The Gargoyle Hunters

by John Freeman Gill

  Most of the stolen bronze is not recovered, but in one instance a bronze urn torn from its base at the Grand Army Plaza monument in Brooklyn was traced and recovered at a belt-buckle factory in the same borough. Its thieves were later apprehended.

  This was the first time it occurred to me that Dad wasn’t alone in preying on the city. The whole damned place was cannibalizing itself.

  But the part of the article that made me queasy came right at the end:

  In a related development, the police arrested two men and were seeking a third yesterday in the theft of cast-iron panels of a dismantled landmark, the Bogardus Building. The two were apprehended after the police traced a truck that had been seen leaving a storage area at West and Chambers Streets with several of the panels.

  Arrested were Furman Boyd, 46 years old, of 121 East 120th Street, and Curtis Knowles, 28, of 155 East 104th Street, both laborers.

  Every time I reread those last two paragraphs, I recalled the feeling of Curtis’s big callusy palm on my forehead, shoving me down into the truck to protect me from being seen. Why should that hand get cuffed behind Curtis’s back at his roachy Harlem apartment while I got my own bedroom in a five-story brownstone? Was Dad right that only “laborers” got arrested for this sort of thing, or did he think the police were onto him now, too, the “third man”? Is that why he’d been so jumpy when I confronted him down at his studio?

  Today’s paper was loaded with the usual sorts of cheerful news: more than five hundred American unions were on strike, mostly over low pay; Nixon’s cohorts were complaining that the head of Congress’s impeachment panel was biased; one of the Watergate “plumbers” was unveiling a new legal defense; Bobby Fischer had renounced his world chess title over a rules dispute (no one knew if the chess federation would accept his resignation or negotiate); both the Mets and the Yankees were in last place; the Equal Rights Amendment was on the rocks; and Harry Browne, best-selling author of gloom-and-doom books about “dollar devaluation and runaway inflation,” was in town—he’d told a crowd at Carnegie Hall that a depression was just around the corner and that he was preparing for it by loading a three-year supply of canned goods and Chianti into an emergency retreat in the frozen north, four hundred miles above West Vancouver.

  There was nothing else in today’s paper about the Bogardus or any other architectural thefts. I wanted to get out and stretch my legs, but when I popped the door open a sliver to peek out, Mom was hunched over a woodcut on her bed with her legs crossed, her yellow peasant dress hiked partway up her thighs. She was wearing maroon underwear, which I really didn’t want to see, and she was using one of her little U-shaped blades to gouge out long strips of wood that curled, as they came loose from the board, in a way that reminded me of the grotesque World’s Longest Fingernails belonging to that wrinkly Indian guy in The Guinness Book of World Records.

  She clearly wasn’t going anywhere soon. There was a cuppa on the travel-scuffed Louis Vuitton steamer trunk she used as a bedside table. Every so often she yawned and took a sip.

  There are worse things than being trapped into taking a summer nap, though. I pulled the door tight again and shifted around in my little cave. There were more than enough odds and ends of my childhood in there for me to make myself comfortable. The Return of the King was a couple inches thick and made a perfectly passable pillow once I took off my pajama bottoms and bunched them on top of the book to make it softer. And a few old issues of Ranger Rick spread out on the floor made it a bit less cold against my naked legs.

  The only way I could fit lying down was by curling into the fetal position, but I liked that. It was comforting drifting off to sleep in there like when I was little. Now, as then, I could faintly hear the twittery classical music from Mom’s radio, which was tuned to QXR as usual. Except for a thin rectangle of light seeping in around the cabinet door, I was cocooned in darkness.

  —

  The terrifying bass-note THUMP that startled me awake sometime later felt like nothing less than all that darkness collapsing onto my head. The impact was right on top of me, shaking the too-small walls of my sleep. At first I thought I was back in our Echo Harbor cottage, where daybreak seagulls dive-bombed our roof with clams to smash them open. But as I shook off my disorientation, I quickly identified the sound as a big shoe stomping onto the cushionless top of the window seat above me. Someone had broken in by climbing the tree branch I’d failed to cut.

