December Park

by Ronald Malfi

  I thought, too, of the way I felt coming home from school on certain days to find my father’s shit-brown sedan in the driveway and to know that we would share a few uncomfortable hours in the house together before he left for the night shift. Funny, the things the mind summons at the strangest times and for no reason at all.

  “He’s not so bad,” I said, meaning Peter’s stepdad. “He let you take the truck.”

  Peter shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”

  There stood a stretch of white dunes overridden by sea grass between the beach road and the Shallows. As we approached, I spotted a number of cars partially hidden beneath the blackened loom of trees on the other side of the dunes. There was hardly any moonlight and the fog was too dense, so the world around us remained pitch-black.

  Peter turned the headlights off and slowed the pickup to a loping ten miles an hour. We parked at the end of the queue of cars beneath the sweeping black fans of pine branches tumored with pinecones. Outside, the thin autumn air carried the strong and acerbic scent of the bay.

  “You know,” Peter said, climbing out of the truck, “I like this place best in the fall when it starts getting cold.”

  While the Shallows was certainly at its most beautiful in the autumn months, this was also where we gathered to watch the celebratory fireworks from Annapolis over the water every Fourth of July and swim in the sweltering heat of an August afternoon.

  We walked down the slope of the dunes toward the beachfront. I noticed a milky funnel of light rising off one of the many docks and, closer to us, the flickering of a single tiki torch, the flame almost lifelike in the way it danced from the torch’s crown. Along the beachfront, a cream-colored glow could be seen in the windows of the clapboard shanties. The occasional silhouette passed before these windows, though the occupants never paid us any attention. At that moment, a lone dog howled from somewhere across the beach.

  Something like three thousand miles away, the Seattle grunge scene had managed to penetrate my group of friends; there was a conference of plaid flannel shirts and canvas army jackets arranged in a semicircle in the wet sand near the foot of the water. Some of my friends even wore scuffed jackboots mined from their fathers’ old wardrobes.

  As Peter and I approached, they were attempting to coax a bonfire to life with little success. While I considered these fifteen or so acquaintances to be my friends, I had never hung out with them on a one-on-one, day-to-day basis as I did with Peter Galloway, Scott Steeple, and Michael Sugarland. The others were good for filling in the background at parties and sharing beers in someone’s garage, but they were not my close friends. I was fine with that. I preferred my small circle of intimates.

  “Galloway! Mazzone!” someone boomed from the crowd of fire starters.

  A can of Mountain Dew catapulted toward my head. I managed to catch it, more out of startled reflex than skill.

  “You guys look like a bunch of cavemen,” Peter said, selecting a can of soda from a cooler that was wedged in the sand. “Those logs are too wet to light.”

  I glanced around. “Where’s Michael?”

  “He’s out on the dock,” Brian Dassick said, jerking his chin in the direction of the rickety old dock that extended into the water. He was sitting on his knees, poking the damp logs with a long stick. “I heard you got into some deep shit with Nozzle Neck, Mazzone.”

  I said, “Yeah?”

  “I heard you threw him over a desk when he went to collect an assignment.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Does it matter? It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Brian frowned. “What’s that mean? Either it happened or it didn’t.”

  I watched him poke at the mound of logs with nothing to show for it but a few streamers of smoke. “It didn’t. People like to exaggerate. I just didn’t do the assignment, that’s all.”

  “And you got kicked out of his class for that?”

  Following the altercation, my guidance counselor, the principal, and my father decided that I would be transferred from Naczalnik’s class to Mr. Mattingly’s class. Mattingly was new to Stanton, and I had yet to earn a reputation with him. “What makes you say I got kicked out? Maybe I wanted a change of scenery.”

  Brian snickered. “Yeah, right.”

  Peter kicked some sand over the struggling bonfire. “I told you, Brian, those logs are too wet.”

  Popping the tab of my soda, I wandered down to the water. The black sheen of the bay unfolded before me. Fog had settled on the water, making it impossible to see the lights of the watermen’s lighthouse and beyond that the blinking lights of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge far off in the distance.

