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Abraham frowned at the bound wrists, the crust at the IV’s point of co
“Does he eat?” asked Abraham finally.
The nurse rolled her eyes. “He eat if he want to. He spit in da meal at breakfast. We can no make anybody eat you know.”
“I want to speak to a doctor,” Abraham concluded peremptorily.
“Doctor come at four o’clock, no here now.” She budged Abraham aside to fuss with the dial regulating the IV’s drip, showing her command. “Is no need of a doctor here.”
“Your supervisor, then.”
The nurse clucked, said nothing. She and Abraham Ebdus went together into the hall, the nurse’s white sneakers shrieking on the tile. Dylan was left alone with the man in the bed.
Abraham might be this man’s champion, but he’d never done more than groan a curse or two at Abraham. Dylan he knew, and seemed to sense now; they’d spoken before. His bruised lids fluttered open.
“Little white boy.”
Was Dylan going to be asked to surrender his spare change? What use could the captive flying man have for fifty cents or a dollar here in the hospital, strapped to a bed frame? Instinctively Dylan felt in his pockets, didn’t find anything.
“Get up here. Cain’t see.”
Dylan obeyed.
“You seen me.”
No question, but Dylan nodded.
“Hah. Hah. Go in that drawer.” Not unscrewing his screwed-up eye, he nodded at the small cabinet beside the bed, where flowers would be set if anyone were setting flowers. “Yass, that drawer, get in it!”
Dylan tugged at the drawer, fearing to find some hellish hypodermic the flying man would want stuck in his arm.
Only a corroded plastic wallet, thin like a bus-pass holder. Driver’s license, issued in Columbus, Ohio, 1952, to Aaron X. Doily.
And the silver ring the flying man had worn on his pinky.
“Thassit, thassit.”
“The ring?”
“I’m done, I’m through, man. Cain’t fight the air waves.”
“You want-?”
“Take it, man.”
By the time Abraham Ebdus and the nurse ran back to the room the man in the bed was deep into his screaming throes of withdrawal or D.T.’s or whatever, sweat broken everywhere on his body, contortions wrenching the bed frame. The bounds held, so that body and bed became one shape rattling, shivering in agony. He found the IV pole and knocked it to the floor, bag bursting yellow spill everywhere. The kid was pressed to the far wall, but not panicked, watching coolly. Nurse harrumphed to broadcast her unsurprise: this only went to show and was all in a day’s etcetera. Abraham, having achieved no satisfaction from the higher-ups at the nurses’ station in the corridor, gathers the poor kid, who’s been punished enough by now you’d have to think, gets him out of there. The man’s bellowing is insane. It’s frankly hard to take.
Dylan Ebdus with a ring gripped in his first, the fist buried deep in his pants pocket, the ring itself pulsing in his sweaty fingers as though it were a token, a tiny fragment of the mad paroxysm of the man in the hospital bed, now borne covertly away into the breezy Fort Greene afternoon.
“What was he saying?” Abraham asked his son gently, once they’d gone a few blocks, the yellow insanity of the hospital receding into dream.
Dylan Ebdus just shrugged. The flying man, he’d said a lot of things.
The last-it couldn’t actually have been “Fight evil! ” could it?
chapter 10
Summer’s start, 1977: various persons are sprung, various terms and sentences completed. For instance here’s Barrett Rude Senior, six years served on a ten-to-fifteen, now paroled on good behavior, dressed in the green sharkskin suit and worn wingtips he’d been tried in, at a Greyhound’s window seat as it courses a circular ramp into the guts of Port Authority, midtown towers doubled in the smoked glass’s reflections and dancing with the engine’s vibration. His only baggage, a hard leather briefcase tucked upright between his ankles, contains legal papers, a certificate of ministry in the Church of the Parlor of God, and a pair of photographs-teenage Barrett Junior and his then-thirtyish, now-late mother in one, fifth-grade school head shot of Mingus gri
Cut to Aaron X. Doily, passing through this same bus station a week later. He’s got a bus ticket for Syracuse pi
Peek ahead further, another two weeks: there’s Dylan Ebdus himself climbing aboard a bus, destination sign reading SAINT JOHNSBURY, VERMONT. Abraham Ebdus nodding goodbye through the tinted pane. Abraham’s got a grudge against the city these days, and a new penchant for exiling those he wishes to protect, first the detoxified Doily and now his own son, to the north, to New England ’s countryside. Dylan’s signed up to be a Fresh Air Fund kid this summer. What was good enough for Rachel, a Fund-ee back in the fifties, ought to be good enough for Dylan. This scheme she would have approved; father and son both sense it, impossible not to. Abraham’s hunch will seem brilliant after the July blackout, the subsequent looting and mayhem which comes as near as Ramirez’s bodega, whose sprays of smashed shopwindow will be kicked up and down Dean’s slate for days after, and the spree and capture of Berkowitz. These give that season an air of disaster, and Dylan, safe in his idyll, will miss it.
But wait, Dylan’s not bound for Vermont, not yet. He’s not even thinking about it. Today’s the first morning after the last afternoon of seventh grade. Spring is sprung, and so is he. I.S. 293 is behind Dylan Ebdus for now, he can go three months not crossing Smith Street if he likes. Eighth grade’s a distant rumor, a tabled issue, and Dylan knows from experience that the summer between might change anything, everything. He and Mingus Rude too and even Arthur Lomb for that matter are released from the paint-by-numbers page of their schooldays, from their preformatted roles as truant or victim, freed to an unspoiled summer, that inviting medium for doodling in self-transformation. Who knows how it’ll come out, what they’ll resemble by the end of it? All Dylan knows is he’s giddy, loosed, flying.