The Gargoyle Hunters

by John Freeman Gill

  “What in FUCK’S NAME is wrong with you people?” I heard myself shouting. “What are you even doing here?”

  My parents stared at me, utterly startled. As if they’d only just noticed I was in the room. I had never cursed in front of Dad before, had never dared. I had never even raised my voice around him.

  —

  Later, with my separated parents separated again, I retreated alone to the winter darkness of the backyard. There, resting my butt against the huge gnarled filth tree for support, I bent over at the waist and gulped for air, unable to breathe.

  The light had come on in Mom’s room upstairs, turning the curtained rectangle of her window into a kind of shadow box just above where the swollen tree branch approached her sill. She began to undress, her distorted bosomy shape moving about behind the jagged Roman ruins.

  24

  OUR PARENTS’ FRONT-ROW ABSENCE from Quigley’s performance, the public loneliness of that evening, worked a change in my sister. Starting the very next morning, she no longer dressed to capture attention. She no longer even tried. Gone was the rainbow-leather newsboy cap, the gold lamé jacket, the yellow bell-bottoms with the wide, built-in belt and oversize buckle. Gone was the Liza Minnelli mole over her left cheekbone—and all makeup for that matter. Now Quig mostly wore plaid flannel shirts, a khaki army jacket from Weiss & Mahoney, ordinary Wrangler jeans with no embroidery. Even her freckle-stained lips were exposed to general view, unconcealed by tangerine lipstick. She never again went on an audition.

  At first she shut the world out, locking herself in her girl cave pretty much the moment she came home in the afternoon. But after a couple of weeks she stopped coming home after school at all. Instead, she would appear hours later—eight, nine, even ten o’clock—weary but with a strange, knowing calm about her.

  “None of your business,” she’d say when Mom insisted on knowing where she went, who she was with. “Like you actually care what I do.”

  Then, just when we were getting used to Quig’s mid-evening arrivals, she took her disappearances to the next level. All at once, she started coming home around midnight. On weekends she slept till noon.

  I’d like to say I was worried about her, and maybe I was a little, but the main reason I finally followed Quigley after school one Friday is that my curiosity was eating me alive. Quig headed east on Eighty-Sixth Street as I expected, but instead of continuing past Lex and Loew’s and on to Shelby’s place above Drake’s Drum, she surprised me by ducking into the IRT under Gimbels. I hid myself in the crowd at the far end of the subway car and tailed her when she got off at Thirty-Third.

  Turns out she was headed to Shelby after all. On the south side of Thirty-Sixth near Third, Quig knocked at the red door of the Amateur Thespians Society clubhouse and slipped inside when it opened. The moment the door shut behind her, sealing her in there with him, an unexpected wave of disgust washed through my innards. Though I’d known in the abstract that Quig was probably messing around with Shelby, it wasn’t until I actually saw my frizzy-haired fifteen-year-old sister sneaking around town to meet a grown man with graying hair and thick fingers that the creepiness of the whole thing hit me.

  I wasn’t about to tell on Quig to Mom, who might well call the police or Dad, but I could see that this situation was way too skeezy to be allowed to continue. I decided to catch them together and confront them.

  The Thespians’ performances were formal, invitation-only affairs. You couldn’t just buy a ticket and go, and on weekends adult audience members had to wear tuxes and gowns, though boys could get away with only a sports jacket and necktie. Since I couldn’t borrow these items from Shelby, as I had when we’d come to see him the last time, I went home and swiped a gray jacket and fat polyester tie from Mr. Price’s closet. The jacket was too big and swathed me in a spicy funk of old sweat, but it made me presentable enough. When the play let out a little before eleven, the well-dressed audience of couples and families spilling onto the sidewalk through the arched double doors, I mixed in among them. The play, I saw from the program in a lady’s hand, was The Cherry Orchard.

  After a time, the dressing rooms were opened upstairs and those with friends in the cast went back inside and marched up the carpeted steps to visit them, as Mom and Quig and I all had after seeing Shelby in The Front Page. The clubhouse had a ramshackle elegance. In the second-floor lounge, ladies in fancy dresses reclined on worn velvet banquettes while men popped corks and filled up little plastic Champagne glasses. The walls above the wood paneling were covered with framed programs and cast photos from almost a century of performances. The curved shades on a couple of the ornate wall sconces were crooked and bulb-blistered.

  I followed some merrymakers out of the lounge and into the warren of dressing rooms behind it. Little explosions of laughter burst from some of the rooms as I passed. At the back, near a wall of costumes hanging from a horizontal pipe, I found Shelby’s dressing room. I didn’t really have any kind of a speech planned or anything. I was kind of just hoping that my catching them in the act would help both him and Quigley see the whole affair through my eyes, maybe show them how pervy the whole thing was.

  I threw open the door. Inside, two heads turned to look at me in astonishment. One belonged to Shelby. He was lounging in a chair pulled back from a mirrored dressing table, wearing a silk Oriental robe and those leather half slippers that dads wore on shows like Father Knows Best. His made-up face looked overripe and plasticky. Leaning against the table facing him was a younger man with a stiff mustache and wavy brown hair that tumbled down past his shoulders. The top three buttons of his wide-lapeled green shirt were open.

