The Gargoyle Hunters

by John Freeman Gill

  Maybe not, but it just seemed like whenever a group of men or boys got together to do something, one of them, usually the most vulnerable, got totally hosed. A memory came to me of Lamar, the time an after-school mob of us, chanting “Fathead! Fathead!,” stuffed him in a forty-gallon garbage can and lifted it up on a classroom table so he couldn’t tip the can over to escape without risking falling on his head.

  In Blazing Saddles, there was this huge thickheaded lummox named Mongo, who worked for the bad guy played by Harvey Korman and whom Kyle and I always told Lamar he reminded us of. The way Mongo finally met his end was that his enemies put a stick of dynamite inside a box of candy and delivered it to him at a campfire: “Candygram for Mongo! Candygram for Mongo!”

  Mongo never saw the explosion coming.

  I wondered what went through Furman’s mind up in Harlem when he opened his door to the police and his decision to trust Dad blew up in his face.

  31

  ZEV’S PLACE ON THOMPSON STREET was pretty much a dump. A very tiny tenement apartment directly above a tailor shop with a flickery green neon sewing needle and spool in its window. As we hunched over Zev’s little table, sopping up our Dinty Moore with slices of white bread, the sound of the sewing machine downstairs jittered up through the floorboards in irregular bursts.

  “You like living here?” I asked, looking around.

  Zev shrugged. “It’s home. I don’t spend a whole lot of energy thinking about what I don’t have.”

  What he did have was pretty unusual. His floor was mostly covered with small, haphazardly overlapping Oriental rugs, including one really beautiful red one that looked like a dog had taken a bite out of it. Not an inch of space in the room was wasted, yet nothing in it seemed useful. There were piles of antique tins—cigarette tins, and tooth-powder tins, and tins painted to look like wicker baskets. There were unframed oil paintings of sheep and old women and a peacock who was missing a leg. There was a window shelf of brightly colored glass seltzer bottles, no two alike. There was a red wax Empire State Building whose spire had drooped in the heat.

  “How old are you now, anyway?” Zev asked me. “Fourteen?”

  “Thirteen.”

  The number hung there in all its maddening ambiguity, neither very much nor very little.

  “You like it, being thirteen?”

  I looked at him. “What do you think?”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s a pretty dumb question.” He smiled. “It’s a pretty rotten age, way I remember it: nothing to do, and no one to do it to.”

  A silence grew.

  “You have to admit,” I said finally, “it was pretty fucked up of him to just go and trash that one-of-a-kind landmark like that. It was.”

  The tailor’s sewing machine vibrated through the soles of my Pumas in tommy-gun bursts: a Thompson on Thompson.

  Zev sighed. “Look,” he said, “your dad is not an easy man. But he loved that building, and they tore it down. People respond in unexpected ways when things they love get damaged. And yeah, his way sure isn’t the only way.” He watched his own fingers drumming the metal tabletop. “Can I show you something?”

  I followed him to a three-foot-tall Hostess CupCakes display cabinet under his narrow loft bed. On its white grillwork shelves stood a number of unusual, very old objects. The only thing they seemed to have in common was that every one of them had something wrong with it.

  “I call these Poignant Repairs,” he said. “They’re antique objects, some of them completely unremarkable to begin with, that broke at some point in the past but whose owners were so fond of them that they went to extraordinary lengths to fix them. In doing that, they transformed the object, by their ingenuity and affection, into something completely new and singular.”

  Zev squatted down so his face was only a few inches from his ragtag collection.

  “Kids do this all the time,” he went on. “A favorite stuffed animal loses an eye, right, so in its place they have their mom sew on a button from last year’s winter coat. Or a toy car’s tire goes missing, so they replace it with one of those little round rubber bands from their big brother’s braces. But most adults forget how to care that much. They get impatient. All they see are the flaws, in the object and in their own craft. So into the wastebasket it goes.”

  Zev picked up a pitcher whose glaze looked like brown lava cascading down its sides.

