December Park

by Ronald Malfi

  “Oh. Okay. Do you have a lot of friends here?”

  “Sure,” I said. “There’s a bunch of kids on this block, too.”

  He nodded impassively. “Do you like comic books?”

  “Sure,” I said, though I didn’t own a single comic book. When I was younger, I used to buy them for a dollar and a quarter at the Newsoleum on Second Avenue, but I hadn’t continued the practice once I started reading horror novels.

  “I’ve got a bunch. I was just unpacking some of them upstairs. Do you want to come up and take a look?”

  “Well, I sort of have to get back home. I gotta help my grandma hand out candy to the kids.”

  “Are you going trick-or-treating?”

  My friends and I hadn’t gone trick-or-treating since we were eleven. But this kid looked about my age, and I didn’t want to make fun of him, so I just said, “Nah, I’ve got some homework and stuff to do, too.”

  “Where do you go to school?”

  “Stanton. You probably saw it when you came into town. It’s a big old building that looks like a medieval fortress.”

  “Oh yeah. That’s my new school, too.”

  Great, I thought. I would probably wind up sitting next to this kid in half my classes. He would follow me around, inserting himself into my group of friends, and sit next to me at the lunch table.

  “Well, maybe you can come by some time, and I can show you my comic book collection. When you have time.”

  “Okay.” I feigned interest in the setting sun outside the nearest window. “But I should get back home now.”

  Without uttering another word, Adrian turned and led me to the front door. He twisted the doorknob with two hands, the way a small child would do it, and when he pulled the door open it seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. It was like watching someone open a bank vault.

  “Well,” I said, hurrying out the door, “I’ll see you around.”

  “Hey,” he said. “Does it hurt? Your face, I mean.”

  “No, not really. It’s just sort of embarrassing.”

  “Wait here,” he said, whirling away from the door and pounding up the stairs before I could say anything.

  I turned and watched hordes of witches, ghosts, ghouls, and goblins rove up and down the street. Given all that had been happening in town since the Demorest boy disappeared in August, their joyful screams took on a sinister quality.

  Adrian returned with something in his hand. “Sorry,” he said, out of breath. “It took me a while to find it.” He extended it to me and I took it. It was a pair of fake plastic teeth, all yellow and rotted and crawling with plastic bugs. “They’re zombie teeth.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You can wear ’em when you answer the door to hand out candy. This way, you won’t have to be embarrassed about your face. People will think it’s part of a costume.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say. “That’s a good idea. Thanks.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Later.” I hopped off the porch and walked across his front lawn. When I glanced over my shoulder, I saw him standing in the doorway, watching me. He was still watching me when I walked through my front door.

  Chapter Five

  In the Shadows, in the Shade

  Following my altercation with Mr. Naczalnik, I was reassigned to Mr. Mattingly’s English class. The polar opposite of the stodgy Naczalnik, Mr. Mattingly was young and looked more like a lacrosse player than a high school teacher. He spoke to his students as if they were peers. This was his first year teaching, and his slight Southern drawl made him seem as foreign and intriguing as someone from the other side of the world. I liked him instantly.

  That Monday, I sat in Mr. Mattingly’s class for a good forty minutes before I realized Adrian Gardiner was seated toward the back of the room. His presence surprised me; he looked completely out of his element here, like a ghost who’d just walked in from a graveyard. When he met my eyes he quickly bowed his head and stared at the top of his desk. I turned back around and faced the front of the classroom, inexplicably discomfited by his presence.

  When the bell rang, I expected Adrian to follow me out, but he didn’t. He gathered up his books, strapped a ridiculously large backpack to his shoulders, and bustled out of the classroom ahead of me. In the hallway, he vanished among the sea of students.

  The following day, I said hello to him as I crossed the aisle on the way to my desk. He gazed up at me from his seat, his expression one of perplexity behind his thick glasses. When he recognized me, he offered me a partial smile that seemed to have no feeling behind it.

