December Park

by Ronald Malfi

  By the time we returned to our neighborhood, the clock on the dash read 9:09 p.m. Keener’s truck was still parked on Haven Street, the interior light now completely dead. We took the turn onto Worth with particular lethargy, and I wondered if my father was dreading having to tell Doreen Gardiner that we hadn’t found her son. Of course, I was hoping Adrian was already home. He couldn’t still be in that horrid place, could he?

  Yet as we passed the Gardiner house, it looked unchanged. Adrian was not sitting on the stoop, waving at us. His round face was not in any of the windows. That blue light still strobed in one of the first-floor windows, though Doreen Gardiner’s silhouette was no longer pressed against the glass like a hideous shadow puppet.

  My dad pulled the car into our driveway and shut it down yet remained behind the wheel for several seconds, unmoving and soundless. My left hand itched to touch his shoulder, but he startled me by turning and smiling wearily at me. His face looked incredibly old in the moonlight coming through the windshield, and there were purplish crescents beneath his small and tired eyes. Each individual fleck of beard stubble stood out in sharp relief against the pasty paleness of his face. Though it had undoubtedly been happening for a long time now, I noticed for the first time just how gray his hair had turned.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  The question caught me by surprise. “I guess so.”

  “I’m going next door. I know it’s late, but why don’t you give the guys a call and see if they’ve heard from him. All right?”

  “All right.”

  “Put on a pot of coffee for me, too?”

  “Yeah.”

  We got out of the car together but went our separate ways.

  In the kitchen, I started up a pot of coffee, then dialed Peter’s phone number. It rang and rang but no one answered. Eventually the answering machine came on, Monica Blum’s cheery schoolgirl voice instructing me to leave a message. I hung up.

  I called Michael’s house next. His father answered in a dull monotone. He seemed irritated at having to speak with me, particularly at such a late hour, but he called for his son nonetheless.

  “Adrian hasn’t come back yet,” I said the second Michael came on the line. “His mom came by earlier tonight. She hasn’t seen him.”

  Michael said, “He’s an idiot. He probably fell asleep in that old building and will show up tomorrow morning.”

  “I’m worried about him.”

  “He’ll turn up.”

  Then I called Scott. His sister answered and seemed disappointed that the call wasn’t for her. When Scott came on the line, I repeated what I’d told Michael.

  “Shit,” Scott said. “You really think he’s in that building?”

  “Remember how he didn’t want to leave? He was so certain we were going to find something in there. Yeah, I think he went back in.”

  “What if he broke a leg?” Scott said. “Or fell down one of those holes and broke his neck?”

  I could only exhale heavily into the receiver.

  “Crap,” Scott groaned, “I gotta go. Kristy needs the phone. Call me back if you hear from him.”

  “I will,” I said, and hung up.

  When my father returned home from the Gardiners’ house the look on his face told me all I needed to know: Adrian hadn’t yet come back. I told him none of my friends had heard from him, either. He nodded and yawned while kicking off his shoes in the front hallway. The coffee was ready and waiting for him on the counter, but my old man went straight for the liquor cabinet.

  In the morning, I hoped for good news. None came. I got on my bike and rode past Keener’s truck on Haven Street. It hadn’t moved. I went to work at Secondhand Thrift, plodding through my day like someone who’d had a lobotomy. Yet despite my lethargy, there was a nervous tension vibrating throughout my entire body; I could feel it like live wires strumming just beneath the surface of my flesh.

  Peter stopped by the store at noon and asked if I’d heard any news about Adrian. I told him I hadn’t. He seemed nonplussed. We ate lunch together and played a few hands of Uno while on my break. Then he went home.

  “You,” growled Callibaugh at one point during the day. “You move like you’ve got a pant-load of bricks. What’s the matter with you today?”

  I told him I didn’t feel very well.

  He examined a gold pocket watch that he’d procured from one of the many pockets of his overalls, then consulted the wall-mounted clock above the cash register, as if his watch required corroboration. “Give it another hour, then. No more customers come in, you can head home early. I’ll take care of the receipts.”

