The Gargoyle Hunters

by John Freeman Gill

  Ahead of us, the city seemed to fall away abruptly. As the day’s remaining brightness faded, Dad led us into the barren band of blocks on the island’s western fringe. Three high-rise monstrosities of puke-brown bricks were rising just uptown, behind which, Dad said, an equally hideous community college would one day be built. But for now, we were walking a grid of rubbled lots, each surrounded by a chain-link fence.

  “This is what I was telling you about up on the Woolworth,” Dad said.

  Dad stopped at a vacant lot where weeds had grown up around some piles of metal junk. He leaned against the chain-link fence with his back and offered me a Life Saver, the wintergreen kind that sparked in your teeth if you bit down on them in the dark. I took one and sucked on it. I liked the way you could force your tongue tip through the ring as the candy dissolved.

  “Are the others meeting us?” I asked. “What are we waiting for?” I was starting to feel uneasy.

  “I just want to be sure we’re alone.”

  We were. There were ONE WAY signs on the corners, but no cars to obey or ignore them. No one walked the smashed sidewalks. Back in the direction from which we’d come, on the far side of what might have been Greenwich Street, a weak beam of light flashed briefly across the inside of a third-floor loft window.

  Squatters, Dad explained. Artists with flashlights who didn’t want to be seen by city building inspectors. “Of course, at this hour all the inspectors are home on Staten Island with their families, eating pasta fazool,” he said. “But the threat of eviction makes you paranoid, believe me.”

  Dad walked around the corner of the lot whose fence we’d been leaning on. The lot was a funky shape, like a candy corn. Near its skinny end, just across a wide street from the piers, he stopped at a padlocked gate and pulled a pair of long-handled clippers from his duffel.

  “Wait, we’re going in here?” I asked. “Why?”

  Dad applied the clippers to the curved chrome part of the lock and cut it cleanly with a powerful jerk of his hands. He slipped the lock off the gate and pocketed it.

  “Welcome,” he said grandly. “Feel free to look around.”

  There was nothing to see, other than some windblown trash flattened against the fence and the piles of metal debris at the wide end of the lot. He wandered over and laid hands on two broken pieces of a long, skinny rectangular box, muttering to himself: “That must be how these go, yeah. They must’ve—shit!” He yanked his hand back and shook it in the air. “That edge is sharper than it looks.”

  He turned my way. “It’s a really good thing you came along. Much better to do this methodically. You see those big piles over there?”

  I nodded warily. Not five minutes in this crappy vacant lot and he was already giving my precarious trust a poke.

  “Well, what I need you to do is just drop down in the spaces between them for me, starting with the two on the left.” He patted his belly. “I’m afraid I’m getting a bit too broad in the beam for that sort of thing.”

  He pressed an unlit penlight into my palm.

  The piles of mostly flattish metal were grouped by shape and size, no pile more than four feet high. Turned out it was actually no problem to slip into the narrow space between the first two piles and crouch down on the dirt as he instructed. I liked it in there, I was surprised to find. The dark was darker, the quiet quieter. It was comfortingly private, like the cabinet beneath Mom’s window.

  “You got your bearings?” Dad’s voice asked from above. “Now look at the undersides of any panels whose edges might be sticking out where you can see them. Start with the left pile.”

  I clicked on the penlight. The ground in here was weedless and dusty.

  “See any numbers? We only need one from each pile, or maybe two to be sure.”

  The panels closest to the ground were too low for me to look beneath. Starting about a foot off the ground, though, I began seeing stenciled yellow numbers on some panels, three digits each, in yellow paint as bright as the graffiti we’d passed earlier.

  “Three ninety,” I called up. “Three forty-one. Three-oh-six.”

  “Do they all begin with three?”

  I confirmed that they did, and we repeated the process on the second pile—long, grooved half cylinders of some kind, each stenciled with a letter and a number: C4, C8, C5. When I popped my head back out the top, Dad was scribbling into a composition notebook. I tilted the penlight beam toward his face. Even wincing away from the light, he looked more hopeful than I’d seen him in a long time.

  “Dad,” I asked, emboldened. “What is all this junk, anyway?”

