The Gargoyle Hunters

by John Freeman Gill

  On a third card, postmarked 1913—again from the same vantage point, looking down Broadway from Chambers—the Gothic, drip-castle tower of the Woolworth Building had risen to its full, world-topping height, lording it over the Singer Building and everything else. Just below the Woolworth’s pinnacle, my eye was drawn to a small, energetic architectural element jutting over Broadway from the northeastern tourelle: my gargoyle! In the intervening years, before I severed him from his home, that vivid watchful skybeast must have witnessed both that big post office and the Singer Building being smashed to rubble. And now, just a handful of blocks downtown from where I stood, the mighty World Trade Center loomed over the Woolworth, nearly twice its height, having transformed the Cathedral of Commerce, in the eyes of most, into a quaint afterthought in the city skyline.

  I flipped through some more antique cards: grand vanished hotels, mansions, and clubs—the Manhattan Club, the Union League Club, the Progress Club—each with dates and locations printed on the back. Some of the cards were organized in stacks held together with rubber bands. I stuffed a brick of them in my shirt pocket and another brick in each of my back pockets. They were awfully uncomfortable. If I wandered over to the piers and happened to fall into the Hudson, the weight of the lost city would pull me under for good, as surely as the cement shoes of any mob victim.

  In the bottom of the chamber pot, uncovered when I removed the cards, was an age-browned clipping from an 1856 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. “New York is notoriously the largest and least-loved of any of our great cities,” the story said. “Why should it be loved as a city? It is never the same city for a dozen years altogether. A man born in New York forty years ago finds nothing, absolutely nothing, of the New York he knew. If he chances to stumble upon a few old houses not yet leveled, he is fortunate. But the landmarks, the objects which marked the city to him, as a city, are gone.”

  A bit of action was stirring down the block. An old man and woman, both dressed head to toe in purple and wearing oversize fly-eye glasses, were filling an industrial laundry cart with oddments. Grinning and chattering to each other, they moved antically from pile to pile in their floppy purple hats, occasionally holding up an artifact for the other’s approval. I wandered over to check out the objects in their cart, whose randomness, I found, unaccountably enraged me.

  That wasn’t the only thing bothering me, either. I had an idea that the pointy bulge in the woman’s purply tie-dyed shoulder bag might just be the mast of my radio-controlled Lightning sailboat. I couldn’t imagine actually wanting to play with that boat anymore—I was too old for that now. But after piecing the vessel together with my own hands, right down to the filament-thin hawsers and the tiny cleats, I didn’t like the idea of its living in someone else’s home. I imagined the boat cloistered lonely in the darkness of that bag’s insides.

  “Um, excuse me, miss?” I said, half pointing with a crooked index finger at the purple lady’s purple bag. “But if that’s a sailboat in your bag and you, um, got it from one of these piles of stuff? Well, then I think it’s possible it might actually be mine.”

  For a moment there came no answer, and I was about to repeat myself when the purple lady suddenly wheeled on me, bared her big beige teeth like a rabid squirrel, and shrieked in my face with the primal ferocity of a woman whose baby is being yanked from her arms: “What? WHAAT?! You think…you OWN…the STREEET?”

  39

  IT WASN’T JUST MY FATHER who was missing that fall; it was Dani, too. She never seemed to be home when I phoned and never called back with an answer to all my messages asking if she was coming to visit over Thanksgiving vacation. When I finally did reach her, it was obvious from the startled, peevish way she said, “Oh, hi, Griffin,” that taking my call had been an accident.

  She was not sympathetic when I tried to tell her about my father’s eviction and the lousy luck I was having searching for him. She listened awhile in silence before interrupting me: “You know I know it’s bullshit, right?”

  “What’s bullshit?” I was thoroughly taken aback.

  “All this garbage about you not knowing where your dad is. You steal shit for him, you’re his little right-hand man and everything, and you honestly expect me to believe you have no clue where he’s living?”

  It took a whole lot of probing and arguing before she finally told me what this was all about: the Laing folder.

