December Park

by Ronald Malfi

  Headlights appeared around the bend at the intersection of Haven and Worth. All of them except for Ottawa, who seemed powerless to remove his eyes from mine, turned in the direction of the headlights.

  I saw my opportunity and took it, bringing up one knee and swinging it forward, then swinging it back.

  “He’s—”Ottawa started but it was too late.

  I planted my sneaker squarely against Nance’s kneecap and felt something pop. A sound like someone snapping an elastic band rang through the sudden stillness. Nance’s hands dropped from my forearm. Then an agonized howl burst from his lips as he collapsed in a messy heap to the pavement.

  I wasted no time gathering my own feet beneath me. I headed straight for the woods but only managed about two strides until I was jerked backward and dragged to the ground. Something tightened around my neck. I heard something tear—it turned out to be the hood of my sweatshirt—and saw Sallis stumble to the ground beside me, a look of stunned agony on his pale face. He went down hard, his chin rebounding off the pavement. Then his body went limp.

  I hopped to my feet and tore through the blinding darkness of the woods. My exhalations were a rhythmic, abrasive rattle in my throat. I heard Keener and his friends shouting at each other, trying to regroup. Sheer seconds later, their thundering footfalls crashed through the underbrush behind me.

  Reinvigorated by their pursuit, I pushed myself harder through the trees. I found the dirt path that I had taken my bike down the night I rode to the Shallows and ran for all I was worth. But as the shouts and footfalls of my pursuers grew louder and louder, I knew I was an easy target on the dirt path, so I ditched into the woods.

  “There!” someone shouted behind me. “He cut into the trees!”

  I kept going and didn’t look back. Through the tangled network of tree limbs I spotted the filaments of yellow light dancing in the windows of the houses on the next street over, which was Worth Street, where I lived. I could even hear the wind chimes that hung from the Mathersons’ back porch tinkling in the wind.

  Something hard struck the small of my back. Something else banged into my left elbow and jostled the nerves straight up through my forearm. A third object whizzed past my head, and even in the sightlessness of the woods I could see it was a large stone. The bastards were throwing rocks at me.

  Keener’s friends shouted, their heavy feet crashing through the underbrush. They made the brusque and confused noises of big, dumb mammals. On the far end of the street, I heard Keener’s pickup growl to life and squeal as it shuddered into drive. I made out the truck’s headlights streaming down the street, running parallel to me. He was planning to beat me to Worth Street and grab me when I came out of the woods behind the Mathersons’ house.

  I cut sharply to the right and vaulted over a fallen tree. The lights at the rear of the Mathersons’ house were abruptly blotted out by a stand of pines.

  “There! There!” someone yelled, and the voice was close enough behind me to trigger a perceptible twinge at the base of my spine.

  For one moment, I considered bolting out onto Worth Street and making a mad dash for my house. There was a good chance I’d get to my porch before they grabbed me. But then for whatever reason, I threw myself forward through the wall of pine trees at the last second.

  The trees swallowed me up. Blindly, I propelled myself forward, my hands swatting pine boughs out of my face. I struck a tree trunk and landed hard on my side in the dirt, temporarily liberating all wind from my lungs, and rolled until I came to rest in the approximation of a sitting position.

  My eyes still closed, I felt the prickle of pine branches closing in on my head. I brushed them away, opened my eyes, and found myself corralled within a cover of dense and shaggy firs. I pulled my legs up to my chest and remained sitting, breathing harshly into the pit between my knees. I couldn’t see my pursuers, couldn’t see the lights of the Mathersons’ house, couldn’t even see the moon. My face stung and my eyes were blurry with tears.

  I heard them, though: their shouts, their fury, calling out to one another as they got separated. They were all around me, yet they couldn’t find me in my perfect hiding spot. Keener’s truck, its exact location impossible to pinpoint, growled somewhere close by. Holding my breath, I listened to feet crunching through the woods. They were moving much more slowly now. Lost. Looking for me. I caught nonsensical snippets of disembodied voices.

