December Park

by Ronald Malfi

  We retraced our steps back to our bikes. Out in December Park, some kids had gathered on the baseball diamond with gloves and a ball. Farther across the park, where Solomon’s Bend Road was veiled behind a curtain of walnut trees, a few younger kids flew kites under the guidance of their parents.

  A terrible feeling squirmed around inside my guts. “Listen,” I said as we prepared to split up. “You guys be careful, okay? And stick together. Don’t separate.”

  “Yes, mom,” Michael quipped.

  “He’s right,” Peter said, bouncing an acorn off Michael’s forehead. “Quit being a prick.”

  “Can’t,” Michael said. “It’s my nature.”

  Scott straddled his bike and headed across December Park. Michael gave Peter and me the finger, then turned and went after him. They carved a serpentine path through the overgrown grass while gathering speed and blasted right through the baseball diamond, kicking up clouds of dust and eliciting a barrage of swears from the older kids. A moment later, they both vanished beneath the underpass.

  “Where to first?” Peter said, adjusting the volume on the walkie-talkie.

  I didn’t have to think about it. “The Werewolf House.”

  Since that day Adrian and I had cowered in the basement shin-deep in fetid brown water, my perception of the Werewolf House had changed. It was no longer just a creepy old house at the far end of a vacant lot. It was something more sinister now.

  As we rode through the field and stopped before the wrought iron fence that surrounded the property, I felt my eyes glued to the house. It was as if to take them from it—even for a second—was akin to turning my back on a growling lion ready to pounce. It was nothing more than a collection of sun-bleached boards held together by scores of rusted carpentry nails, but I felt—no, I knew—that its whole was greater than the sum of its parts.

  “That door looks pretty sealed up,” Peter said.

  “We went in through the back door.”

  We set our bikes down in the grass. I walked through the opening in the fence, grass seed and small bugs adhering to my clothes, and headed around the back. Peter followed close behind me.

  “I can’t believe you guys went in there,” he marveled, gazing up at the crumbling roof and the hornets’ nests that hung like Chinese lanterns from the eaves. Then he froze. “What if Keener and his friends are in there?”

  “I don’t see their cars anywhere. Besides, I didn’t get the impression that this is a place they typically hang out. I think they went in looking for us.”

  “Are you sure you weren’t bullshitting about the rifle?”

  “I’ll show you where he blew a hole in the wall,” I said, approaching the back door. The boards still hung loosely, just as Adrian and I had left them. The door was shut.

  “Do we really have to go in there?” Peter said.

  “It’s why we’re here,” I said, climbing the steps. I gripped the knob and shoved one shoulder against the door. It popped open without much effort. “Come on.”

  It was like a dream, entering that house again. Indeed, I’d suffered nightmares about it, though I only now remembered them.

  Peter came up behind me, looking around at the ruined interior in awe. “It stinks.”

  “I think there’s a busted sewer pipe in the basement,” I said.

  Stepping over random debris and avoiding the blackened floorboards, I went into the kitchen. Peter was practically piggybacking on me, he was so close.

  “Right there,” I said, pointing to the blast hole in the cupboard. The possum’s blood had dried to brownish muck on the wall and the floor. Amazingly, I thought I could still smell gunpowder in the air.

  “Holy shit.” Peter shook his head slowly. “Keener’s a psycho. I know we’ve joked about it before, but is it possible he’s the Piper?”

  “I don’t think stealth is Keener’s style. The Piper is someone more”—I wanted to say cerebral, but it didn’t quite fit—“cautious. You don’t stay hidden from the cops for the better part of a year by stomping around town in steel-toed boots and spray-painting grocery stores. It’s too obvious.”

  “Where are you going?” he called to me.

  I hadn’t realized that I had been slowly making my way down the hall toward the basement door. I turned around and saw Peter standing at the opposite end of the hallway. Grainy harpoons of daylight filtered into the room behind him, creating the unsettling illusion that he was semitransparent.

