Lost Boy Lost Girl

“And maybe your head was up your ass,” said Bisbee. “Boys, pardon my French.”

“Up hers, more likely,” said Livernoise.

“That is right,” Pop said. “You boys are too young to know about sex, but it’s never to early to learn a few facts. Sex is an activity shared between men and women, but we enjoy that activity more than they do. It’s different with every person. Sometimes it’s a lot better than others.” He paused, and his face fell into a pattern of serious reflection. For the first time I realized how drunk he was. “Don’t tell Mom anything about this, or I’ll knock your little blocks off. I mean that.” He pointed his finger at us, and left it there until we nodded.

“All right. The point is, with this third woman, the sex is always great. Unless it’s really terrible, but that’s pretty rare, and for those women, the terrible sex works almost the same way as great sex does for the rest of ’em. Because the point is, either way you’re gonna think a lot about that woman. See, these women aren’t interested in the stuff the first two are. They don’t want to get in your wallet, they want to get into your head. And once they get in there, they send down roots, they throw out grappling hooks, they do everything they can to make sure you can’t get them out.

“Remember I said how they don’t care about that stuff like jewelry and houses and whatever else money can buy? They want something else instead, and that something is you. They want you. Inside and out, but especially in. They don’t really want you out in the world, where you can mess around with your friends, they want you in their world, which is a place you never dreamed of before you got there. For all you know, the sky there is red all the livelong day, and up is down, and all the rivers run upstream.”

“Daddy, why is the sky red?” Philip asked, evidently having considered this point for some time.

“To burn the shit out of little knuckleheads like you,” Pop said. His hideous cronies cracked up.

I have often imagined that Philip turned out the way he did because of the kind of person Pop was. Maybe my brother would be the same uptight, ungenerous, cautious prick if Pop had been someone like Dag Hammarskjold, or even Roy Rogers, but I don’t think so.

Sometimes, at odd moments during the day and always completely unexpectedly, I remember the little boy seated next to me in the Saracen’s booth asking, “Daddy, why is the sky red?” He makes me feel like weeping, like battering my fists against the desk.

16

Mark followed Jimbo through the door with the sudden and unanticipated sense of having found himself at a hinge moment, from which point everything in his life would divide itself into before and after. It was a watershed he had passed at the very moment of its observation. He had no idea why he should have the sense that nothing would be quite the same again, but to deny that sense would be like lying to himself. The perception of the watershed moment, with himself at its center, was almost instantly surpassed by the next moment, in which a tremendous tectonic shift had already happened, leaving him with his second great impression of the morning, that the kitchen, and by implication the rest of the house, was far emptier than he had imagined.

Side by side, he and Jimbo took in a perfectly ordinary, empty room that had been left to itself for the past three or four decades. On the floor, the flurry of their footprints carved tracks in the thick carpet of dust. Fox-brown stains blotched the flaking yellow walls. The room felt extraordinarily hot. The air smelled musty and lifeless. The only sound Mark could hear was Jimbo’s breathing and his own. So it was true, he thought; in the daytime, they were safe here.

At first glance, the kitchen seemed to be around the same size and shape as the kitchen in Mark’s house. The arch to the dining room seemed to replicate its counterpart across the alley. The rooms might have been a bit smaller. Apart from the absence of a stove and the refrigerator, the great difference between this room and the Underhill kitchen lay in the wall to his left, the one that replaced the exterior wall at home. This wall had no window to look out upon the brief length of grass leading to the next house. It seemed never to have held the spice racks and shelves for cookbooks, little figurines of dogs and cats, and china miniatures of shepherds and shepherdesses that stood in that position in the Underhill household. What it had instead was the door, snugly fitted into the frame, he had noticed the last time.

“Well?” Jimbo nodded at the door in a you-first manner.

“We’ll get to that,” Mark said. “First, let’s look out the front windows and see if anybody noticed us.”

“Yo, whatever,” Jimbo said, acting cooler than he felt.

Mark moved across the room and discovered, just as he was about to pass through the narrower of the two arches, that the house was not as empty as he had supposed. A shrouded, boxlike object that could only be a table beneath a bedsheet occupied the middle of the dining room. Through the wider arch beyond he could see the shapes of other pieces of furniture draped in sheets. When the owners decamped, they had left behind two good- sized chairs and a long sofa. Why would anyone move out and leave good furniture behind?

With Jimbo breathing noisily in his ear, Mark went through to the living room. Remembering what Jimbo had thought he had seen, and his own vision, or half-vision, of the day before that, Mark looked for footprints in the dust. He saw only tracings, loops and swirls like writing in an unknown alphabet inscribed with the lightest possible pressure of a quill pen. Neither Jimbo’s threatening giant, his own monstrous figure of warning, or the girl could have made these faint, delicate patterns. The same hand, that of neglect, had scrawled its ornate but meaningless patterns on the walls. These had faded to the colorlessness of mist—as if you could punch your hands through the unreadable writing and touch nothing more substantial than smoke.

17

Of course nobody saw us,Jimbo thought, nobody ever really looks at this house. Even when the neighbors get together to mow the lawn, they pretend they’re somewhere else. And the last thing they ever do is look in the windows. We could dance naked in here, and they wouldn’t see a thing.

While Mark gazed at the walls and saw God knows what, Jimbo moved toward the big front window without, despite what had just gone through his mind, getting so close to it that he could easily be seen from the street. Deep striations in the film over the glass caught the light and stood out like runes.

With the passing of a cloud, the bright streaks and swirls on the window heightened into beaten gold, a color too rich for late morning in the Midwest. Within Jimbo, something, a particle of his being that felt like remembered pain, moved as if it had been touched. A sense of bereft abandonment passed through him like an X ray, and in sudden confusion he turned from the window. The sheets sagging over the furniture in the living room spoke of a thousand lost things.

Jimbo turned back to the window. The golden runes had faded back into the gaps between smears of dust that offered him an oddly unexpected vision of Michigan Street. Directly opposite stood two houses, the Rochenkos’ and Old Man Hillyard’s. Although Jimbo knew exactly what these structures looked like, it was as if he had never quite seen them before. From this vantage point, the Rochenko and Hillyard houses seemed subtly different in nature, remote, more mysterious.

A sound like the rustle of fabric over fabric reached Jimbo from somewhere close at hand, and he jerked his head and looked over his shoulder at . . . what? Some white scrap, briefly visible in the murky air? He was spooked enough to ask, “Did you hear that?”

“You heard something?” Mark took his hand from the wall he had been examining and looked at Jimbo in a manner far too intense for his liking.

“No. Sorry.”

“Let’s start upstairs, or down here—with that.” Mark only barely nodded toward the kitchen and the rear of the house. “Upstairs, what do you say?”

Why ask me?Jimbo wondered, then realized that he was being told, not asked. “Makes sense to me,” he said. “And what are we looking for, exactly?”

“Whatever we can find. Especially anything with a name on it—like envelopes. We can always Google a name. Pictures would be good. ”

One flight up, the stairs ended at a bleak hallway and the narrow, steeply pitched flight of stairs to the attic.