  “Junk?” he cried, with mock indignation. “Did the young fellow say junk? That’s no way to talk about a man’s home.”

  I was at a loss. “What do you mean?”

  Dad laughed, enjoying my confusion.

  “I told you I’d show you my Washington Market studio sometime, didn’t I? Well, you’re standing in it. Your mom and I made you inside this thing.”

  27

  WHEN I AWOKE in his four-poster bed the next morning, Dad was nowhere to be seen. The pillow beside me, where his big head had been snoring raucously most of the night, was now occupied by a dog-eared antique booklet the size of a comic book. It was missing its cover.

  You could tell by the greasy thumbprints on its pages, and the occasional stains from someone’s nineteenth-century lunch, that this wasn’t the sort of jealously guarded manuscript that had spent its life locked up in a library. This thing was meant to be used.

  The booklet was drawings mostly, intricately executed, black on white. The first one had a rollicking quaintness that reminded me of an old-timey Ringling Bros. poster. It depicted a cheerfully industrious “manufactory”—“ARCHITECTURAL IRON WORKS: D. D. Badger and Others, Proprietors”—with puffs of smoke issuing from its eight perky stacks and a beneficent wind holding aloft the pennant that crowned its cupola. The rest of the booklet was more abstract. Interspersed with illustrations of entire fancy building façades was a grab bag of minutely rendered architectural odds and ends: Plate XLIII: Window Lintel Architraves & Sill; Plate XXXII: Cornices, Arches & Arches Ornamental.

  I heard the heavy whine of the opening door before I saw Dad coming through it. He was in high spirits, cradling a brown paper bag mottled with grease stains.

  “Oh, I see you’ve met Mr. Badger,” he said when he saw the booklet in my hands. “I thought that might interest you.”

  “It does, sort of. But what is it?”

  “Well, it’s a rather remarkable thing. It’s an original catalog from one of the foundries that produced components for cast-iron buildings in the mid to late eighteen-hundreds. Badger’s office was right down here on Duane Street. His factory was over on Thirteenth and Avenue B, right by where that Con Ed plant is now.”

  “Is that what all those metal pieces were yesterday?”

  “Yep. The whole system was basically pioneered by a New Yorker called James Bogardus. Clever fellow.” Bogardus, Dad said, would start by having a foundry pour molten iron into sand molds to individually cast the component parts of a building. Then all those pieces would get delivered to a building site, where they’d be bolted together on the spot like a giant Erector set to make either a freestanding iron building or, more often, a handsome classical façade that could just be attached to a regular old brick-and-wood building.

  “Like a mask?”

  “Yeah, but a beautiful mask, and convenient. In fact, iron-front buildings became so popular that a bunch of different foundries, like Badger here, started designing their own iron modules. A lot of the history’s been lost, though, so that of all the surviving cast-iron buildings in New York, there’s only one, over on Leonard Street, that we know for sure was actually designed by Bogardus. And since none of his construction drawings of whole buildings survive, no one even knows exactly how his system fit all these interlocking components together.”

  I flipped through the Badger booklet. Page upon page of Capitals, Corbels,
and Pilasters, each identified in florid calligraphy.

  “So how is this a catalog? Could you actually buy a building out of this thing?”

  “Sure could. Or you could design your own and they’d cast it for you. It was kind of an architect’s dream, because it let them design remarkably intricate façades that could be put up quickly and then painted to look like stone. It was practically like ordering from a Chinese menu: ‘Gimme a Number Twelve—the Second Empire mansard roof—with a side order of Palladian windows and a couple servings of broken pediments.’ ”

  “ ‘And make it snappy!’ ”

  “That’s right. I know you’re joking, but it really was quick. Took only two months to put up my Washington Market studio back in 1849. Which only made it easier for the barbarians who run this city to tear it down.”

  I asked when they’d done that.

  “Three years ago—you remember. I took you over to watch. You liked the way the blowtorches spat sparks when they were cutting the bolts.”

  That morning of destruction came back to me. The burly men straddling a beam three stories up. The way they peeled off the building’s skin and winched it down with a chain, one panel at a time. The raw hurt on Dad’s face.

