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Then there was the making of the skully caps. Metal bottle tops from soda or beer were the standard, and the slightly heavier tops lined with cork were best, though from time to time a kid would experiment with a plastic cap, or a wide metal one from some other type of jar or bottle, ketchup, even pickles or applesauce. The notion of a monster cap, one which would drive opponents off the board with crushing blows, haunted the institution of skully. But in practice the bigger caps were unwieldy, tended to hang across the boundary lines, and were painful to shoot hard across the board with flicked fingers. You could fool with a big cap before it was filled with wax but then it would skid and slide right off the board too easily, and anyway a cap not filled with wax wasn’t really skully. You wanted wax. Candles could be bought or “boosted”-shoplifted-from Mr. Ramirez’s bodega, or volunteered by Dylan from his mother’s bedside supply. And Dylan became an expert at melting the candles, an operation always performed on the stoop of the abandoned house in the cause of not freaking out either parents or “little kids”-though Dylan and Earl were still the littlest kids around, apart from a couple of mute girls in severe cornrows-with lit matches. Then damping the wax into the cap, so it hardened into a smooth whole without seams or bumps, one which wouldn’t pop out when struck by an opponent’s cap. Like a tiny factory Dylan made rows of perfect skully caps and lined them up along the stoop: vanilla Yoo-Hoo with pink wax, Coke with green, Coco Rico, the cork of the cap still stinking of sugar, with white.
Strangely, after Dylan’s rapid rise to chief alchemist and philosopher of skully, nobody seemed to want to play the game anymore. Dylan presided over an ideal slate which was persistently shirked, deserted in favor of just about anything including standing around Henry’s front yard with hands in pockets, kicking at one another’s ankles and saying, “Fuck you, motherfucker.” Perhaps the Dean Street kids had never really been able to keep their attention on skully but only on the attendant crafts, on puzzling out the tradition. So much easier to tell a younger boy that he didn’t know to play skully than to have to play him to take his caps away, and what good were the caps anyway? Everybody lost their caps or even perversely threw them at the passing bus to watch them ding harmlessly and go wheeling into the gutter. Maybe skully sucked. Maybe to perfect a thing was to destroy it.
The Solver girls moved away. That was the first surprise. One day they were gone. Isabel Vendle peered out her window and saw the van, the movers tramping down the stoop with liquor-store boxes loaded with books and glassware, the girls on the sidewalk in the skates that seemed to grow from their ankles, whirling untouchable as ever, one final taunting pirouette. The girls’ parents hadn’t paid Isabel the courtesy of saying a word, hadn’t apparently known they were lines in a blueprint drawn by Isabel, founding participants in her Boerum Hill. So at the very start the circle shrank.
It didn’t matter much to Dylan, though. The Solver girls had gone to Saint A
She made it sound important. Dylan didn’t want to disillusion Rachel, but in fact each day his time in the classroom at P.S. 38 was only a prelude to affairs on the block. Kids in school didn’t look at each other, they looked at the teacher. Nobody Dylan knew from the street was in his class except Earl and one of the silent girls from Marilla’s yard. Henry and Alberto and the others were older and though they were presumably at the same school might as well have been in some other galaxy during the hours Dylan spent listening to Miss Lupnick teach the alphabet or how to tell time or what were the major holidays, hours Dylan spent reading the classroom’s small collection of tattered picture books over and over until he’d memorized them, hours spent abstracted, scribbling his pencil, drawing utopian skully boards with ten, twenty, fifty corners, drawing rectangles like frames of his father’s painted film and filling them in until they were entirely black. The alphabet Miss Lupnick taught was represented on the wall above her head by a series of personified cartoonlike letters-Mr. A, Eating an Apple; Mrs. B, Buying a Broom; and so on-and something insipid about the parade of gri
The kids in your first-grade class might be in your second-grade class or you might never see them again. It might not matter. Even the ones you knew from the block you didn’t know in school. Dylan tried to touch his nose with his tongue until someone told him to stop. One or two kids didn’t ask to go to the bathroom until it was too late and they’d peed in their chair. One kid scratched his ear until it started bleeding. Sometimes Dylan could barely recall first grade seconds after bursting out onto Dean Street again.
The strange and unfortunate Abraham Ebdus might actually be on to something, she admitted privately. Time was indeed a series of days, and the film of the block’s changing was as static as a series of hand-painted frames, considered singly. The New York Times had put her new name for the neighborhood into print, Boerum Hill -that was something. But Isabel Vendle wished to see the film in motion now, the frames run together, trees hurrying in the wind instead of dying in the humid stillness, the abandoned house unbricked and rescued. Growth, process, renovation. The only thing that moved on the block were the boys in the traffic, like insects skating on the surface of a still pond, the one white skimming among the black. The incinerator at the Wyckoff Houses housing project was on fire every other day, or so it seemed, a plume rose which the air refused to dissolve. A single man had bought the house with the terrible blue siding and threatened to renovate so slowly that it might as well be never. He lived in one room near the back and renovated from the inside out so that no one could tell the house wasn’t a ruin. It was a ruin, the block was hopeless, and Pacific Street was progressing more quickly than Dean. Isabel wished she could tear away the blue siding with her own hands, an idiotic thought, but nevertheless: she wished she could paste money over the blue siding which stung her eyes like ointment, wished she could slather money over Dean Street entirely, could bribe the man with the car with the painted flames to polish it on Pacific or Nevins instead or just to drive it into the Gowanus Canal. She didn’t actually have so much money as that. She had white paper and envelopes and stamps and days which refused to end-a thunderstorm might break the heat and an hour afterward the humidity clamped itself over the block again as though no thunder had struck. She wrote to Croft, who’d gotten another woman on the commune pregnant, I’m ru