December Park

by Ronald Malfi

  Once, I heard the shower come on, and I was reminded of how he had frequently gotten up in the middle of the night to shower in the months after we had learned that my brother, Charles, had been killed in combat in Iraq. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the running water was really just noise to cover up the sounds of my father’s grief in a house with thin walls.

  That night, I realized this wasn’t just about the dead girl. This wasn’t about the Piper, or whoever was out there, and all the stress of my father’s job. Not to him. Not to me, either.

  My father had become a different person after my brother’s death. Everything about him seemed to fade into a variant of semiexistence. His bedroom resembled a room you might get at a roadside motel. The items in it were purely functional: a bed, a dresser, a bedside lamp on a nightstand, an alarm clock, a closet full of dark suits, a mirror, and some toiletries on a bureau. He kept his shoes lined up at the foot of the bed, often with his socks still balled up inside them. Sometimes he left a tattered paperback mystery with a sensationalist cover and a gaudy foil-stamped title on the nightstand. There was always a stale quality to the air, as if the windows and door had been hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world.

  The only sentimental items were the two framed photographs on the nightstand beside his bed, one of my mother, who had died when I was three. The few memories I had of her were muzzy and undependable, like looking at someone’s shape behind a plastic shower curtain. The other photograph was of Charles in his military uniform. He appeared frighteningly young, and if you looked close enough, you could see the places on his chin where he’d cut himself shaving.

  I kept my own photographs of Charles in a scrapbook on the top shelf of my bedroom closet, tucked beneath a stack of comic books and issues of Mad magazine. I used to look at the scrapbook a lot in the months following Charles’s death, but I never took it out anymore. I’d stopped going in his room, too. It stood untouched at the end of the hall, the door shut but unlocked. Charles’s football and track trophies were on his shelves, his record albums and tapes meticulously filed away in an old steamer trunk at the foot of his bed. His varsity jackets and Windbreakers with his name embroidered over the breast, his jeans and slacks and shirts and jerseys, his football gear and track shoes were still there, too.

  Most days, I managed to get by without thinking of Charles. Maybe that sounds cold. I don’t know if it is or not, but that’s the truth of it. Yet ever since I saw Courtney Cole being hoisted out of the woods, it was Charles’s face that haunted me at night, Charles’s caved-in head beneath the white sheet on the gurney.

  After a while, nighttime began to terrify me. And it didn’t help that my friends couldn’t let it go, either.

  “I’ve been thinking about it nonstop,” Scott said out of nowhere one afternoon as the two of us sucked on cigarettes outside the Quickman, our favorite burger joint. “I keep seeing the way she looked when that sheet blew off her.”

  “Yeah,” I confessed, “I think about her, too. Sometimes. Mostly at night.”

  “Perv.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Do you think much about the killer?”

  No, I didn’t. It seemed implausible that there was actually a living, breathing human being responsible for the whole thing. It was easier to see the missing children and what Courtney Cole had looked like beneath that white sheet than to consider what type of animal could be behind such things.

  “A cousin of mine sat next to Ted Bundy on a bus in Florida,” Scott said before I could answer his question. “He was wearing a fake cast on his arm, too, like they say he used to so he could get his victims to help him carry stuff to his car. My cousin said she recognized him when he was arrested and they showed pictures of him all over the news. I always thought it was weird that she recognized him—I mean, how closely do you look at people on a city bus, right?—but I guess people like that stick with you in some caveman part of your brain that tells you something’s just not right. Like a flashing neon sign that says stay away.”

  I gazed out across the parking lot, beyond the trees and toward St. Nonnatus. Cars scuttled along the highway like shiny beetles. The sky was the saturated monochromatic yellow of an old photograph.

  “They say he drilled holes in girls’ heads and poured boiling water into their skulls while they were still alive. That psycho tortured the shit out of them. Can you fucking imagine?”

  “Who did?” My mind was wandering.

  “Ted Bundy.”