  “Breakfast dumplings!” he said now, trying to wrench us back to the present. He extended a fried lump to me on the tip of a chopstick. I plucked it off. Steam escaped from the round puncture wound.

  I bit the dumpling in half. It was delicious, a compact little explosion of grease and salt. But Dad must not have looked at my face until my pleasure had turned to revulsion.

  “Oh God, son. Don’t do it!” he said, laughing. “Don’t you know the first rule of eating Chinese food is never to look inside a dumpling?”

  —

  It was a little after nine when we clattered up to the fenced lot in a big brown delivery truck Zev had brought by the warehouse. Dad turned up the radio as loud as it could go and hopped out, leaving the door open so the cheesy love song on his oldies station could be heard by anyone who might happen by. He wanted it to appear as if we belonged here.

  Wearing a blue hard hat, Dad opened the padlock with a key attached by a chain to his belt loop, and waved Zev through the gate. We trundled in over the uneven dirt, then backed up to the cast-off iron panels.

  “What does he want that stuff for, anyway?” I asked Zev.

  “Scrap iron. Any chop shop up on Hunts Point’ll pay a hundred bucks a ton, easy.”

  When Dad rolled up the truck’s overhead rear door, Curtis stood up and hopped out, followed by an older, slightly stooped black guy who had been sitting on a DECARLO FUNERAL HOME cooler. His skin had a bluish tint and a dusty look to it even before he started working. No one introduced us, but everyone called him Furman.

  Dad made me stay out of sight in the back of the truck all morning with the composition book. My job was to count each iron panel the crew loaded into the truck and record its stenciled number in the notebook.

  “The foundries kept pretty good production records of each panel’s specs,” Dad explained, “so the numbers you got me last night allowed me to look up how much each component weighed. This way, as long as you keep careful track of how many of each type we take, the scrap yard won’t be able to rip us off on weight. Everyone knows their scales are rigged.”

  The truck got pretty full after only a couple of hours. Some of the pieces, like the skinny, ridged columns with the bolt holes on their edges, took only two guys to lift. The larger panels took three or even four. My favorite pieces had at their center a beetle-browed lady with writhing, twisty hair. Dad said she was Medusa. To me she just looked like an unhappy woman who didn’t like to get out of bed in the morning.

  It must have been about 105 degrees in the back of the truck. The hotter it got, the more I found myself stealing glances at that DECARLO cooler, recalling with repulsion the putrefying meat smell from the cooler in our backyard and dreading finding out what was inside this one.

  A little after twelve, I got my answer. My father—followed closely by Zev, Curtis, and Furman—climbed into the truck and slid the cooler to its center.

  “And now, boys, the moment you’ve all been waiting for,” my father said, lifting the top with great fanfare. “Let’s just see what our kind benefactor Tony has sent us today.”

  Curtis and Zev peered inside eagerly, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  “Not bad at all,” my father announced, poking around inside the cooler. “Turkey, ham, Swiss—oh, and those stuffed olives you like, Curtis. A pretty good haul.”

  I looked into the cooler, and sure enough it was full of rolled cold cuts and other hors d’oeuvres on plastic trays covered with Saran Wrap. These, my father explained, were the leftovers from the previous day’s memorial reception at DeCarlo’s “body shop.”

  “Is that what’s always in those coolers you have around?” I asked, as relieved as I was surprised.

  “What else?” Dad said. “No one ever eats at those services—too busy grieving—so Tony always ends up swimming in leftovers. Won’t even take any money from me for them.”

  The guys took turns filling their plates with cold cuts and cheese cubes, and we all sat down amid the scavenged scrap iron to eat. Around the time Curtis started grumbling about needing a Yoo-hoo to wash it all down, Dad declared our work done for the day. He was in a terrific mood as he locked the gate behind us.

  “We’ll take Manhattan,” he sang, his head bobbing, “the Bronx and Staten Island, too…”

  Zev rolled his eyes at the bad pun. “Christ almighty, Nick. Not in front of the child.”