  I thanked him.

  I stopped by December Park on my way home from work, even though it was out of my way, hoping—and almost strangely expecting—to find Adrian waving at me from the edge of the woods. But he was not there. A few police officers milled about the grounds, but there were no kids.

  Nathan Keener’s truck was still parked on Haven Street.

  When I turned onto Worth Street, I saw police cars in front of the Gardiner house. The front door stood open, and a uniformed officer walked around the perimeter of the property with a German shepherd on a leash. I hopped off my bike at the foot of the driveway and just watched. I wondered how far beneath the crust of the earth a German shepherd could smell.

  My father’s unmarked sedan was not in our driveway. With a sickness coiling around my spine, I wheeled my bike into my yard, propped it against the wall of ivy, and found today’s paper on the front porch. Those editors at the Caller had wasted no time in putting a photo of Adrian on the front page. The headline proclaimed Piper Claims Another Teen.

  My grandfather opened the front door and seemed startled to find me standing there. “You’re home early. Cops are talking to your friend’s mother.”

  “Have they heard anything?”

  “No.”

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “He got called in. He won’t be back till late.” He drew me closer to him with one of his big rough hands on the back of my head. I smelled pipe tobacco on his shirt and the old man smell of his skin.

  And I thought, Piper claims another . . .

  I had no appetite, and my grandmother didn’t make me come down for dinner. I listened to my grandparents’ muted conversation through the floor while I stretched out on my bed and stared absently at the ceiling. Outside, twilight had soured the sky to the color of seawater and turned the trees on the edge of our property into black pikes.

  Something Scott had said to me last night on the phone still resonated in my head: What if he broke a leg? Or fell down one of those holes and broke his neck?

  Adrian should have been home by now.

  After dinner, as per their ritual, my grandparents retired to the den to watch television. My father still wasn’t home. Aside from the occasional bout of canned laughter from the TV, the house had grown uncomfortably silent.

  Twice, I picked up the telephone in the upstairs hallway, intending to dial Peter’s number; both times I replaced the receiver to the cradle without so much as punching the first digit. From the hall windows, rapiers of bruised light speared through the leaves of maple trees. Thunder rumbled. I felt an aching nostalgia.

  I took a hot shower, hoping it would make me feel better. It didn’t. I put my old clothes back on, then found myself staring at the telephone in the upstairs hall again. This time, I dialed Peter’s number. It rang a few times before he picked up.

  “Midnight at the rendezvous point. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”

  There was prolonged silence on the other end of the line. I was about to hang up when Peter said, “I’ll call the others.”

  “I’ll understand if they don’t want to go.”

  “I think they’ve been waiting,” he said and hung up.

  At eleven o’clock, the television went off. I heard my grandparents moving around downstairs. The bathroom sink came on. Their soft voices nearly lulled me to sleep as I lay lis
tening to them on my bed.

  Twenty minutes later, as I listened to their duet of snores through the floor, I changed from shorts into a pair of blue jeans, then strapped on my sneakers. I upended my JanSport backpack and emptied textbooks, papers, pens, pencils, a slide rule, and two Ronald Kelly paperbacks onto my bed. Rachel’s poems were among the items. For whatever reason, I put those folded squares of lined notebook paper in my pocket.

  Out in the upstairs hall, I listened to the silence for what seemed like an eternity. Then I entered my father’s bedroom.

  The mattress held the faint impression of him, the single sheet and coverlet balled up at the foot of the bed. The pillows looked like they had been punched. On the nightstand stood a bottle of cholesterol medication, an alarm clock, and the framed photos of Charles and my mother.

  I went to the bed and knelt down. I reached underneath and felt around until my fingers brushed the edge of a cigar box. I slid it out. It was made of very thin wood, not unlike my old balsa airplane. The lid was laid with gold foil. I had expected it to be locked but it wasn’t. I opened the lid and there it was: a six-shot revolver with an inlaid wooden grip, the body and barrel shiny even in the darkened bedroom. When I picked it up, it felt heavy and very real. I searched for the lever and learned how to release the cylinder. It rolled out. The six cylindrical chambers were empty.