  “It’s not like that here,” I said. “She just had her skull crushed.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t know what kind of twisted things the Piper might have done to her before she died.” After a moment of consideration, Scott added, “Or even after she died.”

  “You’re sick.”

  Scott rolled his shoulders. “It’s a sick world.”

  “I guess anything’s possible.”

  “So what about the others?” he said. “The ones they haven’t found yet?”

  “I don’t know. You think they’ll find them eventually?”

  “I would think so. I mean, they gotta be somewhere, don’t they? People don’t just disappear.”

  Even though I knew that people disappeared without a trace every year, I sucked at my cigarette and said, “I guess so.”

  “Doesn’t your dad tell you anything?”

  “About the missing kids? About the Cole girl’s murder?”

  “About anything,” said Scott. “About his job. About being a cop.”

  “Not really. Besides, I don’t think the cops know any more than anyone else. And if they do, they’re not gonna tell me about it.”

  “Have you ever seen his gun?” Scott asked. He put one hand in the pocket of his coat, digging around for something.

  “Well, sure,” I said. I saw my father’s issued firearm in its holster every night when he came home from work and took his coat off. I also knew he kept it in his sock drawer when he wasn’t wearing it—the top drawer of his bedroom bureau. He also kept a six-shot revolver under his bed in an old cigar box.

  The truth was that my father had carried a gun for as long as I’d been alive. It was as commonplace to me as if he’d been a salesman hauling around a briefcase full of encyclopedias. To my friends, however, the prospect of having a gun in the house was both foreign and tantalizing, so they professed an inordinate amount of interest in the weapon.

  “He ever let you shoot it?”

  “Nope,” I said.

  Scott produced a dangerous-looking butterfly knife from his pocket. With a magician’s flourish, he flipped it open and held it out away from his body. The blade was shiny, a good five inches. He turned it over slowly in his hand. “I wonder how it happened.”

  Behind us, a mother and her two young children bounded out of the Quickman, and I caught a whiff of the deep fryer.

  “I wonder how the Piper got to her.”

  “There is no Piper,” I said, more out of habit than anything else. I was instantly reminded of what my father had told me the night he’d sat on the back porch, waiting for me to come home. When you go out, stay with your friends in populated areas, preferably at their houses.

  So Harting Farms mourned the death of one of their own and feared that a similar fate might have already befallen the three children who had previously disappeared from its streets.

  Mischief Night, the night before Halloween, saw a sky that trembled with snow. It seemed to swirl and hover above the streets and the low gabled peaks of the neighborhood houses without ever touching the ground. Halloween had always been my favorite holiday, but Mischief Night carried with it the sense of jittery anticipation of things to come, like Christmas Eve.

  Before heading out for the evening, I helped my grandmother put up decorations on the front porch—rubber skeletons dangling from invisible wire, an electric cauldron that spewed dry ice smoke, a ceramic black cat whose eyes glowed a feral green. I filled a bowl with candy and l
eft it on the kitchen counter in anticipation of the little kids who would come knocking on the door tomorrow.

  In the den, while It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown played for perhaps the fiftieth time on TV, my grandfather grumbled about the shaving cream and toilet paper he would undoubtedly have to clean up in the morning.

  An old box filled with Halloween costumes was tucked away at the far end of the basement, up against the hot water heater and suitably ghostlike beneath the drape of a paint-splattered white sheet. Inside were a number of masks, including one of Lon Chaney from The Phantom of the Opera that my father had donned a few years back just prior to waking me up for school, intent on—and successful in—scaring the shit out of me.

  There were also rubber gloves whose fingers concluded in hooked claws; a set of glow-in-the-dark plastic vampire teeth; a large plastic cauldron; latex bats that tittered when jostled; a variety of wooden pitchforks; capes; furry hoods, some adorned with horns; oversized clown shoes; a Superman T-shirt; my old remote-controlled race car (I had no idea why this had been stored in the Halloween box); a rhinestone-infested bikini top and hula sarong; and various other things.