  Dad hopped back into the cab, and we rumbled across town and up the FDR Drive toward the Bronx, with me up front between Dad and Zev, and Furman and Curtis in the back with the scrap iron. I tried not to show my disappointment when Dad had Zev drop me off on Eighty-Ninth and Third, rather than letting me continue with them across the Third Avenue Bridge to watch the thunderous machines shred metal in the Bronx.

  On the cracked steps of the tenement near the corner, three old Puerto Rican men with saggy socks were drinking cans of Schlitz and yelling in Spanish at a staticky transistor radio playing the Mets game. A little up the block, a Puerto Rican boy played handball against himself with a Spaldeen.

  It wasn’t until I was almost home, passing the apartment house with the ripped green awning, that I realized just how little I wanted to be inside the dark, airless brownstone.

  28

  OVER THE NEXT COUPLE OF WEEKS I stayed over at my father’s as much as I could. I found that if I got up early enough, he’d help me put my model Lightning together for a bit before it was time to go load up the scrap iron. I could never have managed the boat’s motor without his help. He’d grown up in Rhode Island in the thirties repairing tractor engines with his brothers, so this kind of work came naturally to him.

  Carting away the cast-iron fragments became a routine. In the morning, before it got too hot, we’d pull into the lot in the brown truck and get to work. Zev and Curtis would bicker a little about which way to tilt the panels as they came off the piles. Furman would wait for them to work it out and then silently lend his muscle to the effort, never smiling or complaining. I stayed out of sight in the truck and recorded the stenciled numbers in the composition book.

  Sometimes I wondered how I would look to Dani if she ever saw me here, whether I would come off as a rough-and-ready laborer performing man’s work or if I might just seem like a secretary taking dictation.

  After locking the gate behind us, we always headed across Chambers and then uptown. I never got used to the sting of being dropped off on Eighty-Ninth Street instead of completing the trip up to the scrap yard in the Bronx.

  One afternoon after watching the brown truck speed up Third without me, I walked up the block and kept right on going past the brownstone. My hand didn’t pull out my key ring, so my eyes didn’t search for the new key marked with maroon nail polish that Mom had given me after chang
ing the lock on our front door. Perhaps out of habit, my feet took me past Finast and the Paulding Pharmacy on Lex, over to school on Ninetieth Street, and through the Engineers’ Gate to the dusty black bridle path ringing the reservoir. On the West Side, I emerged at Ninety-Sixth Street and kept on going, past Fowad, an emporium of shitty used clothes sold for profit, and past the Salvation Army, an emporium of shitty used clothes sold for charity. By the time I took a moment to think about where I might be going, I looked up to find myself standing in front of Dani’s building on West End.

  I stood there awhile, rocking on my heels. The door was open, a giant circular fan standing just inside the lobby, disturbing the air with a whirring noise worthy of a jet turbine. Steely Dan was playing on the doorman’s radio: Any major dude with half a heart surely will tell you, my friend: Any minor world that breaks apart falls together again…

  I squinted into the sun and counted up to the eleventh floor, where the windows were framed by Greeky terra-cotta ornament the bland beige of Alpha-Bits cereal. Which windows were her apartment? Might she be looking down at me this very moment? What if she had moved away, or was too unwell to even sit up?

  I took a couple steps toward the building before seizing up with fear. What if that ornery Irish doorman I’d deluged with hose water was on duty today?

  Yeah, and what if he wasn’t? It wasn’t too common, after all, for a guy who worked weekend nights to suddenly be working weekday afternoons.

  Maybe, but you could never be too careful.

  I headed down toward the Eighty-Sixth Street crosstown without even poking my head inside the lobby.

  Wuss.

  29

  FURMAN AND I HAD AN ARRANGEMENT. Dad refused to buy me junky desserts, and Furman only liked the outside of his Ring Dings. So Furman would give me his snack cakes’ spongy innards (half-life twelve thousand years, give or take) in exchange for my share of any olives and cornichons that came out of the DECARLO lunch cooler. I watched his weathered face as he carefully gnawed the flaky frosting off each Ring Ding, first around the circumference and then the top and bottom. The flesh beneath his eyes was bunched and gray-blue, like the skin of an old elephant. His broad nose whistled when he breathed.