  I opened the drawer of his nightstand. It was cluttered with junk. I rooted around until I found a box of ammunition beneath some folded papers and a checkbook. I opened the box, slid out the plastic tray, and selected six rounds. They were silver with bronze heads. Like the gun, they felt solid and very real. I slid the tray back inside the box and replaced it in the drawer.

  As Scott had said, there was a chance Adrian had hurt himself stumbling around inside the building. There was a chance he needed someone to find him, help him get out. I thought about how Scott had nearly been crushed by the items on that falling shelf, and I could too easily imagine Adrian lying inside that place, bleeding, hurt, possibly unconscious.

  There was also a chance that something worse had befallen him.

  Piper claims another, I thought, tucking the revolver into the waistband of my jeans and hurrying into the hallway, closing my father’s bedroom door behind me.

  Outside, summer thunder growled its disapproval.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The Piper

  The rain held off until I reached December Park. When it hit, it came down in sheets from the black sky, instantly soaking my clothes and backpack and plastering my hair down over my eyes. It was the type of warm summer rain that tasted like the Chesapeake and felt like fresh tears on my skin.

  I pedaled like mad across the park, the ground churning and swirling in a muddy miasma choked with bits of trash. Lightning cracked the sky, briefly illuminating the skeletal puzzle of the swing set and the geometry of the chain-link backstop halfway across the park.

  A waterfall spilled over the mouth of the underpass from the street above. I stopped, already breathing heavily, and felt a cool stream of mud dampen the cuffs of my jeans and patter against my legs. I climbed off my bike and walked it into the underpass.

  It was like passing through a vortex to another dimension. Time stood still, stars winked out of existence, cells ceased aging, blood froze in the system of veins, arteries, capillaries. Objects tossed in the air remained in the air. Raindrops crystallized into needle-thin javelins of ice.

  My heart stopped, too. As I leaned my bike against the underpass wall, my chest felt like a hollow tube. I peeled the wet backpack off my shoulders. Inside were the gun and the samurai sword, its blade wrapped in a bath towel, poking out about two feet from the backpack. I sat down, my back against the wall, and fished out a pack of Marlboros from the backpack’s front pocket. There were only four left plus a plastic Bic lighter. I shook out a cigarette and the lighter, lit the smoke, inhaled. My exhalation was shaky. My hands trembled on my knees.

  I wasn’t halfway through my smoke when I heard noise at the mouth of the underpass. I looked and saw three figures passing beneath the waterfall toward me. The light of the lampposts from the street above caused their chrome handlebars to shimmer.

  I stood up as Peter, Scott, and Michael wheeled their bikes into the tunnel, then leaned them against the wall next to mine. Scott was dressed all in black, with his Orioles hat on backward. Michael wore the World War II helmet and a backpack. Peter’s hair was wet and slicked back off his forehead.

  With an unsteady hand, I extended the pack of cigarettes to them. “Only three left.”

  Peter and Scott took one each. Michael shook out the last smoke and stuck it between his lips.

  “No kidding?” I said.

  “Keep your comments to yourself,” he said, “and light me up.”

  The four of us smoked awhile.

  “We’ll take the dirt road out to the cliffs,” I said once we’d finished, pulling on my backpack. “It’s quicker than going through the woods.”

  But I hadn’t meant quicker. I’d meant safer.

  We gathered up our bikes.

  We were four black souls carving our way up the cliff road on the outskirts of town. The city faded to smeary lights and dark pits of shadow. It was the world as we knew it, and we were shuttling right out of orbit. The woods spread out like a vast inky stain on the face of the city. Lights lined the coast along the bay, and I made out the blurry headlights of cars traversing the Bay Bridge. When lightning split the sky, it cast eerie bluish-white light onto the cliffs. The faces of my friends were the faces of warrior ghosts.

