December Park

by Ronald Malfi

  Then the dark figure rushed toward Peter, kicking up torrents of water and smashing through the stack of crates that, in all the commotion, had tipped away from the mattresses and crashed to the floor.

  And then the revolver was suddenly in my hands. I extended my arms until my elbows locked. Pulled the trigger. Twice.

  The muzzle flashes provided horrific snapshots that would no doubt remain burned into the gray matter of my consciousness for the rest of my life: the bleak emptiness of the figure’s face, a sweep of filthy wet hair, the pale crescent of the back of a hand as it blurred into motion . . .

  The figure spun and faced me in the white flash of the second gunshot, loud as damnation. His face was a blazing skull whose features seemed to shift and reposition themselves. Then, in the glow of Peter’s lighter, the man fell backward into the frothing miasma of water, mud, and garbage.

  The gunshots still echoing in our ears, we all stood there in silence. In fact, the whole world had gone silent: I could no longer hear anything at all. Then . . . slowly . . . sounds filtered back to me. The first to return was a mechanical whooshing; it took me a moment to realize it was the sound of my own blood racing through my veins. Then my heartbeat and respiration joined in the chorus. My entire body was made of wax.

  I lowered the gun, then dropped it to the floor where it splashed between my feet and was swallowed up by the dark water.

  “The Piper,” Adrian said. I recognized the words, but the sound of his voice could have been the bleating of a sheep or the firing of rocket engines.

  White foam collected about the Piper’s fallen body. In the timorous glow of Peter’s lighter, I thought I glimpsed the Piper’s chest shuddering up and down. I took two, three steps toward him until I could see the tiny holes in his tattered shirt. With each dying breath, blood spurted from the holes. I had made those holes in him. I had done it.

  The Piper’s eyes were open. He looked at me, and I could see the life slipping from him very quickly, the—

  My breath caught in my throat.

  For a second, I was no longer here: I was running a field day relay race in December Park. The front of my pants was soaked because I’d been so petrified that I’d urinated in them. The crowd loomed over me as I fell behind, running to keep up, my face burning, my sides burning. I wasn’t fast enough, wasn’t good enough, and they said—

  “Angelo.” It was Peter. He was closer to me now. “Angelo.” He kept repeating my name. He never used my full name. To him, I was always Angie.

  I exhaled with a tremendous shudder. Beside me, a younger version of my grandfather (who wasn’t my grandfather at all, I now realized) shoved me toward the triangular opening in a grass hut. When I went inside, a slightly different version of my father (who wasn’t my father at all) was there. This man held my shoulders and whispered horrible things in my ear. When I asked him to explain, he just said, I become you and you become me and us become us and we become we.

  “I don’t know what that means.” I must have spoken aloud because Peter reached a hand out to touch me.

  I shoved him aside.

  —You will find, said the Piper in my head. You will find, you will find, you will find.

  Shaking, I went to the Piper and dropped to my knees beside him. He turned his head slightly, his longish hair fanned out in the water, the color drained from his face. The features had stopped shifting and had come to rest, and I now understood why they had originally appeared to be shifting.

  Then my hand was out, hovering in the air. I smelled nothing. I heard nothing except the rushing water filling the room. If there was still a storm outside, I knew nothing of it: we could have been submerged beneath the sea.

  I placed my hand on one of his shoulders. Around me, the water grew frigid. The Piper’s breath rasped, and blood spurted from the two bullet holes in his shirt. He held what I had thought was a curved blade but was in actuality a piece of the metal configuration that had been bolted to the far wall, too crude to be called a weapon even if that was its purpose.

  “Go,” I said to Peter and Adrian. I didn’t know how many words I had left in me, so I had to make them count. “Get Dad. Tell him.”

  Tears spilled down my face. My entire body burned. I was aware of Peter and Adrian talking, but their language had become nonsense to me. I was only aware that they had finally left once the light from Peter’s lighter was no more.

  Trembling, I rested my head on the Piper’s chest. After a while, I felt his hand come up to the back of my head and settle there. By the time his heart stopped beating, I was sobbing like a baby.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Out

  And then I was on the boat again. I was seven years old, and it was a big deal being out on the boat alone with Charles. We had our shirts off, and the sun baked our shoulders and backs. There were two crab lines tied to the oarlocks, old chicken necks at the ends. A crab would follow the chicken neck all the way to the surface, gorging itself. Mere inches from the surface, you’d bring a net underneath it and scoop it up.