  I heard a kind of gasp of surprise from Mom—less a scream than a startled intake of breath. My heart drumming, I pushed the cabinet door open a crack and blinked into the light to see a big man kneeling on the bed in front of Mom, leaning desperately into her. He had her by the shoulders, and seemed to be trying to wrench her body toward him so her mouth would meet his.

  “Stop it! Stop it!” she cried, squirming and slap-grappling at his hands on her body until he gave out a horrible throaty groan and abruptly pulled away from her, staring in startled agony at her woodcut tool, whose little U-shaped blade was lodged half an inch deep in his upper arm.

  “You bitch!” he roared, pulling the blade out with his fist and throwing it aside. Enraged, he pushed her down and kneeled on top of her, pinning her arms with his hands, her dress hiked up to her waist and her naked legs splayed on either side of him. Again, he leaned in and tried to kiss her, but she shook her head violently from side to side, battering his face with her chin.

  “Get off me!” she yelled. “Get off! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Me?” the man snarled. “Where do you get off locking me out of my own home!”

  “It’s not—” Mom began, but he thrust his mouth against hers, and maybe his teeth cut her lip, because her words dissolved into a hard little bleat of pain. For just a moment more Mom struggled, and then she stopped moving and so did he, the two of them locked together on the bed in motionless misery.

  I don’t know if I pushed the cabinet door so hard on purpose, but it swung all the way open on its hinges until its porcelain knob banged against the outside.

  Both bodies on the bed jolted in response as if electrocuted, and both my parents’ heads turned abruptly to look my way, their eyes wide with oddly similar looks of panic. Dad was crying, red-faced and helpless even in his position of supposed dominance. Mom was indignant and out of breath.

  She blinked away her indignation then, blinked away my father. I saw her look over at me kneeling in the little doorway of the cabinet in my underwear—really look at me, as if seeing me for the first time in a very long while.

  “Oh, Griffin,” she said in a voice you could barely hear. “I am so sorry.”

  PART FOUR

  SALVAGE

  34

  HE NEVER CAME BACK that summer. We never heard from him at all.

  My mother’s drowsy aloofness had vanished. She seemed more alert, more there, than I could remember seeing her, like when you sharpened our RCA Victor’s fuzzy picture by crumpling knobs of tinfoil onto its rabbit ears. She was also newly, overbearingly attentive to me.

  At first, I liked it. Eating a hot dog in the spray of that nifty manmade waterfall in Paley Park wasn’t bad, and neither was drinking an egg cream at Agora. But she kept asking me if I wanted to talk about stuff.

  I didn’t. At least not the kind of stuff she had any clue about. The thing that was worrying me most, if she really wanted to know, was the condition of George Thomas Seaver’s left hip. It was hard to overstate how bad the Mets had sucked all season. Just last fall we’d come within one World Series win of knocking off the scary-swaggery Reggie Jackson–Catfish Hunter Oakland A’s. (Was there a more dumb-ass team name in all of sports than the Athletics? Was there a relief pitcher anywhere who looked more like a mustache-twiddling silent-film villain than Rollie Fingers?) But this season our team was just falling to pieces. Willie Mays had retired, Buddy Harrelson was reduced to pinch-running duties by a broken hand, and the pitching performances of Seaver—by far my favorite player—had gone from l
ights-out to ordinary. Today was the exact halfway point in the season, Game 81 of 162, and we were in last place, a putrid ten games under .500. Seaver, after winning nineteen games and the Cy Young the year before, actually had a losing record of 5–6. It all came down to the health of his hip.

  My mother was pushing to take me to Tru-Tred for new penny loafers that afternoon, but there was no way I was missing Seaver’s start. Even watching the game on Channel 9 was a fallback plan. For weeks, I’d been drinking quarts of Dairylea milk like a madman, cutting the waxy rectangular coupons out of the back of each carton in hopes of collecting the twenty you needed to earn a ticket to Shea. I’d only gotten to sixteen, though, so Channel 9 it was going to have to be.

  —

  Lindsey Nelson, wearing one of his customary hideous plaid jackets in the Shea booth, had just gotten through telling Bob Murphy how urgently the struggling Mets needed “Tom Terrific to be terrific again” when the phone rang. It was Dani.

