“There’s your keystone,” Dad said when he came back. He handed up a pair of pry bars. “Now to free it up.”
He joined me on the top bunk, and the two of us went to work on the remaining two layers of brick on either side of the keystone, using the pry bars to chip away the mortar and prize out the bricks. I worked without stopping, though Dad took another short break downstairs before returning to help me finish. Before too long, we had both poked through to the outside world, creating a pair of ragged windows through which you could make out the hunkered shapes of two undemolished brownstones across the street. Their own keystone gargoyles scowled back at us.
“Okay, this seems like a pretty good time to grab a bite,” Dad said. “Come.”
On the way downstairs, that angry crack in the first-floor side wall caught my eye again. It looked like it had gotten longer. And wider.
The water was at a rolling boil when we got to the kitchen, and Dad strained the spaghetti and poured it back into the pot. He had all his ingredients lined up, like Julia Child on her Channel 13 cooking show. With one hand, a little show-offy but great fun to watch, my father made a grand presentation of cracking an egg into a bowl and beating it with a whisk. Into the spaghetti pot went the mixed egg, followed by crumbled bacon and parmesan.
Dad folded a dishrag over his forearm and leaned forward from the waist like a waiter at a fancy restaurant.
“Signore,” he said, gesturing with a goofy hand flourish toward the table’s single place setting. “Per favore.” He pulled out a chair and seated me, then filled my bowl with a steaming dish of eggy, bacony pasta. It was the best thing I’d tasted since the era of boy-cheese sandwiches.
“Mmmm,” I declared, my mouth full. “What is this, anyway?”
“Spaghetti alla Gargoilara,” Dad said in an awful Italian accent. “Spaghetti in the way of the Gargoyle Hunters.”
He leaned against the fridge, his lips curled into a grim attempt at a smile, and watched me slurp up the eggy strands. His green eyes had a lonely remoteness to them, looking right at me but also beyond me.
“Nothing like a home-cooked meal,” he said.
—
All that remained to liberate the gargoyle was to detach it from the row of bricks above it and the row below. Dad’s method caught me by surprise. He produced from his plumber’s bag the very white plastic case I’d found in his toolshed, and he took out the little surgical saw that had given me the willies—the long-armed pizza-cutter-looking one with the angry-toothed wheel on the end. He flicked it on, its blade spinning so fast you couldn’t see it move, and eased it into a crack between the gargoyle and its adjacent bricks. Delicately, with the precision of a jeweler, he worked it back and forth, gritty gray powder spinning into the room, until most of the mortar had been removed.
Now the keystone was all but freestanding, its bottom supported by the makeshift wooden form. Together we pushed the bunk bed right up snug against the window and then, kneeling on the top bunk, put our arms around the gargoyle and hugged it roughly into the room.
What it must have looked like had anyone been watching us from the street, I can only guess: the silhouette of a single unnamable mythological monster, maybe, with a wedge-shaped brown head, two man arms and two boy arms, gripping its own face in the middle of a ruptured wall.
When the keystone finally broke loose, it tipped backward and fell onto the bunk bed, gently cratering the mattress between us. It was oddly intimate, the three of us so close together after all that struggle, and the roguish character staring up at me from the keystone made me laugh. He was a smirking, blunt-nosed man whose cauliflower-shaped head was elaborately turbaned with bandages, as if some well-meaning friends had swaddled his poor noggin in dishrags after a barroom beat-down.
“Ha!” Dad exclaimed. “Just look at that irreverent spark in the pugilist’s eye, that undimmed commitment to mischief. Is it just me or—yes! His eyes are popping, Griffin!” He cupped the stone chin in his hand, looking into the gargoyle’s pupils. “That’s extraordinary! The carver put lumps in his eyes to make them more expressive.”
He met the carved face’s gaze with his own. He did not blink. A minute passed, maybe two.
“The bridge of time is very poignant,” he told me. “I think about the immigrant carvers who came over here and did this work on people’s homes—itinerant nobodies, many of them, with no stable homes of their own—and I meet them across time.”
