The Gargoyle Hunters

by John Freeman Gill

  As the chatter drew closer, Dani made a sword blade of her right hand and raised it to her left shoulder in readiness. “See,” she whispered, “if these were Huns or Vandals coming up the stairs, rather than giggly little knuckleheads, they would be running up toward me right now with their swords raised forehanded, while I would be forced to defend the tower entirely with my backhand. And with that kind of disadvantage, I couldn’t realistically expect to have success killing my attackers like…THIS!!” Here she brought the blade of her right hand slashing down, lightning-quick, to the throat of poor Julia Watkins, a painfully shy classmate of mine who was just coming round the bend from below.

  Julia let out a bloodcurdling shriek, which she quickly swallowed when she saw that her assailant was only Dani.

  “What are you doing?!” Julia cried. “That’s not even funny!”

  “Sorry,” Dani said with a shrug. “I thought you were a Visigoth.”

  We gave the knuckleheads some lead time to climb up ahead of us in their Frye boots.

  “You really have a way with people,” I told Dani. “I can see why you’re so popular with all the other girls.”

  “Me? You’re not exactly a born charmer, Cadaver Boy.”

  I stood up and hugged myself a little for warmth. It was way too chilly to be sitting around this long.

  “I know,” Dani said, leading the way upstairs again. “Brrrr!”

  The shape of Lady Liberty’s insides changed constantly as we climbed, darkened recesses and half-seen folds always just beyond identification. A shadowy little canyon off to our right seemed ripe for exploration, but Dani kept on climbing. Finally, when we reached what turned out to be Liberty’s forehead, the spiral staircase ended and things widened out enough to let us stand upright on a strut that ran around the perimeter of her skull. Here, too, Dani paused for no more than a moment before heading up a short final staircase to a metal platform speckled with flattened chewing gum.

  Another park ranger was up there, this one a boyish woman with close-cropped brown hair. She was finishing up some explanation about plaster casts while four or five kids, including Julia Watkins, blinked into the Arctic wind that poured in through the arched windows of Liberty’s crown.

  “Cold as a witch’s tit,” I whispered to Dani, hoping to make myself a little more comfortable by making her a little more uncomfortable.

  “Colder,” she countered, unfazed. “Colder than a brass monkey’s balls.”

  The interior of Lady Liberty’s scalp—the rounded ceiling—was a clutter of graffiti, hundreds of men’s names and nicknames scrawled lengthwise down the narrow rivulets of her hair. Apparently Tito72 had made the pilgrimage to his nation’s enduring monument to freedom, as had a fellow patriot called the Puss Man.

  Dani and I elbowed our way up to the windows and peered out. Brooklyn lay low and uninviting across the slate-gray water, heaps of sullen clouds above it. Whatever dark weather those clouds held was heading our way.

  The ranger told us all that it was just about time to head back to the bottom with her. While she was busy identifying one last geographical feature that Julia had spotted out the window, Dani and I started down ahead of the others. As soon as we reached the bottom of Liberty’s forehead, we bypassed the “down” staircase and slipped down the “up” staircase a few twists to hide.

  Huddled mid-spiral in our down jackets, we listened in silence until we could no longer hear the descending clang of boots on metal steps. But as we rose to make our assault on the torch, a low, thunderous rumble reverberated through the statue, right up through my hands on the railings and my feet on the stair treads.

  My old fears about lightning flashed through me. How high above the harbor were we, anyway? Plenty high enough to be at risk, that’s for sure. And to make matters worse, Lady Liberty, oblivious to the danger, was thrusting her torch heavenward, fairly begging to be zapped. Her whole posture was so irrational for a fifteen-story-tall metal woman that it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that she was actually standing on her tippy toes, trying her damnedest to brush the tip of that torch against a storm cloud and draw down its voltage, the way the pole on the back of a bumper car sucked its power from the electrified grid above it.

