by Ronald Malfi
A water tower appeared from behind a stand of leafless trees, looking like one of the giant alien fighting machines in The War of the Worlds. Just beyond the water tower was our destination—the Harting Farms town sign that stood at the southernmost border of our town. It had once proclaimed, Welcome to Harting Farms, before a wicked storm in the early eighties eradicated the first two words, leaving only the city’s name on the sign.
The four of us approached the large hand-carved sign and stared up at it. This close, it was higher off the ground than any of us had originally thought—perhaps fifteen feet. It was spotlighted from beneath by two halogen bulbs that cast stark shadows around the three-dimensional wooden letters screwed into the wooden plank.
“Fuck, that’s high up,” Michael marveled. “Doesn’t look so high when you drive past it, huh?”
“It’s more lit up than I thought, too,” Peter added. He was still trying to catch his breath. “Those lights are seriously bright.”
“You changing your mind?” I asked Michael. I had forgotten about the halogen bulbs, too; it seemed foolish to climb up there while they burned so brightly. If a car happened along this stretch of road, we would be spotlighted like inmates escaping a prison yard.
“Heck no.” Michael walked around the base of one of the two thick posts that held the sign up off the ground. “I’m just recalculating.”
“Wonderful,” Peter muttered under his breath.
Scott swiped at the air with his butterfly knife, feigning an attack on an invisible assailant. When he caught my eye, he looked briefly embarrassed, but then he smiled and shrugged, as if to say, Eh, what can you do?
“Here,” Michael said. He was on the other side of the sign now, standing in the tall weeds. “Come take a look at this.”
We all went around to the rear of the sign. Huge bolts had been drilled into the rear of the posts and into the back of the sign. Each bolt head looked nearly the size of a child’s fist. Michael pointed them out to us even though they were perfectly evident.
“We can use them as handholds, like rungs in a ladder, and climb up,” he said. “When we get to the top of the post, we can stand on it and lean over the top of the sign. This way we’re partially shielded from cars, and we can duck behind it quickly if we have to.”
“What’s all this ‘we’ business?” I said.
“You’re such a pussy, Mazzone,” he countered. “You don’t have to do a single thing, okay? How’s that sound?”
“Sounds pretty good actually.”
Hands on his narrow hips and his oversized pith helmet crooked on his head, Michael took a few steps backward while keeping his gaze trained on the rear of the sign and the twin posts. He chewed on his lower lip and looked lost in his own unique brand of mischievous contemplation.
“Anyway,” he said after a moment, “we only really need one of us to do it.”
“Not it,” Peter barked.
“Not it,” I shouted.
“Not it,” Scott said just as Michael unhinged his jaw to perhaps disqualify himself from his own plan.
Peter laughed and pointed at Michael.
“Yeah, yeah,” Michael said, dropping his pith helmet to the ground and motioning for Scott to hand over the knapsack. “I was gonna do it anyway. Couldn’t leave something as important as this to one of you goofballs.” He took a screwdriver out of the knapsack.
It looked huge and ridiculous in the garish light from the halogen lamps, like a rubber horror movie prop. If we were attacked by a faceless child killer tonight, I’d sooner take the screwdriver as protection than Scott’s butterfly knife.
Michael stepped over to one of the posts and propped his sneaker on the lowest of the bolt heads. “You guys hoist me up.”
Peter and I came up behind him and pushed against his bony ass. Michael pulled himself up, using the bolt heads as handholds. Without warning, he released a meaty and powerful fart.
“Oh, you shit head!” I cried, staggering backward and wrinkling up my face.
Peter, who’d burst out laughing the second we heard the trumpet call, waved a hand before his nose and tried to speak but couldn’t. Tears streamed down his cheeks.
Scott poked his head up underneath the sign and laughed at us, then looked at Michael who was scaling the ledge along the back of the sign.
I hurried around to the front of the sign just as Michael’s head appeared over the top.
He grinned like a Cheshire cat. In the light of the halogen lamps, he had the wild-eyed countenance of the devil himself. He brought his arms down and felt around for the letters below him. “They’re bigger than they look. The letters, I mean.”