  “A few weeks ago Mom got so tired of me asking why we couldn’t move back to the city that she finally told me the real reason Dad had to leave Columbia—that he was such a drunk, he’d lost the whole freakin’ folder for, like, his most important project. But then when she said it was the weekend of my birthday party last year that it disappeared, I totally realized it was you who took it. I mean, I saw you blunder into my room from his study with your backpack. And the more I heard about how screwed up that Laing project ended up getting, the more obvious it became to me you must’ve stolen the folder for that weird business of your dad’s.” Her disgusted sigh blew through the receiver. “I can’t believe a word that comes out of your mouth, Griffin, and I don’t want you calling me anymore. Okay?”

  I was so stung by her anger, so shamed by both my guilt and my ignorance, that I could barely speak. The few words I could get out did nothing to convince her that I didn’t even know who Laing was, much less what was in his folder.

  “I thought you were on my side,” she said. “I mean, here I am, stuck in this fucking awful Stepford Wives suburb where nothing ever happens, and now it turns out that it’s all because of you.”

  40

  ZEV DIDN’T ANSWER HIS BUZZER. The old tailor downstairs, his shriveled head as intricate as the carved knob of a walking stick, looked up from a pinned hem long enough to tell me that he did know Zev but hadn’t seen him in some time.

  How odd that I’d worked with a guy all those months without ever learning his last name. I couldn’t get his phone number without it, so I’d just have to keep coming back until he was home.

  Or maybe not. Turning the corner on King Street to get back to the subway, I had a stroke of luck: there at the curb midblock, parked on an angle, stood the Good Humor truck. In the slanting November light, the brushstrokes of house paint over the phantom Popsicle looked more textured than before, the anatomy of the concealment more visible.

  I peered inside the passenger-side window. Nothing much in there. Take-out wrappers and a bottle of fabric softener on the seat, sand and dead leaves on the floor mats. Wait—fabric softener?

  The windows of the Laundromat down the block were too fogged for me to make out anything but hazy forms moving around inside. One of them turned out to be Zev, putting a badly folded pair of jeans on a pile of other badly folded jeans.

  He gave me a surprised grin when he saw me come in. “Perfect timing, Griff. Can you give me a hand with one of these?” He nudged one of his two laundry sacks with a boot toe. “Truck’s parked a few doors down.”

  The back of the ice cream truck was filled with tools and spackle buckets and two more bulging laundry bags.

  “What’s with all this laundry?” I asked.

  “Been away awhile.” He was looking at me funny. “You mind helping me schlep this stuff upstairs to my place?”

  He got behind the wheel and leaned across to unlock the passenger door. “Here, let me get this junk out of your way.” He swept his arm across the seat beside him like the clearing mechanism on a bowling lane, knocking to the floor a crumpled white paper bag and a sheet of creased wax paper with a crust of something in it.

  The truck smelled of cigarette sweat and tartar sauce.

  “My dad got evicted from the warehouse,” I told Zev as he began the short drive back to his apartment. “Or at least his stuff did.”

  Zev nodded. “Well, it was only a matter of time, I guess. DeCarlo is certainly not known for his patience when someone owes him money.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that.

  “Do you think he’d hurt D
ad over that back rent?”

  Zev thought it over. “Maybe, maybe not,” he said. “They do go way back. Besides, he’d have to find your father first. And that, as you probably know by now, is no mean feat.”

  I turned in my seat and looked at him sharply. “Do you know where my dad is?”

  “Yeah,” Zev answered after a pause. “Sure I do. I’ve been helping him out. Was helping him out.” He turned a corner, more aggressively than necessary. “Never again, that’s for sure. No one talks to me that way. No one. Especially after all the crazy things I’ve done for him.”

  “Where is he? Is he at his Manhattan place now?”

  “The warehouse? You just said he was evicted.”

  I paused. “No, I mean his Men-hatin’ place.”

  Zev looked at me, startled. “You know about that?”

  “Sure,” I bluffed. “But where is it exactly?”

