ancestors came from. Like the old women in
Jimbo glanced at Tim, bit the inside of his cheek. “He thought maybe there was something inside there that could explain why his mom was dragging around like she was. Something like pictures, or old papers, or what, bloodstains, even.” The boy looked profoundly uneasy, and a trace of anger flashed in his eyes. “He wanted to get a look at it. That’s how it went down. Since that one day, we never saw anything or anybody in there, and nobody went in or out, either. If the Sherman Park Killer ever used to hide out there, it sure looked like he took off. And you know what?”
The anger flared again in the boy’s face.
Tim said, “I have no idea.”
“He didn’t trust me. That jerk. He was going to go against his precious promise, and he didn’t want me along.”
“Jimbo, for God’s sake, what did he do?” Tim asked, knowing that he was getting somewhere at last.
“He broke in—he smashed a hole in the rear window, and he got inside. He told me about it afterward, but right then he wanted me out of the way. So naturally, the asshole lied to me.”
In a cell-phone conversation after dinner that night, Mark had surprised Jimbo by suggesting that they see what was happening at the fountain. If they went together, they would surely be safe from whatever had befallen the missing boys. The greatest danger they faced was that Sherman Park would wind up being even more boring than hanging out on Michigan Street.
Mark’s proposal delighted Jimbo, who wished to stay as far as possible from the man whose eyes had found him through his father’s binoculars. And although by going to Sherman Park they would undoubtedly be breaking the letter of their vows—they might as well be honest about it—the meaning, the soul, of the vows remained intact, since the presence of half a dozen cops like Officers Rote and Selwidge guaranteed the continued well-being of any adolescent within a hundred-foot radius of the fountain. Actually, their parents should have been begging them to spend their evenings in Sherman Park.
Up the alley they went, Jimbo feeling a happy relief at the return of their customary occupations. So much of the past few days had the flavor of dreamlike confinement in someone else’s irrational designs. Now he felt an unexpected lightness of spirit, as if he had been set free in a restored world.
On West Auer Avenue, a man in a gray University of Michigan football T-shirt, gray cotton shorts, and flip- flops was washing a dark blue Toyota Camry in his short double-wheel-track driveway. Heavy-looking muscles stood out on his arms and legs while he scrubbed the Camry’s hood. As the boys approached, he looked toward them and smiled. Helplessly, they fell into their homeboy stroll.
“Ah, youngbloods,” the man said. “How y’all doin’ tonight?”
“Hangin’ in there,” Jimbo said.
The man leaned against his car and smiled at them. “That seems to be working out just fine. Be sure to take care of yourselves, all right?”
The day was still hot, and the shops still stood open. Bored clerks lounged against counters, sneaking looks at their watches. Widely separated cars trolled along the boulevard. The only other people on their side of the street were an old woman bent nearly parallel to the sidewalk and a man who recently had been thrown out of a liquor store. He was aiming punches at a parking meter. The old woman carried a string bag containing a single head of iceberg lettuce.
“I’d really like to get out of this nowhere town,” Mark said. “I should e-mail my uncle Tim and ask if I could come to New York and stay in his place.”
“Would he let you?”
“Sure he would, I think. Why wouldn’t he?”
Jimbo shrugged. A second later, he said, “Maybe I could come with you.”
“Maybe,” Mark agreed. “Or I could just go and send you a postcard.”
“You fathead skell.”
“No, you’re a fathead skell,” Mark said, and for a time the two of them sniggered like children.
“A lot of great-looking women live in New York. They’re all over the place, bro. They’re lining up at every Starbucks in the city.”
“Yo, and what would you do with them?”
“I know what to do,” Jimbo said.
“You know what to do with your right hand.”
“I didn’t hear any complaints from Ginny Capezio,” Jimbo said.
“Ginny Capezio? Give me a break. She’s so hopeless, she’d go down on that guy.” He waved toward the rummy, who had finished punishing the parking meter and seemed now to be looking for a soft place to lie down.
Virginia “Ginny” Capezio had administered brisk oral sex to a number of the boys in Quincy’s ninth grade, among them Jimbo but not Mark. According to Ginny, oral sex did not count as actual sex.
“You’re jealous, that’s all,” said Jimbo.
He was jealous, Mark silently admitted, but of Jackie Monaghan, not his son. Also of everybody who had ever had sex with an attractive, or even a semi-attractive, woman. Ginny Capezio had fat legs and the disconcerting beginnings of a mustache, which her father forbade her to remove. Mark did not suppose that his inventions concerning a gorgeous and brilliant girl named Molly Witt, who after having been universally desired at Quincy had left the previous year, had ever convinced Jimbo. Mark wasn’t even sure why he had lied about Molly Witt. It had happened in a weak moment, and after that he was stuck with it. Fortunately, they now reached the street corner diagonally across from the park’s entrance, and checking the traffic to make sure they could run across the street without waiting for the light to change gave him an excuse to ignore Jimbo’s remark.
They trotted across the street, and the same thought floated into two heads, that they should have brought their skateboards. The paths and benches, in themselves no less suitable for skateboards than the building site’s ramps, converged at the wide, curved bowl of the fountain, which was large enough for some halfway serious fun.
Knowing nothing of the shadows gathering about them, the boys began walking toward the fountain on the broad, long path, imagining their skateboards bumping and rumbling over the grooved stone flags. Imagined pleasure would be all the pleasure to be enjoyed at Sherman Park that evening: a small group of boys in baggy jeans perched on the lip of the fountain, ignored by two police officers who appeared to be talking to their girlfriends on their cell phones but were probably engaged in official business.
To look upon this scene was depressing; to join it would have been unthinkable. In a single shared gesture, the boys wheeled around and drifted toward the nearest bench. One of the policemen gave the boys a quantifying once-over.
Jimbo jumped to his feet and said, “What are we going to do?”
“I think I’ll go home,” Mark said. “I don’t feel very good.”
They returned the way they had come, past the nearly empty stores and the rows of houses beside driveways leading nowhere. The athletic-looking man washing his Camry waved as they passed him, and they waved back. They turned into the alley and walked the fifty feet to the Monaghans’ backyard.
“Want to come in?” Jimbo asked.
“Not now,” Mark said. “Tomorrow, we’ll hack around on our boards, okay?”
“Okay.” Jimbo pretended to punch Mark’s stomach, grinned, and jogged across the backyard to his kitchen door.
Mark waited until Jimbo had gone inside before continuing down the alley. At its southern end, he turned right onto Townsend, then right again onto Michigan Street, where he walked slowly up the block on the west side of the street, checking the porches for people who might see what he was about to do.
If someone had asked Mark what he intended to do, he would have said,
Satisfied that no one was watching him, he moved at twice his normal pace up to the property line at 3323,
