Lost Boy Lost Girl

7 (#ulink_c901ff41-7eb6-5ea9-917e-5480d237f0c5)

MARK’S OBSESSION HAD begun quietly and unobtrusively, as simple curiosity, with no hint of the urgency it would so quickly acquire. He and Jimbo had been out with their skateboards, trying simultaneously to improve their skills, look at least faintly impressive, and irritate a few neighbors. Over and over they had seen it proved that the average adult cannot abide the sight of a teenage boy on a skateboard. Something about the combination of baggy jeans, bent knees, a backward baseball cap, and a fiberglass board rattling along on two sets of wheels made the average adult male hyperventilate. The longer the run, the angrier they got. If you fell down, they yelled, ‘Hurt yourself, kid?’

Unsurprisingly, the city of Millhaven offered no skateboarding venues with half-pipes, bowls, and purpose-built ramps. What it had instead were parking lots, the steps of municipal buildings, construction sites, and a few hills. The best parking lots tended to be dominated by older kids who had no patience with newbies like Mark and Jimbo and tended either to mock their equipment or to try to steal it from them. They did have amazingly good equipment. Mark had seen a Ledger classified ad placed by a dreadlocked twenty-year-old hippie named Jeffie Matusczak who was giving up the sport to pursue his spiritual life in India and was willing to sell his two boards for fifty dollars apiece. They went on the Internet and spent the last of their money on DC Manteca shoes. Their outfits looked great, but their skills were drastically under par. Because they wished to avoid ridicule and humiliation, they did some of their skateboarding in the playground at Quincy; some on the front steps of the county museum, far downtown; but most of it on the streets around their houses, especially Michigan Street, one block west.

On the day Mark’s obsession began, he had pushed himself past the entrance to the alley, rolled up to Michigan Street, and given the board a good kick so that he could do the corner in style, slightly bent over, his arms extended. Michigan Street had a much steeper pitch than Superior Street, and its blunt curves had donated a number of daredevil bruises to the forearms and calves of both boys. With Jimbo twenty or thirty feet behind him, Mark swung around the corner in exemplary style. Then it took place, the transforming event. Mark saw something he had never really, never quite taken in before, although it had undoubtedly been at its present location through all the years he had been living around the corner. It was a little house, nondescript in every way, except for the lifeless, almost hollowed-out look of a building that had long stood empty.

Knowing that he must have looked at that house a thousand times or more, Mark wondered why he had never truly noticed it. His eyes had passed over its surface without pausing to register it. Until now, the building had receded into the unremarkable background. He found this so extraordinary that he stepped backward off his board, pushed sharply down on its tail, and booted it up off the street. For once, this stunt worked exactly as it was supposed to, and the nose of the skateboard’s deck flew up into his waiting hand. Jimbo rumbled up beside him and braked to a halt by planting one foot on the ground.

‘Stellar,’ Jimbo said. ‘So why did you stop, yo?’

Mark said nothing.

‘What’re you looking at?’

‘That house up there.’ Mark pointed.

‘What about it?’

‘You ever seen that place before? I mean, really seen it?’

‘It hasn’t gone anywhere, dude,’ Jimbo said. He took a few steps forward, and Mark followed. ‘Yeah, I’ve seen it. So have you. We run past that stupid place every time we come down this street.’

‘I swear to you, I have never, ever seen that house before. In my whole life.’

‘Bullshit.’ Jimbo stalked about fifteen feet ahead, then turned around and feigned boredom and weariness.

Irritated, Mark flared out at him. ‘Why would I bullshit you about something like this? Fuck you, Jimbo.’

‘Fuck you, too, Marky-Mark.’

‘Don’t call me that.’

‘Then stop bullshitting me. It’s stupid, anyhow. I suppose you never saw that cement wall behind it either, huh?’

‘Cement wall?’ Mark trudged up beside his friend.

‘The one behind your house. On the other side of the alley from your sorry-ass back fence.’

The wooden fence Philip Underhill had years ago nailed into place around a latched gate at the far end of their little backyard sagged so far over that it nearly touched the ground.