  “Come on,” someone said. The voice was impossibly close, and I could not fathom how I hadn’t heard the speaker’s footsteps upon the carpet of crunchy dead leaves.

  I pressed my face into my knees, wishing I could shrink to the point of disappearing.

  The footsteps retreated. Their voices gradually grew more and more distant as they retreated toward the street. I heard Keener’s truck roll coolly down Worth Street, then waited until the simmering sound of its engine was heard only in my memory.

  Still, I did not move right away. It wasn’t that they were clever enough to trick me into giving away my position by feigning retreat, because they weren’t. They were morons. No, it was merely that I needed a moment to catch my breath and realign myself. The anger had not yet set in, temporarily bullied into submission by the stronger, innate sense of self-preservation. But it would strike soon enough. I knew it would.

  I touched my face. My fingers came away wet with blood. Or mud. I couldn’t tell for sure in the dark, but judging by how my face felt, I had a pretty good idea what it was.

  I sat until my overheated body was once again aware of the cold. Turning over on my side, I crawled forward through the veil of trees, much more aware this time of the pricking and prodding and scratching of limbs. Then I paused. Listened. Because for a second, I had been certain . . . had been certain . . .

  I risked it: “Who’s there?” Then winced, bracing myself.

  Someone was right beside me, hidden just beyond the trees. I was suddenly sure of it.

  “Who’s there?” I said again, my voice trembling.

  Still, I received no answer. And I could no longer hear that whistling rasp of someone else’s respiration.

  I stared at the darkened curtain of pines, expecting at any moment to see a figure emerge. Those spiny black boughs would part like curtains, and a white face would appear from the depths, eyes rimmed in silver, a gaping mouth lined with razor-sharp teeth . . .

  I turned and bolted out of the woods.

  There were no lights on at my house when I arrived, and my father’s car was gone from the driveway. Quiet as a baby’s whimper, I stripped out of my clothes in the upstairs bathroom, only to feel a cold resignation wash over me at the sight of my mud-ruined jeans. Balling up the jeans, I buried them at the bottom of the laundry hamper.

  Then I examined my face in the bathroom mirror. My lip was split, and there was dried blood smeared across my face. Also, it looked like I would have one hell of a shiner when I woke up tomorrow morning. I tried to convince myself that much of the bruising was really just shoe polish, even though I knew it wasn’t. I washed up at the sink, then dabbed a swab of cotton doused in rubbing alcohol to the split in my lip.

  The anger and humiliation struck me later as I struggled to find sleep in my bed, my face burning but only partially due to the rubbing alcohol and my injuries. I thought I would stay awake all night—that I would hear the shudder of my father’s unmarked sedan coming to rest in the driveway at dawn, would smell coffee brewing on the stove . . .

  Thinking all this, I fell quickly asleep.

  Chapter Four

  The New Kid

  I awoke the next morning, Sunday, feeling bruised and sore all over. My ribs hurt, my face hurt, and there was an aggressive headache drilling through the center of my brain. I saw bright orange leaves float by my bedroom window and remembered that today was Halloween.

  I got up, went into the bathroom, and spent the next few minutes gazing into the mirror, trying to convince myself that the wounds on my face incurred from last night’s run-in with the K
eener Gang didn’t look as bad as I’d feared. But they did. My lip was puffy and the split at its center had dried to a brownish-purple scab, and the skin around my left eye was swollen and bruised.

  Thankfully, it was early and everyone else in the house was still asleep, so I dressed and slipped out the back door before anyone could see me.

  I trotted across the street to the edge of the woods behind the Mathersons’ house. I noticed black tire marks on the pavement where Keener’s pickup had burned rubber and peeled out. I hurried onto the Mathersons’ lawn and headed toward the pine trees where I had hid from Keener and his gang. On my mind was the gut feeling that there had been someone else hidden among those trees with me last night. It hadn’t been one of Keener’s buddies—they would have snatched me and dragged me out—but it had been someone.

