The Ambidextrist. Peter Rock
wooden heads sneer angrily, vertical cracks in their faces; they rest on thick columns, making it seem their bodies are encased or hidden behind.
“Usually it means someone’s trying to get away with something,” the guard says.
“Doesn’t it make you want to smile back?” Scott says.
“I’m working,” the guard says.
It is about time, after all, to return to the heat outside. Admission is free, Sunday mornings, and Scott has been inside almost all day. Nothing straightens him like the colors of the paintings, the cold rooms of statues. Now he walks past the Indian temple hall, stone people balancing the roof on their heads, and then finds one of the smaller, side stairways, and descends toward the coat check. He feels strong, full of anticipation. A window runs the length of the stairs, and through it he can see the dark water of the Schuylkill, its curves mirrored by the highway. Closer, a forty foot woman stretches across a billboard wearing a spangled white bathing suit and pantyhose, reclining with her blond hair thrown back. He can’t make out the words beneath her, nor the letters on the smokestacks spitting up black clouds. Trains come and go into the switching yards at 30th Street Station, heading out only to circle back.
He retrieves his pack from the coat check, then heads outside, onto the museum’s front steps. It is late afternoon, still getting hotter. Taking off his jacket, he jams it into the top of his pack. He likes to feel the sun on the skin of his arms.
Straight ahead, towers of glass stretch from the center of the city; to his right, a gilded horseman shines gold, blinding. Scott sits near a small fountain, where black girls play, screaming and splashing each other. Some wear bathing suits and others just T-shirts, their colored underwear showing through. Red, blue, flowered. One little girl leaps up, smiling, and flips her middle finger at her friends. The others laugh.
The sun shines heavily, not letting up; Scott wishes he had a hat. All he wants is to get a good look at the woman. Her name is Ruth. He does not want to talk to or touch her. Not yet. He knows you have to be ready for someone, to make it worth their while. It would be enough to see her in the sun, swinging her hips as she walks, shielding her eyes from the glare. Ruth. If she would only come outside and see him there, look at him, even if it is only a glance, her eyes passing over him, their slight pressure joining the heat of the sun. But too much time has gone by now, and she and the boy must have gone out the back way. Scott has missed her. Standing, he starts away from the fountain. A tour bus stops at the bottom of the steps, and people swarm up and past him, speaking all kinds of words he cannot understand.
“Look at that nigger come,” Darnay says, and Terrell and Swan laugh, watching John walk along the river, toward them. The empty train tracks run on his other side; the tops of cars are visible, sliding along the Market Street bridge, above and behind him.
Terrell knows it’s a bad feeling to be the last to arrive, to know the other three have been together without you, talking where you can’t defend yourself or cut one of them in return. John is closer now, his lips moving in a silent rap as he approaches, jeans slung low to show the band of his underwear. The boys are only thirteen, but they’ve known each other for years; they knew John long before he even cared that he’s white. He wears a Phillies cap, sideways and high, so they can see straight through the mesh, to the gravel path behind him. His hair is reddish, and his face is a little puffy. Freckled. Reaching out, he slips his palm against theirs, pulling it smoothly toward him. There’s no grip, no slap.
“What up?”
“Nothing.”
“Got lots to do.”
“Word,” John says.
Now they’re all here, and they look at each other, silent for a moment, uncertain where to begin. All the air around them is motionless, hot and damp. Across the river, the train station bakes white in the sun. The boys stand on the strip of gravel and dirt, fifty feet from the fence to the river, the train tracks in the middle. Along the fence, a snarl of bushes and trees hides the parking lot and on-ramp; above, the museum’s roof settles against the sky. Things between the four of them feel different, uneasy, everyone growing at different speeds and in different ways. A year ago, Terrell had been the smallest, and now he’s as tall as John and Swan. Darnay never stops growing. He speaks first.
“We do the tats,” he says, “then the test.”
“Dope,” John says.
“Dope?” Terrell says. “No one says that anymore.”
“What do they say?”
“Not ‘dope.’”
“What are we doing here?” Swan says.
Terrell smells his own sweat, feels the hot metal rail through the rubber sole of his shoe. The idea of tests had been Terrell’s, though Darnay acts like he thought of it. He takes things over that way. Terrell watches Swan; everyone will have their own test, and Swan’s is first. Each will be different.
“Test is set up for four-thirty,” Darnay says, and they all look up at the TastyKake billboard, its red-handed clock next to a giant donut. It’s about quarter to three.
“I brought the magic marker,” Terrell says to Darnay. “You seen this done?”
“Yeah,” Darnay says. “No, not really. I heard it described, though, a couple times.” He takes the cap off the marker and waves them all closer.
Each boy will get the first letter of his own name, with the rays of the sun around it. First, Darnay draws them on with the marker. He has a few whiskers, like dirt under his chin; he turns his head and there’s a D shaved into the back. His mother is a hairdresser.
“Let it dry for a second, or it’ll smudge,” he says.
The tattoos will be on their hips, below their belts, where their parents are least likely to see them—not that their parents are all around, or would care. Swan’s foster parents wouldn’t ever notice; John’s parents would. Darnay could say someone did it to him, held him down. He and Swan live in North Philly, where that kind of thing can happen—being from there gives them some authority, some experience. No one plays on the street up there. They get bused to school, into John and Terrell’s neighborhood. Next year, it’s high school.
“No one’ll see them,” Swan is saying. “And that’s the point—we’ll know they’re there. That way we can’t be split up.”
Darnay reaches into his pocket and drops a handful of matchbooks on the ground. From one, he takes a needle, and begins sharpening it on the sandpaper strip of one of the matchbooks. He touches the needle’s point, then sets it aside. He takes four cards of plastic pen refills from his socks—stolen from somewhere—and opens one. A capsule in his fingers, he tries to bite off the top; it explodes, dark blue, all down his arm.
“Just stick the needle in,” John says. “Through the plastic.”
Darnay nods like that’s obvious. His teeth are blue, and he’s spitting into the gravel, trying to get the ink out of his mouth.
“I’ll go first,” he says.
“I’ll do it,” John says. “I’m down with it.”
“That’s a pretty big needle Swan says.
“If it’s small,” Darnay says, “then you got to stick it in a million times.”
“It’s going to hurt,” Terrell says, then catches himself. “That’s all right.”
“It’s supposed to hurt,” John says. He sticks the needle into an ink refill, then into Darnay’s hip, following the line made by the marker. Darnay—lying on his side, holding down the waistband of his pants—is either