  For the next fifty-five minutes, I wondered if Adrian would come up to me after class. But once again, the moment the bell trilled, he was up and out the door. Strangely, I found myself more troubled by his ignoring me than if he’d latched onto me and followed me around like a puppy.

  One afternoon before class started, a kid named George Drexler strutted over to Adrian’s desk. Adrian was staring absently at his textbook. Drexler, who was a stocky little prick with bad teeth, pointed to what looked like a doodle in the margin of a page, and said, “Hey, did you draw that?”

  Adrian looked up at him. “Yeah.” Then he smiled meagerly like he’d just befriended someone who appreciated his artistic talent.

  “Cool,” said Drexler before returning to his seat. Thirty seconds later, as Mr. Mattingly entered the classroom with his briefcase and a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup, Drexler raised his hand. When Mr. Mattingly called on him, Drexler said, “The new kid drew all over his textbook.”

  I kept an eye out for Adrian in the cafeteria, but I could never spot him. Toward the end of the week, I wandered outside into the quad. It was a chilly November day, and there were only a few students braving the weather, mostly the hopheads who didn’t get along with the rest of the student body. Adrian was not here, either.

  Similarly, my friends and I never caught up with him as we walked home from school. Adrian lived right next door to me, but I never saw him walking along Worth Street in those first few weeks. On a couple of occasions I was tempted to knock on his door, but the thought of entering that stale, tomb-like house again caused my skin to break out into braille.

  “Have you met him yet?” Peter asked me one afternoon as we walked home from school.

  “Yeah. My grandma made me bring cookies over to the house the day they moved in. He’s in my English class, too.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Kind of strange. He’s already missed a couple of classes.”

  “Your dad’s not gonna make you hang out with him, is he?”

  “Are you kidding? No way I’m hanging out with him. The kid’s a spaz.”

  In fact, my father never said a word about the new neighbors. Not only was he overworked, but he was at his all-time lowest around the holidays. Charles’s absence weighed heaviest on him this time of year, and I suppose he thought often of my mother around this time, too.

  We maintained the family tradition of driving out to the Butterfields’ where we bought apples for pies and Indian corn to decorate the front door. Yet my father moved through the Butterfields’ cornstalks and bales of golden hay like a ghost, a humorless grin frozen onto his face. When he paid for the items at the register, he didn’t engage Henry Butterfield in their ritualistic cheerful banter.

  Thanksgiving morning, just as I had forgotten all about Adrian Gardiner, he appeared on our front doorstep holding a dish tented with foil. “It’s lasagna, I think. I’m not sure. My mom made it.”

  My grandmother took the dish from him—it was our dish, the one that had been stacked with my grandmother’s cookies—then invited him inside. The kid stood in the foyer, shifting from one foot to the other, his ski parka too tight around his shoulders while his glasses looked too big for his face.

  “How are you getting along at school?” I asked him.

  “It’s okay.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Sure.”

  �
�Is it really different than Chicago?”

  “I guess so.”

  “What about the town? I bet it’s totally different than living in a big city.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you miss your friends?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Our conversation was strained to the point of breaking, so I wished him a happy Thanksgiving and ushered him out onto the porch. He said nothing in response and seemed relieved to be out the door. From the bay windows in the living room, I watched him cross the lawn toward his house. He dragged his feet and hunched his shoulders and looked like someone who felt uncomfortable merely existing.

  The following Sunday, as my family and I drove back from church, I saw Adrian’s narrow little frame packaged in that same undersized parka, marching up Haven Street. He had his bulky backpack strapped to his shoulders, and he walked with his head down, as if the effort of the exercise took so much out of him.

  As our car glided past, I stared at him. It looked like he was searching for something in the patch of brownish grass that abutted the shoulder of the road. He did not see me.

  Of course, I had more important things to worry about than Adrian Gardiner. In the weeks following my run-in with Keener and his gang on Mischief Night, I had seen Nathan Keener’s truck cruising my neighborhood at odd hours of the day and sometimes in early evening. There was little doubt he was looking for me.