  I recalled two summers ago when a small fixed-wing plane tried to avoid striking the bridge and plummeted to the water below. Miraculously, all on board survived. It was on the TV news, and there had been a write-up in the Caller. In the photographs it looked like a partially submerged seesaw, one wing, shiny and white in the sun, jutting at an angle out of the water. The metal gleam of a propeller blade poked from the surface of the water like the dorsal fin of a mechanical shark.

  I’d wanted my father to take me over the bridge before the water was dredged and the airplane was removed, so I could see it down there in the water firsthand. He didn’t take me, though, and I resorted to the memory of the photos in the news to quench the thirst of my curiosity of the matter.

  Peter came up beside me. “Hey, you okay?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “I don’t know. You seem messed up about something.”

  I was still thinking of the dead girl. The sight of her had troubled me more than I would have thought. Looking at Peter, I could tell it didn’t weigh as heavily on him. “I’m cool,” I said, wondering if he could see through my lie.

  Peter turned and gazed down the length of the beach.

  I looked, too. Floating ghostlike in the sheen of fog, a cone of light shifted around at the end of one of the docks. Something splashed in the water. There were people moving out there, and the fog made their laughter seem closer than it actually was. Faintly, I heard music drifting down the beach to us, although I couldn’t recognize it. It was hollow and unsettling. A loon cried out.

  Peter took a swig of his soda. When he cleared his throat, he said, “Okay, I’ve got a good one. How do you catch an elephant?”

  I groaned and rolled my eyes. A few months ago, he had checked out a book called 101 Elephant Jokes from the public library. These jokes were so bad, they couldn’t properly be called jokes, yet Peter thought they were just about the funniest things ever committed to paper. He never passed up an opportunity to spout one of these pearls of comedy.

  “Please,” I said, though I couldn’t help but grin, too. “Please don’t . . .”

  “Hide in the grass and make a noise like a peanut.”

  “Brilliant,” I said.

  Peter laughed.

  “You’re a rhino rod chomper,” I told him.

  “Just once,” he said, and we were both laughing now. “I needed the money.”

  “All right, all right,” I said.

  “Chomp.” He glanced over his shoulder at the distant boat dock and said, “Come on, Angie. Let’s head over there. I don’t wanna miss Sugar sinking the cow.”

  Together we trampled the reeds on our way across the snowy white dunes. As we closed the distance, the dock materialized through the diminishing fog. I recognized Michael Sugarland’s voice issuing down the beach, and I heard more laughter. The sounds of the music grew louder, too: what I’d initially thought was a tape or CD was actually Sasha Tamblin playing an acoustic guitar on one of the dock pilings.

  Peter and I mounted the dock and crossed the weather-warped and moss-slickened planks.

  “Intruders,” crooned Michael from the far end of the dock. For the sake of the moment, he’d adopted a very thick and very bad German accent. “Zee fog is great. Identify yourselves!”

  “Immigration,” Peter shou
ted.

  Michael responded with a series of yelps, whoops, and catcalls in his bad German drawl.

  Scott Steeple stood with the Lambeth twins midway down the length of the dock. They watched Sasha Tamblin strum a Pearl Jam song on his guitar.

  Sasha was dark-skinned, with a low brow and tight black curls. His profile was severe and hawkish, and his eyes were small, black, deeply recessed. He played and sang well, much better than I could play. Jonathan Lambeth said something to him and Sasha laughed, exposing perfectly white teeth.

  Sasha nodded at Peter and me as we paused beside Scott. “Hey,” he said, stunting his final strum with his hand.

  “Hey, Sasha,” I said.

  Sasha glanced down at his fingers, which were splayed along the fretboard. He arranged them in a C major chord and strummed it once. Then he fingered a hard G chord and picked the strings while sliding his pinky on the high E higher up on the fretboard. He played a few bars in this style, bending in a unique fashion a deep note on the G.

  “That’s pretty cool,” I said. “Did you write that?”

  “It’s Dave Matthews,” Sasha said.