“Just hurry.” I felt naked out here in the open. If a car drove by we were screwed.
Still laughing, Peter came around the sign to stand beside me. He pawed tears from his eyes and gazed up at Michael with a look of amazement on his face. “He’s gonna break his neck if he falls,” he said low enough so Michael wouldn’t hear him.
Scott stepped around to the rear of the sign. “I’ll stay back here and try to catch him if he falls.”
“Great,” I said. “Then you’ll both be killed.”
“Probably,” Scott said, then vanished behind the sign.
The whole thing didn’t take longer than three minutes, though it seemed an eternity. Thankfully, no cars passed as Michael worked, but twice we thought we heard one approaching and Michael had ducked behind the sign while Peter and I ditched into the overgrown shrubbery at the shoulder of the road.
Once he finished, Michael climbed down, and then he and Scott joined us on the front side of the sign, where our quartet admired his work like appraisers at an art show.
He had switched the first letter of each word so that the sign now read, Farting Harms.
It was brilliant—a Michael Sugarland original.
The sound of a vehicle startled us. I turned and saw headlights coming down the road toward us. The four of us crouched in the heavy weeds and bushes as a rusted pickup whooshed by.
“Welcome to immortality, good buddy,” Michael intoned and clapped me on the back.
We reached the intersection of Haven and McKinsey and waited as two cars rolled slowly beneath the traffic lights. A sharp wind rustled Scott’s cape. I hugged myself, suddenly cold. This was where we departed.
Scott handed the knapsack to Michael, pulled the pointy collar of his Dracula cape around his neck, waved, and crossed the intersection. He disappeared around the bend of Haven Street.
Michael strapped the knapsack onto his back. The pith helmet was on his head again, his shoe-polish moustache smeared halfway across his left cheek. “Good night, punkos.” He went straight, cutting through a darkened yard between two houses, a satisfied bounce to his gait.
Peter fished two smokes from his pocket and handed one to me.
“Thanks.”
It was tough lighting the cigarettes in the relentless wind, but we managed.
“Your pops ain’t home yet, is he?”
“No,” I said. “Not till morning. Just like every year.”
“You wanna get something to eat at the diner?”
“Not tonight. I should get home.”
“Yeah,” he said, “me, too.”
“What?” I could tell there was something on his mind.
“It’s nothing. It’s just . . . I saw your face when we were trashing Naczalnik’s house. I mean, you were really . . .” He frowned. “I don’t know.”
I hadn’t told anyone, not even my father after he’d grounded me for a week, the real reason I didn’t turn in that report to Naczalnik. Peter was my best friend and I considered telling him now. But in the end, I decided against it. Not because I didn’t trust Peter with the information, but I didn’t think I could bring myself to talk about it.
“Nozzle Neck’s a jerk,” I said, taking the easy route. “That’s all.”
Peter nodded and looked down at his new sneakers, which were still greased in black shoe polish.
His lower lip quivered in the cold, and a plume of smoke wafted about his head until it was dispersed by the wind. “Seriously. My mom’s gonna have me for breakfast over these stupid shoes.”
“It might wash off,” I suggested, though I didn’t think it would.
“Yeah. Maybe.” He grinned wearily at me. “All right. Later, skater.”
“After a while, pedophile.”
He crushed his cigarette out beneath one ruined sneaker, then stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans, his broad shoulders hunched and his plastic Batman mask hanging over the nape of his neck. He sauntered across the intersection. The green glow of the traffic light cast an eerie bluish radiance on him. He looked like one of the ghosts straight out of December Park folklore.
I stood on the corner and watched him go until the darkness swallowed him up whole.
As I continued along Haven Street toward home, I replayed the incident with Mr. Naczalnik. Had I been paying more attention to my surroundings, I might have noticed the vehicle hiding in darkness ahead of me. As it was, I nearly jumped out of my skin when the engine abruptly roared to life. Just as the headlights flashed on, the vehicle lurched forward, and I heard the chain saw shudder of grinding gears as it advanced toward me.
