‘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.
During dinner that evening, Mark noticed that his mother seemed a bit more distracted than usual. She had prepared meat loaf, which both he and his father considered a gourmet treat. After asking the customary perfunctory questions about how his day had gone and receiving his customary perfunctory evasions, Philip was free to concentrate on impersonal matters. Instead of recounting tales of intrigue and heroism from the front line of the gas company’s customer relations office, his mother seemed to be attending to an offstage conversation only she could hear. Mark’s thoughts returned again and again to the house on Michigan Street.
Now he wished that he had after all walked up to the place, climbed onto the porch, and looked in the window. What he remembered of the feelings he had experienced in front of the house boiled down to a weird kind of politeness, as if his approach would have been a violation. A violation of what? Its privacy? Abandoned buildings had no sense of privacy. Yet … he remembered feeling that the building had wanted to keep him away and erected a shield to hold him back. So the building had kept him from going up the stone walkway? That was ridiculous. Mark had kept Mark from leaving the sidewalk. He knew why, too, though he did not want to admit it. The house had spooked him.
‘Pretty quiet tonight, Mark,’ said his father.
‘Don’t pick on him. Mark’s fine,’ his mother said in a lifeless voice.
‘Am I picking on him? Am I picking on you?’
‘I don’t know. Are you?’ He watched his mother shaving tiny slices off her meat loaf and sliding them to the side of her plate.
His father was getting ready to call him on his insubordination. Mark rushed through the verbal formula for exiting the dining room and said, ‘Jimbo’s waiting for me.’
‘God forbid you should keep Jimbo waiting. What are you going to do that’s so important?’
‘Nothing.’
‘When it begins to get dark, I don’t want to hear the sounds of those skateboards. Hear me?’
‘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