  “Who’s that?”

  “You haven’t heard of the Dave Matthews Band? It’s good stuff. Folkie but . . . modern, I guess. Original. They got a horn player and a violin.” He played a bit more without looking at his hands. “Who do you listen to?”

  I shrugged. “Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden.” I was also into Metallica, U2, Nine Inch Nails, Jesus Jones, Van Halen, and the Talking Heads, with a mix of Springsteen and Mellencamp thrown in for good measure. I also maintained a secret love affair with Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, Creedence Clearwater Revival, John Lennon’s solo recordings, and, like a dirty little secret, ABBA.

  “Cool.” Sasha proceeded to strum with ease the opening chords of Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters.”

  Michael Sugarland stood at the edge of the dock, his birdlike chest, pale and hairless, puffed out in bravado, his miniscule nipples like twin bug bites. In all the years I’d known him, which had been the majority of my life, he’d maintained the unimposing physique of a sapling. His ribs protruded beneath the taut flesh of his chest cavity, and his belly button poked out from his abdomen like the thumb of a hitchhiker. His sandy hair was always trimmed and meticulously combed and parted to the right.

  Michael rested one elbow on the head of the enormous ceramic bovine beside him. The life-sized cow was painted in alternating stripes of blue and gold. He’d busted off the shiny pink bulb of the cow’s udder and cupped it now in both hands like Oliver Twist asking for more porridge. As Peter and I approached, he placed the udder on his head and grinned at us like a jack-o’-lantern.

  “Mr. Sugar the Cosmic Booger,” Peter said. “You’re going to catch pneumonia dressed like that, you moron.”

  Michael wore a pair of floral Jams and a Swatch watch and nothing else. To the best of my knowledge, Michael Sugarland did not own a single article of clothing that hadn’t ceased being fashionable at least a decade earlier.

  Peter motioned to the ceramic cow. “And how the hell did you get this thing out here?”

  Michael saluted us, then stood rigidly at attention. His teeth were vibrating in his skull from the cold. “Can’t t-t-tell you that, s-s-sir. Top s-s-secret information, s-s-sir.”

  Peter waved him off. I could tell he was fighting more laughter. So was I. “Very well, soldier. Go about your business.”

  “Check it out,” Michael said, reverting to his own naturally squeaky voice. He bent and gripped the lip of the gaping hole at the bottom of the ceramic cow where its udder had once been. “It’ll fill up with water and sink like a stone.”

  “Buried treasure,” Jonathan Lambeth added from his seat on the piling beside Sasha.

  “Oh holiest of ceramic cows,” Michael intoned. “Oh giver of blue and gold milk and creator of papier-mâché cow pies. How selfless of you to sacrifice yourself on this wondrous of nights, to sustain the idle youth of this sad little beach community . . .”

  Had Michael Sugarland not maintained an unsurpassable disdain for Stanton School’s student body, the ceramic cow would have appeared in the homecoming float in Monday’s parade, just before the Stanton varsity football team took the field. However, Michael had used his charm to hasten a friendship with members of the homecoming committee, enabling him to secure a key to the garage where the float was stored. He’d enlisted the assistance of the Lambeth twins to break into the garage and kidnap the Stanton School cow. They’d strapped the giant ceramic bovine to the roof of Mrs. Lambeth’s minivan with bungee cords and driven around the back roads of Harting Farms, the windows down, hooting and hollering, and blasting Led Zeppelin on the tape deck.

  “So here’s the deal,” Michael said, turning to the ugly ceramic cow. His lips were turning purple, and knobs of gooseflesh had broken out on his forearms. “I woke up this morning realizing that my moment of greatness has yet to arrive. I’m nothing more than your average miserable teenage fuckup.”

  “I could have told you that and saved you the headache,” said Peter.

  “I mean,” Michael went on, not missing a beat, “I nearly wept into my bowl of Count Chocula. But then it occurred to me—my purpose, my lot in life, is not to achieve greatness but to make the arrogant bastards around me equally as miserable.”

