Lost Boy Lost Girl. Peter Straub
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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 down the alley. ‘Come on, look at something with me.’
‘This is such bullshit,’ Jimbo said. ‘But okay, do your thing.’
Mark was already moving down the alley. ‘You’ve seen it a thousand times before, but this time I want you to think about it, okay?’
‘Yo, I can remember when you used to be sort of fun to hang with,’ Jimbo said.
‘Yo, I can remember when you still had an open mind.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘No, fuck you.’
Feeling obscurely improved by this exchange, they walked down the alley to the point between Mark’s backyard and the concrete wall.
‘Look at that thing. Just look at it.’
‘It’s a concrete wall, with barbed wire on top.’
‘What else?’
Jimbo shrugged. Mark gestured toward the tangle of vines and leaves erupting from the sides of the wall.
‘Plus all that crap,’ Jimbo said. ‘And lots of plants around the sides.’
‘Yeah, the sides. What’s on the sides?’
‘Like fences, or big hedges.’
‘What’s all this stuff for? Why was it put here?’
‘Why? To keep other people off his property.’
‘Take a look at the other houses on this block. What’s different about this one?’
‘You can’t get in there without a hell of a lot of grief.’
‘You can’t even see in,’ Mark said. ‘This is the only house in this whole neighborhood that you can’t see from the alley. Does that tell you anything?’
‘Not really.’
‘The guy who put this up, whoever he was, didn’t want anyone looking at his backyard. That’s what all this stuff is for, to keep people from seeing it.’
‘You’ve been thinking about this way too much,’ Jimbo said.
‘He was hiding something. Look at that humongous wall! Don’t you wonder what his secret was?’
Jimbo stepped backward, his eyes round with disbelief. ‘You’re like the world champion of bullshit. Unfortunately, to you everything you say makes sense. Can we go to the park now?’
In silence, the boys left the northern end of the alley and turned east on Auer Avenue, not an avenue at all but merely another residential street lined with houses and parked cars. Down Auer they proceeded for a single block that offered for their consideration two interracial couples sitting on