‘Sure, fine,’ he said, and carried his plate into the kitchen before his father remembered that his irritation had a cause more specific than its usual source, his son’s adolescence.
After losing the yolky look of the afternoon, the sunlight had muted itself to a dispersed, fleeting shade of yellow that struck Mark Underhill with the force of a strong fragrance or a rich chord from a guitar. Departure, beautiful in itself, spoke from the newly shorn grass and infolding hollyhocks in the Shillingtons’ backyard. He thought he heard the scraping of an insect; then the sound ceased. He rushed toward his destination.
Beyond the defeated fence Jimbo had remarked lay eight feet of dusty alley, and beyond the alley rose the cement-block wall also remarked by Jimbo. If the wall fell over and remained intact, it would blanket fourteen feet of the alley with concrete blocks; and the triple strands of barbed wire running along the top of the wall would nearly touch Philip Underhill’s ruined fence.
Eight feet tall, fourteen feet long, and mounted with coils of barbed wire – Mark had certainly noticed the wall before, but until this moment it had seemed no less ordinary than the Tafts’ empty doghouse and the telephone wires strung overhead, ugly and unremarkable. Now he saw that while it was undoubtedly ugly, the wall was anything but unremarkable. Someone had actually gone to the trouble to build this monstrosity. The only function it could possibly have had was to conceal the rear of the house and to discourage burglars or other invaders from sneaking onto the property from the alley.
Both ends of the wall disappeared into a thick mass of weeds and vines that had engulfed wooden fences six feet high walling in the backyard on both sides like false, drastically overgrown hedges. From the alley, this vegetation looked impenetrably dense. In mid-summer, it oozed out a heavy vegetal odor mingling fertility and rot. Mark could catch a hint of that odor now, fermenting itself up at the heart of the weedy thicket. He had never been able to decide if it was one of the best smells he knew, or one of the worst.
That he could not see the house from the alley made him want to look at it again all the more. It was a desire as strong as thirst or hunger – a desire that dug a needle into him.
He ran up the narrow alley until he reached the Monaghans’ backyard, vaulted over their three feet of brick wall, and trotted over the parched, clay-colored earth softened by islands of grass to their back door, which he opened a crack.
‘Yo, Jimbo!’ he called through the opening. ‘Can you come out?’
‘He’s on his way, Marky,’ came the voice of Jimbo’s mother. ‘Why are you back there?’
‘I felt like coming up the alley.’
She appeared in the arch to the kitchen, coming toward him with an unsettling smile. Margo Monaghan’s smile was not her only unsettling feature. She was easily the most beautiful woman Mark had ever seen, in movies or out of them. Her watercolor red hair fell softly to just above her neck, and she combed it with her fingers. In summer, she usually wore T-shirts and shorts or blue jeans, and the body in these yielding, informal clothes sometimes made him feel like swooning. The woman smiling at Mark now as she walked to the screen door seemed not only to have no idea of how stunning she was, but to have no personal vanity at all. She was friendly in a half-maternal way, slopping around in her old clothes. Apart from her amazing looks, she fit into the neighborhood perfectly. His mother was the only person Mark had ever heard speak of Mrs Monaghan’s beauty. She opened the door and leaned against the frame. Instantly, Mark’s penis began to thicken and grow. He shoved his hands into his pockets, grateful for the roominess of his jeans. She made the situation infinitely worse by reaching out and stroking the top of his head with the palm of her hand.
‘I wish Jimbo would get one of those haircuts,’ she said. ‘He looks like a silly hippie. Yours is so much cooler.’
Mark needed a moment to realize that she was talking about body temperature.
‘What adventures are the homeboys getting into tonight?’
‘Nothing much.’
‘I keep asking Jimbo to show me what he can do on that skateboard, but he never does!’
‘We have a way to go before we’re ready for the public,’ Mark said.
She had the whitest, purest skin he had ever seen, more translucent than a young girl’s; it seemed that he could look down through layers, getting closer and closer to her inner light. The blue of her irises leaked out in a perfect circle into the whites, another suggestion of gauzy filminess contradicted by the luxuriance of the shape beneath the black T-shirt, which bore the slogan: 69 LOVE SONGS. It was one of his, borrowed weeks ago by Jimbo. His shirt, hugging Margo Monaghan’s shoulders, Margo Monaghan’s chest. Oh God oh God.
‘You’re a handsome kid,’ she said. ‘Wait till those high school vixens get their mitts on you.’
His face had become as hot as a glowing electrical coil.
‘Oh, honey, I’m sorry I embarrassed you,’ she said, rendering his embarrassment complete. ‘I’m such a klutz, honest –’
‘Mo-om,’ Jimbo bellowed, sidling past and nearly pushing her aside. ‘I told you, stop picking on my friends!’
‘I wasn’t picking on Mark, sweetie, I –’
If you wanted to drive yourself crazy you could remind yourself that fifteen years ago, Jimbo had crawled out from between Margo Monaghan’s columnar legs.
Jimbo said, ‘All right, Mom,’ and jumped down the steps to the backyard. Mark pressed a hand to a burning cheek and glanced at his friend’s mother.
‘Go,’ she said.
He jumped off the steps and caught up to Jimbo on the other side of the low brick wall.
‘I hate it when she does that,’ Jimbo said.
‘Does what?’
‘Talks to my friends. It’s creepy. It’s like she’s trying to get information.’
‘I don’t mind, honest.’
‘Well, I do. So what do you want to do?’
‘Check out that house some more.’
‘Yeah, let’s go to the dump and shoot rats.’
This was an allusion to a Woody Allen movie they had seen a couple of years before in which, faced with any amount of empty time, a brilliant guitarist played by Sean Penn could think to fill it only by shooting rats at the local dump. For Mark and Jimbo, the phrase had come to stand for any dumb, repeated activity.
Jimbo smiled and cast him a sideways look. ‘Only I was thinking we could go over to the park, see what’s happening over there, you know?’
On summer nights, high school students and hangers-on from all parts of town congregated around the fountain in Sherman Park. Depending on who was there, it could be fun or a little scary, but it was never boring. Ordinarily, the two boys would have walked to the park almost without discussion, understanding that they would see what was going on and take it from there.
‘Humor me, all right?’ Mark said, startled by the bright pain raised in his heart by the thought of not immediately going back
