for speed. Mark rolled downhill after him. Six feet ahead, Jimbo swung through the corner, popped himself onto the sidewalk, and kept sailing until he reached the alley, where he jumped off his board, scooped it up, and ran toward his house. Mark trotted along in his wake, thinking that whatever Jimbo wanted to take from his house, he was pretty dedicated about it.
Then he remembered: the fancy binoculars.
“Wait here,” Jimbo called over his shoulder, sprinting across his backyard to the kitchen door. The light over the sink burned yellow in the window; behind it, light from the living room washed a long rectangle across the floor. Mark heard Jimbo’s voice raised in argument, then his father’s voice, louder and more aggrieved. He settled down to wait.
By slow degrees, the air thickened and gathered itself. At his feet, the separations between the cobblestones filled with shadows. A familiar alto voice drifted from the kitchen window, calm and soft as a summer cloud. His mother at his shoulder, Jimbo reappeared in the door. For an instant, Mark wished he could let Jimbo go his way while he slipped into the kitchen to spend an hour with Margo Monaghan. The door closed, and his ideal woman disappeared. Jimbo came bouncing toward him, carrying a leather case in one hand and in the other, something black that looked like a club. He held his skateboard clamped against his side. When Jimbo reached the end of his backyard, Mark saw that the club was a Maglite.
“That isn’t going to work, you idiot,” he said. “When you shine a flashlight on a window at night, you just see the reflection.”
“If you’re holding the flashlight, yeah. But what if I hold the field glasses, and you hold the flashlight?”
“It won’t work,” Mark said.
“You don’t want it to work. You don’t want me to see your girlfriend.”
“My girlfriend, sure.” At the center of his being, Mark knew that his friend was right; he wanted this experiment to fail.
Up on Michigan Street, streetlamps cast shining pools of light. Unnoticed, night had come upon them. The sky seemed one shade lighter than the inky blue of the earth. A single star pierced the great bowl above.
“I still don’t see how this can work,” Mark said.
Jimbo switched on the big flashlight and shone it directly into Mark’s face, dazzling him. “You look scared.”
“I’m not scared, you blinded me!” Mark raised his hands in front of his eyes.
“Move over there and stand still.” Jimbo lowered the flashlight and swept the beam in a long, erratic arc onto the pavement in front of the Rochenko house. “Get over there. I’ll keep marking the spot.”
“Where will you be?”
“Never mind, just get to your spot.” Even more irritated than he had been earlier, Mark moved into the street and walked toward the yellow ellipse cast on the sidewalk by the Maglite. Bright windows showed television screens. A middle-aged black man in a Cubs T-shirt sat in his living room reading a hardback book the size of a dictionary. In the next living room uphill, an obese white man of no determinate age in a mesh T-shirt propped a can of beer on his gut. The streetlamps hung silhouetted against the oddly light sky, soon to darken. Except for the warmth of the evening, the look of the street reminded him of wandering in costume down this street on Halloween night and imagining, half in pleasure, half in terror, that occult presences shared the evening.
When he reached the spot, the ellipse disappeared at a click from the Maglite. He set down his board.
“Okay,” Jimbo said. “One sec.”
Indistinct in the wide lane of darkness between lampposts, he jogged toward Mark. The binocular case swung on its strap like a fat handbag. When he reached Mark, he passed the heavy flashlight into his hands. Mark switched it on, and a streak of yellow light cut through the air and pooled on an empty lawn. Jimbo hissed, “Turn it off!”
“Don’t pee in your pants, Jim Boy,” Mark said, obeying. “All right, now what?”
“Now I go over there and get ready to give you the word.” He was pointing back across the street to a position ten or fifteen feet down the mild hill. “Don’t do anything until I tell you to.”
“You are so annoying,” Mark said.
“Yo, who started this? Me? Wait for the signal.” The skateboard still clamped beneath his elbow, the leather case dangling from one hand, Jimbo swung away and sauntered diagonally down the street. He seemed to be moving with deliberate lack of speed, as if to maintain his own composure while shredding his friend’s.
Jimbo mounted the opposite curb and took a few additional paces downhill to the western edge of 3323’s plot line. He lowered his skateboard to the narrow strip of grass between sidewalk and curb and fiddled with the strap of the case. Mark could barely see what he was doing. A small, bulky object that must have been the binoculars separated from its container, and Jimbo bent over to lower the case to the ground. He straightened up and toyed with the binoculars before raising them to his eyes. Mark thrust the Maglite out before him like a baton. He placed his thumb on the switch.
Jimbo lowered the glasses again, shook his head, fiddled with the lenses, and once more raised them to his eyes. Getting the house into focus seemed to take him an eternity. Mark thought,
Neither did he, it came to him: not this way. They were doing it all wrong, coming at it from the wrong angle, invasive and clumsy. If he had truly seen the slow dance of advance and withdrawal he thought he had seen, that person, that young woman, that girl was going to hate what they were about to do.
A millionth of a second earlier, the absolute certainty of having seen a young woman in the house had taken root in his mind.
Jimbo steadied the field glasses. He commanded, “Now!”
Unhesitatingly, Mark pushed the switch, and a fat ray of light from the eye of the Maglite cast a wide, dull yellow circle on the front of the porch. Even before Jimbo ordered him to do it, he raised the circle to the window. The flat circle of light spread across the glass like an oil stain.
Jimbo stiffened and jumped backward. With uncoordinated, almost spastic movements, he lowered the binoculars and staggered to the edge of the sidewalk, dragging the binoculars along the ground. His feet wandered from beneath him. He folded over, went down, and struck the lawn bottom first. His trunk toppled backward, and his legs twitched.
Mark hit the button on the Maglite’s shaft, and the light snapped off. In the sudden darkness, he could make out Jimbo lying like a corpse on the lawn in front of 3325. Fear probed Mark’s stomach. He was not sure he could move. A second later, he found that he had already begun to walk across the street.
His mind felt curiously empty; he felt strangely empty all over, as if he were a blank sheet of paper waiting for a pencil’s rough, awakening bite.
Jimbo’s hands lay limp at his sides, his head back against the grass. Mark knelt beside him and watched his eyelids fluttering. A combination of anxiety and fear made him want to kick his friend in his ribs.
Jimbo blinked up at the sky. He licked his lips.
“What did you see, man?”
“Whoo.” Jimbo was staring straight up.
“When I put that light on the window, you jumped backward about a foot. Then you
“Well, that’s your story.” Jimbo’s face seemed drawn and sunken, as if suddenly aged. “Here’s
Mark got the glasses from the sidewalk and handed them to him.
“Where’s my board?”
Mark found it with the flashlight, and Jimbo got up and gathered it in so slowly it seemed that his joints ached. He turned around and held out a hand for the Maglite, which he shoved into his waistband. Mark walked around the corner and into the alley with him, but Jimbo remained silent until they reached the ruined fence and the concrete wall. “See you tomorrow,” he said, telling Mark to go no farther.