  “I need to check the basement,” I said.

  “Do you really think Adrian would have gone into the basement by himself?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I approached the basement door, took a breath, opened it. The stink of the rancid water rushed up and slapped me across the face. They say the olfactory sense is the one connected most closely with memory, and I believe it; by just catching a whiff of that fecal stench, I was back down there in the dark, crouching beside Adrian while heavy footfalls tramped the boards above our heads. My sneakers were submerged in it, my jeans soaked, my heart strumming frantically. I had to take a step back from the doorway to convince myself that I wasn’t actually still down there.

  “You all right?” Peter said, joining me. “You look like you’re gonna be sick.”

  “I just had a weird thought,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Remember how I said Keener had tried to trick us into coming out? How he’d had his friends drive the cars away while he stayed here, waiting for us? And then he’d come halfway down the stairs?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well,” I said, my throat suddenly dry, “what if it hadn’t been Keener?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, only because I couldn’t bring myself to say it.

  The house creaked.

  “Hey!” Peter shouted down the mine shaft of the open basement door. “Adrian! You down there?”

  His voice echoed in the fetid chamber—there . . . ere . . . ere . . .

  “I don’t like this place,” Peter said, his voice nearly a whisper. “Let’s get out of here.”

  We hurried back through the house, and Peter was out the door first. I followed, shutting the door behind me. After some consideration, I readjusted the two-by-fours and pressed the nails back into the nail holes in the frame.

  “Why’d you do that?” Peter asked.

  “So we’ll know if someone goes inside,” I said.

  “If we ever come back out here, you mean.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Come on.”

  We went around the side of the house, absently swatting at wasps that orbited our heads . . . then froze as we stepped out into the overgrown front yard.

  A man stood on the other side of the fence, a red baseball cap tugged down low over his face. He wore carpenter’s pants and a gray T-shirt with a faded emblem on the chest. He was looking directly at us. “What are you two doing?”

  I couldn’t speak. If his silence could be construed as evidence, I don’t think Peter could, either.

  “Angelo?” the man said, his voice cracking slightly. “Angelo Mazzone? Is that you?”

  The man pushed back the bill of his hat. Instantly I recognized his face, although I couldn’t place his name.

  “Y-yes,” I managed.

  “You guys shouldn’t be hanging around out here. It’s dangerous.”

  “Oh,” I muttered. In my head, I was gauging the distance to our bikes. The man was closer to them than we were; we wouldn’t be able to get on them without him stopping one or both of us.

  “Seriously,” the man said. He turned and looked at the house. If we were to run for it, now would be our chance. “This place should be torn down. It’s asking for trouble.”

  Just as I was about to break into a sprint, I realized who the man was: Mr. Mattingly, my English teacher. Something like relief washed over me. I must have uttered a pathetic little mewl, too, because Mr. Mattingly turned back to me.
r />   “Hey, Mr. Mattingly,” I said.

  He laughed. “Didn’t recognize me, huh?”

  “Not at first, no.”

  “You kids think that after the school year’s through, all the teachers are packed away in crates filled with Styrofoam peanuts,” he said not unkindly.

  It wasn’t that at all. Rather, it had been the inability to fully recognize someone when they were out of their usual place—in Mr. Mattingly’s case, the classroom.

  “Forget it,” he said. “No hard feelings. But seriously—you guys shouldn’t hang around this place. Know what I’m saying?”

  I nodded like an imbecile. “We were just leaving.”

  “How come you’re out here?” Peter said.

  “I’m looking for my dog.” The abrupt change in his tone was unmistakable.

  “You want us to help you find him?” Peter said.

  “That isn’t necessary,” said Mr. Mattingly.

  “It’s no big deal. What’s his name?”

  When I realized I was holding my breath, I released it in a shuddery exhalation.