—
Dad could see I was exhausted. He said I should sit tight while he wheeled the keystone back to the truck in the shopping cart. He would come back for me.
I was too worn-out to put the tools back in his bag. Instead, I brushed the loose mortar and brick shards from the Snuffleupagus comforter and climbed into the kid’s bed. The room had really gotten quite chilly; now and then a rush of cold street air came through the hole we’d punched in the wall and made me shiver. I didn’t mind. I hugged the kid’s comforter tightly around me and felt very safe and at home.
When I awoke, I didn’t know where I was and then I did. My head was flopped sideways. I felt a strand of slobber running from the corner of my mouth to the corduroy shoulder of the man cradling me in his arms. It was dark still, and we were moving across a rubbled lot. I could feel Dad’s breath in his chest, my body rising and falling along with his labors. I must have been dead weight, big and unwieldy, gangle-armed. A burden in unexpected new ways. It was a struggle for my father to carry me, far more than when I was small. But he was doing it.
10
THE SUN COMES UP when it comes up, but the city doesn’t show it to you until it’s good and ready. The sky over TriBeCa next morning had that veiled brightness that told you the day had begun and that if you lived anywhere outside the five boroughs, in some backward, hillbilly place where nature still held sway, then by now you would be enjoying a quaint pyrotechnical display known, according to lore, as a sunrise.
Not here. Over on West Street, where I found myself walking uptown between the river and the elevated ghost road of the defunct West Side Highway, daybreak was more a question of feeling Manhattan gather its energies. I longed for that this morning, wanted to confront those energies head-on. I’d told Dad I had to get home, that Mom was expecting me, and he’d sent me on my way with cab fare and an onion bagel.
The waterfront was pretty ragged here, wind-burred waves breaking against the rotted pilings of vanished docks. The roadway fringed with litter.
A few blocks above Chambers Street, I found the Good Humor truck parked on a crumbling pier where we’d left it. I clambered up its bumper and hood to its roof and stood there in the wind waiting for the city to reveal itself. At the pier’s end, a barge with a crane arm rocked in the water, its lines groaning now and then in concert with the incessant rope clack of its flagless pole. A green bottle blew around the pier’s cracked pavement in a ringing half circle.
I turned away from the river and eyed the city, its long back porcupined with towers. The buildings in their thousands looked sullen and colorless in the unfinished morning light. But as I stood there on the truck roof, doing a shivery little jig to keep warm, the sun in an instant edged above the skyline, climbing fast and touching whole walls of windows into flame. The city came alive, had always been alive, and now my eye was drawn to individual marvels in the streetscape. Just across town the sky was pierced by a turreted, green-spired tower with the majestically oddball appearance of a drip-castle cathedral. A bit to its north, a circular colonnade atop another imposing tower was crowned with a statue of some tarnished goddess. And a few blocks downtown soared the twin behemoths of the World Trade Center, begun with great hoopla when I was in third grade and completed several years later.
It was exhilarating to think of all the gargoyles locked in the belly of the truck beneath my feet. The city was mine. I would not be sneered at, frowned upon, belittled with a smirk from on high. I would not be looked down on or put in my place. Just wait long enough and those smug st
one faces would come tumbling down from their perches. Or if need be I could force them down, chisel them loose, make them my own. The city would always be full of surprises, sure, but now I was one of those surprises myself. Now I understood that you weren’t required to just let New York’s evolution happen around you, happen to you. You didn’t have to hang around and wait for the city to drop your future on your head, whether that future was a gargoyle or a cornice or a lunch box.
—
So of course I crashed Dani’s party that night. It didn’t occur to me not to. The doorman of her West End Avenue apartment house was a gruff leprechaun with hairy wrists poking from his braid-edged uniform sleeves. He was standing just inside the lobby door at a card table with a clipboard on it.
“You Irish?” I asked. “A son of the Emerald Isle?”
His Irish eyes were not smiling. “Why you asking me that?”
