The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem Read Free Book Online Page B

had clung to this one face, bent over the slates as though they were sheets of Spirograph paper on the floor of his room, not noticing until too late that they were part of an edifice which curled past Bond and Nevins Street, into the unknown. He’d sooner take Isabel’s letters all the way to Atlantic Avenue to the post office than walk around the corner to Buggy’s. He didn’t trust Bergen Street. He could feel the sidewalk tilt there.
    Robert Woolfolk sat draped on the stoop beside Buggy’s, leaned back just as he had been on Henry’s the day of the fight, the knuckles of his knees seeming higher than his shoulders though they rested two steps lower. Dylan stopped there before the store, commanded. The sun of the day made a desert of light all around them, and the traffic was still and distant. Dylan could see the bus up near Smith Street, where it seemed to rest at a tilt, fatigued. Dylan heard church bells.
    “You work for that old lady?”
    Dylan tried to shake his head for a thousand reasons. He thought of Isabel swimming in her bed, the nearest authority for miles. Or there was Buggy and her dog, a pane of glass away, but they were entombed inside a cave of products, rice, bicarbonate, Nestlé’s Quik. The store was so dark inside Dylan imagined Buggy would wilt if she ever stepped out into the sun.
    “You got her money in your pocket?”
    Dylan was certain he’d said nothing.
    “How much you got?”
    “I have to buy milk,” Dylan said dumbly.
    “How much she pay you for doing her errands, a dollar? You got it on you now?”
    “She gives it to my mother,” Dylan lied spontaneously, amazing himself.
    Robert only turned his head quizzically, lazily, and swung his hand where it dangled from the step, as though just then discovering his wrist’s capacity for motion. His slung weight didn’t cleave from the stoop.
    The two of them were in a rehearsal for something, Dylan sensed. How much of something, and whether it was personal to him and Robert or larger than that, he couldn’t yet say.
    So he stood frozen while Robert continued to examine him.
    “Go buy milk,” Robert said at last.
    Dylan moved for Buggy’s door.
    “But if you come around here with that old lady’s money next time I might have to take it off you.”
    Dylan recognized this as a sort of philosophical musing. He was grateful for the implied sense of pooled information. He and Robert could move forward together from this point into whatever was required.
    “Tell Henry fuck you,” added Robert in a meaningless flourish.
    Dylan ducked his head inside the dark, cheese-acrid storefront. Buggy’s German shepherd snapped up to the limit of its chain behind the counter, whining into a single pointed bark, and Buggy floated out of the back like a pale bloated pickle in a jar to hover at the register. When Dylan emerged with the brown sack of groceries Robert was gone.
     
    It was a whole week and Sunday morning again before Dylan found his voice. Abraham was in his high room, Rachel in her garden, Dylan stewing alone in his room as he dressed at noon, the ritual time. Downstairs he paused in the kitchen calculating his defection, then went down the backyard stair. He approached his mother where she kneeled on the cold ground beneath the bare ailanthus, hacking with a trident at a network of unwanted roots, cigarette smoldering from between her lips. The cigarette’s filter was smudged with mud. Rachel wore jeans and an orange denim jacket and a Dodgers cap. Rejected blooms lay heaped in a pile of green and brown that bleached and shrank in the air as Dylan stood watching.
    When he opened his mouth Robert Woolfolk was left out of the story.
    “Poor old Vendlemachine. So don’t work for her, kiddo.”
    “I tried to tell her, though.”
    “What do you mean you tried?”
    “I said it two times.”
    “You’re kidding me, Dylan.”
    “She pretended not to listen.”
    “Just ignored you?”
    Dylan nodded.
    “Come on,” she said. She