Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

Anything, anyway, not to see his decimated pawns clapped back on their squares.

Mingus was home. In fact he was sitting on his own stoop, halfway up to catch the shade thrown by the house, staring dazedly at what he held between his two hands like a treasure, or perhaps a small live thing which required his protection: a fresh spaldeen, its pink flesh unscuffed, as though it had never had contact with the street, as though every latent bounce remained sealed inside it, pure potential.

He looked up when Dylan and Arthur approached and Dylan understood instantly that Mingus had been into Barrett Rude Junior’s freezer pot stash, had gotten deeply stoned, a solo afternoon jaunt. His eyes were dewy with it.

“I found it,” he pronounced, raising up the spaldeen.

“This is Arthur,” said Dylan lightly, making the introduction he’d never meant to make, but tossing it off. “From Pacific.”

Mingus snapped to exaggerated attention, reached to shake Arthur Lomb’s hand. “Yo, Arthur, how you doin’?”

“Okay,” said Arthur sheepishly.

“Pa- cif -ic,” said Mingus, measuring it with his dope-thickened tongue, tasting the syllables. “You got your own homeboys up around Pacific , Arthur?”

“There, uh, aren’t any other kids my age on my block.”

“Oh yeah?” Mingus looked impressed. “All right, I think I know what you mean, yeah. So, what you think-some little kid lost this ball, man?”

“I guess that’s most likely,” said Arthur. He looked stymied to be interviewed by Mingus Rude, pushed out of his ordinary range of operation. He might fear himself on the verge of a stupid answer to a snappy question , that was what his eyes seemed to say.

“You think we ought to play stoopball?”

Arthur made a helpless face, looked at Dylan.

“What you think, D-Man?”

“If you even remember how ,” said Dylan. He savored a certain hard-boiled flavor in his reply, pleased to assert before Arthur Lomb the deep and weary history between himself and Mingus Rude, a history extensive in ways Arthur couldn’t begin to imagine.

“I’ll throw a home run on your ass, boy.”

“Let’s see you,” said Dylan.

Maybe the summer was only waiting for them to resume their places, the light and heat waiting to gel around them. The block was like an open-air museum of their former days, the slate cracked and skewed in all the usual places, the abandoned house still theirs any time they wanted to reclaim it. It had taken Arthur Lomb’s presence, though, to rouse the effort. They’d silently partnered to show him what Dean Street meant, the old essential traces. If it had been only Dylan and Mingus they would have been off tagging DOSE on lampposts, away from headquarters on some undercover operation.

Arthur Lomb, and the beacon of the fresh spaldeen. It had something to do as well with the pink ball which appeared in Mingus’s hands like a problem unsolved, an old itch.

There were only the three of them at first. Mingus at the abandoned stoop, turned sideways as he wound up to slam the ball high off the steps. Dylan on the opposite sidewalk, beyond the parked cars, playing the outfield. Arthur Lomb placed between, in the street, under the canopy of trees, to play infield and flatten himself to one side to make way for the rare car.

“Mother fucker !” Mingus shouted when Dylan made a perfect catch. Consoling himself, he rattled a double up the middle, chattering too-late encouragement: “Block it with your body, Artie, Arthur Fonzarelli, Fonzie, A-Boy .”

Dean Street ’s kids were drawn out-of-doors, or back to the block from some other place by magnetism, a weird call. Nobody knew they were nostalgic until they saw Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude in the golden leaf-light that covered the middle of the block, a dream of a summer ago, ripened into history while nobody noticed. Plus here’s this new gawky grim-faced white boy in the street, knees tangling as he tried to stop the screaming rifle-shot grounders and line drives Mingus kept winging off the stoop.

Irresistible not to look. And then to wander over.

“King Arthur, man, you done fell down!”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t sorry me, son! Sorry is for snakes. Catch the damn ball!”

Mingus arched one high over the parked cars, destined for number 233 Dean’s sunken concrete yard, the shallow where a stoop had been demolished. Dylan leaped to intercept, found the spaldeen cool in his palm, transmitted from Mingus’s hand to his by way of the stoop and the air. He tossed it back casually, over Arthur. Mingus shook his head, medium-impressed, unwilling to exaggerate.

Alberto drifted up, hands in pockets. He quickly sussed the situation, then set himself behind Arthur to gather what dribbled or zinged through, just wanting to put his hands on the ball. Next came Lonnie, then a couple of young Spanish kids whose names nobody could stop forgetting. Mingus waved them into place, the infield turned into a mob. He kept throwing.

Marilla and La-La arrived, elbow-perched themselves on Henry’s stoop, trying not to look like they cared.

Henry himself had gone off to Aviation High School in Queens, was never around. Just a ball-game ghost, the name given a particular stoop.

In theory five catches got a kid up to bat, in practice today who knew? Mingus was writing the rules. Arthur and the little kids, they didn’t know any better. Alberto was deferential, easy. Dylan, Mingus’s conspirator, was camped in the outfield, not saying. He knew Mingus’s druggy adamancy, had seen him go into a zone, tagging, or just making some point aloud, talking in circles. He’d stay at the stoop until he threw a home run.

Arthur Lomb shot Dylan paranoid eye-bolts from within the crowd of kids jostling in the street for up-the-middle position.

Dylan if he bothered to notice was one of the older kids around Dean Street now.

He was more aware of his feet leaving the ground as he reached for another line shot, robbed another long bomb out of 213’s yard. Perfect catch numero tres.

Marilla sang, high falsetto, I used to go out to parti-i-ies, and stand around -

He’d hung in the air just as long as it took, matched the flight of the spaldeen exactly. Then came down soft, unjarred.

White boy was some kind of catching machine today.

You were flying .

’Cuz I was too nerv-uh-us, to really get down -

Arthur Lomb kicked a grounder down the street sideways and they all stood head-lolled watching him corral it.

“Yo, Mingus,” said Lonnie, falsely breezy. “I seen all of the Funk Mob visited your pops the other day.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mingus deadpanned.

“You must of seen it, Mingus, man. They had a big white limo all in the street. They looked like superheroes, man.”

“What drug you on, Lon?”

“Don’t say you don’t know what he’s talkin’ about,” said Marilla.

Dylan had heard Earl and a couple of kids mention it the day before-the limousine, the wild-costumed musicians that had poured out of it.

“I saw nothing,” said Mingus, increasingly pleased with himself, thriving on the absurdity of denying it.

“That boy’s lying ,” said La-La, shaking her head.

Mingus reared, the spaldeen shot into the sky. A dark smudge wobbled to describe the pink ball’s torque against the background of sun-stained leaves.

“Take that !” taunted Mingus.

Dylan flew and found it in his hand again.

The ring and the ball in some kind of partnership of magical objects.

You between them: the beneficiary, airborne.

“Dang! My man can jump !”