The Gargoyle Hunters

by John Freeman Gill

  —

  Shelby never returned to our house, but that didn’t mean Quig accepted his exile. Before coming to us, he had lived with a friend in a tenement apartment above Drake’s Drum, an English pub on Second Avenue near Eighty-Fifth that had a wooden ship and dusty signal flags in the window. Apparently Shelby had moved back there, or at least Quig hoped he had. My friend Rafferty lived a couple of blocks farther downtown, and practically every day on his way home from school he saw Quig haunting that pub building, either right outside it or directly across the avenue. She was pacing back and forth, looking up at the apartment windows upstairs, hoping to catch a glimpse of the only grown-up who had ever paid any attention to her.

  18

  THE MEN IN KYLE’S FAMILY were a peculiar bunch, every one of them a scientist. Kyle’s grandfather was a British field surgeon in World War II who was credited—true story—with inventing the holes in Band-Aids. Kyle’s father was a wry Park Avenue gynecologist considered one of the world’s foremost experts on the G-spot—which meant that if he didn’t quite invent the holes in women, he certainly conducted major research on them. We all wanted his job when we grew up.

  On Friday afternoons when his folks weren’t around, Kyle’s house was easily everybody’s favorite place to hang out. For one thing, he lived in a fourth-floor apartment right across Madison Avenue from the Jackson Hole hamburger place, which meant that we could get the world’s tastiest bacon cheeseburgers delivered, without exception, in somewhere between six and a half and seven and a half minutes.

  The second reason we liked Kyle’s house was that Dr. Sherman, his dad, possessed probably the finest collection of smutty Victorian literature in the United States. The stuff was everywhere—leather-bound volumes as well as Grove Press paperback reissues—scattered all over the house with the dirty bits studiously underlined by Kyle’s father. None of us really had any clue what a G-spot was, other than the obvious understanding that it was as perfectly round, clearly labeled, and easily illuminated as an elevator button.

  Kyle always said that his dad’s special genius was in proving the existence of the G-spot through not just scientific evidence but also literary. Women’s bodies were women’s bodies, Dr. Sherman maintained, no matter what century they happened to live in or however little most men understood about them. What this meant was that if the G-spot’s existence was a physiological fact, then accounts of the Old Faithful gushers it generated must surely appear in dirty books throughout the ages.

  To prove his point to the medical community, Dr. Sherman had gathered in his Madison Avenue home all the antiquarian smut he could get his hands on. Wherever you turned in that apartment, you were practically guaranteed to stumble over a dog-eared pornographic Victorian novel.

  Dr. Sherman’s helpful underlining made it much easier to find the dirty parts in his books than in my mom’s collection of Anaïs Nin stories, which required you to wade through pages of snoozy description about Parisian artists before you got to the good stuff.

  Another advantage to Kyle’s place was that his folks weren’t around much. They hadn’t officially separated the way mine had, but things were pretty obviously headed in that direction. Kyle’s father was openly dating a hot thirtyish photographer, and his mom was never at home when I was over there, giving me the distinct impression that she, too, was sleeping around; all Kyle would tell me was that she was in the NYU library studying for her Ph.D. in English literature. The single time I made a crack about his mom “boning up” for her “oral exams,” Kyle shot me a look that warned me I would never say anything like that again if I wanted to remain friends.

  —

  One Friday night when Kyle’s parents were out and a bunch of us were sleeping over, his dad came home early with his hot photographer while we were all lying around in front of Star Trek in our sleeping bags, reading his vintage porn novels. I was the last to notice Dr. Sherman standing in the doorway, so I didn’t hide my book fast enough.

  He couldn’t conceal his amusement. He asked to see the novel, and I showed him the cover illustration. It depicted a whip-brandishing lady in petticoats and ankle boots riding a similarly dressed lady, who was down on all fours.

  “Ah, The Bawd of Fontainebleau. One of my personal favorites,” he said in his posh English accent. “You like it?”

  I nodded. “Way better than Beowulf, anyway.”

  “Oh God, yes,” he agreed. “I can’t abide that Grendel.”

  Greta, his hot photographer, was just behind him in the hall.

