Mystery

“Okay, okay,” Tom said. His heart was still beating hard.

“I see you where you live!” she yelled.

He turned west into the next block, and after he had taken a few steps his view of her was cut off by the house on the corner.

The flawless enameled sky of the Caribbean had begun to show the first traces of the yellow that soon would flash over its entire surface and darken in a moment to purple, then into real night.

Tom wondered if the old woman had gone back into her house. She was probably waiting to make another run at him if he tried to sneak back around the corner.

He lifted his foot and forced his leg to thrust it forward. A forlorn wail immediately blossomed in the air before him. He froze. He glanced at the houses on either side of him—heavy curtains had been drawn over front windows in both houses, giving them a vacant, closed-up look. At this time of the year, nearly everybody in Mill Walk kept their windows open to catch the Atlantic breezes. Only Mr. von Heilitz kept his windows closed and his curtains drawn. Even the people who lived in the “native” houses, naturally cooler than the European or North American buildings, never closed their windows during the summer months.

Of course, Tom thought, they closed their windows so that they would not hear the creature.

Tom stepped forward again, and up ahead of him, off behind one of the houses across the street to his right, the creature uttered a protest that set the chickens flapping and clucking: He thought he was going to melt down into a stain on the sidewalk. He would have to take his chances on the old woman’s having gone back inside her house. He turned around.

And then he was so startled he nearly jumped off the sidewalk, for no more than five or six feet behind him was a teenage boy his own height, frozen in place with one foot in advance of the other, his hands held out in a straight line from his elbows. The boy, who clearly had been trying to sneak up on Tom, looked as startled as his quarry. He stared at Tom’s face as if he had been stuck with a pin.

“Okay,” he said. “Hold it right there.”

“What?” Tom said. He stepped backwards.

The teenage boy stared at Tom with a very careful absence of expression on his broad, sallow face. The only animation in his face was in his eyes. A scattering of pimples lay on his forehead beneath a fringe of black hair. A magnificent pimple reddened the entire area between the left corner of his mouth and his chin. He was wearing jeans and a dirty white T-shirt. Hard, stringy muscles stood out in his biceps, and premature lines of worry bracketed his mouth. At thirteen, he had the face he would carry with him through all of his adult life. What struck Tom most was the jumpiness in the boy’s flat black eyes.

“Hey, calm down,” the boy said. He licked his lips as he considered Tom’s white button-down shirt and white trousers.

Tom retreated several steps. “Why were you sneaking up on me?”

“Tell me you don’t know,” the boy said. “Sure. You don’t know anything about it, do you?” He licked his lips again, and this time really scrutinized Tom’s clothes.

“I don’t have any idea of what you’re talking about,” Tom said. “All I want to do is go home.”

“Uh-huh.” The boy disbelievingly moved his chin rightwards, then back to center, executing half of a head-shake. His gaze shifted from Tom to a point behind him and to his left, and the impatient expression softened with relief. “Okay,” he said.

Tom looked back over his shoulder and saw a teenage girl marching toward him from what seemed to be the source of the creature’s sounds. Her black hair hung straight to her collarbone and swung as she walked, and she wore tight black pedal pushers and a black halter top, very dark black sunglasses, and what looked like dance slippers. She was four or five years older than the boy. To Tom, she looked completely grown up. He saw that she did not care at all about her brother, and that she cared even less about him. She came toward them across the street on a diagonal line from the steps of the two-story brown and yellow house. A fat man with a stubbly brown crewcut leaned against one of the side windows in the little bay, his arms folded over the frame of the lower windowpane and his large fleshy face pressed against the upper pane.

The girl wore unusually dark lipstick, and had pushed her full, rounded lips together to form a pouty little nonsmiling smile. “Well, ho hum,” she said. “And what are you gonna do now, Jerry Fairy?”

“Shut up,” the boy said.

“Poor Jerry Fairy.”

She was close enough now to examine Tom, and peered at him through the black sunglasses as if he were gunk on a laboratory slide. “Well, is that what Eastern Shore Road boys look like?”

“Shut up, Robyn.”

Robyn slid the sunglasses down her nose and peered at Tom through amused dark eyes. For a second Tom thought she was going to stroke his cheek. Instead she pushed her glasses back up over her eyes. “What are you gonna do with him?”

“I don’t know,” said Jerry.