Free Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth

the little boy retorted.
    “Go on, get out, Perse,” Herman ordered. “You stink.”
    “You stink worst.”
    Somebody said “Bust him once,” but Perse was out before they could get him. He stuck out his tongue and made a great blasting raspberry at Peter, who had dived for his leg through the entrance.
    Then Peter looked up at Ambrose from where he lay and said: “Our meeting’s started.”
    “Yeah,” someone said from inside. “No babies allowed.”
    “No smooching allowed,” another member ventured, mocking Ambrose in an official tone. Sandy Cooper added that no something-else was allowed, and what it was was the same word that would make him laugh sometimes instead of sicking his Chesapeake Bay dog on you.
    “You and Perse skeedaddle now,” Peter said. His voice was not unkind, but there was an odd look on his face, and he hurried back into the Den, from which now came gleeful whispers. The name
Peggy Robbins
was mentioned, and someone dared, and double-dared, and dee-double-dared someone else, in vain, to go invite Ramona Peters to the meeting.
    Perse Goltz had already gone a ways up the beach. Ambrose went down the high bank, checking his slide with the orange roots of undermined trees, and trudged after him. Peter had said, “Go to Hell your own self,” in a voice that told you he was used to saying such things. And the cursing wasn’t the worst of it.
    Ambrose’s stomach felt tied and lumpy; by looking at hisarm a certain way he could see droplets standing in the pores. It was what they meant when they spoke of
breaking out in a cold sweat:
very like what one felt in school assemblies, when one was waiting in the wings for the signal to step out onto the stage. He could not bear to think of the moustachioed boyfriend: that fellow’s wink, his curly hair, his leather jacket over white shirt and green tie, filled Ambrose’s heart with comprehension; they whispered to him that whatever mysteries had been in progress in the Den, they did not mean to Wimpy James’s brother what they meant to Peggy Robbins.
    Toward her his feelings were less simple. He pictured them kicking her out of the Nurses’ Home: partly on the basis of Herman Goltz’s story about his sister, Ambrose imagined that disgraced student nurses were kicked out late at night, unclothed; he wondered who did the actual kicking, and where in the world the student nurses went from there.
    Every one of the hurricanes that ushered in the fall took its toll upon the riverbank, with the result that the upper beach was strewn with trees long fallen from the cliff. Salt air and water quickly stripped their bark and scoured the trunks. They seemed never to decay; Ambrose could rub his hands along the polished gray wood with little fear of splinters. One saw that in years to come the Jungle would be gone entirely. He would be a man then, and it wouldn’t matter. Only his children, he supposed, might miss the winding paths and secret places—but of course you didn’t miss what you’d never had or known of.
    On the foreshore, in the wrack along the high-water line where sandfleas jumped, were empty beer cans, grapefruit rinds, and hosts of spot and white perch poisoned by the run-off from the canneries. All rotted together. But on the sand beach, in the sun and wind, Ambrose could breathe them deeply. Indeed, with the salt itself and the pungent oils of the eelgrass they made the very flavor of the shore, exhilarating to his spirit. It was a bright summer night; Peggy Robbins had just been kicked out of the Nurses’ Home, and the only way she could keep everybodyfrom seeing her was to run into the Jungle and hide in the Sphinx’s Den. As it happened, Ambrose had been waked by a clanking in the alleyway and had gone outside to drive off the black dogs or the Arnie twins, whichever were rooting in the garbage. And finding the night so balmy, he strolled down to the rivershore and entered the Jungle, where he heard weeping. It was pitch black in