  “Why don’t you show them your slide show, Nigel?” she asked. “You certainly couldn’t ask for a more enthusiastic audience.”

  Dr. Sherman loved the idea. “You know, that’s an awfully good notion! Would you boys care to see my G-spot lecture? I’m presenting it next month at Mount Sinai, but a dry run could actually prove quite useful.”

  Our rush to his bedroom, where he told us the show would be presented, was nothing short of a hormone-fueled stampede. While Dr. Sherman fussed around with the slide carousel, we stole randy glances at Greta, who had perched herself on one side of the bed.

  She caught me staring at her and smiled at her power. “Anything I can help you with, Young Raccoon?”

  I felt my cheeks go red. My twin black eyes had faded a lot since that Yankees fan had busted my nose, but the matching dark rings around my eyeballs still made me look like a cartoon burglar. It was Dani, actually, who had initiated the whole raccoon line of ridicule, weeks earlier. Even before the nose incident, she had had me squarely in her sights. Twice she had cornered me in school and told me some detail about the flood damage in her apartment building—how the repairs had cost her dad two thousand dollars, how they hadn’t yet caught the boys who did it. And both times she had then fixed her hazel-flecked blue eyes on me and said, “I’m willing to go easy on you if you come clean. Is there anything you want to tell me?” In response, on both occasions, I had given her a look of bewildered innocence. I guess this didn’t satisfy her, because when I showed up at school for the first time with a pair of black eyes flanking my misshapen nose, she lost no time in dubbing me Rocky, as in Rocky Raccoon, and making sure that everyone, including Kyle and Rafferty and even Lamar, began humming the Beatles tune of that name whenever I walked by.

  Dr. Sherman told us he was going to need a few minutes to set up the projector properly.

  “Cool,” Kyle said. “That’ll give us time to visit the snack bar.”

  While Kyle jiggled the Jiffy Pop over an open flame in the kitchen, the talk ricocheted from the girls’ basketball team to Valerie to Quigley.

  “Dude,” Rafferty told me, “I saw her coming out of that door next to Drake’s Drum yesterday! Did you know your sister’s actually going up to that old guy’s apartment now?”

  Of course I knew, I told Rafferty, though it was the first I’d heard of it. Playing it cool was the only way to avoid a barrage of lewd comments.

  I cut the subject short by going to Kyle’s room to dig out the remains of his Halloween candy, and by the time Dr. Sherman lowered the lights to begin the most eagerly anticipated entertainment experience of our lives, we were fully provisioned with movie snacks. Rafferty, his mouth stuffed with Charleston Chew, made a crack about how much he was looking forward to the “coming attractions.”

  I don’t know what exactly we were expecting, but Dr. Sherman’s presentation was downright tedious, a ponderous parade of clinical anatomical lithographs and scientific jargon, all presented in a stuffy prewar apartment whose radiator kept blasting out waves of soporific heat. As the good doctor laboriously surveyed the scientific literature, beginning with Reinier de Graaf’s tiresome 1672 observation of diffuse glands around the female urethra, I kept sneaking peeks across the darkened room to see if I was the only one undersexed enough to be having trouble staying awake. I sure wasn’t. As Dr. Sherman rambled on, every boy in the room waged a valiant, droopy-eyed struggle against sleep, lest he miss some “good part” of this yaw
n-inducing lecture that must surely be right around the corner. Even Kyle was nodding off, and by the time we got to 1895, and a comprehensive account of that era’s evolving perception of the clinical ramifications of Skene’s glands, Rafferty was out cold, his curly blond head lolling.

  As my comrades dropped like flies, I determined to resist at all costs the lulling combination of the room’s darkness and Dr. Sherman’s scholarly drone. For a boy so committed to staying awake as I, it surely couldn’t hurt if I rested my eyes for just the briefest moment while our lecturer recounted his discovery that female urethras typically returned positive results for prostatic acid phosphatase, manifestly demonstrating their homology with the male prostate and…

  AAAAAAAAH!!! A bolt of eye-scalding lightning jolted me awake, terrified, from the deepest, most coma-like sleep of my life. Someone had switched on the lights. Blinking wildly, I surveyed the bright room and saw everyone else sitting abruptly upright and wiping the sleep out of their eyes.