  “Brindle,” Mr. Mattingly finally said. “And he’s a she.” He glanced at the road, then back at us. “We were out for a walk when she saw a rabbit run by. She can’t resist a good chase.”

  “If—,” Peter began.

  But he was cut off as a black-and-white cocker spaniel bounded toward Mr. Mattingly through the grass. Mr. Mattingly hunkered down and rubbed the dog’s face.

  The dog barked twice, then cut through the grass and came over to Peter, where it proceeded to sniff at Peter’s sneakers.

  “Hey, pooch,” Peter said, bending down to stroke the dog’s back.

  “Do you live around here?” I asked Mr. Mattingly.

  Mr. Mattingly pointed in the direction of the gridded little neighborhood beyond the Butterfield farmhouse. “Back there. It’s just my wife and me,” he said. I must have been staring at him too intensely, since he laughed, possibly to break the tension, and added, “Yeah, I know. Students don’t think of teachers as having wives or husbands, either, right?”

  “Right,” I said flatly.

  “Well,” Mr. Mattingly said, crouching back down in the grass. He patted his thighs. “Come on, Brindle. Let’s head home.”

  The cocker spaniel darted between Peter’s feet and scampered over to Mr. Mattingly.

  Mr. Mattingly removed a leash from the rear pocket of his pants and hooked it to the dog’s collar. When he stood up, he smiled. “I guess I’ll see you guys around. Have a good summer.”

  “See you,” I said and watched him walk across the empty lot.

  “That guy’s your teacher?”

  I nodded.

  “What do you think he was doing out here?”

  “I don’t know, man.”

  “You don’t think . . . ?” Peter let the unfinished thought hang in the air.

  When Michael had listed Mr. Mattingly’s name among the suspects, it had struck me as a ridiculous and far-fetched assumption. Now I wondered why I had thought so . . .

  Static burst through the walkie-talkie. It was garbled nonsense.

  Peter plucked it off his belt and keyed the Talk button. “We didn’t make out a word of that. Repeat. Over.”

  We waited but the static burst did not repeat.

  “Maybe they didn’t hear us,” I suggested. “We might be too far away.”

  “Let’s head back,” Peter said, clipping the radio on his belt. He went over to his bike and pulled it out of the weeds.

  I grabbed my bike, too. As I climbed on, I glanced toward the road where Mr. Mattingly and his dog walked in the direction of the Shallows.

  We were riding down McKinsey when the walkie-talkie came alive again.

  Peter brought the radio to his mouth. “Is that you, Scotty? You’re breaking up, man. Repeat. Over.”

  “. . . to the woods,” Scott’s voice crackled over the radio.

  “Go to the woods?” Peter said into the radio. “We’ll be there in a bit. Over.”

  “Don’t,” Scott’s voice returned, and the word was crisp and clear. “Don’t . . . woods . . .”

  “Don’t go to the woods?” Peter asked me.

  “That’s what it sounded like,” I said.

  Peter brought the handheld up to his face again. “Hello? Guys? We can hardly understand you.”

  Scott’s static-laden voice answered: “. . . dezvous . . .”

  “Rendezvous,” Peter translated. “He wants us to meet at the rendezvous point instead of the woods.”

  “Where’s the rendezvous point?” I asked. After all this time, I had forgotten. “Is it the tree by the baseball field?”

  “No,” he said, clipping the walkie-talkie to his belt loop. He arched his back, lifting his butt off the seat, and pedaled faster. “The underpass.”

  When we reached December Park, we flew through the intersection and hooked a left onto Solomon’s Bend Road. Evening crept across the horizon, making the distant trees look like woodcut carvings, and the baseball players and kite-flying kids had gone.

  Riding side by side, Peter and I took the bike path that curved down into Solomon’s Field. Drunkard’s Pond was wreathed in three-foot-tall cattails, and the water appeared dark and mysterious in the encroaching dusk.

  “There they are,” Peter said, pointing to a figure standing before the mouth of the underpass waving his arms. It was Scott.