  I spent nearly twenty minutes digging through the box before closing it back up with nothing to show for my efforts. Instead, a tin of shoe polish on a shelf caught my attention, and I absconded with it.

  In my room, I dropped a Springsteen cassette into the tape deck and cranked “Born to Run” while I dressed in a black hooded sweatshirt, dark jeans, and my fastest sneakers. Standing before the mirror that hung on the inside door of my closet, I painted my cheeks, my forehead, and underneath my eyes with the black shoe polish.

  Downstairs, my grandmother snagged a fistful of my sweatshirt and commented, “Black on black is a particularly bad idea for nighttime, don’t you think? You’ll get hit by a car.”

  I groaned. My grandmother was always telling me I’d get hit by a car. “I won’t get hit. I’m always careful.”

  “Yes, well, be particularly careful tonight.” She didn’t have to explain what she meant. “And please don’t forget your curfew.”

  “I won’t,” I said, though I knew it was a promise I might not be able to keep. My father worked every Mischief Night, and he wouldn’t be home until dawn.

  “Stay safe,” she said and kissed me on the cheek.

  On a normal night I would have taken my bike, but my friends and I would be weaving stealthily between the shadows on foot tonight, so I walked through the neighborhood, passing hordes of similarly dressed teenagers with backpacks on their shoulders and mischievous glints in their eyes. A few recognized me and raised their hands at me or tossed rocks and, in one case, an egg at my head. I dodged the rocks and the egg and picked up my pace.

  When I hit the rear parking lot of the Generous Superstore, there was spooky music crackling from the public address speakers affixed to the brick columns outside the loading docks. A lone security guard wielding a flashlight eyed me with suspicion as I cut around the side of the building and hopped the curb. There was a brick alcove here, outfitted with a bank of pay phones, a wooden bench, and a single floodlight whose bulb had been busted for as long as I could remember. My friends were there in the shadows waiting for me.

  “Hey,” I said, joining them.

  “Man,” said Michael. “Are you ever on time?”

  “I’ll work on being more punctual if you work on being less ugly.”

  “Ha. You’re a riot.” He swung an overstuffed knapsack off his shoulder and set it down at his feet. He wore jeans and a dark sweatshirt with a hood, similar to mine, but had an old pith helmet cocked back on his head. “What’d you do to your face?”

  “It’s shoe polish,” I said, taking the tin of polish out of the kangaroo pocket of my sweatshirt. I handed it to Scott.

  Scott popped the lid off, then examined the contents. He brought it to his nose and sniffed it, pulling a face.

  “It washes right off,” I promised him, though I didn’t know this to be true.

  Scott shrugged, scooped a bunch of the tarry gunk out of the tin, then smeared it across his face. He wore plastic vampire teeth, which bulged out his lips, and a Dracula cape tied around his neck.

  I peered over Michael’s shoulder as he unzipped the knapsack and opened it wide so that we could all see what was inside: rolls of toilet paper, two full cartons of eggs, several cans of shaving cream, a large screwdriver and wrench he’d shoplifted a few days earlier from Second Avenue Hardware, and some other junk that promised to make the evening memorable.

  “That toilet paper’s not used, I hope,” Peter commented.

  Michael slugged him on the forearm.

  “Here,” Scott said, passing the shoe polish to Peter.

  It looked like an old Buick had backfired in Scott’s face. I tried to stifle a laugh.

  “Hey,” Scott groused, spitting out the plastic vampire teeth into his hand. “This was your idea.”

  “No, no, it looks cool. Trust me.” Then I brayed laughter.

  “Sweet,” said Peter, streaking his own face in shoe polish. He dragged his fingers down his cheeks, leaving vertical black lines that resembled war paint. He was dressed in a tight-fitting navy-blue sweater that looked black in the dark and bright white sneakers. He had a plastic dime-store Batman mask propped on the top of his head, the elastic band cutting into the flesh under his chin.

