across the room. When he reached the door, Mark pushed it open and shoved Jimbo out into the backyard. The door slammed behind them.
Faintly, Jimbo heard Linda Taft say, “Did you just smell something funny?”
In the world’s loudest whisper, Mark said, “He—was—there. Standing next to the door. Facing the wall, so all I could see was his back.”
“Yo, I felt something,” Jimbo said, still feeling as though he were mostly asleep.
“Tell me.
“Something terrible. It was like it was hard to breathe for a while. It sort of got dark, and Mrs. Taft was right, I smelled something nasty.”
Mark was nodding his head. His eyes seemed to have retreated far back in his skull, and his mouth was a tight line. “Damn. I wish you could have seen him, too.”
Jimbo offered his friend the thought that had spoken itself in his mind. “They would have seen him, too. Mr. Shillington and Mrs. Taft.”
“I doubt that,” Mark said. A faint smile touched his mouth, then faded. “But it would have been pretty interesting if they did see him.” He considered that possibility. “I guess I’m glad they didn’t.”
“I’m glad
“He doesn’t want you to see him.”
“Who is he?” Jimbo’s question came out in a small, strange wail.
“He must be the guy who used to live in that house.” Mark gripped Jimbo’s upper arms and for a wild second shook him like a rag doll. His eyes looked enormous and much darker than usual. “It’s obvious. And he’s the reason my mother’s dead. You know what that means?”
Jimbo knew, but decided to keep his mouth shut.
“It means you and I are for sure going to find out who the son of a bitch was. I want to look at his face. That’s what it means. And there won’t be any more argument about this, Jimbo.”
Jimbo realized that Mark had him, he was hooked. He was accepting the most outrageous aspect of Mark’s theory. He had bought into his friend’s crazy theory the moment he’d accepted what Mark told him he had seen in his kitchen. Once you take someone’s word about an invisible man, you are playing with his racquet on his court, and it is no use pretending otherwise.
“Aren’t you afraid?”
“I don’t think anything is going to happen to us if we go in there during the daytime.”
“Even if he is there, I guess I wouldn’t be able to see him, anyhow.” He had it in him to giggle, however nervously. “If I said, Fuck you, you’d do it by yourself, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course I would.”
Jimbo sighed as if from the soles of his feet. “So when are we going to do this thing I said I was never going to do?”
“Tomorrow morning,” Mark said. “I want us to have plenty of time.”
What do people in Millhaven do at ten o’clock on Sunday mornings in June? Most residents of Millhaven who attend church services are already back home, changed out of the shirts and pants they wore to St. Robert’s or Mount Zion—almost nobody in Millhaven wears a jacket and tie to church anymore—into T-shirts and shorts, and they’re already mowing their lawns or working at the tool bench. Some people are driving across town to see their mother, their brother, or their aunts and uncles. A lot of women are planning meals for the relatives who will show up in a couple of hours, ready for lunch. A lot of men are thinking about piling up the briquettes in the barbecue and wondering if they should drive to the store for some nice juicy pork ribs. A number of people are watching Charles Osgood on CBS’s
In the Sherman Park area, formerly Pigtown, chambermaids change sheets at the venerable St. Alwyn Hotel. Golfers pilot their carts, as happily as is possible for golfers, down the fairways at the Millhaven Country Club, where the groundskeepers are eyeing the greens. Hardy children thrash around in the big public swimming pools in Hoyt and Pulaski parks, where, at sixty-eight degrees, the water is still a little too cold for most people, no matter how young they are. Pop once took us all the way to Hoyt Park on a morning in June, and the cold water turned Philip’s lips cobalt blue.
On Superior Street, the only person left asleep is Jackie Monaghan, who will not slip groaning into a painful wakefulness for another two hours. Margo Monaghan is sliding a tray of cinnamon buns into the oven. In 3324, Philip Underhill sits on the threadbare, sagging green davenport and, ostensibly splitting his attention between the newspaper spread open on his lap and a strutting, roaring evangelist on TV, wonders about the identity of this Sherman Park Killer guy and how many kids he will cause to disappear before being locked up. On either side of brooding Philip, a brittle tranquillity pervades the Taft and Shillington residences. Ted Shillington is standing outside in his backyard, smoking, only half aware that his wife is glaring at him from the window above the kitchen sink. Putting away the breakfast dishes in an identical kitchen two houses south, Linda Taft shocks herself by hoping that Mr. Hank Taft might fall down dead of a heart attack before he comes in to ask her what’s for lunch.
In his abstracted and melancholy state, Ted Shillington barely registers the firehouse hair and loping gait of Jimbo Monaghan, who glides across his field of vision without saying a word. When Jimbo passes between the ugly eight-foot wall and the Underhills’ collapsed fence, Ted registers it not at all, nor the figure of Mark Underhill silently stepping over the fence to join his friend. The boys move quickly southward down the alley to Townsend Street, entirely unobserved by Ted Shillington, who has become aware that someone is watching him with a quality—to judge by the sensation at the back of his neck—akin to hostility. Unaware of the banality of this desire, he considers how marvelous it would be were his wife, Laura Shillington, and Linda’s husband, Hank Taft, to have inaugurated a secret passion so great that the two of them would flee Superior Street hand in hand. That could happen, he and she together, couldn’t it? Why should a solution so satisfying, so liberating, so sweet with absolution, be out of court? Why should that automatically be disallowed?
Wordlessly, the boys reach the bottom of the alleyway and begin the turn toward Michigan Street. Mark’s intent, fiercely concentrated presence beside him makes Jimbo see everything around him in heightened color: the cobbles at their feet glow a particularly poignant greenish-gray, for which he discovers he feels a kind of premature nostalgia, as if they have been, or are soon to be, lost; the dust at the alley’s sunny conclusion burns golden-brown. Jimbo has never seen such beautiful dust—yellow-white light irradiates the floating particles—and a nameless emotion grips his throat.
Around the familiar corner they go, onto dazzled Michigan Street. The sunlight hangs in a dense, shining curtain, through which they pass like spies, like thieves. It occurs to Jimbo that, unlike Mark, he’s pretty frightened, and he cuts the pace in half. Mark rakes him with a glance. “Keep moving, homey, nothing’s going to happen to you.”
“Swell,” Jimbo says.
No one sits on the porches up and down the street, though as far as Jimbo can tell, half the neighborhood might be staring at them through their windows. In front of the second house up on the west side of the street, three giant sunflowers appear to follow him with their single, enormous eyes. Rays of sizzling light surround each sunflower; everything before him, Jimbo notices, is defined by an electric, crackling outline.
Old Skip asleep on his porch is the quietest thing on Michigan Street, Jimbo thinks.
Mark moves up the sidewalk quickly but without obvious haste, and Jimbo does not leave his side. The pavement seems to move up and down with their footsteps, and 3323 breathes in and out, growing with each inhalation.
When Mark’s elbow raps against his ribs, Jimbo realizes that he has not been focusing. “Now we’re going to cut across the lawn, and we’re not going to run. Okay?”
Without waiting for a reply, Mark swivels off the pavement and begins walking across the grass at a nice easy pace. His legs swing out before him, his entire body lopes along, Mark’s effortless grace carrying him between the houses and out of sight before a casual observer would notice that he had left the sidewalk. Beside him, Jimbo feels that he moves like a mule, a camel, an ungainly beast incapable of picking up speed without redistributing its