  “So then, lads,” Dr. Sherman asked with a grin. “Any questions?”

  For a moment nobody stirred. Then Rafferty, struggling to stifle a yawn, raised his hand and asked groggily, “Yeah. Um, where is it?”

  19

  NOW AND THEN KYLE MANAGED to get some girls to come over for one of our Friday afternoon burger fests. Since his house was less than two blocks from school, we could sometimes scoop up whichever girls happened to be hanging around with nothing to do after classes got out. Dani came along only once. Besides the slight awkwardness of being a ninth-grade girl hanging out with eighth-grade boys, she didn’t really fit in with the other girls who were willing to come over; she lived on the West Side, she didn’t own any alligator shirts, and she said she didn’t like how obnoxious we were to the delivery guy. She seemed particularly unimpressed with my role as Ceremonial Greeter. Wearing white Rawlings batting gloves and the tails that Quig had bought for her tap performance, it was my job to open the front door with a flourish and take receipt of the bacon cheeseburgers, sometimes enveloping the flummoxed delivery boy in a vigorous, jiggly bear hug.

  But one day the burgers didn’t come. It was a bit embarrassing, because we’d managed to get Laurie Daniels and Rachel Gottlieb, two of the cutest eighth-grade girls, to come over for the first time, and they were looking forward to it.

  But six minutes rolled around, then eight, then ten, and still no burgers. Finally the phone rang and it was the delivery guy. He told Kyle that Jackson Hole had a new policy regarding Kyle’s building, which he conveyed to Kyle with an unmistakable note of pleasure: he was no longer permitted to come up to people’s apartments, but he could bring our order to the basement service entrance if we liked.

  So down I went in the elevator wearing Quig’s tails and my matching black Chuck Taylors with the white rubber toes. When the elevator door slid open in the basement, I was more than a little astonished to see Dani standing there, wearing the broadest smile I’d ever seen on her face. She blew a strand of copper hair from her eyes and drew from her backpack, with ninja-like precision, her duct-taped foam sword.

  “Special delivery, funny guy!” Dani cried, and began gleefully walloping me about the head and shoulders. “You didn’t think you could just flood my building and get away with it, did you?”

  “Actually,” I said, laughing in between blows, “that’s exactly what I thought.” I wrapped my arms around my head in self-defense. Though the hits didn’t hurt much, it was impossible to escape them. “But hey, it’s not exactly chivalrous to beat the crap out of an unarmed man, is it?”

  “Who’s unarmed?” Dani pulled a fencing foil from a loop on her backpack and handed it to me. “A trained fencer like you should have no problem fending off a girl with all those nifty moves you’ve learned from Mr. Kavar this semester, right?”

  I had no moves, had cut every fencing class since the first one, and Dani had to know that. Though I raised my foil in feeble defense, it took her no more than three or four deft maneuvers of her own sword to knock my weapon right out of my hand. It clattered to the elevator’s linoleum floor and she advanced on me, raining blows on my head.

  “My nose!” I bleated. “Watch out for my nose!” But she was too skilled to come anywhere near it, beating me into submission instead by battering my ears and the top of my head.

  She was really enjoying herself. “You know, I do have to admit: the whole flood thing was actually pretty amusing,” she told me. “You should’ve seen how pissed off my dad was. I thought he was gonna pop a vein in his forehead.”

  “Yeah, well, it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

  She gave me a smack on the head for that one, but she was giggling, and so was I. This ambush was turning into a pretty good time, and I was cowering in the corner now, playing along by begging for mercy. When Dani stepped all the way into the elevator—to finish me off, I guess—the door began to close behind her. She immediately threw her backpack in the path of the door to keep it open, turning away from me just long enough for me to grab her sword and give it a yank. She fell on top of me, but quickly recovered by pressing my shoulders against the elevator wall and kissing me, hard. I kissed her back, laughing and clumsy, and now we were sprawling on the floor, pretending to fight, but kissing mostly, feisty little nips at one another’s mouth. We pulled our bodies into each other.