  “You should do your shoes with that polish, too,” Scott suggested. “They’re so white they’re blinding.”

  “They’re brand-new,” Peter retorted. “I’m not gunkin’ them up.”

  “Yeah, but they look like they glow in the dark. We’re supposed to be incognito.”

  “Christ.” Peter squatted and sighed, examining his new white sneakers . . . and then proceeded to smear them with shoe polish. He paused halfway through coating the second one to regard his work. “My mom’s gonna shit birds.”

  Michael produced a map from within his knapsack, unfolded it, and splayed it out on the nearby bench. It was a map of Harting Farms, and even in the poor lighting I could see that Michael had marked a number of locations in either bright red or green marker. There were too many to count.

  “Jesus, that’s a lot of stops,” I said.

  “At least twice as many as last year,” Scott added.

  “I’m feeling particularly vindictive this year,” Michael said.

  He took the holiday seriously, and if you dissed him at one point during the year, he would remember. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he actually kept a journal of all these betrayals.

  Peter gazed down at the map as he gave the shoe polish to Michael. “Red and green,” Peter commented, snatching a roll of toilet paper from the knapsack so he and Scott could clean the shoe polish off their hands. “This is Halloween, not Christmas.”

  Michael gave himself a Hitler moustache with the shoe polish before handing me the canister. “Mischief Night,” he corrected. “It’s better than Halloween.”

  “Why the different colors?” Scott asked.

  “They’re color coded in order of importance,” said Michael. “The red are the hot spots, the priority. Like, we gotta hit those. If we have time, we hit the green.”

  “You’ve got my house on there, you dick,” Peter said.

  Michael nodded. “I was gonna tell you about that. I’ve had a few issues with you this past year. Sorry.”

  “I’ll give you issues.” Peter licked his thumb, then rubbed it against one of the red marks on the map.

  “Okay, then. So we got one less house to hit this year.” Michael zipped up the knapsack and gave it to Scott. “Hide it beneath your cape.”

  Scott swung the knapsack onto his back while I held his Dracula cape out of the way. Once he’d situated it on his shoulders, I draped the cape over it. “Does it look stupid?” Scott asked, craning his neck to see the large black lump on his back.

  “Well, it’s not inconspicuous,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about it,”
Michael interjected. “You just look like a hunchback.”

  “But I’m Dracula, you idiot.”

  “Okay, so you’re Dracula. With a hunchback.”

  I joined Peter, who was still examining the map, and said, “Okay. So where do we start?”

  Michael slapped Peter’s hand away and ran his finger down the grouping of red X’s along Cypress Avenue. It was the residential neighborhood behind the Generous Superstore plaza. “We’ll start here and work our way north so that we loop back around this way and end the night heading south toward the city limits.” His finger stopped at the edge of Harting Farms, where on the map our city was separated from Glenrock by a swath of undeveloped land. “Sound good?”

  “It’s a lot of ground to cover,” I said. “Maybe we should take our bikes.”

  “No way,” Michael admonished. “No bikes on Mischief Night. We go on foot. We’ve always gone on foot. It’s tradition. Besides, the time it would take to go back home and get our bikes—”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “But we should get going.”

  “Yeah,” said Peter, dropping his Batman mask over his face.

  Michael clapped and gave us his grandest smile. “Okay, then! Let’s move out, boys!”

  Like ninjas, the four of us crept into the darkness of the nearest neighborhood.

  That night, my friends and I toilet papered all the houses designated red and even a few marked green on Michael’s map, egged some of the cars that sped along the streets, and dropped water balloons on unsuspecting perambulators from the bridge on Solomon’s Bend Road.

  A few entrepreneurial adults staged their traditional counterattacks. Teddy Boru’s dad threw eggs at young trespassers from his bedroom window. Old Mr. Vandenberg, the hermetic desperado who lived in one of the dilapidated duplexes along Shore Acre Road, sprung out from behind a holly bush, wrapped in a white bedsheet and donning a rubber Frankenstein mask.