  “You busy?” she asked me. “I could use your help with something.”

  I thought I heard Quig or Mom pick up downstairs and palm the receiver, so I played it even cooler than I probably would have otherwise. I told Dani all about Seaver, and the game, and how I couldn’t possibly miss it.

  “So watch it here,” she said. “I’ve got it on anyway, and Seaver usually goes eight or nine, so you’ve got plenty of time to get over here and still catch most of his start.”

  “You’re a Mets fan?” I asked.

  “What kind of a question is that? I thought you liked me. You think I’d root for the Stankees?” The disgusted way she said it, it was as if I’d implied she was a die-hard fan of the raw sewage flushed into the Hudson from the houseboats at the Seventy-Ninth Street Boat Basin, where Kyle and I sometimes went turdwatching.

  —

  I didn’t know what was safe to bring Dani anymore, so I didn’t bring her anything. I just sniffed the pits of my orange “Ya Gotta Believe” T-shirt to make sure I smelled okay, and gave my tongue a few pepperminty Binaca blasts every few minutes on my way over on the Eighty-Sixth Street crosstown.

  Seaver had already come out to the mound for the fourth inning when I joined Dani on her parents’ bed to watch. We were the only ones in the apartment. Our guys were up five–zip over the Giants, but for some reason I still couldn’t get comfortable.

  “Would you stop jiggling your foot already?” Dani said. “You’re making me nervous.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I tell you what. Why don’t you go get us a bottle of something or other from my dad’s booze cabinet. It’s in the hall outside my room, that low thing with the painted-over glass door.”

  There were about a million liquor bottles in the cabinet, but every one I pulled out was so nearly empty you wondered why they hadn’t just thrown it away. Finally I found two half-full ones whose funny foreign names sounded like Monty Python characters. I brought them to Dani on her folks’ bed.

  “Noilly Prat?” she asked, crinkling her nose. “You think we’re gonna drink straight vermouth?”

  I shrugged. I’d never heard of vermouth.

  “And Fernet-Branca?” She held out the second bottle. “You know what this stuff is?”

  I searched my memory. Fernet Branca did kind of ring a bell.

  “Wait,” I said, “isn’t that the guy who gave up that home run to what’s-his-name—Bobby Thomson? You know: ‘The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!’ ”

  She stared at me. “Are you serious?”

  I was. The name Fernet Branca sounded so familiar. I thought maybe it was a liquor named after a ballplayer, like a grown-up version of the Baby Ruth bar.

  Dani had begun to giggle.

  “That’s Ralph Branca,” she said. “Not Fernet-Branca.” She put her hand on my cheek and looked at me in this really wonderful, affectionate way. “Ralph Branca is a toothy Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher who gave up the most heartbreaking home run in, like, his team’s entire history. Fernet-Branca is a disgusting Italian after-dinner liqueur. My dad brought it back from Rome. Said one of the professors there told him it could cure any head cold in twenty-four hours.”

  She twisted the top off and motioned for me to take a swig.

  “What if someone comes home?”

  “Not gonna happen. Brian’s my only brother who’s even around this summer, and he’s at his stoner girlfriend’s in Amagansett.”

  “What about your folks?”

  “They’re house-hunting in Philadelphia—or just outside it, I guess.”

  She gestured with the bottle again. Its contents smelled vile.

  “You’re moving?”

  “Who knows? Dad got an offer from UPenn. I guess he’s considering it. He loves New York and all—he’s nuts about it, actually—but he says the city’s dying.”

  “So he’s moving? Are you kidding me? What a wuss.”

  “Why’re you getting so mad?”

  “Who said I’m mad? I just think your dad’s a wuss, that’s all. So what if the city is dying? He’s just gonna up and leave?”

  “He’s got a job offer. What’s he supposed to do? Go down with the ship?”

  I grabbed the bottle and slugged back a throatful of Fernet-Branca. It was viscous and fiery, with a hideous bitter kicker of an aftertaste. I had to clench my teeth to keep from throwing up. Dani took a swig, too, wincing as it went down.