“Only because a lot of the city’s nineteenth-century stone carvers were Irishmen, and they liked to carve their buddies, and the dude carved above the doorway of that townhouse two doors down looks quite a bit like you.” I jerked my thumb toward the street. “But you’ve probably noticed it yourself.”
He stepped toward the door, which was tied open with a loop of frayed twine running from the inside knob to a brass eyelet on the wall.
“Two doors down?”
I nodded, and he took a tentative step outside to peer down the block, just long enough for me to glance at Dani’s guest list on the clipboard and identify a couple of names that hadn’t yet been checked off.
“You’re lucky that house is even still standing,” I went on. “I mean, with all the insurance fires around town, and the way the city is tearing down more than a hundred abandoned buildings every month in places like Harlem and the South Bronx, the carvings of your ancestors are really in some pretty serious jeopardy.”
“My ancestors?” He looked intrigued.
“Of course. Now, I’m not saying the guy carved on that keystone is definitely your relative,” I went on. “That would be way too weird a coincidence. But he’s totally got to be a comrade of yours, a kindred spirit. I mean, the resemblance between the two of you is really striking.”
“You think?”
“Oh, sure. You’ve both got that strong chin and that heroically miserable look of the longtime hemorrhoid sufferer.”
The guy glared at me and harrumphed back inside to his card table, but when I gave him a name on Dani’s list—Elliot Blum, Quigley’s lab partner—he had no choice but to let me upstairs.
“I’m not one to toot my own horn,” I told him, just before popping into the elevator, “but I really do know an awful lot about architectural sculpture.”
—
The guy must have buzzed up, because Dani surprised me by opening her apartment door before I’d had even fifteen seconds in the hallway to plot out what I was going to say to her. She was wearing faded OshKosh B’gosh overalls with only a black bra underneath, and I was briefly flustered by the sight of her.
“You weren’t supposed to open the door,” I said.
“That’s why I did. The doorman said that a kid with a mouth on him was coming up.”
“That didn’t sound like Elliot to you, huh?”
“Hardly.” Elliot was a bookish, chinless ninth-grader who seemed to spend most of his time trying not to be noticed.
“Well, aren’t you gonna ask if you can take my coat? It’s pretty crummy manners to leave a gate-crasher standing in the hallway like this.”
She looked me over. I couldn’t tell what she saw.
“Is that a present?” She pointed at the large, roundish package under my right arm.
“It might be.” I was having a hard time not glancing at her black bra strap, so I looked down instead. She was a bit pigeon-toed, the tips of her blue-and-white bowling shoes turned in slightly toward each other. Very cute.
“I like presents,” she said playfully.
I extended the package to her. It was an unwieldy thing, the size and shape of an overlarge pizza tray, wrapped in Chinese newspaper. The top story had a photo of a row of topless male Chinese study subjects holding their elbows aloft in unison so their armpits could be given a scientific sniff by a technician in a lab coat, who was going down the row with his nose extended appraisingly.
Dani giggled. “Nice wrapping paper.”
She ripped open the package, and before she’d even gotten it out of the bubble wrap she was laughing.
“How did you ever know I needed one of these?” she asked, pulling my quick-release bike wheel from its wrapping.
“Buffoon’s intuition, I guess.”
“Well, thanks,” she said. “You want some cake or something? I think there’s a little left.”
She turned and headed inside without waiting for me. I watched her matchstick-thin little body recede down the hall.
The apartment was one of those sprawling, prewar Upper West Side places with endless rooms and closets. I poked my head into one of the bedrooms and saw what might have been two or three couples smooching in the dark. In another room, made dim by batik fabric draped over lampshades, a circle of ninth-grade girls was gathered on the shag carpet around a turntable, listening to Ziggy Stardust with an “I’ve found God” expression on their faces. One of them was Quigley. She was wearing yellow, plastic-looking bell-bottoms and a psychedelic Danskin top with sleeves that came down almost to her wrists. She never wore short-sleeved shirts. She suffered horribly from psoriasis, a flaky-skin disorder that attacked her elbows, leaving them so raw and inflamed they looked like someone had abraded them with a cheese grater. The only way she could get enough relief to go to auditions was by slathering an icky white cream all over her elbows and wrapping the whole mess with Saran Wrap to seal in the moisture overnight. It was an awkward operation that required at least three hands, but she always performed it alone.