  Every day for the remainder of that month Keener could be found with a handful of his friends at the Generous Superstore, whitewashing over the vulgarities they had spray-painted on the walls. I saw them there as my friends and I walked home from school, careful to stay out of their sight. Once, I saw Carl Nance among them. He sat on the hood of his Aries K, wearing a leg brace and balancing a pair of crutches across his lap. This gave me some dark satisfaction.

  I had to be careful and anticipated an ambush at every turn. Like a fugitive, I kept to the shadows, kept to the shade.

  One Saturday afternoon as I studied a display of pocketknives at Toddy Surplus, I spotted Keener, Denny Sallis, and Kenneth Ottawa strutting past the front windows. I prayed they wouldn’t come inside. They paused just outside the store and lit cigarettes. A light snow was falling, and the sky beyond the parking lot was gray and brooding.

  I sidestepped over to a rack of hunting gear, keeping my eye on the windows. When they ditched their cigarette butts onto the curb and entered the store, I felt a great waft of heat blossom up out of my coat. I faded toward the back just as Mr. Toddy, the pock-faced proprietor behind the counter, looked up and cleared his throat.

  “Help you boys with anything?” Mr. Toddy asked Keener and his buddies.

  “Just lookin’ around,” said Ottawa as he lazily spun a wire carousel displaying postcards, novelty magnets, and books of crossword puzzles. He wore a grease-stained military jacket and faded jeans. His jackboots left wet footprints on the linoleum.

  I slipped down an aisle and stashed myself between two racks of old hunting coats. At the front of the store, Keener and Sallis snickered about something beside a display case of electronic equipment. Like a restless bear, Ottawa continued to rove around the store, absently picking up items off shelves, then shoving them back in place.

  When Ottawa paused on the other side of the aisle where I was hiding, I glanced up at the antitheft mirror above the front door and saw that both Keener and Sallis were bent over one of the display cases with their backs to the front door. If Ottawa came around the aisle, I’d run in the opposite direction and head for the door. Hopefully I’d make it out before Ottawa could alert the other two.

  But Ottawa meandered over to his friends, his boots still leaving wet tracks on the floor. The three of them muttered, and one of them—Sallis, I thought—tittered laughter like a hyena.

  “Was there something in particular you fellas were looking for?” Mr. Toddy spoke up again.

  From where I stood I couldn’t see him, but I could certainly sense an air of apprehension in his voice.

  “Nope,” said Keener. He shoved his hands into his pockets. “Let’s beat it.”

  They headed out. Before the door shut them out, I heard one of them mocking Mr. Toddy in a reedy parrot’s voice: “‘Was there something in particular you fellas were looking for?’” This was followed by guttural laughter.

  I watched them cross the parking lot and walk up the sidewalk toward the highway. It was snowing harder now, and I soon lost sight of them among the crowd of holiday shoppers.

  “Those boys friends of yours?” Mr. Toddy asked me after I’d come out from behind the rack of hunting coats.

  “No, sir.”

  “I don’t like them coming in here. You tell them I said so.”

  “They’re not my friends.”

  “They come in here again, I’m calling the cops.”

  I nodded, then rushed out of the store.

  On Christmas Eve, we celebrated Festa dei sette pesci, or the Feast of the Seven Fishes. The house was pungent with the scent of scungilli and fried codfish while my grandmother butchered eels in the kitchen sink. My dad and grandfather sat in the living room drinking Chianti as Dean Martin and Perry Como took turns crooning Christmas standards on my father’s old turntable.

  I put the finishing touches on the Christmas tree and watched the snow spiral past the bay windows. Next door, Adrian’s house was completely dark. I wondered if he and his mother had traveled back to Chicago for the holidays.

  Yet the following morning, as my family and I climbed into my dad’s car for Christmas mass, I saw Adrian sitting on the front stoop of his house. He was wearing flimsy-looking pajamas and fuzzy blue slippers.