  As Charles maneuvered in and out of the coves, my job was to keep an eye on both lines for signs of a nibble. We caught no crabs that afternoon, and Charles had grown increasingly bored, so he took the boat out to the choppier waters beneath the Bay Bridge.

  “See those?” Charles said, pointing at the face of the cliffs that loomed high above us. It was the place he called the ass end of Harting Farms. “Those holes? All of ’em?”

  I nodded and asked what they were.

  “Places to hide,” he said.

  “Hide from who?” I asked.

  “Bootleggers and slaves used them.”

  “Who made them?” I asked.

  “Maybe people did. Or animals. Or maybe they were always here even before the city was built, carved out by the water when the bay was higher.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “We can catch bigger things,” Charles said, changing the subject so quickly that it took me a second to realize we were off the subject of holes in the cliff and back to crabbing.

  “What things?” I said, staring up at the span of the great bridge. I had never been out this far before.

  There were seagulls wheeling overhead. Charles motioned to them. His skin was freckled but smooth, the nipples on his muscular chest small and brown and ringed with sparse black hairs.

  “Birds?” I said, laughing.

  “Sure. Birds. Why not?”

  “You can’t catch birds.”

  He winked at me and said, “Just watch. You can catch anything. If you really wanted to, you could catch anything in the world.” He opened his tackle box, dug around inside it, and came up with a rusted barbed fishing hook. “Gimme your lunch.”

  “It’s mine! You already ate yours.”

  “I’m not gonna eat it, dummy. Just pass it over and watch.”

  I handed him the chicken cutlet sandwich wrapped in cellophane that my grandmother had made me that morning.

  Charles unwrapped the cellophane, pinched a bit of bread out from the center of the slice, and carefully rolled it into a ball. Above, the gulls cawed and screeched and deposited white clumps of shit into the water. His tongue propped in the corner of his mouth, Charles threaded the barbed hook through the white marble of bread. When he was finished, only the nasty-looking barbed tip protruded.

  I watched, not speaking. Far above, cars and trucks thundered across the double-span bridge.

  Bracing his feet at either side of the small boat, Charles peered up and winced at the dazzling sun. He shielded his eyes with one arm. Over his head, the seagulls shrilled like squealing hinges. When he tossed the ball of bread straight up into the air, the gulls took on a deliberate pattern that reminded me of old World War II footage of fighter jets bombing battleships. The tiny white sphere was snatched up by the most aggressive of the flock and gobbled down without incident.

  I continued to stare at the birds, then at Charles, then back at the birds again. My brother staye
d balanced, each foot planted on either side of the boat, one arm up to block the sun from his eyes. If he was disappointed the bird had not choked on the hook and plummeted to the sea or even into our boat, he didn’t show it; instead, he looked like the statue of a Greek god, his shorts rippling in the wind, the hair on his bronze and slender legs like fine brown fuzz.

  When the birds saw that there would be no more food flipped into the air, they migrated across the water to where bits of debris floated into the coves.

  Charles screamed, startling me. Sharp cords stood out in his neck, and his diaphragm, like a frown, jostled in his abdomen.

  Because I thought this was some kind of playacting, I made the mistake of giggling. But Charles was not playacting. He leveled his gaze on me, his dark eyes cut to slits. His lips were firm, his eyebrows knitted together.

  Slowly, he brought one arm up and pointed at me. He rocked the boat with such sudden ferocity that it was almost like we’d been struck from beneath by something extremely large and dangerous.

  “Stop it,” I told him.

  With increasing zeal, he continued to rock the boat.

  “Stop it!” I shouted.

  Charles laughed, but there was no humor in it: the sound was a witch’s shrill cackle.

  With my arms splayed out for balance, I rose from my seat and attempted to negate his unbalancing of the little johnboat with a steadiness of my own. But I was seven and I was small and I was ill-prepared and—

  (scared)

  —growing increasingly panicked.

  When I went over the side, I swallowed a lungful of cold water and got tangled in the crab lines. The world around me went instantly black. I flailed one hand, and it thunked against the hollow aluminum side of the boat like a gong. Forgetting that I was underwater, I took a deep breath and felt the water fill my lungs and permeate my entire body. Bright spangles capered before my vision. With the crab lines entwined about my ankles, I couldn’t swim to the surface. The bay thundered in my ears. Panic gripped me, yet a warm blossom of serenity, like the comforting embrace of a loved one, came over me.

  Then I was back on the boat, coughing up brackish water and blinking stupidly at the blurred form that hovered over me.