  Now I attempted to locate the exact spot where I had crouched and hidden the night before. My gaze fell on broken limbs and crushed pinecones, so I assumed I was in the vicinity. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for, but I felt a compulsion to see if there had been any clue left behind. A shoe print, perhaps.

  But I found no shoe print. I found no evidence of any kind. I continued to wend through the trees for several minutes, swatting at bristling boughs and crunching on brown pine needles, but the only shoe prints I discovered were the big sloppy impressions left behind by the Keener Gang’s shit-kicker boots. Had I imagined someone else here? Had it all been in my head? I finally surrendered to defeat and gave up.

  On my bike, I sped through the sleepy streets of the city while passing only the occasional neighbor shuffling to the edge of their driveway to retrieve their morning newspaper. Some looked dismayed at the dried egg yolk shellacked to the sides of their cars, a casualty of Mischief Night. Later the streets would be teeming with trick-or-treaters, and before the night was over there would be more cars to clean and fistfuls of candy corn chucked in the gutters, looking like busted teeth.

  Cold air whipped in off the bay, smelling strongly of wood smoke and cedar and vaguely of impending snow. They were calling for a harsh winter this year. Already the Generous Superstore had its shelves stocked for the predicted snowstorms.

  I rode my bike parallel to the highway and eventually turned in to the plaza where I chained my bike up outside the Quickman. Inside, rubbing the feeling back into my hands, I ordered pancakes, sausage links, bacon, and scrambled eggs. The Quickman made the best scrambled eggs, moist without being too runny, saturated in cheddar cheese, and drizzled with bacon bits.

  I went over to the bank of pay phones at the rear of the eatery and dialed Peter’s number.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Mrs. Blum. Is Peter up?”

  “I think so. Hold on, Angie.” She leaned away from the phone and called for Peter. I could hear a TV or a radio in the background. When she came back on the line, she said, “He’s grabbing the upstairs extension.”

  “Thanks.”

  “How’s your dad?”

  “Oh, he’s okay. I haven’t seen him much lately. He’s been busy with work.”

  She sighed. “I guess it’s a hectic time for him, all right,” she said and sounded glad to be rid of me when Peter picked up the extension.

  “Hey,” I said. “Get your butt down to the Quickman.”

  “What are you doing out so early?”

  “I needed to leave before my dad got up.”

  “Jesus, man, what’d you do now? Are you in trouble again?”

  “Just get down here, will you?”

  He groaned. “Give me fifteen minutes,” he said, and hung up.

  I dropped the phone back on its cradle, then sat at a window booth where I waited for my food. I was the only one in the place, and I found idle contentment in watching the lights of the shops along the plaza come on one by one as daylight broke across the sky. There were paper jack-o’-lanterns taped to the shopwindows. On the front door of Mr. Pastore’s deli was a cutout of a black cat, its spine arched and spiky as if it had been zapped by a current of electricity. Spooky tapestries hung from the old-fashioned streetlamps that ran the length of the sidewalk. The entire parking lot looked like a charcoal etching.

  When my food came, I sliced up my pancakes and drowned them in blueberry syrup. I nibbled at the strips of bacon, avoiding the earlobes of jiggling fat at the ends, and ate a single forkful of egg before I set my fork down and just stared out the window. As ridiculous as it was for Keener to hate me for what had happened to him, so was it equally ridiculous for me to hate my father for what Keener had done to me. But I did. I knew it was stupid. My eyes suddenly burned. At that moment, I was all too aware of my swollen lower lip and my purpling eye.

  Something banged against the plate-glass window. The palm of Peter’s hand was pressed against the glass, pulsing like one of those face huggers in Alien. Pleased to have startled me, he grinned. I shook my head and waved him in. He leaned his bike against the window and entered the Quickman on a gust of cool air.

  His smile faded as he approached the booth. “What the hell happened to your face?” he said, sitting across from me.

  I decided to play coy. “Huh? What are you talking about?”

  “Are you shitting me? It looks like someone hit you with a goddamn truck.”

  “Eat this,” I said, pushing my plate in front of him.

