Read Online The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem - Free Book Online

She knew Brooklyn in ways he didn’t. He walked the periphery of Wyckoff Gardens, not crossing into the grounds, the maze of walkways and hedge and low Cyclone fence, not knowing where to start if he did. Light soured in the shade of the graffitied white brick of the projects. They seemed designed as future ruins. He put his head into a Puerto Rican social club on Bond Street, a small hangar full of cardplayers. Before he ducked out he registered a tiny pool table, blue carpeted walls, the tang of malt-stale cork. Nobody spoke to him.
    But by the end of the afternoon word was out, somehow. A woman with a baby stepped out of her door, seemingly angry at him for wandering. Abraham’s family was possibly famous for being white, fools. She passed the child back inside and led Abraham around to a vacant lot on Baltic, a fenced yard filled with debris shot through with ailanthus sprouts, the mongrel trees which grew as fast as a crack in a windshield spread under pressure of a fingertip. The heap of crushed baby carriages and rotted lath with clinging bits of plaster and torn tin ceiling made a pattern with which Abraham Ebdus refused to permit his eye to become fascinated. The bicycle was on top of the pile, above his head, flung there who-knew-how, its blue curved fender twisted like a splintered wing. Give it another day and the ailanthus might have shot through the spokes. He had to climb the fence and ended up tossing the bike to the ground to free his hands. No one was inclined to help, though some watched. He wasn’t sure it mattered to rescue the bicycle. If it had been stolen for use by another child, maybe. But this, this gratuitous trashing, was just the street’s incomprehension, its resistance. That shadows stood sipping from paper bags as he struggled down to join the bicycle on the pavement was only appropriate, matched his mood. The bicycle was defeated, and Abraham Ebdus wondered why he’d taught the boy a useless skill. He knew Rachel required he bring the bicycle home for repair but suspected the boy would never choose to ride it outside of the dirt of their backyard.
     
    Marilla and another girl were waiting, playing jacks at the base of Dylan Ebdus’s stoop.
    Marilla sang in crazy falsetto The prob-lem is you ain’t been loved like you sho-huh-hood, what I got will sure-nuff do you good—
    The other girl—Dylan recalled that Marilla called her La-La, wondered if that could really be her name—scooped jacks between ball bounces, counting with a slurred inrush of breath whoosies , whreesies , whorsies , whivesies . The game was splayed beneath his bottom step so he couldn’t pass. He sat on the third step from the bottom and watched.
    “Robert Woolfolk says he didn’t take your bike and if you say he did he’s gonna mess you up,” Marilla announced suddenly.
    “What?”
    “Robert said don’t go saying he took your bike since he didn’t even.”
    “He said he’d fuck you up,” clarified La-La. Her hand darted in distraction to fumble eightsies , the jacks scattering.
    “I didn’t say—” he began, thinking he hadn’t, hadn’t said a thing.
    The bicycle was in Abraham Ebdus’s studio, its fender straightened and decorated now with Dylan’s name in his father’s brushwork hand. Soon it would be downstairs again, leaning in the hallway like a stuffed animal, a blind chrome elk loaded with his parents’ expectation and Dylan’s dread.
    Marilla shrugged. “I’m just saying.” Squatted like she was peeing, her ass an inch above the slate, she seized the tiny red ball and swept the jacks up, and sang You refuse to put anything before your pri-hi-hide—what I got will knock all that—uh—pride aside!
    “Robert told you to say it?”
    “Nobody told me nothing, I’m just saying what I heard. You got a dollar for some candy, Dylan?”
    Who was on the block? Was Henry in his yard? Was Robert Woolfolk there?
    Dylan Ebdus’s head twitched, trying not to look. His fingers clenched the