  My grandmother commented about how the kid was going to catch pneumonia sitting outside dressed like that, and wasn’t his mother paying any attention? I thought of Doreen Gardiner’s medicated stare and zombielike gait and decided that maybe paying attention was beyond her ability.

  That night, we had the Mathersons over for Christmas dinner. They were a childless couple of middle age, plain and good-hearted. Mr. Matherson told the story about how a deer had gotten tangled in his Christmas lights one year and how he and my father and Charles had chased the deer up and down the street to try and get it untangled. I had been positioned on our front lawn with a broom; my dad had instructed me to swing the broomstick at the buck if it got too close. Mr. Matherson told the story every Christmas, as if none of us had ever heard it, let alone been there when it happened.

  “Eventually,” said Mr. Matherson, smiling ruefully if not a bit drunkenly, “the thing took off into the woods, trailing about one hundred feet of colored bulbs behind it. It’s probably still out there to this day, its antlers strung up in lights.”

  Just as coffee was served, my grandmother ushered me into the kitchen and shoved a ceramic plate into my hands. It was filled with struffoli, which were little balls of dough glazed in honey and covered with colorful round sprinkles.

  “Just go on over and wish those people a merry Christmas,” she said and practically tossed me out the front door.

  I crossed the snowy patch of yard. Paper-bag luminaries lit up the far end of Worth Street like an airport runway. As was typical, the worry about a heavy snowstorm this year had been for nothing, and we had received only three inches of snow, which was quickly melting. It was terribly cold, however, and the brief walk from my house to the Gardiners’ was enough to numb my cheekbones and cause my nose to start running.

  I climbed the porch steps of the Gardiner house, wondering once again if anyone was home. The lower level was dark, but there was a single light in one of the upstairs windows. I knocked on the door, then peered through the adjacent window, searching for any kind of festive lighting inside. I saw nothing.

  Doreen Gardiner opened the door. Her face was pale and haggard, her hair tugged back on her head and tied in a tight bun. She wore a loose-fitting cotton shirt and flared pants with a wallpapery paisley pattern. The smell of stale, unwashed flesh combined wi
th liquor wafted out onto the porch with me.

  “Merry Christmas,” I said, thrusting out the plate of struffoli.

  “How nice,” she said flatly and bent down to survey the sticky balls of dough. “Very interesting.”

  “It’s called struffoli,” I said. “I don’t like it much, but the rest of my family does. My grandma makes it for Christmas every year.”

  As she leaned forward to take the plate, the frayed collar of her shirt gaped, and I saw what looked like a hideously pink scar twisting around the base of her neck. It was dark on the porch, and I thought it was maybe a trick of the light. Before I could get a better look, she straightened up, and the scar disappeared beneath the collar. “Do you want to come in? Adrian’s upstairs.”

  “Uh, I need to get back home and help my grandma clean up,” I said.

  Doreen Gardiner smiled with much effort. She looked like a corpse brought to life by black magic, doomed to walk around still reeking of the grave. “Tell your grandmother thanks for the . . . What’s it called again?”

  “Struffoli.”

  “Yes. Tell her thanks. And merry Christmas, too.”

  Chapter Six

  An Incident on Bessel Avenue

  As was tradition on New Year’s Eve, my father, grandfather, and I drove to the old rock quarry at the end of our street to watch some of the neighbors light off fireworks. The quarry was a large pit of excavated limestone surrounded by two layers of chain-link fencing topped in concertina wire. It took up several acres, beginning at the end of Worth Street, where Worth denigrated from paved asphalt to a narrow access road comprised of crushed white gravel, and stretching all the way out to the black curtain of stately pines in the west. It was hard to tell how deep the pit was, although you wouldn’t be too far off estimating the drop at around two hundred feet.

  It was eleven thirty when we arrived, still early for the fireworks show, but even at this hour I could see that there weren’t as many people hanging outside the quarry fences as there had been in the past. It was easy to chalk up the poor attendance to the cold weather, yet I couldn’t help but wonder if people had stayed home because of the Piper.