  Jason Lambeth stepped up beside us and distributed fresh beers.

  Michael didn’t take one. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t try to finagle misguided coeds out of their bras. He was what we all aspired to be, although none of us were willing to condemn booze and girls in an effort to reach it. We admired him for his convictions, even if we could not fully commit to them.

  Instead, we took enjoyment in his mischievous plots against a community that did not accept any of us because we liked music and not football and played guitars and not sports. That was what made him Sugarland the Answer Man: his ability to provide for all of us a sense of alleviation from our otherwise tepid lives. That was why we were here tonight to sink the homecoming cow.

  By this time, the flannel-clad gang from down the beach joined us. They gathered around Sasha while he played his acoustic guitar, the few girls among the crowd meandering over to the edge of the dock, examining the ceramic cow and whispering to each other.

  “Oh,” one of the girls said, “it’s too cute!”

  “Is it a bull?” said another girl.

  Michael clapped, then waved Peter and me over. Scott was already beside him. He wanted the three of us, his best friends, to help him push the cow into the water.

  I placed one hand against the fake cow’s flank and recalled the autumns when I’d fed the real cows at the Butterfield farm, feeling their body heat radiate through my palms and inhaling the sharply fetid stink of cow shit.

  From his perch on the dock piling, Sasha reeled off a Mexican standoff progression—an alternating E major/F major progression.

  A number of us laughed.

  Michael squeezed between Peter and me, placing his hands against the flank of the ceramic cow. He thumped the side of his head against Peter’s shoulder, then turned his gaze on me. His smile was as bright as the moon. For a moment he looked absolutely insane. “I want you to remember this, Mazzone. I want you to think back on this as one of the best times of your life. Promise me.”

  “I promise,” I said.

  Sasha began down strumming an E chord.

  The rest of us stomped our feet in time with the beat.

  “One!” Michael shouted, and the crowd repeated it. “Two!” I felt my toes curl in the tips of my sneakers. “Three!”

  And we shoved, sending the ceramic cow tipping over the end of the dock. It struck the water on its side, creating a splash much larger and louder than I had expected.

  The two girls beside me clapped and cheered.

  “Yeah!” Michael bellowed, thrusting a fist into the air. He gripped one of the pilings with both hands and swung hims
elf around the lip of the dock. One of his feet dangled precipitously in the air, and for a split second, I feared he would plummet into the water. “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!”

  Peering over the side of the dock, I watched the enormous ceramic cow suck water in through the gaping wound where its udder had been. It grew heavy and tipped on its back, causing its shiny plastic legs to stand straight up out of the water. This procured more laughter and applause from the crowd.

  Michael dipped his dangling foot toward the cow’s belly and stepped down on it, sending it bobbing in the water like a giant cork. “Cold,” he shouted, laughing. “That water is fucking cold.”

  Peter and Scott hoisted him over the side of the dock while the rest of us watched the cow slowly sink beneath the surface of the Chesapeake Bay. It seemed to take forever for it to disappear from view and become fully submerged. Once it did, everyone cheered again, and someone sprayed beer into the air.

  One of the girls grabbed me and hugged me tightly, and I smelled a mixture of cigarette smoke and cinnamon in her hair. I didn’t know who she was.

  Still perched on the piling, Sasha began playing “All Along the Watchtower.” The few who knew the words chimed in.

  I watched him from the edge of the dock, suddenly cold and damp and slightly winded from the excitement. My heart was pounding.

  Michael slung an arm over my shoulder, and for one crazy moment, I thought he was going to plant a kiss on my cheek. It wouldn’t have been unlike him. Instead, he looked at me with his startling and somewhat insane blue eyes. “You know, Angelo, someday I’m going to fall in love.”

  “Never. Don’t ever fall in love, you son of a bitch. Please. Spare us all.”

  We were buzzed on adrenaline, we were loud and happy, and no one knew what it was all about until the evening ended. Less than an hour later, after the rest of our friends left, the four of us sat on the edge of the dock, our feet dangling mere inches above the coal-black water, and passed around a can of root beer.