  Dani was wearing a gray T-shirt, the one with the Led Zeppelin album cover of the old grinning hermit hunched over beneath the weight of a giant load of sticks. Her breasts were right there inside that T-shirt, pressing up against my chest, small and warm. I could hardly believe it. If I could just work up the nerve to get my palm on even one of them, this whole ambush by Dani would make a terrific story to tell Kyle and Rafferty, rather than a humiliating one about getting my ass kicked in an elevator by a girl.

  Dani’s T-shirt had pulled up a little, exposing a magnificent swatch of flat white stomach. I put my fingers together in the shape of a trowel and slid my hand under the fold of fabric and up toward the promised land. But before I even got past her first bony rib, she shifted her weight expertly and pinned my arm underneath her, then countered my move with one of her own: she grabbed my hip, really gripped it, then slid her hand over my Levi’s toward my crotch. Whoa. Way too close to my Johnson. I was terrified. Definitely not ready for that. I was supposed to be the one putting the moves on her. I leapt up, pushing her off me and into the wall, harder than I meant to.

  “What the hell, dude?” she asked, rising to her knees.

  But I’d had enough. This wasn’t fun. The Jackson Hole order was sitting on the floor just outside the elevator, a brown paper bag filled to the top with foil-wrapped burgers. I guess she’d bought them off the delivery guy and put him up to calling us. I grabbed the burger bag and headed out the service entrance and up the ramp to the street. Dani was right on my heels, demanding to know what was up with me.

  “Nothing,” I grumped. “I’m just hungry, okay?”

  —

  I had never been more relieved to see Kyle than when I found him standing in his kitchen, grinning down like the Cheshire cat at Laurie and Rachel. Both girls were sitting in ladder-back chairs at the kitchen table wearing strained smiles, Laurie with her knees together, Rachel with her arms knotted in front of her chest. Rafferty, his mouth open in pleasure, was sitting on the stove.

  “Hey, Griffin,” Kyle called to me. “Just the guy I wanted to see. Oh, hey, Dani, what’s up? Listen, you guys, for some reason the girls are having trouble believing that my dad keeps a tray of vagina cadavers in our kitchen freezer.” He nodded at Laurie and Rachel. “Griffin will tell you.”

  “Of course there are vagina cadavers in the freezer,” I said, happy to have an excuse to leave Dani in the kitchen doorway and go lean against the counter beside Kyle and his cheerfully aggressive grin. The kitchen was split into two groups now, the three of us boys on one side, smiling complacently across at the three girls.

  “That’s just what I was telling them,
” Kyle said.

  I nodded. “I mean, how else could your dad have done all the important research necessary to complete his seminal work on the G-spot.”

  The girls looked at me skeptically.

  “Oh, yeah,” I went on, feeling my bravado mounting. “Doc Sherman totally has a whole slew of vagina cadavers in there. And whenever he gets bored, he takes them out of the freezer and runs electric current through them, just to see which ones like him the best.”

  “A man has to have a hobby,” Rafferty said.

  “Exactly,” Kyle added. “So I was telling Rachel and Laurie how they’re right in the freezer door there.”

  “Bullshit,” Dani said flatly.

  This surprised us all.

  “Well, if you don’t believe it,” replied Kyle, “then just open the freezer and take a gander.”

  “Why don’t you?” Dani countered.

  “Because we’ve already seen ’em,” Kyle said.

  “All the time,” Rafferty agreed. “We’re on, like, practically a first-name basis with them.”

  Kyle bore down: “So if you really don’t believe us, Dani, why not just open the freezer and look?”

  Laurie and Rachel were still smiling, but you could see they were pretty horrified.

  Dani gave a little eye-roll and then, with a complex half smile I couldn’t quite read, put her hand on the freezer handle. She stared at her fingers a long moment and took a deep breath. But as long as she stood there, she just couldn’t quite bring herself to open that freezer door.

  Finally, she let her hand drop and turned back to us, laughing reluctantly. She looked from me to Kyle to Rafferty and said, shaking her head, “Did anyone ever tell you guys you’re pigs?”