Black House

"So I see. But first tell me if you’ve gone and spread your crap around the kitchen. And I know you’ve been down there, so don’t lie."

"Warshed my hands first," Burny says, and shows them. They are gnarled, but pink and clean for all that. Even the nails are clean. He certainly has washed them. He then adds: "Jackoff."

"Come on down to the bathroom with me," Butch says. "The jack-off asswipe will get you cleaned up."

Burny snorts, but comes willingly enough.

"You ready for the dance this afternoon?" Butch asks him, just to be saying something. "Got your dancing shoes all polished, big boy?"

Burny, who can surprise you sometimes when he’s actually home, smiles, showing a few yellow teeth. Like his lips, they are stained with red. "Yowza, I’m ready to rock," he says.

Although Ebbie’s face doesn’t show it, he listens with growing unease to T.J.’s story about Tyler Marshall’s abandoned bike and sneaker. Ronnie’s face, on the other hand, shows plenty of unease.

"So what’re we gonna do, Ebbie?" T.J. asks when he’s done. He’s finally getting his breath back from his rapid pedal up the hill.

"What do you mean, what’re we gonna do?" Ebbie says. "Same things we were gonna do anyway, go downstreet, see what we can find for returnable bottles. Go down the park and trade Magics."

"But . . . but what if — "

"Shut your yap," Ebbie says. He knows what two words T.J. is about to say, and he doesn’t want to hear them. His dad says it’s bad luck to toss a hat on the bed, and Ebbie never does it. If that’s bad luck, mentioning some freako killer’s name has got to be twice as bad.

But then that idiot Ronnie Metzger goes and says it anyway . . . sort of. "But Ebbie, what if it’s the Misherfun? What if Ty got grabbed by the — "

"Shut the f**k up!" Ebbie says, and draws back his fist as if to hit the damn mushmouth.

At that moment the raghead clerk pops out of the 7-Eleven like a turbaned jack out of his box. "I want none of that talk here!" he cries. "You go now, do your filthy-talk another place! Or I call police!"

Ebbie starts to pedal slowly away, in a direction that will take him farther from Queer Street (under his breath he mutters dune coon, another charming term he has learned from his father), and the other two boys follow him. When they have put a block between them and the 7-Eleven, Ebbie stops and faces the other two, both his gut and his jaw jutting.

"He rode off on his own half an hour ago," he says.

"Huh?" says T.J.

"Who did what?" says Ronnie.

"Ty Marshall. If anyone asks, he rode off on his own half an hour ago. When we were . . . ummm . . ." Ebbie casts his mind back, something that’s hard for him because he has had so little practice. In ordinary circumstances, the present is all Ebbie Wexler needs.

"When we were looking in the window of the Allsorts?" T.J. asks timidly, hoping he isn’t buying himself one of Ebbie’s ferocious Indian burns.

Ebbie looks at him blankly for a moment, then smiles. T.J. relaxes. Ronnie Metzger only goes on looking bewildered. With a baseball bat in his hands or a pair of hockey skates on his feet, Ronnie is prince of all he surveys. The rest of the time he’s pretty much at sea.

"That’s right," Ebbie says, "yeah. We was lookin’ in the window of Schmitt’s, then that truck came along, the one playin’ the punk-ass music, and then Ty said he hadda split."

"Where’d he have to go?" T.J. asks.

Ebbie isn’t bright, but he is possessed of what might be termed "low cunning." He knows instinctively that the best story is a short story — the less there is, the smaller the chance that someone will trip you up with an inconsistency. "He didn’t tell us that. He just said he hadda go."

"He didn’t go anywhere," Ronnie says. "He just got behind because he’s a . . ." He pauses, arranging the word, and this time it comes out right. "Slowpoke."

"You never mind that," Ebbie says. "What if the . . . what if that guy got him, you dummocks? You want people sayin’ it was because he couldn’t keep up? That he got killed or somethin’ because we left him behind? You want people sayin’ it was our fault?"

"Gee," Ronnie says. "You don’t really think the Misherfun — Fisherman — got Ty, do you?"

"I don’t know and I don’t care," Ebbie says, "but I don’t mind it that he’s gone. He was startin’ to piss me off."

"Oh." Ronnie contrives to look both vacant and satisfied. What a dummocks he is, Ebbie marvels. What a total and complete dummocks. And if you didn’t believe it, just think of how Ronnie, who’s as strong as a horse, allows Ebbie to give him Indian burn after Indian burn. A day will probably come when Ronnie realizes he doesn’t have to put up with that anymore, and on that day he may well pound Ebbie into the ground like a human tent peg, but Ebbie doesn’t worry about such things; he’s even worse at casting his mind forward than he is at casting it back.

"Ronnie," Ebbie says.

"What?"

"Where were we when Tyler took off ?"

"Um . . . Schmitt’s Allsorts?"

"Right. And where’d he go?"

"Didn’t say."

Ebbie sees that for Ronnie this is already becoming the truth and is satisfied. He turns to T.J. "You got it?"

"I got it."

"Then let’s go."

They pedal off. The dummocks pulls a little ahead of Ebbie and T.J. as they roll along the tree-lined street, and Ebbie allows this. He swings his bike a little closer to T.J.’s and says: "You see anything else back there? Anybody? Like a guy?"