by Peter Straub
Pleased and surprised, Mark said he would love to do that and asked if Tim had mentioned the visit to his father.
“I will later,” Tim said. He smiled at Mark before cutting through the crowd in search of Philip.
For the next ten minutes, he lost sight of Jimbo as neighbors and coworkers patted his cheek or gripped his upper arm and uttered, over and over again, always with the sense of communicating a great truth, the same useless and depressing remarks. Must be awfully tough on you, son. . . . She’s in a better place now. . . . God has a reason for everything, you know. . . . Gee, I remember when my mom died.
Finally, he spotted Jimbo eyeing him from just inside the dining room arch and went over to talk to him.
“Are you okay?” Jimbo asked.
“More than you’d think.”
Their fathers stood, conversing quietly, only a few feet away, their backs turned toward the boys. On the other side of their fathers, Mr. Battley was flapping his gums at Uncle Tim.
“Good,” Jimbo said. “You know . . .” Jimbo’s wide mouth turned down at the edges, and his eyes shrank into a look of pure anguish. “Yo, I’m really sorry about your mom. I should have told you that right away, but I didn’t know how.”
Without warning, emotion surged up within Mark, searing everything it touched. For a couple of seconds, an abyss of feeling opened before him, and the sheer weight of the air on his shoulders threatened to push him in. Tears blinded him. He brought a hand up to his eyes; he exhaled and heard himself make a strangled, inarticulate sound of grief.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
Jimbo’s voice rescued him.
“I guess,” he said, and wiped his eyes. His body was still reverberating with emotion.
Behind him, Jackie Monaghan said, “Wasn’t Nancy related to this weird guy who used to live around here? Somebody said something about it once, I don’t remember who.”
His father said, “Should have kept his mouth shut, whoever he was.”
“I sort of lost it for a second there,” Mark said, wondering what Jimbo’s dad was talking about. Now Jackie was saying that his mother’s relative had risked his life to save some children. Mark turned his head just in time to see Jackie tell his father that the kids were black. That would be that, he thought; the conversation would get ugly in a hurry.
“Well, it’s no wonder,” said Jimbo.
“No, it’s not the funeral,” Mark said. “I just understood something I should have seen before. Actually, I don’t know how I missed it.”
“What?” Jimbo asked.
Mark moved closer to Jimbo and whispered, “It was the house.”
“What do you mean, ‘the house’?” Comprehension flashed into his eyes. “Oh, no. No, man. Come on.”
“It’s the truth. You didn’t hear her chew me out for even thinking about that place. Ask yourself—why would she kill herself?”
“I don’t know why,” Jimbo said, miserably.
“Right. I didn’t stay far enough away, and something in there killed her. That’s what happened, Jimbo. We can’t dick around about this anymore. We have to go in there.”
In the silence of Jimbo’s inability to respond, both boys clearly heard Philip Underhill say, “I should have known better than to marry into a bunch of screwballs like that.”
Mark turned pale. Unnoticed by Philip and Jackie, he moved past them and dodged through the crowd gathered around the table. Jimbo hastened after his friend and caught up with him at the opening into the kitchen, where, surprisingly, Mark had come to a sudden halt.
When Jimbo reached Mark’s side, he was struck by the expression on his face. His mouth hung slightly open, and the side of his face visible to Jimbo had gone white. But for a small blue vein beating just above the V of hair at his temple, he might have been carved from marble.
Jimbo did not dare to look into the kitchen. After having glimpsed that being through his father’s field glasses, the last thing he wanted to do was to see it in Mark Underhill’s kitchen. The thought of that formidable presence standing before him sent fear washing through his stomach.
He had no idea how long he stood beside Mark Underhill, too afraid of what he might see to turn his head. Mark did not move; as far as Jimbo could tell, Mark did not even take a breath. To Jimbo, they seemed to stand, he immobilized by Mark’s immobility, for an eternity. Around them, the world, too, had become immobile; yet the blue vein in Mark’s temple beat, beat, beat. Jimbo’s tongue felt clumsy and enormous in his dry mouth.
Awareness of his own cowardice forced him to turn his head and face what had trespassed into Mark’s kitchen. Half the oxygen seemed to leave the space immediately around him, and the light faded as if a subtle rheostat had been more breathed upon than dialed. A faint odor of excrement and corruption, as of a corpse rotting in the distance, tainted the air.
A sound like buzzing, like insects, filtered in through the screen door.
But what he saw after he had turned his head was only Mr. Shillington leaning against the sink next to Mrs. Taft, who seemed depressed by what her neighbor was saying. When both of them stopped their conversation to stare at the boys, Jimbo saw annoyance in Mr. Shillington’s eyes, the shine of tears in Mrs. Taft’s. Two thoughts occurred to him at virtually the same moment: Mr. Shillington and Mrs. Taft were having an affair, and he just dumped her and For a second or two, time just stopped, so those seconds never happened.
At the center of his being, Jimbo felt as though some great machine had paused its workings, come to rest, then ponderously swung back into motion.
