriff, digging in above my hip bones.