  “Where is she?” I demanded, surprising myself with my vehemence.

  Shelby looked at his companion, then back at me. It took him only a moment to recover.

  “Jerome, this is young Griffin, child of Ivy, my erstwhile landlady. Griffin, Jerome.”

  I refused even to look at the other guy. “I mean it,” I said. “What have you done with Quigley?”

  Shelby stood up. He was quite a bit taller than me. “The question you should be asking,” he said, “is what has she done with herself?”

  He put his hand on my shoulder and guided me, firmly but not roughly, out the door and a couple of steps down the hall.

  “Why don’t you go downstairs: here”—he gestured to an open door with an uncarpeted, industrial-looking stairway behind it. “You have not been extended an invitation, and I think it would be best for all concerned if you took the back way out.”

  I felt foolish. A pipsqueaky little “Okay” was all I could manage.

  At the bottom of the steps, the landing opened up into a broad backstage area with black fabric draped all around. It was dead quiet. Everyone was upstairs. I spotted a program on the floor with a footprint on it. I picked it up and scanned the cast list. I knew the club sometimes brought in women from outside to play female roles, but Quig’s name was not there, and she had to be too young, anyway.

  I wondered if I’d missed her in the audience. I went to where a black curtain met the side wall and peered out at the auditorium. It was dim and empty, filled with the lonesome quiet of recently departed crowds. The double doors to the street were now closed. A smattering of abandoned programs littered the floor.

  I was heading down the side aisle to go home when something onstage caught my eye. It was Quigley, her back to me. She was standing alone, holding a clipboard, in a room of dilapidated grandeur. There were no curtains on the room’s richly carved windows, no pictures on its walls. The few remaining pieces of elegant furniture were piled up in a corner as if for sale.

  Quig was wearing black jeans and a plaid shirt, her frizzy orange hair back in a ponytail. A rolled script poked from her back pocket. I stood in the shadows and watched as she lifted an overturned chair from the top of the furniture pile and set it down at center stage, meticulously adjusting it until its two front legs aligned with strips of glow tape on the floor. As she went back to the
pile to fetch a small table and a chair, I looked again at the program in my hand, squinting at the letters in the dark. Still I didn’t find what I was looking for, until I flipped to the crew list on the back cover and four words leapt out at me: QUIGLEY WATTS (STAGE MANAGER).

  By the time I looked up again, the chairs were assembled at angles around the little table as if in conversation. Quig brought over a standing lamp from the pile, positioned it on its mark, stepped back to admire her work. She wasn’t satisfied, though, not yet. She nudged a chair just a smidgen, shifted the table’s angle a tad. Getting it all ready for tomorrow’s performance, everything in its place, everything just so.

  25

  IT’S TEMPTING TO TRY TO FORCE the past to behave in the retelling, to make it lie down flat for once. But some memories, usually those involving my casual destructiveness, stand up like a cowlick.

  If it wasn’t the coldest morning of the year, it sure felt like it. While everyone milled about in front of school, shoving their hands in their armpits and laughing about what geniuses the teachers were for choosing such a miserable day for the field trip, Kyle and I took advantage of the big crowd to stage our most high-profile slobber race of the year.

  To the right of the school entrance, which was built into the side of the church on Ninetieth Street, a low wall of limestone blocks separated the sidewalk from an enclosure full of stinking garbage bags. Kyle and I climbed into that trash pit and stood on the pile of bags with our chins atop the wall, facing the street. At a signal from Rafferty, we each began slobbering down the outside of the wall as copiously as we could. The trick, we’d learned during past races, was not simply to produce more spit than one’s rival, but to create at the outset a nice, cohesive phlegm blob, then to generate a steady stream of slobber for that blob to ride down the wall to victory. If you had the proper technique, it was like sending a barrel down a waterfall. First slobber blob to the bottom won.

  The contest was nip and tuck right from the get-go, with both of us launching genuinely handsome blobs down the wall. A crowd of kids, mostly eighth-grade boys, gathered to watch, chanting with a fervor usually reserved for fistfights:

  “Slob-ber race!”

  “Slob-ber race!”

  “Slob-ber race!”

  I had a good rhythm going, but just when I felt my salivary glands really kick into gear, my phlegm blob began freezing to the wall, barely halfway down to the sidewalk. Kyle’s blob, I quickly noted, had also stopped descending, but it was a couple of inches ahead of mine. And whatever I did, I couldn’t get mine to make up that distance. With my slobber trail frozen like a glacier, all my slobber reinforcements froze solid, too.

  Naturally, I argued that the game should be called on account of weather. But Kyle maintained that the match was official because both slobber trails had descended across five stone blocks, just as a Major League Baseball game became official after the fifth inning. The crowd sided with him, and Rafferty leapt to the top of the wall.

  “The winnnah!” he shouted, hoisting Kyle’s arm aloft to roisterous applause.