  Our bike tires eating up the earth, we cut across the field and coasted to a bumpy stop next to the underpass. Michael stood just inside it, halfway cloaked in shadow. Their bikes leaned against the black stone walls of the tunnel.

  “What gives?” I said, still straddling my bike.

  “There’s someone in the woods,” Scott said.

  “At Echo Base,” Michael added.

  “Who is it?” Peter asked.

  “Some guy,” Scott said. He described him—a man in his thirties with short, sandy hair, wearing dark-colored cargo pants and a black shirt. Neither Scott nor Michael had recognized him.

  “We were walking through the woods over to Echo Base when we saw him just kind of . . . well, looking around at all our stuff,” Michael said. “He was opening one of the trash bags when he looked up and saw us watching him through the trees.”

  “He didn’t say anything,” Scott said. “That’s when Michael and I took off and came here.”

  “Is he still there?” Peter asked.

  “How should we know?” Michael said.

  “Well, should we go back and look?”

  “Seriously?” Michael said. “It’ll be dark soon and I gotta get home. Besides, you really wanna be in those woods with some weirdo who’s rooting around in our stuff?”

  “What if it’s the Piper?” Peter said.

  “All the more reason,” Michael said. “I’m not keen on having my skull bashed in tonight.”

  “Mikey’s right,” I said. “I need to get home, too. We can check things out tomorrow.”

  “All right,” Peter said, though he seemed uncertain.

  “Who’s there?” someone called and we all jumped. A man walked toward us through the underpass, his legs spaced wide apart, his hands loose at his sides. “Let’s see you.”

  Michael jumped out from beneath the tunnel and joined us on the grass.

  “Let’s see all of you.” The man raised one hand and made a come hither gesture. When he stepped out from beneath the underpass, we could see he was a uniformed police officer. “What are you kids doing down here?”

  “We’re just hanging out,” Michael said. Then, as conversational as you please, he added, “What’s up, dude?”

  Looking right past Michael, the cop pointed at the walkie-talkie on Peter’s belt. “What do you got, son?”

  Peter glanced down at the handheld. “Uh, a walkie-talkie, sir.”

  “You boys vandalizing anything?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Got any spray paint? Anything like that?”

  “
No, sir,” Peter repeated.

  The cop jerked a thumb over his shoulder but kept his eyes on us. “That backpack belong to one of you?”

  “It’s mine,” Scott said.

  “School’s out,” the cop said, as if he’d caught us in a lie. He had a tired, creased face with cold eyes beneath heavy lids.

  “It’s for scavenger hunting,” Michael piped up. “We’re looking for treasure.”

  “Yeah?” the cop said. “Find anything?”

  Michael frowned at the irony of it. “No, sir. Not a thing.”

  “You kids shouldn’t be down here, especially after dark. You know you’re supposed to stay away from enclosed places like this, don’t you?” He outlined the opening of the underpass with one finger, in case we were ignorant about what “enclosed places” meant.

  “Yes, sir,” I vocalized from the back of my crew. “We’re sorry, sir.”

  “You boys should know better.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re Sal Mazzone’s boy, ain’t you?”

  I swallowed a lump of spit that felt like a walnut. “Yes, sir.”

  “I know you know better than to play down here.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Just skedaddle. I won’t tell your pops.”

  “Thanks.”

  The cop glanced at Scott’s and Michael’s bikes leaning against the wall of the underpass. “Then get on home.”

  Scott and Michael got their bikes out and joined Peter and me in the grass.

  “Do me a favor and don’t cut across the park.” The cop pointed up the embankment toward Solomon’s Bend Road. “It’s getting too dark. Stick to the roadways.”

  The four of us rolled our bikes across Solomon’s Field. Still standing at the mouth of the underpass, the cop watched us go.

  When we hit Solomon’s Bend Road, Michael said, “That guy came out of nowhere. Gives me the creeps.”