  “Take a look,” he said. “This is a Bennington earthenware pitcher made probably around 1910. At some point its handle broke off. But instead of just tossing the pitcher out, someone took remarkable care to fashion this handsome replacement handle for it out of tin, which they attached with nuts and bolts through two holes they had very artfully drilled in the pottery.”

  The handle totally didn’t match the pitcher, but that made the whole thing look cooler somehow. Less ordinary. You could even see the hammer marks on the tin, where the guy had beaten the handle into a graceful curve. Zev put the pitcher in my hands. I closed my fingers around the handle, which curled perfectly into my palm the way a cat nestles in snug behind your knees when you’re sleeping on your side.

  “And check it out,” Zev said, taking the pitcher from me and turning it sideways. “The guy who did this repair, a Mr. Frühman, was so proud of his handiwork that he even crafted a brass plate for his name on the inside of the handle.”

  Zev returned the pitcher to its shelf, alongside a glass goblet with a prosthetic marble foot and the carved white king from a chess set whose crown’s lost cross had been replaced with a typesetter’s tiny X turned slantwise.

  “So isn’t this all just a particular kind of restoration?”

  “No way. Restoration is basically a fancy word for trying to hit rewind, struggling to take an object back to an earlier version of itself. This is actually kinda the opposite. It’s an act of idiosyncratic creation that carries within it a pretty violent implied destruction—the destruction of any possibility of returning the object to its former state.”

  “Of unbreaking it, you mean?”

  Zev laughed. “Yeah, of unbreaking it.” He gnawed an already gnawed thumbnail. “Because unbreaking something, as you put it, even if it was possible, is a pretty unimaginative thing to do. It may be a craft, but it sure ain’t art.”

  He picked up a two-toothed tortoiseshell comb carved with swirling, dragony-floral designs.

  “My pal Marilynn Gelfman gave me this one. You can see that at one time it snapped at its two weakest places—probably, Marilynn figures, while fastening one of those Spanish lace shawls to a woman’s coiled mass of dark hair. But you see those beautiful little silver reinforcements that are holding the comb together now?”

  I peered closely and saw the absolutely tiny silver scraps he was talking about, each smaller than my pinky nail. They were engraved with impossibly fine floral designs, and fastened to the two halves of the tortoiseshell comb by the most infinitesimal nails I’d ever seen. I can’t say I’d ever really given a crap about a woman’s comb before, but this one was pretty amazing.

  “The damage was the opportunity, you see,” Zev said. “Without damage, there’s no discovery.” He was marveling at the thing as if he were laying eyes on it for the first time. “It was a pretty nice comb to begin with, you know, like a lot of pretty nice combs.” He returned it to the shelf. “But now it’s the only one like it in the world. Now it’s perfectly itself.”

  I mulled this over, unsure why it made me feel both lonesome and energized.

  32

  A BOY OF ONLY FAIR-TO-MIDDLING COURAGE does what he has to do. I waited till Dani’s cranky Irish doorman slipped around the corner for a smoke, then snuck through her lobby. All the way up the gray staircase, the bottom foot or two of its walls were snowdrifted with white swoops of spackle. Patched up, sure, but very West Side to still need painting after all these months.

  I’m not certain what my plan was, but I know it didn’t include getting busted by one of Dani’s obnoxious college-age brothers the very
second I popped my head into the eleventh-floor hall. He had poofy black David Cassidy hair parted in the middle, and he was just coming out their front door when he spotted me. He looked me over skeptically while I tried to explain myself.

  “Y’know what?” he said, before I’d gotten very far. “Save it. I suddenly realize it’s way too much work to pretend I’m interested.” He shouted over his shoulder: “Yo, Dani! You got a little admirer skulking around out here. Squeaky voice like his balls haven’t dropped yet.” He thought a minute, then yelled into the apartment, “See? I told you you had friends!”

  A TV spasmed with canned laughter from somewhere inside. After a few moments, Dani appeared at the door in a Bruce Lee T-shirt and blue pajama bottoms, looking thin and winter-pale. A little “Oh!” of surprise escaped her when she saw me.