The suddenness of it all frightened me into temporary immobility; I merely stood in the center of the street, my hair bullied by the wind and blowing across my forehead and down into my eyes. I brought one arm up to shield my eyes and stepped over to the curb as the headlights roared toward me.
The notion to run, to dash over the curb and through the flanking woods, occurred to me right away, but I was powerless to move. I watched the headlights barrel down on me until the vehicle screeched to a sliding halt no more than ten yards away. It was a pickup, and the force of the stop caused it to fishtail across the center of the street. The tires smoked. I felt the heat of the truck even at this distance. I heard the muffled sound of the radio blasting in the cab and saw darkened, swarthy shapes spilling over the side of the truck’s bed. In a flash, I caught the gleam of metal belt buckles.
Disembodied, someone’s voice floated out to me. “Mazzone, you asshole, I’ve been looking all over town for you.”
They moved around the truck, circling me like hyenas. The cab’s dome light came on as the door opened, illuminating the driver.
Nathan Keener.
I sidestepped off the road and halfway into a row of thick shrubs. This new angle removed the glare of the truck’s headlights from my eyes, enabling me to fully view my predators. Nathan Keener and four or five of his lackeys had spilled from the truck and now hovered around me, their white, skeletal faces seeming to float unanchored in the darkness. Cadaverous grins radiated all around me.
Keener paused alongside the front of his pickup and leaned against the hood, his body stiff. He poked a cigarette into his mouth and lit it with a Zippo. The Zippo gleamed in the moonlight. He inhaled, the cigarette’s ember blazing red, his arms folded.
Nathan Keener was eighteen and a recent graduate of Stanton’s vocational school, although just barely, from what I’d heard. He and his assemblage of like-minded cohorts looked wholly out of place in this section of Harting Farms. They haunted the alleys of the boulevards, the run-down brick-fronted establishments that flanked the industrial park, and desiccated bulwark of the fishing piers. They all lived out on the Cape and rarely came to this part of town, which made me suddenly very, very concerned.
“What’s the matter with you, Mazzone?” Keener said. “How come you look so shaken up, man? You surprised to see me? You shouldn’t be.”
“The fucker’s in blackface,” said one of Keener’s friends, and for a moment I forgot I had shoe polish smeared across my face.
“What do you want?” I tried to sound tough, but I couldn’t muster the right tone.
Two of Keener’s goons approached me from either side. They moved slowly at first, as if they were just shifting their positions. The glare of the truck’s headlights, so strategically placed, made it impossible to see their faces until they were right up on me. Then they jumped at me, grabbing and squeezing my forearms and jerking me backward until I lost my balance and hung like a drying T-shirt on a clothesline between them.
The one on my left was Denny Sallis, his freckle-spattered moon face so close to my own I could smell his rancid breath. His eyes were sloppy, wet, and red-rimmed—the eyes of an ancient hound dog. When I turned away from him, he exhaled in my face, causing me to shudder at the toxic aroma of marijuana, beef jerky, and boiled cabbage.
To my right, clinging to my other forearm with both of his squirrelly claws, Carl Nance grinned like a lunatic, his deep-set eyes like two pits that had been drilled straight through to the back of his skull.
Keener took another drag on his cigarette, then tossed it to the ground. When he stepped toward me, I couldn’t help but think I was about to be killed by a bad cliché. Two more of his lackeys, their hands in the pockets of their dark coats, their heads partially down as if they were ashamed of what they were about to do, approached me as well. I couldn’t make out their faces, but I knew from past experiences they were probably Eric Falconette and Kenneth Ottawa.
I struggled against the two guys holding my arms.
Their grips tightened and Carl Nance muttered, “Cool it, fuck stick,” into my ear.