Beside him, Mark was saying, “His back is always turned.” The words reached Jimbo as if through the process of translation from a foreign language. When he had at last absorbed their meaning, he understood Mark’s sentence no better. The only man in the kitchen was Mr. Shillington, who was pretending to be happy that two teenage boys were staring at him.
“Something in Linda’s eye,” he said, and smiled. “Mrs. Taft has something in her eye, and I was trying to get it out.”
“Who?” Jimbo whispered to Mark.
“You didn’t see him?” Mark turned upon him in amazed disbelief.
“No, but something happened,” Jimbo said.
“Now, kid,” said Mr. Shillington. “Don’t go getting the wrong idea about this.” His long, bony face was undergoing an interesting color shift. Below the cheekbones, he was turning a blotchy red, but from the eyes up, he went white.
“Something happened, all right,” Mark said.
“No, it did not,” insisted Mr. Shillington. Linda Taft shrank into herself, wrinkling her nose and glancing around.
“Sorry,” Mark said. “I’m not talking to you.” He looked back at Jimbo. “You really didn’t see him standing between them and the door, with his back turned?”
Jimbo shook his head.
“There was no one in this room but the two of us, Mark, until you and your friend barged in.”
“Well, we’re going to barge out now, so you can go back to your eye surgery,” Mark said. “Come on, Jimbo.”
Their eyes as large and innocent as those of sheep, Linda Taft and Ted Shillington watched Mark drag Jimbo 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. Tell me, Jimbo. I have to know.”
“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 I didn’t,” Jimbo said.
“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 Sunday Morning, and a good third of those are still in bed. Hundreds of men and women are dividing their time between reading Sunday’s Ledger and eating breakfast. Hundreds of others are still asleep, and a few of those, the ones with pasty complexions and foul breath, will wake up hungover. Joggers jog in the parks and along the sides of the roads; shopkeepers open up their shops; young couples awaken beneath rumpled sheets and embrace in shafts of sunlight.
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 weight.
At the back of the house, the sheer scale of the disorder makes Jimbo gasp. Some of that stuff is waist-high! What Mark called the “pup tent” slants downward, heavy as a scar, just past the k
itchen door, ending at a stumpy little wall placed about fifteen feet out into the jungly yard. The addition is carelessly built, and although it is the newest part of the house, it will collapse long before the rest of the structure. Jimbo does not care for the look of that slanting roof, no he does not.
“All right,” Mark says, and sets off into the weeds on the suggestion of a path he had made earlier. Walking behind him, Jimbo sees the house inhale and exhale with every step he takes and starts to panic. Mark says, “For God’s sake, calm down,” and Jimbo realizes that the inhalations and exhalations are his.
Mark jumps the steps to the back door. Jimbo trudges behind him. He sees the empty pane in the kitchen door and peers in at what resembles a haze or cloud, then reveals itself as the kitchen’s grimy ceiling. Grimly, Mark smiles down at him, tilts to the side, and flattens himself against the door. He thrusts his arm through the empty panel. Mark’s smile curdles into a grimace. The knob turns, the door swings open. His mouth now a thin, hard line, Mark gestures for Jimbo to join him. When Jimbo places his feet on the step, Mark clamps a hand on his wrist and without further ceremony propels him into the kitchen.
The
Red
Sky
PART FOUR
15
Now and again during our childhood, Philip and I had the benefit of Pop’s discourses on the female gender—never when Mom was within hearing range, of course. Pop gave us the lowdown on women when we accompanied him on his Saturday “errands,” which involved visits to the houses of his companions Mom disliked or detested. Refreshing stops at local bars and taverns formed the connective tissue between his social calls. Maybe one-third of the time, Philip and I were allowed to come with him into his friends’ houses or apartments. We were allowed into the taverns in about the same proportion.
Going with Pop into his friends’ places and the bars he frequented on Sherman Boulevard and Burleigh was only slightly more satisfying than having to wait in the car. In the car, we could listen to the radio, and in the taverns we could order Cokes. In both the car and the Saracen Lounge at the St. Alwyn Hotel—or Sam n’ Aggie’s Auer Corner, or Noddy’s Sportsmen’s Tavern—we were essentially left alone to quarrel with each other while Pop carried on according to the requirements of the moment. Sometimes I saw money changing hands, usually from his pockets to another man’s hand, but sometimes the other way around; sometimes he helped one of his friends move boxes or heavy objects like electrical saws or water heaters from one place, say, like a warehouse, to another, say, like a garage. In the bars and taverns he installed us in a booth along the wall, got us set up with Cokes, and left us there for an hour or two while he drank beer or played pool with his buddies. Once he commanded us to stay in the car while he went into the Saracen Lounge to “have a talk with a guy,” and after half an hour I got out of the car and peered in the window to see Pop nowhere in the room. In the pit of my stomach, I knew he had left us there, really walked away and left us, but I also knew that he would come back. As he eventually did, from around the corner, his eyes filled with handsome apologies.