  Her brother studied her. “Looks like someone wasn’t expected,” he said, peering at her in a way that somehow seemed both mocking and protective. “Shall I show your gentleman caller the gate?”

  “No, no,” Dani said. “This is Griffin. From school. It’s fine.”

  Brother was not satisfied. “What’s in the Big Brown Bag, Griffin from School?”

  I was, in fact, carrying a big brown bag, which was helpfully printed with the words Big Brown Bag.

  “None of your beeswax, Brian,” Dani said, leading me inside by the elbow. “Don’t answer him,” she ordered me.

  —

  What do you bring someone who’s sick? Food, right? Homemade chicken soup or a tray of lasagne or something. Much better than one of those hokey Get Well cards from Lamston’s—because what if Quig was totally full of it and Dani wasn’t sick at all? Food would work either way.

  “So what is in the Big Brown Bag?” Dani asked me. We were sitting on the saggy blue velvet sofa in her living room, not far from several enormous homegrown avocado trees. Their leaves were big green paddles.

  I lifted a large Tupperware tub from the bag and placed it on the Lucite-cube table. “Hungry?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “This is a little breakfast delicacy I whipped up at home,” I told her. “Just for you, as a kind of peace offering. Me and Kyle invented it at the beginning of the year. It’s evolved over time, but today, I’m really pretty sure, I perfected it!” I peeled off the top—“Et, voilà, mademoiselle!”—and tipped the tub toward Dani.

  She peered in reluctantly, then jerked her head back in horror.

  “Gross! What is that? It looks like somebody already ate it!”

  That cracked me up. “I know, I know,” I said. “But it’s as tasty as it is ugly, I swear. All we need to do is heat it up.”

  “It’s green! What the hell are you trying to feed me here?”

  “Well, it’s a scrambly little breakfast masterpiece I like to call the Eggsorcist. Repugnant, yes, but so diabolically delicious that after just one bite it’s sure to possess your body and soul”—Dani’s face was a total blank—“and maybe even lift you up in the air and spin you around above your bed while a gnarly old priest shrieks at it to release you.” (I’d never actually seen The Exorcist, but everyone knew about Linda Blair getting twirled around all freakily by Satan, and I thought pretending to have seen an R movie might make me seem less middle-schoolish.)

  Dani didn’t say anything, so I kept blabbering: “Its ingredients are pretty simple: six jumbo eggs, six ladlefuls of Seabrook Farms creamed spinach, a six-ounce can of StarKist tuna, six tablespoons of lard, six Steak-umm strips, six dollops of Hellmann’s mayo, and six tablespoons of bacon grease—you know, that congealed goop from the coffee can you keep on the stove. All of which—and I think this is safely within the Recommended Daily Allowance—adds up to roughly six hundred sixty-six thousand calories a serving.”

  For the longest time, Dani just stared at me, her face betraying nothing. Then a Dani-esque smile began to play across her lips.

  “What?” I asked.

  Her smirk grew broader. “You are an extremely considerate bozo, you know that?”

  “But it’s the Eggsorcist!” I protested helplessly. “Surely you are not shunning the Eggsorcist?! Have a bite! You’ll love it.”

  Dani was laughing openly now.

  “What?” I pleaded. “What is it?”

  She put her hand gently on my forearm. Still grinning, she looked into my eyes and said, “You do know that I was hospitalized for my anorexia last month, right?”

  —

  I’d never even heard of anorexia. Everyone knew that chubby girls like Quig ate too much, and that was a problem, but I’d always thought the skinny girls were doing just fine.

  “So it means you can’t eat?” I asked, after she’d spent a few minutes trying to teach me about the world of eating disorders.

  “I can. I just don’t. Not enough, anyway.”

  I nodded as if there were something sensible going on in my head.

  “And you know what?” Dani went on. “It’s weird. Deciding not to eat kind of felt really good sometimes, in a way. Like I was in control of myself for once. Like I’m choosing—was choosing—stuff entirely for me.”