  We arrived at the top of the cliff with our clothes soaking wet. We tossed our bikes down and marched soundlessly into the trees. Each time it seemed like we might lose our way, lightning filled the sky, allowing us to glimpse the massive stone façade of the Patapsco Institute. We redirected our course and continued onward.

  And then we were there.

  “There were thick branches leaning up against the window the other day,” I said. The branches were gone now.

  “Over there,” Scott said, pointing to where one of them lay at an angle over a large boulder. “They must have fallen over in the storm.”

  “Come help me lift them,” I said.

  “Wait.” Michael took off his backpack and set it down in the grass. He unzipped it and hoisted out the collapsible ladder. “Use this.”

  Shivering, I helped him unfold the ladder. We carried it over to the side of the building where we struggled to keep it from falling over.

  “You realize we’re holding up an eighteen-foot aluminum ladder in the middle of a thunderstorm,” Michael said.

  “Don’t remind me,” I countered.

  He smiled.

  It took us three tries to get the brackets around the window’s ledge. I stepped back. Lightning lit the sky behind the building, making the whole thing look superimposed.

  “I’m going in after him,” I said, turning to the others. I swung my backpack off my shoulders. “At least two of you should wait out here and stand guard.”

  “Stand guard for what?” Michael asked.

  “Well, if anyone comes,” I said.

  “You mean the Piper,” he said. It was not a question.

  I nodded. “Or . . . if I don’t come back out.”

  “You’ll come back out,” Scott said firmly.

  “Yeah, I know. But if I don’t, you guys will have to go for help.”

  Both Michael and Scott nodded.

  “I’m going in with you,” said Peter. His shock of red hair had turned brown in the rain. His eyes were fierce, determined.

  “Are you sure?” I said. “You don’t have to.”

  He grinned. “No retreat, baby, no surrender, right?”

  I unzipped my backpack and withdrew the sword I’d wrapped in a bath towel at the house. The towel was drenched, but I’d secured it with rubber bands. I undid them and peeled the wet towel away, revealing the sword’s moonlit blade.

  �
��Holy shit,” Scott mused.

  I held it by the handle with both hands, its weight almost preternatural. Then I passed it over to Scott. “Hold on to this.”

  He took the sword and held it horizontally, his gaze running back and forth across the length of the blade. “This is incredible.” Then he looked at me. “Maybe you should take it.”

  “I’ve got something else,” I said, reaching into the backpack and taking out my father’s revolver. My hand shook, rattling the barrel.

  They all stared at the weapon. No one said a word.

  I stuffed it back inside the backpack and secured one of the backpack’s straps over my shoulder.

  “Promise me you won’t get killed,” Scott said.

  I touched my nose. “Promise.”

  Scott glanced at Peter. “You promise, too.”

  Peter touched his nose. “I promise.”

  Scott nodded, his jaw firm. His stoic expression didn’t change even when he touched his nose. “I promise we won’t get killed out here, either.”

  “Good,” I said, and we all looked at Michael.

  He winced. “Seriously? We’re still doing the nose thing?”

  “Do it.” Peter threw a jab at his bicep.

  “Okay, yeah, I promise.” Michael pressed an index finger against his nose hard enough to flatten it. “See? So now no one gets killed.”

  “Good deal,” I said, and turned to face the ladder.

  Peter gave me a boost, even though I was able to grab on and pull myself up without any assistance. I proceeded to climb, the storm raging all around me. An idea for a story came to me—a story about a boy who goes into an old building looking for a killer but gets lost and spends the rest of his life wandering around, trying to find his way out. It made me sick to my stomach.

  When I reached the window, I unzipped the front pocket of my backpack and took out the flashlight I’d stowed in there. I shined the beam into the window. The pyramid of rocks fell into view on the other side of the wall. I was hoping to catch sight of Adrian, but I wasn’t so lucky. The smell—that rotten fecal stench—greeted me, and the reality of what I was about to do grabbed me around the throat.