  “It is pretty gross,” she said, wiping her mouth on her wrist. “But believe me, you get used to it.”

  I took another swig, then another. It was a little less repellent each time. I was starting to feel more…I don’t know, at home, maybe. I felt like I was right where I was supposed to be. I settled back into Dani’s parents’ poofy pillows, and Dani joined me there, her bare shoulder just touching mine.

  Seaver froze the Giants’ hitter, a lefty, with a curveball at the knees for strike three. I pumped my fist. Two outs.

  “Maybe there is hope,” I said. “My man looks good.”

  “No, he’s laboring.”

  “What’re you talking about? He just struck the guy out looking.”

  “He’s not finishing his pitches.” She pointed at the screen. “Here, watch.”

  Seaver wound up and threw a riding fastball high and inside. The hitter danced out of its path.

  “There!” Dani said. “See that?”

  “See what? Just a little chin music, that’s all.”

  “You’re not looking.”

  “I am too looking.”

  “No, you’re not. Not if you don’t see how off he is today. The first rule of looking, Griffin, is to look.”

  Seaver wandered around the mound, rubbing the ball between his hands, scowling at its seams. It would’ve been awful to be that ball and have him looking at you that way.

  “I’m telling you,” Dani said, “he’s not finishing his pitches. Seaver gets his power from those big thick legs of his, driving toward the plate. But look at his right pant leg—there’s barely any dirt on it.”

  “So?”

  “So when Seaver’s right, he rotates his hips and follows through so completely that the front of his right pant leg always drags in the dirt. It’s usually filthy by the fifth inning, right on the knee, where no other pitcher’s uniform ever gets dirty.”

  “I never noticed that.”

  “Yeah, but today his knee’s not coming anywhere near the dirt because he’s not coming all the way toward Grote.”

  Seaver was back on the pitching rubber. He shook off a sign from Grote, then threw a breaking ball, which the batter bounced to Milner at first for the third out. During the commercials, one for Rheingold and another one I don’t remember, Dani and I took a couple more swigs of the booze, which we had taken to calling “Mr. Branca,” out of respect. I was feeling pretty excellent—until, that is, the broadcast came back on and Bob Murphy told us something that pretty much sank the Mets’ season then and there: Seaver had taken himself out of the game with a sharp pain in
his left hip.

  Dani and I groaned in unison.

  “Ohhh, that’s a terrible blow to the New York Metropolitans,” Bob said in that folksy, not-from-here way he said everything. Yogi Berra, our manager, was already trudging out to talk to the home plate umpire about the pitching change.

  “It’s over, Yogi!” I yelled at the TV. “The whole damn season.”

  Dani went and turned the volume all the way down. But even without sound, I couldn’t bear to watch anymore.

  “What was it you needed help with, anyway?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Help. You said you needed my help. That’s why you called me, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah yeah yeah, sure I do. Wait here a sec.”

  She came back a couple minutes later with a plastic serving tray containing a bunch of unusual items: a Popsicle still in its wrapper, some paper napkins, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a great big sewing needle, a few nipply-looking white-tipped matches, and a little square of wood that seemed to be a blank Scrabble tile. She pushed her mom’s hand mirror aside and set the tray down on the bedside table, on top of a small pile of Ms. magazines.

  “What’s all this for?”

  “Well,” she said playfully, “there are some things a girl can’t do herself.” She lay down flat on her back with her slender arms raised on the pillows above her, her burnished-copper hair spilling onto the white bedspread. “I’ve decided I’d look pretty fabulous with a single gold hoop earring. Kind of piratey, you know?”

  “I guess.”

  “So you’re gonna pierce my ear for me.”

  A prickle ran up my spine. I told her I didn’t think I wanted to do that.

  “Sure you do. I’ll talk you through it.”

  Dani held the unopened Popsicle to her left ear to numb it, squirming a bit at the cold. I sat on the edge of the bed. At her instruction, I struck a match and poked the needle tip into its flame, then put the needle aside for a second. I rubbed alcohol on her earlobe with the corner of a napkin, and she squirmed again.