  “I can’t tell you that, sorry. I gave him my word.” He tightened his fists around the steering wheel. “But it’s just as well, Griffin, believe me. You’ve already lost him. We all have. It’s really better that you stay away.”

  Something was poking me in the butt. I fished around on the seat under me and found the culprit, an object so unexpectedly familiar, even across such a distance of years, that seeing it actually made me flinch with recognition. It was a blue plastic swordfish, flat and see-through. The kind of thing they pierce through sandwiches to keep them from falling apart. On its side was a stylized letter S whose bottom curve ended in a little fishhook barb. My butt had snapped the poor swordfish in half at the base of his pointy nose. I pocketed both pieces anyway.

  “Here we are,” Zev said, trying to sound upbeat as he pulled up in front of his walk-up.

  “Yup,” I said. I got out and headed up the street toward the subway again.

  “Wait,” he called after me. “Aren’t you gonna help me with my laundry?”

  I turned a moment to answer. “No time,” I said. “There’s someplace I just realized I need to be.”

  41

  IN From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, a popular children’s book Quig hated because it involved running away from home, two suburban kids get to New York City by finding a commuter train ticket with one unpunched adult fare left on it. My method for funding my trip in the opposite direction—out of town—was admittedly less clever: I swiped the cash from Monsieur Claude’s billfold. I figured he owed me—if not for wolfing down so many breakfasts that by rights should’ve gone down the gullet of a certain growing boy, then as a penalty for repeatedly afflicting my eyeballs with the ghastly sight of his saggy sweatpants and pallid Gallic posterior.

  —

  Port Authority. Don’t make me describe its foulness in any detail. Just imagine a bus terminal tucked deep down in one of the more rancid and overstuffed corners of Smaug the dragon’s colon, several hours after he’s taken top honors in a hobbit-eating contest.

  The bus seats were threadbare and uncomfortable. I used my blue duffel as a pillow, and tried not to think how much easier this trip would be if Dani were traveling with me, if my father hadn’t driven her out of my life with that whole Laing business.

  From my spot near the bathroom in the back, you could hear the septic fluids sloshing around mintily as the driver made the wide turn into the Lincoln Tunnel. After the initial assault of ugliness when we emerged into New Jersey—the electrical plants and the gas stations and the choking tangle of infrastructure—the highway unspooled through an increasingly green and uncomplicated landscape, the sort of comparatively verdant remoteness that passes for nature to a native New Yorker.

  My bus window was either childproof or broken. After a struggle, I managed to slide it open a few inches, enough to feel the air growing chillier and thickening with salt. Did they still have softshell-crab sandwiches this time of year?

  —

  After the bus dropped me off across from the Echo Harbor General Store, which was closed for the day, I headed over to visit Mrs. Krauss, the old lady who adopted all the cats abandoned by the summer people every Labor Day. Maybe I longed for something solidly familiar amid the disorienting wash of memory, or maybe I thought she might have seen Dad.

  I was immediately sorry I’d come. There were no cats. There was no old-lady tricycle. The cottage had been torn down and replaced by a bigger and swankier bungalow that shouldered its way out to the property line. A station wagon sided with fake wood panels was parked at the curb. A preppy dog, one of those golden Irish setter retrievers that annoying happy families always have, sat at prick-eared high alert on the porch, the way all house pets do when heavy weather is coming.

  It was weird how well my body knew its way around, even though I didn’t remember many street names. The round cedar picnic tables were right where I remembered them on the deck of the Sandcastle, our family’s favorite seafood place, which stood as always at the end of one of the many narrow canals Echo Harbor was known for. My stomach gave me a little rumble of reminder that I was supposed to be providing it with a softshell-crab sandwich, but the Sandcastle was all boarded up. Someone had printed a note in block letters with a Sharpie on the plywood nailed over the door:

  TO “OUR CUSTOMERS,”

  HOPE TO SEE YOU AGAIN SOON AFTER EMMA BLOWS THROUGH.

  —“NORMA AND ED”

  God, it made me crazy when people used quotation marks for no good reason.