  She took me to the fridge in the kitchen and showed me a bunch of special milk shake cans she was supposed to drink three times a day now; they were all stacked up in the back, chocolate mostly, with a couple of pink ones that must have been either strawberry or cherry. They looked sort of gross and industrial, but she said they’d “fattened her up” to 106 pounds from the 94 she’d weighed when her mom checked her into the ICU the second-to-last week of school. Though I had no clue what a girl was supposed to weigh, neither number sounded like a whole hell of a lot. Last I’d checked, my own weight was 133 with my tighty-whities on.

  “Did you know you’re the only one who came to see me?” Dani asked. “Except Valerie—she came the first weekend I got back from Roosevelt, and acted really weird, like I was contagious or something, and then she never came back. Other than her, it’s like no one at school even noticed I was gone.”

  Dani padded over to the kitchen table and carefully lifted herself onto its enameled metal top. She let her skinny pajama’d legs dangle.

  “I mean, my brothers have been okay, in a Neanderthal kind of way, and Mom fusses over me in this totally annoying, How could any daughter of mine do such a thing to herself way—at least when she’s not at one of her hairy-armpit conventions with her lefty friends up at Barnard.” She gnawed on her lip. “But otherwise, you know, I kind of got to feeling that if I stopped eating completely, I’d just”—she looked away from me, down at her swinging feet—“I’d just disappear.”

  I went over and sat beside her on the kitchen table. Her thigh was surprisingly warm where it touched mine.

  “You wouldn’t…,” I started. “I mean, you didn’t. I mean…I noticed.”

  Neither of us said anything for a long time. When I finally turned to look at her, I was startled to discover that she was studying my face.

  She smiled a small smile. “You’re pretty hard to figure, you know that? I mean, for such a nice guy, why do you do such jerky things?”

  I looked down at my sneakers, my palms on the worn-smooth knees of my Levi’s cords. “Maybe I’m a jerky guy who does nice things?”

  Nothing happened for a bit. Then I felt her small hand come to rest on top of mine. I’d never looked closely at her fingers before. They were elegant and bony: elegaunt. Maybe she was two things at the same time, too.

  Dani’s breath warmed my ear. “I’m glad you came,” she said.

  33

  WHILE MONSIEUR CLAUDE was in the kitchen lighting one of his stinky unfiltered Gauloises on the stove, I snagged the Times from his place at the table and fled upstairs with it to the one spot I knew I couldn’t be found: inside the cabinet under the window seat in Mom’s bedroom. I’d been spending a lot of time in there the past few days, scouring the paper for any scraps of information about the police investigation into the stolen Bogardus.

  This morning Mom came back b
efore I was even halfway through the first section, but I was prepared for that: when I saw that she was settling in on her bed, I carefully pulled the cabinet door closed from the inside with a rubber band looped round its knob, and I switched on the nifty headlamp I’d rigged by gaffer-taping Dad’s penlight to the bill of my Mets helmet. It was reassuringly familiar there in my old hiding place; the exposed brick wall under the window gave the space a cavy coolness I’d always loved.

  The first bit of unsettling follow-up news had been buried in an article just two days after we were spotted loading the Bogardus into the truck. I still had the clipping here inside the cabinet. The story was headlined RIVERSIDE BRIDGE STRIPPED OF BRONZE, PART OF A WAVE OF THEFTS. Apparently someone had swiped seven sections of an ornamental bronze railing from the Riverside Drive bridge at Ninety-Sixth Street. The article said it was a big deal because the bridge had been the work of Carrère and Hastings, the same architects who had designed the world-famous Lion Library on Forty-Second Street.

  There was a photo, too. It showed a guy and his daughter—or maybe his long-haired son—leaning on a railing whose elaborate, curving decoration looked vaguely like a row of bronze violins. Attached to it was the city’s pathetic wood replacement for a stolen section: a bunch of two-by-fours banged together in the most primitive way you could imagine.

  The article listed a bunch of other cool-sounding architectural treasures that had been stolen from around town, including two lavishly adorned lampposts from the Firemen’s Memorial on Riverside and 100th Street and an entire bronze statue of a big-time nineteenth-century architect named Richard Morris Hunt, which someone had swiped right off its plinth in Central Park.