Motherless Brooklyn

A horn honked, the Impala’s, not the van’s. Then the brothers got out and came to the cyclone fence and waited for us to gather. Tony and Danny were playing basketball, Gilbert perhaps ardently picking his nose on the sidelines. That’s how I picture it anyway. I wasn’t in the yard when they drove up. Gilbert had to come inside and pull me out of the Home library, to which I’d mostly retreated since Tony’s attack, though Tony had shown no signs of repeating it. I was wedged into a windowsill seat, in sunshine laced with shadows from the barred window, when Gilbert found me there, immersed in a novel by Allen Drury.

Frank and Gerard were dressed too warmly for that morning, Frank in his bomber jacket, Gerard in his patchwork leather coat. The backseat of the Impala was loaded with shopping bags packed with Frank’s clothes and a pair of old leather suitcases that surely belonged to Gerard. I don’t know that Frank Minna ever owned a suitcase in his life. They stood at the fence, Frank bouncing nervously on his toes, Gerard hanging on the mesh, fingers dangling through, doing nothing to conceal his impatience with his brother, an impatience shading into disgust.

Frank smirked, raised his eyebrows, shook his head. Danny held his basketball between forearm and hip; Minna nodded at it, mimed a set shot, dropped his hand at the wrist, and made a delicate O with his mouth to signify the swish that would result.

Then, idiotically, he bounced a pretend pass to Gerard. His brother didn’t seem to notice. Minna shook his head, then wheeled back to us and aimed two trigger fingers through the fence, and gritted his teeth for rat-a-tat, a little imaginary schoolyard massacre. We could only gape at him dumbly. It was as though somebody had taken Minna’s voice away. And Minna was his voice-didn’t he know? His eyes said yes, he did. They looked panicked, as if they’d been caged in the body of a mime.

Gerard gazed off emptily into the yard, ignoring the show. Minna made a few more faces, wincing, chuckling silently, shaking off some invisible annoyance by twitching his cheek. I fought to keep from mirroring him.

Then he cleared his throat. “I’m, ah, going out of town for a while,” he said at last.

We waited for more. Minna just nodded and squinted and grinned his closemouthed grin at us as though he were acknowledging applause.

“Upstate?” said Tony.

Minna coughed in his fist. “Oh yeah. Place my brother goes. He thinks we ought to just, you know. Get a little country air.”

“When are you coming back?” said Tony.

“Ah, coming back,” said Minna. “You got an unknown there, Scarface. Unknown factors.”

We must have gaped at him, because he added, “I wouldn’t wait underwater, if that’s what you had in mind.”

We were in our second year of high school. That measure loomed suddenly, a door of years swinging open into what had been a future counted in afternoons. Would we know Minna whenever it was he got back? Would we know each other?

Minna wouldn’t be there to tell us what to think of Minna’s not being there, to give it a name.

“All right, Frank,” said Gerard, turning his back to the fence. “Motherless Brooklyn appreciates your support. I think we better get on the road.”

“My brother’s in a hurry,” said Frank. “He’s seeing ghosts everywhere.”

“Yeah, I’m looking right at one,” said Gerard, though in fact he wasn’t looking at anyone, only the car.

Minna tilted his head at us, at his brother, to say you know. And sorry.

Then he pulled a book out of his pocket, a small paperback. I don’t think I’d ever seen a book in his hands before. “Here,” he said to me. He dropped it on the pavement and nudged it under the fence with the toe of his shoe. “Take a look,” he said. “Turns out you’re not the only freak in the show.”

I picked it up. Understanding Tourette’s Syndrome was the title, first time I’d seen the word.

“Meaning to get that to you,” he said. “But I’ve been sort of busy.”

“Great,” said Gerard, taking Minna by the arm. “Let’s get out of here.”

Tony had been searching every day after school, I suspect. It was three days later that he found it and led us others there, to the edge of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, at the end of Kane Street. The van was diminished, sagged to its rims, tires melted. The explosion had cleared the windows of their crumbled panes of safety glass, which now lay in a spilled penumbra of grains on the sidewalk and street, together with flakes of traumatized paint and smudges of ash, a photographic map of force. The panels of the truck were layered, graffiti still evident in bone-white outline, all else-Gilbert’s shoddy coat of enamel and the manufacturer’s ancient green-now chalky black, and delicate like sunburned skin. It was like an X ray of the van that had been before.

We circled it, strangely reverent, afraid to touch, and I thought, Ashes, ashes-and then I ran away, up Kane, toward Court Street, before anything could come out of my mouth.