  Was Lady Liberty grounded? It was a funny word, grounded. Dad had taught me that it was an electrician’s term, the method by which wayward voltage could be tamed and guided safely down to the earth, rather than coursing all through the house turning ordinary objects deadly. Grounded was also the punishment Mom gave Quigley the time Quig stole a half-smoked joint from the coat pocket of one of Mom’s musician friends. But grounded had yet another meaning. Some of the boys at school used it to describe any girl who seemed to have her shit together. They meant it as a compliment, as in not crazy. But I didn’t hear it that way; whenever someone said a girl seemed really grounded, what I heard was dull.

  “Let’s go, Pokey.” Dani was motioning me up the stairs, her too-tall hat under her arm, her coppery hair alive with static electricity. No one would ever think to call Dani grounded. She was too unpredictable. Too herself.

  A little ways up, one of the pockets of darkness out beyond the steel skeleton seemed to curve upward into a vertical tunnel.

  “That’s got to be her shoulder joint, and her upraised arm,” Dani said, clambering out onto the steel framework. “C’mon.”

  But when we reached a paint-chipping steel platform with a bolted ladder leading up from it, we found a padlocked mesh gate blocking the tube of Liberty’s arm.

  “Crap,” Dani muttered, climbing back down. “No torch for us. Want to explore a bit?”

  We returned to the staircase. A couple more twists up, Dani stopped at the dim canyon that had caught my eye earlier.

  “Her face!” she said. “Look, you see the negative of her nose in the dark, way back there? And those roundish indentations have to be her eyeballs!”

  “Ha! I do see it. Very cool.”

  We were standing inside her neck. Dani and I helped each other up the penny-pink copper wall of Liberty’s throat and nested in the giant woman’s chin, snapping our down jackets together for shelter. Mine was a cheap mustard-colored one from Herman’s that clashed with the red of hers, a superior item she’d probably gotten at Paragon. Kneeling face-to-face, we must have looked like a pair of heads poking out the top of a puffy, two-tone igloo. I could feel the heat of her body filling the space between us, mingling with my own to form a dome of warmth within this freezing copper silo of a statue.

  “It’s like winter camping,” I said, just to say something. “Only with cold knees. And I mean really cold knees.”

  Dani regarded me with a smirk.

  “Pussy,” she said, and she pressed a hard kiss on my lips, backing me against the cold wall of Liberty’s cheek with her little breasts shoved up against my chest. Her mouth tasted sweet, and not fake sweet like Franken Berry cereal; more like bananas.

  But what was she doing with her lips? It was exciting but confusing—terrifying, actually. Her mouth kept forming into a tight little wet circle, an open passage, as if she had an urge to whistle, or blow a secret down my throat. Why? Why did she keep doing that? No matter how many times I pulled away and tried to restart things with a normal kiss, there it was against my lips again: that open, expectant wet circle of her mouth. And when I opened my eyes, hers were fixed on me—so close—with a terrible look of irritation.

  “What?” I asked.

  “What do you mean, What?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “What am I doing? What are you doing? Or what aren’t you doing, is more like it!” She pulled away from me. “Don’t you even know how to French?”

  Before I could answer, an obnoxious, high-pitched cackle startled both of us. We turned to see Zaccaro standing on the staircase in his bomber jacket with two of his dickhead pals.

  “Ohmyfuckin’god!” Zaccaro brayed, pressing his palms to the sides of his wool Jets hat in a show of disbelief. “Little Ott
o snagged himself an older woman and he doesn’t even know how to French-kiss!”

  The other dickheads joined in the laughter.

  Dani looked from them to me, embarrassed, and hastily unsnapped her jacket from mine. For a moment, as she pulled it around her body and snapped it all the way up to her neck, I thought she was going to say something kind to me. But at the last instant, her eyes ticked over to Zaccaro and she said, “I guess that’s what I get for going after an eighth-grader. Do you seriously not know how to French?”

  I felt my face redden. How could she? I thought we were on the same side.

  Zaccaro and company loved all this. They were still guffawing about my incompetence as they continued up the stairs. When they were safely gone—we could hear them cackling and roughhousing up in the crown—I turned to Dani. I was livid. I couldn’t believe she had betrayed me like that just to save face with a douchebag like Zaccaro. I wanted to hurt her for that. I wanted to punish her.