  HEY, “NORMA”! I thought. WHY DON’T YOU AND “ED” DO US ALL “A FAVOR” AND LEARN HOW TO WRITE “AN ENGLISH SENTENCE”? AND WHILE YOU’RE AT IT, HOW ABOUT STICKING AROUND TO SERVE A HUNGRY KID A “CRAB SANDWICH” OR TWO?

  At the Sandcastle, you had to order something on bread if you wanted one of those blue plastic swordfish that Quig and I always used for our epic swordfights. She usually ordered a BLT. I got the softshell-crab sandwich, whose fried claws I enjoyed dangling in her face.

  The bungalows in Echo Harbor were mostly of two kinds: charmless, one-story rectangles that looked like boxcars with windows, and pitched-roof cottages resembling human-scale birdhouses. Mrs. Krauss’s place had been the boxcar kind, while ours was a birdhouse, complete with a little round window just beneath the peak. Most were arrayed along the canals, which had been created at the same time the original developer filled in the area’s marshland with landfill he could build on. In summer, many of those houses had boats tied up out back.

  Alive with families and recreation in my memory, Echo Harbor was bleak and windswept this time of year, particularly with a tropical storm hurrying up the coast for a visit. The windows of most of the houses I passed were X’d with masking tape. Some were sealed with plywood.

  Even with daylight slipping from the sky, it was easy finding our old bungalow. It was one of the exposed ones right on the beach, looking out at the Great Bay and its distant island and the ill-tempered ocean beyond. The house looked pretty much the same as I’d remembered it, that basic birdhouse shape with the deck, except that its seaglass-blue paint on the ocean side was peeling off in long, thin strips. As with all the houses directly facing the sea, its windows were boarded up.

  I suppose it was unrealistic to expect to find Dad sitting in a director’s chair in the living room waiting for me. Or a potful of Spaghetti alla Gargoilara warming on the stove. When I peered through the glass-louvered side door, it was clear enough from the sheets over the furniture inside that no one was home.

  No house key hung on the nail where it used to live, so I found a length of metal flashing among the debris under the house and used it to pry out one of the glass louvers on the side door, as I’d once seen Dad do when he lost his key. From there, all I needed to do was tear a hole in the screen and reach my hand through to unlock the door.

  Nothing and everything had changed. The musty beach-house smell was exactly the same. I went around and yanked the sheets off the furniture with a series of presto! wrist flicks, revealing each time a tired wicker chair or a cheesy, nautical-themed table edged
with rope. The floor had been painted an unforgivable bright yellow since our time, but in the chair-scraped ring surrounding the dining table you could still make out traces of the eggplant-purple floor Mom always loved, as well as intervening layers of green and blue. What lives, what losses, had played out in this room during the green and blue eras? Had the people who lived those lives ever regarded the chair scrapes and wondered about the eggplant-purple days our family had spent here before them?

  My stomach felt scooped out with hunger. The fridge, of course, was empty, its door propped open with a Kadima paddle to keep mold from growing in there during the winter. The mice had already gotten to the Quaker oatmeal I found in a cabinet. But there was plenty of canned stuff. I cranked open some Chef Boyardee and forked it into my mouth right out of the can.

  The family room was artificially dark with its big windows sealed up for the winter. I found a cat’s claw in the tool closet under the stairs and used it to pry off the plywood nailed to the outside of the window frames.

  All the beds had been stripped down to their mattress pads. I went from room to room, gathering whatever folded sheets and blankets I could find. These I unfolded and piled up on my old cot at the top of the house, right under that small round window beneath the roof peak that at bedtime had always made me feel like a little bird tucked away in safety.

  Without removing my down jacket, I crawled under the mound of bedclothes and hugged them around me for warmth. They had the same old mildew smell as ever, mildly unpleasant yet comforting in its familiarity. If I craned my neck just a bit I could see out the little round window, where night was falling over the Great Bay like a scratchy charcoal blanket, obscuring the distant tuft of Fish Island. Every so often the clanging of an unseen buoy called out from the water, lonesome and arrhythmic.