  I spotted Dani at the edge of the crowd, looking grudgingly amused. She was wearing a big fuzzy hat like Brezhnev wore in the newspaper. It looked a lot better on her.

  The last of the yellow school buses pulled up with a moan, and a surge of excitement went through the crowd. Two teachers with clipboards tried to muster the kids into the right groups. A couple weeks earlier, everyone in the eighth through tenth grades had filled out a form listing their preferred field trip destination among the five offered. Kyle chose the observation deck of the Empire State Building, from which he hoped to murder a pedestrian with a tossed penny. Rafferty was going to the aquarium to check out the sharks. Both those trips sounded pretty okay, but I’d chosen instead to go with Mr. Darrow, the art teacher, on the theory that he was Dani’s favorite and she would choose whichever trip he was leading.

  Turned out I was right, and I celebrated my ingenuity by completely ignoring her as I got on the bus. Tipping my head away casually in the manner of a wily waiter avoiding eye contact, I breezed right past her and strode toward the way back, where I discovered too late that the only seat left was next to a notorious tenth-grade dickhead named Zaccaro. Immediately living up to his reputation, Zaccaro started right in on me, informing me in a braying voice how he liked the cut of my jib (“I do, I just do!”) and telling me loudly, to the delight of all his dickhead friends, that “henceforth, young fellow, your name shall be Otto!” Then someone made a stupid crack about “Otto-eroticism,” and how well the term applied to a wanker like me, and the whole chorus of dickheads took up the theme, all the way down the FDR Drive until they lost interest somewhere around the U.N.

  —

  When our ferry pulled away from the dock at Battery Park, most of the kids hurried around to the far side of the ovoid deck for an early look at our destination, the Statue of Liberty. But I didn’t see what the rush was. Instead, as the boat growled its way out into New York Harbor in a gray mist, I stayed on the unpopular side of the deck with a smattering of chilly tourists. Aside from a gawky German and his plump dumpling of a wife, I was the only one at the railing as Ellis Island’s onion-turreted main building slid past. A half-sunken ghost ferry lay tilted in the slip, its rusted funnel poking forlornly from the choppy water.

  When our own ferry swung around Liberty Island and headed for the dock a bit later, I looked over to see a fuzzy hat beside me; it was attached to Dani.

  She nodded at Lady Liberty, who loomed above us on her pedestal, growing more gigantic by the moment.

  “Kinda freakish, no?” she said. “This giant green chick guarding Manhattan?”

  I had to laugh. “Completely! You ever see Godzilla?”

  “I know! I keep expecting Megalon to stomp out from behind the Verrazano and do battle with her.”

  We settled into a comfortable silence, watching side by side in the biting cold while our ferry, groaning and backing into its own fumes, parallel-parked at the dock. As we walked up the cracked path and prepared to climb under the enormous green lady’s skirts, Dani was still at my arm.

  The park ranger inside Liberty’s base wore the same sort of goofy round-brimmed hat as his Yellowstone counterpart on Yogi Bear. Standing on the first of the 315 steps that led up to Liberty’s brain, he gave us an earnest orientation lecture: no running, no pushing, no throwing stuff or hanging banners from the crown, no climbing to the torch.

  “Wanna climb to the torch?” Dani whispered in my ear.

  I nodded. She took hold of my upper arm through my puffy down jacket and led me to the side so we could let the other kids go ahead. With her fuzzy Brezhnev hat a little off-kilter atop her unbrushed coppery hair, and her cheeks still flushed from the cold, she had a roguish lopsidedness about her I quite liked.

  The pedestal stairway was spacious enough, but the moment we climbed from the pedestal into the shadowy confinement of Liberty’s insides, I began to lose my bearings. As long as you kept going up the claustrophobically narrow spiral staircase, there was no way to actually get lost, but the staircase ceiling was so oppressively low, and so much colossal infrastructure pressed in on you from all sides, that it was impossible to know quite where you were or what you were looking at. As far as I could tell, twin staircases—intimately entwined but usually invisible to each other—corkscrewed up the statue’s center, surrounded by an elaborate steel skeleton that looked something like an oil derrick.

  “You all right?” Dani asked me. She was twisted partway round to look down at me.

  “Sure, maybe just a little dizzy from all this walking in circles.”

  “C’mon up. There’s a bench thingy here.”

  Hanging off the side of the staircase was a kind of broad bucket with a metal bench inside it. I sat down next to Dani, or more accurately, next to her fuzzy hat, which rested between us. I pretended to scratch it under its chin.

  “Does this thing have its shots?” I asked.

  �
��Shhh. You hear that?”

  High-spirited chatter wound its way up the stairs to us from somewhere below. It turned out we weren’t the last kids to come up after all. Dani motioned me to stay put and stepped back into the spiral stairway, her right arm raised as if to defend us from marauders. Then, deflated, she let her arm fall.

  “What total buffoons!” she said. “They built this staircase backwards.”

  “How can a spiral be backwards?”

  “Because it can. This one spirals counterclockwise, which favors the attacker. Whereas every medieval castle designer without his head up his butt knew you had to make the stairway spiral clockwise, so it was the defenders who got to swing their swords forehand.”