  “I do actually know how to French,” I said. “But I’m a little rusty. Why don’t you show me. Remind me how, and I’ll do it with you.”

  She was flustered. “You’re the guy, not me. I can’t keep being the one who has to initiate everything.”

  “No, I know. Just show me how to French-kiss and I’ll do it to you.” I pointed to a pair of depressions in the wall just below the statue’s nose: her two giant lips. “Liberty is French, isn’t she? Just French her, and then I’ll do it to you.”

  The weirdness of this suggestion appealed to her. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? A little multinational girl-on-girl action?”

  “Ooh-la-la,” I said.

  So she did it. She crawled over to Liberty’s enormous inverted lips, opened her mouth, and gingerly touched her little wet tongue to the freezing copper wall.

  You could see in her eyes that she knew at once she’d made a horrible mistake. Once her tongue tip fused to the metal, there was no getting it loose. Just as I’d planned. She made some terrified noises with her throat. She began to cry. And then she did the only thing she could: she pincered the tip of her tongue between her two index fingers and tore it free, leaving behind a little flap of flesh.

  After she was gone, running down the staircase with blood pooling in her mouth, I felt violently ill. It wasn’t until hours later, when my urge to throw up still hadn’t subsided, that I realized it wasn’t Dani’s wounded mouth that was making me sick. It was me. I couldn’t stand to be around me anymore.

  PART THREE

  WE TOOK MANHATTAN

  26

  THE END OF THE SCHOOL YEAR was tough going. I found myself alone a lot, scuffing my Pumas down the long halls or peering busily into my backpack when friends went by, as though there were something crucial hiding in there somewhere, if I only knew where to look.

  It was unclear how much the story of my misadventure with Dani had gotten around the building. Maybe not at all; maybe it was as humiliating for her as for me. No one mentioned it, anyway. No one teased me, or challenged me about it, or even shot me a look of wary disgust. But something had changed. A distance had opened up between me and my schoolmates, Kyle included. Whether everyone was pushing away from me or I from them, I couldn’t quite tell.

  As for Dani herself, she seemed to come through our encounter surprisingly undamaged. She was back in school after only two days, and she seemed okay, aside from a slight lisp that lasted a week or so. She, too, never talked to me about the field trip, choosing instead to express herself more directly. Once, when I was hurrying to sixth-period Latin, she tripped me down the stairs with her skinny ankle and I chipped a front tooth on the slate floor under the water fountain.

  From that point on, she mostly ignored me. Whenever she passed in the halls I tried to convey a sense of brooding sensitivity by staring into the middle distance, hoping she might perceive—telepathically, I suppose—how shitty I felt about what I’d done to her.

  It occurred to me that this effort might be more successful if I developed powerful jaw muscles of the sort possessed by Steve McQueen and the male models in the copies of GQ that Quigley hid under her bed. So for three straight days I bought a fifty-piece box of Bazooka gum at the Sweet Suite after school and camped out alone in the back of the shop chewing it all in one sitting. This made my mouth muscles sore as hell, but as often as I checked myself out in the shop’s full-wall mirror, I could detect no improved manliness to my jawline.

  I needn’t have gone to all that trouble. The last week of May, Dani stopped coming to school altogether. I was fairly sure it had nothing to do with her tongue, because more than two months had passed since the field trip. But I couldn’t get any good information, either. None of the ninth-grade girls I asked seemed to know squat about her whereabouts or, to be honest, to care all that much.

  “I heard she was sick or something, I don’t know,” Quig told me. “What are you, her truant officer all of a sudden?”

  —

  The last thing I had expected, after school let out for the summer, was to miss our boarders. But as the weather warmed and they hung around less and less, I became more aware of the empty well of darkness at our brownstone’s center. Hollow and cool, with the sagging staircase twisting around it floor by floor, this unlit core of our home was suffused with a melancholy languor. Mom wasn’t around all that much, and even when she was, she was rarely available. Her door was closed.