I’d heard her ask Mom for help over the years, the last time a few weeks earlier.
“Oh, I really would,” Mom answered, her hands fluttering like birds, “but you know I’m hopeless at that sort of thing, and I promised poor Monsieur Claude I’d help him with his visa renewal.” As Mom bustled away, I felt Quig’s eyes shift hopefully to me, but there was no way I was doing something that gross for my sister. Sorry as I felt for her, all I was willing to offer was the invasion of her privacy. At bedtime, I spied through her door crack, her arms all pretzeled around each other, an angry pink elbow jutting, as she struggled to heal herself. One end of the Saran Wrap kept sticking infuriatingly to the other, and she kept having to throw the whole blob away, cursing and close to tears, and start all over again. When she finally succeeded in binding both afflicted elbows in plastic, Quig just sat there on the floor, exhausted and lonely, both her arms bulging in the middle with ugly, clinging kitchen wrap. She looked like leftovers.
In Dani’s apartment, I wandered down a narrow back hall, searching for the room my father had asked me to find: Dani’s dad’s study. On our way uptown in the ice cream truck the night before, Dad had casually mentioned that it would be a big help to him if I could poke around among Dani’s father’s papers and swipe anything I could find marked Laing.
“Her father’s an architect, right?” Dad asked. I had no clue; I thought maybe he was a teacher or something.
“Yeah, that sounds like the one. He’s an architecture professor at Columbia, in the grad school.” My father had hoped to take me and Quigley to dinner the day after we went gargoyle hunting, once he was done fixing my broken bedroom window. But Quig told him she was going to Dani Gardner’s party. Intrigued by Dani’s last name, Dad looked her up in the class list and discovered that her father, Aaron Gardner, had the same name as an architect whose work he was interested in. If he turned out to be the same man, it would really help Dad’s business a bunch to know more about his designs and business partners.
Doing my sneaky best, I slipped quickly into the first of a pair of side-by-side maid’s ro
oms, which turned out to be Dani’s bedroom. It was dark, and I nearly broke my neck stepping on something that tried to slide out from under my foot. When I switched the light on, I saw that the offending object was a small silver pizza tray with two loops of black Velcro attached to its center. After mulling it a few seconds, I figured out it must be a homemade shield of Dani’s own invention.
Dani was a Dungeons & Dragons nerd. D&D was a new fantasy game that one of her big brothers, Luke, was always playing on the weekends with friends like Max Schloss, older brother of Lamar (a.k.a. Fathead). They usually let Dani play, and once Max even brought Lamar along when they needed an extra player. Lamar was always trying to tell me about the game, how much I’d like it, but its rules involved way too much phantasmagorical mumbo jumbo for my taste.
From what I could gather, D&D centered on a bunch of adventures in which each kid took on the role of either a human or a fantastical creature like an elf or a dwarf. The players were all supposed to be on the same team, tackling monsters and ethical dilemmas together. But the game was so sketchily conceived, with so many holes in its procedures, that it always degenerated into a big shouting match, a roomful of pimpled, self-righteous lawyers hollering at one another about Hit Points and the Axis of Morality.
Dani loved the fantasy element of the game, all that role-playing stuff about pretending you were a muscle-bound medieval warrior. But listening to boys argue irritated the hell out of her, so she had introduced her own, more streamlined method of conflict resolution: hand-to-hand combat. Following her example, all the boys made swords by wrapping a length of broomstick with foam rubber and duct tape, and whenever two players had a disagreement over the rules, they would face off in the living room, walloping the crap out of each other for thirty seconds, at which point the less bruised combatant was declared the winner.
Dani was good: small but quick. She had three older brothers, so she took special pleasure in besting boys, and she took the swordplay so seriously that she even signed up for after-school fencing, to work on her moves. I, too, had signed up for fencing, to watch her work on her moves.
The Gargoyle Hunters Page 10