  When the waitress came by, he supplemented the meal with a heart-stopper, the Quickman’s specialty—a toasted parmesan bagel slathered in melted cheese and topped with a fried disc of salami that curled like burned paper around the edges.

  “Seriously, man,” he said, stuffing his face with egg. “What happened to you?”

  I told him about the night before, and I could see the anger welling just below the surface of his face as the story progressed. By the time I’d finished, his normally ruddy complexion had transitioned to a purple rash-like blotchiness that seemed to originate somewhere below his neckline.

  Peter pushed the half-eaten plate away. “That son of a bitch coward, jumping you when you’re alone. He must have been following us and waiting for the right time.”

  I had been thinking the same thing. I even recalled seeing a pickup coast by the Harting Farms sign last night after we’d switched the letters. In hindsight, I thought it might have been Keener’s truck.

  “We gotta get that asshole. Like, for real. Payback’s a bitch.” Peter hooked one finger into his shirt collar and stretched it away from his neck. I nearly expected a cartoon mushroom cloud of steam to belch out. “What’s his community service?”

  “He and his friends gotta scrub the graffiti off the back of the Generous Superstore. Either that or paint over it.”

  Peter shook his head. “And that dumb fuck blames you?”

  I shrugged, trying damned hard to look disinterested and not upset all of a sudden. “He thinks I ratted him out to my dad. He knows I saw them spraying the store.”

  “But, well, you didn’t rat them out, did you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “That overgrown fuck. We could set his truck on fire.”

  “Chill out,” I said. “I’m in no mood to go to juvie over it.”

  “But you can’t just not do anything about it.”

  “Well, if it’s any consolation, I’m pretty sure I busted Carl Nance’s kneecap before I got away.”

  Peter arched his eyebrows. “No shit?”

  “I got him pretty good,” I said, “and I think I heard it pop.”

  “Good for you. I hope he’s in a wheelchair the next time I see him. Those assholes.” Though still visibly angry, Peter’s appetite had evidently returned, because he scooped up a mound of egg. “I’m assuming your dad doesn’t know anything about this.”

  I snagged a strip of bacon off the plate. “Nope. Wasn’t in the mood to get into it with him. That’s why I left before he woke up.”

  “So then the plan is to hide from him all week until your face heals up?”

  “I have no plan.”

/>   “Maybe we can catch a movie at the Juniper. They’re showing all those old horror flicks for Halloween, remember?”

  “Cool,” I said.

  “After that, we can figure out what to do about your face. Maybe Scott will have an idea. He’s on his way over here.”

  When Scott arrived almost twenty minutes later, winded and chapped from biking halfway across town, he plunked down beside Peter, who was in the middle of eating a fresh order of breakfast.

  Scott plucked a sausage link from his plate. “Jesus, Angie, what happened to your face?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “You missed the reenactment.”

  “Nathan Keener and his ballet troupe jumped him last night after we all split up,” Peter informed him.

  “Goddamn it. He tuned you up good.”

  I rolled my shoulders and pursed my lips. “Apparently it looks worse than it feels.”

  “What’d your dad say?” he asked, snatching another of Peter’s sausage links.

  This time, Peter shot him a disapproving look.

  “He hasn’t seen me yet.”

  “You think he’ll arrest Keener and his friends for assault?”

  “Christ,” I said. “That’s the last thing I need.”

  “Then what are you gonna tell him?”

  “Beats me. You got any ideas?”

  Scott narrowed his eyes and scrutinized my face while chewing slowly and methodically on the last bit of sausage. Then his eyes brightened and he snapped his fingers. “You could pretend it’s fake. Like, it’s your Halloween costume.”

  “What’s he supposed to be?” Peter quipped. “A guy who got his ass kicked?”

  “No, man,” Scott said. “Your dad’s got those old boxing gloves in the basement, right? You can say you’re a boxer.”

  “Nice,” I said, frowning. “And what am I supposed to do tomorrow? Pretend I’m still in character?”

  “You can pretend you’re one of the Piper’s victims,” Peter suggested. “The one who got away.”