I was accosted by a right hook to the jaw. I never saw it coming. Flashbulbs went off beneath my eyelids, and a cold numbness pervaded the left side of my jawbone. A moment after that, a white-hot needling surged across the lower half of my face in concert with a high-pitched ringing in my left ear. It felt like the left side of my jaw had come unhinged. When I opened my eyes, Nathan Keener’s face was mere inches from my own.
“One hundred hours of community service.” Keener narrowed his eyes to slits and clenched his teeth. I swore I could hear him grinding his molars to powder. “You listening, Mazzone, you little faggot? One hundred hours.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I managed through my pained jaw.
“Your fucking father,” said Keener. He jabbed a finger at my face. “Your fucking father, you faggot narc.”
And then I remembered. Days ago, I had gone to the Generous Superstore for my grandmother, and as I biked around the back of the store on my way home, I saw Keener and his pals spray-painting the rear of the store. I had put my head down and pedaled faster, though Keener had caught me staring at him. Sometime later, Keener and his buddies were arrested for vandalism. I had nothing to do with his arrest, but I knew now that he believed otherwise.
“Hey, man, if this is about you guys tagging the Superstore, I never said shit.” It was all I could say, since it felt like someone was trying to unhinge the jaw from my face with a screwdriver.
Keener lunged forward and administered an uppercut to my stomach. I buckled forward as far as Denny’s and Carl’s grasps would allow. Gasping for air, I felt my legs go rubbery. After a moment, Keener’s friends hoisted me to my feet where I wavered like a drunkard between them. Someone tittered.
“You think I’m some kind of asshole?” Keener said, taking a step back from me. He was fuming, his chest heaving, both his fists clenched. I could almost see steam spewing from his nostrils.
“Is this a trick question?” I responded. It was a stupid thing to say, no doubt the result of spending too much time with bigmouthed Michael Sugarland, but I just couldn’t help myself.
Keener kicked my legs out from under me. At the same instant, both Nance and Sallis let me go.
I dropped to the pavement like a sack of wet laundry, a stunning bright pain bolting through my hip. It took a second or two for the world to shift back into focus. Just as Keener’s Doc Martens advanced toward me, Sallis and Nance yanked me to my feet, but this time my legs had difficulty cooperating.
“I’m not a fucking imbecile. We know you ratted us out to your old man,” Keener said. Behind him, Ottawa looked like he wanted to leapfrog over Keener and tear
me apart. “There’s no way the cops could’ve known it was us unless you told them.” His eyes gleamed. They were the eyes of a hungry wolf. “None of the cops saw us do it. But I know you saw us, you little rat fuck.”
“You ever scrub paint off walls, cocksucker?” Sallis barked too close to my ear, shaking me in his grasp.
“Should make him scrape it off with his face,” Ottawa said. “Should take him there tonight, watch him work it off for you, Nate. Use his teeth on it.”
“Not a bad idea,” Keener said. “But first, I’m gonna play cop, just like you and your old man. See, I got your community service right here, Mazzone. I got it for you good, bro.”
I turned my head, and the punch caught me behind my right ear: the heat-filled sting of a giant wasp. A great bell began to ring in the center of my head.
“Hold his face up,” Keener said calmly.
“Dude,” Nance whined through the tolling of the bell as he gripped my chin and turned my face, “just watch where you’re swinging.”
I buried my chin against my collarbone like a frightened turtle.
“Hold him,” Keener shouted.
“Hurry up,” Nance protested while trying to pry my chin off my collarbone. “Just punch him in the face so we can get the fuck out of here.”
“Yeah, man,” Sallis added. “Push his teeth up into his gums so we can bolt.”
Keener hit me again. I saw the swing come through blurry eyes. Again I managed to turn my head away, but he caught me high on the cheekbone. Pain exploded. It felt like the bones in my skull were about to shake apart.
Keener laughed maniacally.
I opened my eyes. The world swam in and out of focus. Tears froze to my face. Or it could have been blood.
“How’s that feel, you stool pigeon faggot?” Keener said. “How’s that community service working out for you?”
“Coward bitch,” I spat.
The smile on Keener’s face vanished. “You don’t know when to shut the fuck up, do you, asshole?”