From the darkness of his room, Nick listened to the dying of the evening, waiting for them to go to sleep. The plain white sheets and his thick comforter covered him, and he did not move while his parents were still up and about. Their muffled conversation slow and regular as the tides, the sound of a glass against a bottle, weary tread upon the stairs. Not too long, usually, when they were besotted, and then they would pass out, exhausted, and purr like kittens in their dreams. Drunken kittens. The telltale signs began: his father singing in falsetto as he stripped off his shoes, his mother stumbling and cursing the rug. After these weekend binges had become routine, Nick could time almost to the quarter hour when they would end. In the beginning, his parents used to show up plastered and sloppy and throw open his door to watch him sleep, but he stopped all that one evening when he screamed in their faces as they hovered over him. That night he had scared them away once and for all.
When it was safe and quiet, he clicked on the lamp and tiptoed to his dresser, opened the bottom drawer, and reached beneath the sweaters stuffed inside. Curled into a tube, the paper seemed a pirate map entrusted to him for safekeeping, though he knew already that it revealed no treasure. At the Keenans’ house, as they were saying good-bye, Jack Peter had pressed the scroll upon him in the mudroom. “Don’t open it till you are in secret where no one can see,” he had said, but Nick could not resist. He had sneaked a look at it in the Jeep while waiting for Mr. Keenan to drive him home. Sitting on the edge of his bed, Nick unfurled it again and smoothed the edges.
Sketched in pencil was that man from the road, the figure that he and Mr. Keenan had encountered earlier that evening. No mistaking the scarecrow features, the pale skin stretched taut over bones, and the deranged hair twisted like a mop. Jack Peter had captured him in the act of rising from the ground, one hand lifted and begging, the other flat on the ground, supporting his weight. The drawing showed the same incomplete face and the figure’s blank stare, as if Jack Peter, too, had witnessed him on that same deserted road. He knew it was impossible, but Nick could not ignore the similarities. Above the man, penciled in his friend’s familiar block letters, were the instructions: DRAW MORE MONSTERS.
They had been playing this game for years, passing secret messages to each other, hiding notes in coat pockets and underneath pillows where they surely would be discovered later after the friends had parted. For the past month, Jack Peter had been obsessed with war. Through a series of orders and communiqués, their mutual forces had been marshaled. Old soldiers, long forgotten, emerged from their hiding places in shoe boxes on closet floors and dusty cookie tins rescued from underneath the bed. Epic battles featured cowboys versus Nazis, Indians versus the French foreign legion, the blue minutemen versus the red Russians. One battle begat the next in a war without end. Maps to imaginary lands were plotted and then destroyed to prevent the intelligence from falling into enemy hands. Week after week, the carnage continued in the bedroom, behind the Christmas tree, and in one daylong siege in the workshop in the basement among all the dangerous tools. Many men were lost, abandoned beneath sofa cushions or dropped into the abyss below the heating registers.
Before the wars, it had been board games. Hours and hours of Monopoly and Risk. Two weeks to master checkers, and a month of chess. Before the games began, they had gone through a phase of comic books, beginning with Batman and Superman and ending with Tintin, reading side by side with hardly a word between them. They never bothered with the Internet or video games on the computer. The closeness of the big monitor and the brightness of the screen and the quickness of the action gave Jack hammering headaches. Summertime was given over to baseball on the radio, the Red Sox mostly, but on long August nights, they could pick up on AM radio faraway Pittsburgh and Chicago and, for one magic evening, the golden glow of a Dodgers game all the way from southern California. Last spring they had devoted to model ships, whalers and clippers, and over a long Easter break, a scale model of the U.S.S. Constitution, complete with cloth sails and string lines and the intoxicating smell of glue and black paint. What mania came before that, Nick could no longer remember, but anything was acceptable, as long as it was safely indoors.
And now, as with every obsession, this war had its natural limits, a moment when the luster faded suddenly and without reason, and the bored boy would cast around for novelty. His latest passion would be drawing monsters. Not bad, he thought, I could get into monsters. And yet.