Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

“Fish in the rain,” Buzz, the delinquent teenage son of the city kid’s host family, the Windles, had said that morning. “I’ll set you up. You can’t miss.” Buzz had begun sloughing off the boy from the city with bogus rural assignments, stuff he likely wouldn’t touch himself if you paid him. Buzz at sixteen had a small mustache and was hot to rejoin his Vietnam-vet pals chain-smoking over the open hood of a theoretically souped-up, in truth inert, Mustang. The city kid had trailed along for an afternoon and an evening before Buzz cut him loose. In an oil-stained, weedy driveway Buzz’s grown friends flicked glowing butts at a lame golden retriever, urinated into empty bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and joked in a language the boy from the city couldn’t understand.

It was only malicious to wrench fish through that lens to drown on mushy planks. The boy had no interest in reenacting Buzz’s hasty demonstration. The pole rested in the curved grass at the dock’s base, hidden like a comb in hair. The boy hunched in borrowed yellow slicker, back turned from the path up to the fields behind the house, painting a figure of solitude for anyone approaching, for his own mental eye: Brooklyn-bereft in Vermont, 1977.

Anyway, he might have an audience for ostentatious kindness to fish. Heather, the Windles’ daughter, thirteen to his twelve. He’d felt her trailing him with her eyes. The bookish way the boy talked to their parents and his long, bowl-cut bangs, turnoffs to Buzz, had aroused her curiosity.

She was blond like a Solver.

She darted on her bicycle in quick silence like a figure in Brueghel or De Chirico.

You might murmur to a girl on a dock in the summer, what you’d never dream of trying in school.

You might be one lucky motherfucker.

Heather Windle picked her way down the path. Her legs had outgrown her own yellow raincoat so it rode high, giving her a Morton Saltish aspect. She hopped side to side on the wet rocks, and slapped, fingers splayed, at a cloud of gnats.

So the kid from the city had completed the transfer, brother to sister.

“Hi, Dylan.”

“Hi.”

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

She stood at the top of the dock, glanced at the pole in the grass.

“Are you sad?”

“Why would I be sad?”

“I don’t know, you just look sad.”

Maybe he was. Not, though, if the rest of July could be theirs, on the dock, in the field, in the mist, anywhere but out in the oily, pull-tab-strewn driveway, the 7-Eleven lot full of pickups. Dylan Ebdus was ready to vanish out of Buzz’s Vermont into a girly world, into Heather’s hair. He wanted to ask her if he could simply breathe the oxygen of her blondness, nose the wisps at her cheek.

“I was waiting for you,” he heard himself say.

She didn’t speak, just clambered to sit beside him at the rain-puckered window of the pond.

“Are you sad because you have no mom?” she said eventually.

“I said I wasn’t sad.”

“That’s why you came to stay here, though, right?”

Dylan shrugged. “Plenty of Fresh Air kids have moms,” he said. He’d been justifying the Fund to a stoned man with an eye patch the night before, and the spiel came easily. “The whole point is for city kids to, you know, spend the summer in the country. For variety’s sake. I guess your parents thought it was a good idea.”

“I know,” she said. “We had one last year, but he was black.”

“My best friend is black,” said Dylan.

Heather thought for a minute and then leaned into him. Raincoat elbows squeaked together. “I’ve never been to New York City.”

“No?”

“Not yet.”

“You have no idea.” A glow in Dylan replied to the pressure of her body. He felt her curiosity as a kind of enclosing radiance, a field.

Sure, he’d be sad, accept pity, work with whatever came his way.

At that moment he decided to tell his secret, show her the costume he’d brought hidden in his knapsack, the ring, his secret powers.

“You know what graffiti is?” he asked.

“Uh-uh.”

“Motion-tagging?”

“What’s that ?” she said, delighted.

“You do graffiti on a moving train,” he said. “Instead of in the yard.”

“But what’s graffiti?”

Yes, he’d reveal the costume, he’d wear it for her. First, though, they sat inside a cloud and he told her about Brooklyn.

When after dinner Heather’s mother called to where they played and whispered in the sharply pitched attic Dylan felt a bolt of guilt, as though accused of what hadn’t yet happened, as though his yearnings were films projected on the walls downstairs. He’d anticipated Buzz’s scorning gaze all afternoon, but when Buzz missed dinner no one even spoke his name. Dylan had felt himself and Heather to be invisible under the Windles’ eyes, attic mice, dust balls. Now at her mother’s voice he and Heather shared one luscious gaze of complicity, then moved in silence to the stairs.

“You’ll want to call your dad, if the phones are getting through,” said Heather’s father from his recliner, in the room lit by the television’s glow. He spoke without turning his head from the spectacle. In shades of blue, New York was in the dark and on fire.

The phone rang four times before his father answered.

“I wouldn’t care to be on Fulton Street,” said Abraham Ebdus. “There’s no sign here, though, just fools yelling. Ramirez parked his station wagon on the sidewalk blocking his shop window. He’s standing with a bat, I can see him. I suspect he’ll be disappointed.”

Dylan nearly asked about Mingus, didn’t.

“It’s been so hot, it’s really a blessing. I’m in my studio, I’ll paint the stars, you never see them. Or I’ll paint Ramirez. I’ll be fine, don’t worry.”

“Okay.”

“Everything well with you, Dylan?”

“Sure.”

“Put Mrs. Windle on.”

Dylan handed over the phone and turned to Heather. To show provenance over the distant riot he said, “It’s no big deal.” Then, a bit wildly: “This actually happens all the time, it just doesn’t usually get on the news.” This drew a look of perplexity from Heather’s mother, who’d just replaced the receiver.

The television never returned to the blackout. Still, those rapid-flashed shots of spilled glass and running figures trumped his father’s report. Dylan lay dreaming awake of the city on fire.

While Mrs. Windle shopped, the three wandered together to the magazine rack in the broad, white-lit aisle of the supermarket. There Buzz marked his indifference to the new order. Dylan and Heather knelt at the comics rack and murmured in low tones, Dylan patiently explaining the mysteries of Marvel’s Inhumans while Buzz leafed at hot-rod magazines and High Times , then wandered away.

As he did, Dylan saw Buzz was trailed by a middle-aged woman with a dirty blue apron and a sticker-gun dangling in one hand like Dirty Harry’s Luger. She leaned on her hip to follow Buzz’s progress around the aisle’s corner, then strolled after him. Dylan smiled to himself, returned to the comics. Heather was oblivious.

Followed in a shop like a black kid.

Dawdling through checkout behind Mrs. Windle, Buzz labored at innocence, shrugging, poking at a rack of gum, making small talk, doomed. The woman with the gun and a bald, stern manager hung near at a closed register, biding time until it was official, until Buzz moved for the exit without plopping whatever he had in his pants and sleeves onto the scudding rubber belt. Only Mrs. Windle and Heather were surprised when the manager corralled them just through the automatic doors.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Windle.” The manager squinted in the pounding sunlight, his tone full of sorrowful inevitability. “We gotta ask Buzz here to step into the back, please.”