  A closed door could mean any number of things, all of which translated to: You’re on your own, kid. Two of the more common scenarios were that she was napping or that she had a boyfriend in there. Of course, she never used the word boyfriend, possibly because the personnel changed too often to justify the term. “He’s a friend,” she would say, in the same way she would never acknowledge being drunk when Quig called her on it, no matter how sloppy-fond Mom and one of her friends got around the Bushmills bottle at night. “No, we’re not drunk, honey,” our mother would say, stretching catlike on the black sofa with a great show of sensuous dignity. “We’ve been drinking.”

  Likewise, Mom would never quite own up to napping during the day. If she happened to sack out with her door open and you startled her awake at two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, for example, she would cage a yawn behind her ringed fingers and languidly assure you that she had not been napping; she had merely been lying down. All of this, we were given to understand, was part of her creative process.

  Thus, anytime her bedroom door was closed, as it so often was that June, there was no sure way to tell whether Mom was receiving children that day—that is, whether she was simply lying down and would enjoy a visit from a son bearing a cuppa, or if, on the other hand, she had been drinking, was with a friend, had been drinking with a friend, or was even lying down with a friend with whom she had been drinking.

  Working through all these domestic permutations was just exhausting. Quig avoided the whole thing by spending most of her time at the Thespians’ clubhouse, where she was now learning about set design and lighting; I headed outside and tried to get Dad to do summer stuff with me. Although he’d never mentioned my outburst that time when I separated him from Mom, he hadn’t been back to the brownstone since, and I had the sense he’d been trying to go easier on me.

  We both liked to hang around the boat pond near Seventy-Fifth Street, beside the Alice in Wonderland sculpture, whose bronze toadstools I sometimes still clambered up. There was something reassuring in the realization that my own grappling hands and scuffling feet had contributed, at ages three and five and eight and so on, to a timeless vitality of wear that continually polished Alice’s nose and the White Rabbit’s pocket watch at the points of the climbers’ greatest exertion. Surely my mother’s struggling ascents, too, had once lent their burnishing friction to these very same spots.

  My newest enthusiasm was the radio-controlled sailboats that tacked around the pond with urgent, tilting grace. If I stood too close to the alligator-shirt kids working their expensive remote controls, my envy became
almost too much to bear. But one of the doughy middle-aged regulars, a gentle redbeard in a Model Yacht Club T-shirt with yellowed armpits, confided to me that a boat cost only half as much if you bought a kit and put it together yourself. I thought the idea of building something would appeal to Dad, and it did; when I showed him a boxed Lightning inside the boathouse, he pulled out two twenties and bought it for me on the spot.

  “This’ll be good,” he said. “You help me with my project, and I’ll help you with yours.”

  I was so excited about my model sailboat that it didn’t occur to me to wonder where we were going until we reached the speckled, hexagonal-stone pavement of Fifth Avenue.

  “So what’s your project, anyway?” I asked. “Will it take long?”

  “Well, it might,” Dad said, putting his palm up to stop a car as we crossed Fifth on the red. “We’re going to steal a building.”

  Quig and I had been discussing lately whether Dad might be starting to lose it. This latest ambition of his seemed to lend weight to that idea.

  “Dad…,” I began carefully, but he cut me off with another raised palm.

  “It won’t be anything like the Woolworth, I promise. No climbing! And I’ve got a whole crew lined up to do all the lifting this time.”

  —

  Down in TriBeCa, I tried to get some details as we walked in twilight from Dad’s warehouse after swapping my model boat for Dad’s army duffel. My curiosity only irritated him.

  “No, not part of a building, son. What we’re going to steal is a building—the whole damn thing, cornice to curb. Just stop asking so many questions and you’ll see. Okay?”

  He was leading me toward the Hudson. Past once-grand commercial palaces of weathered marble. Past proud old factories with broad brick arches and drooping iron canopies. Past a squiggle-roofed, Dutch-looking oddity, its brick façade ablaze with puffy-lettered orange graffiti. Though I obviously understood that stealing a building was impossible, I tried to guess which grittily picturesque old structure Dad might fantasize about taking home with him, in some world where the laws of physics didn’t apply.