‘Oh, yeah,’ Mark said. ‘The wall thing, with the barbed wire on top. What about it?’

‘It’s in back of this place, dummy. That’s the house right behind yours.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ Mark said. ‘Right you are.’ He squinted uphill. ‘Does that place have numbers on it?’

Rust-brown holes pocked the discolored strip of the frame where the numerals had been.

‘Somebody pried ’em off. Doesn’t matter. Check out the numbers on the other side. What are they?’

Mark glanced at the house closest to him. ‘Thirty-three twenty-one.’ He looked at Jimbo, then carried his skateboard up the low hill until he was standing in front of the abandoned building and read off the numbered address of the next house in line. ‘Thirty-three twenty-five.’

‘So what’s the address of this one?’

‘Thirty-three twenty-three,’ Mark said. ‘Really, I never saw this place before.’ He began to giggle at the sheer absurdity of what he had said.

Jimbo grinned and shook his head. ‘Now we got that out of the way –’

‘They had a fire,’ Mark said. ‘Check out the porch.’

‘Huh,’ Jimbo said. The wooden floor of the porch and the four feet of brick below the right front window had been scorched black. These signs of an old fire resembled a fading bruise, not a wound. The place had assimilated the dead fire into its being.

‘Looks like someone tried to burn it down,’ Jimbo said.

Mark could see the flames traveling along the porch, running up the bricks, then subsiding, growing fainter, dying. ‘Place wouldn’t burn,’ he said. ‘You can see that, can’t you? The fire just went out.’ He stepped forward, but not far enough to place a foot on the first rectangular stone of the walkway. There was a bemused, abstracted expression on his face. ‘It’s empty, right? Nobody lives there.’

‘Duh,’ said Jimbo.

‘You don’t think that’s a little unusual?’

‘I think you’re a little unusual.’

‘Come on, think about it. Do you see any other empty houses around Sherman Park? Have you ever heard of one?’

‘No, but I’ve seen this one. Unlike you.’

‘But why is it empty? These houses must be a pretty good deal, if you’re not completely racist, like my dad.’

‘Don’t leave Jackie out,’ Jimbo said. ‘He’d be insulted.’

A well-known foe of skateboards, Skip, old Omar Hillyard’s even more ancient, big-nosed dog, pushed itself to its feet and uttered a sonorous bark completely empty of threat.

‘I mean,’ Jimbo went on, ‘it’s not one of those places with whaddyacallems, parapets, like the Munster house. It’s just like all the other houses in this neighborhood. Especially yours.’

It was true, Mark saw. Except for the narrowness of the porch and the beetle-browed look of the roofline, the building greatly resembled the Underhill house.

‘How long do you think it’s been empty?’

‘A long time,’ Jimbo said.

Tiles had blown off the roof, and paint was flaking off the window frames. Despite the sunlight, the windows looked dark, even opaque. A hesitation, some delicacy of feeling, kept Mark from going up the walkway, jumping the steps onto the porch, and peering through those blank windows. Whatever lay beyond the unwelcoming windows had earned its peace. He did not want to set his feet upon those stones or to stand on that porch. How strange; it worked both ways. All at once, Mark felt that the house’s very emptiness and abandonment made up a force field that extended to the edge of the sidewalk. The air itself would reject his presence and push him back.

And yet …

‘I don’t get it. How could I miss seeing this place before today?’ He thought the house looked like a clenched fist.

Jimbo and Mark spent the next two hours rolling down Michigan Street, sweeping into curved arcs, leaping from the street onto the sidewalk, jumping off the curb back into the street. They made nearly as much noise as a pair of motorcyclists, but no one stepped outside to complain. Whenever Mark eyed the empty house, he half-expected it to have dissolved again back into its old opacity, but it kept presenting itself with the same surprising clarity it had shown when he’d first rolled around the corner. The house at 3323 North Michigan had declared itself, and now it was here to stay. His obsession, which in the manner of obsessions would change everything in his life, had taken hold.