  “I’m sorry,” Charles said. He repeated it over and over like a litany, a prayer. “Angelo, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  Once I regained my senses, I shoved him off me and crawled backward on my butt.

  “I would never hurt you,” Charles said. The intensity in his eyes frightened me even more than having him knock me in the water. “I would never let anyone else hurt you, either. If anyone ever hurt you or tried to hurt you, I would snap their neck. I would bury their corpse in the quarry at the end of our block. I would leave them there for the rats.”

  I just stared at him.

  Then he laughed—that carefree, boyish laugh that adults found jovial and girls found charming.

  High above, traffic growled across the bridge.

  Somehow, I’d fallen asleep. When I woke, it was to the stricken voices of men, their large, indistinct forms swiping tungsten lights across the darkness. Strong hands gripped me and lifted me off the body of the Piper. It took me a moment to recall where I was or what had happened.

  I had the vague impression of being handed off, round-robin style, from man to man. With my eyes squeezed shut, I smelled each of my handlers distinctly—their colognes, their body odors, their breath. I struggled and fought them around the same time my eyes sprung open and a great aching wail burst from my lungs.

  Someone held me in a strong embrace and whispered over and over in my ear—

  (i’m sorry angelo i’m sorry)

  —to calm down, it’s okay, kid, calm down, you’re okay, you’re okay.

  My vision was blurry. I swiped tears from my eyes with shaky hands. There were cops everywhere. One of them held me and kept whispering in my ear. Before me, I recognized the enormous double doors beneath the arcade at the front of the Patapsco Institute—or rather where the doors had been: they had been busted down and lay on the stone floor like twin drawbridges over a moat. I heard the storm raging around us, the rain spilling down from the arcade in torrents.

  “Angelo!”

  I broke free from the cop’s hold and spun around in the direction of the voice. The slope of the woods that led away from the building was a swirling, black tornado of rain. Thin trees were pressed close to the ground by the force of the wind. More tungsten lights bobbed in the miasma, along with figures that emerged through the trees like ghosts of Civil War soldiers coming through an early morning mist.

  “Angelo,” the man said again.

  It was my father. He stumbled through the trees, his hair and clothes soaked, his face a cadaverous cut of moonlight. His eyes were two colorless stones. When he saw me, he ran toward me. I wanted to run to him, too, but my legs would not obey.

  He grabbed me, pulled me hard against his chest. My face went into the crook of his neck while my fingers dug into his back. I sobbed again, trembling. He squeezed the back of my neck and I said, “Don’t g-g-go in th-there . . .”

  “Shhh,” he said, cradling me.

  “Don’t g-go in,” I said. It was important to say it. I didn’t think the words even passed through my lips, or if they did, they were gibberish.

  “It’s okay, Angelo. Calm down. You’re safe now. You’re safe.”

  I pulled away and looked hard at him. His face seemed to tremble and threaten to disperse into nonexistence at any second, as if made of dreams. I opened my mouth and stuttered, “Ch-Ch-Ch—,” but I couldn’t get the name out.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said, his voice calm and his words coming slowly. “It’s okay now. It’s okay.”

  But it wasn’t, I knew.

  It wasn’t.

  I sat with my legs hanging out of the open rear doors of an ambulance, a fire-retardant blanket around my shoulders, and shivered. The ambulance looked out over the promontory and at a sky that flared occasionally with lightning.

  Peter stood in the rain beside the ambulance, seemingly unable to take his eyes from me. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought he had seen and understood. It looked like he wanted to say something to me but couldn’t find the words.

  Michael and Scott came up behind him, Scott clutching the samurai sword to his chest. Rain danced across Michael’s army helmet and cascaded over the brim of Scott’s Orioles cap.

  Briefly, I closed my eyes and willed my thoughts into their heads. But my thoughts were messy and confused beasts, and even if they managed to pierce their brains, they wouldn’t have understood them. I didn’t understand them myself.

  My father talked to some cops near the edge of the cliff. When he finally came to me, I said, “Where’s Adrian?”

  “Ambulance took him. Hospital.”

  We said no more.

  Sometime later, when they brought the Piper’s body from the woods, my father dropped to his knees in the mud and hung his head. He sobbed. I watched as his shoulders hitched and the rain drenched his clothes. I watched as the dark, wet curls of his hair hung down over his eyes.

  He stayed like that for a long, long time.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Aftermath

  The rain had stopped and sunlight was beginning to crack the distant sky by the time my father and I got home. The sedan rolled heavily into the driveway, the chassis groaning. There was a squad car parked at the curb in front of our house. The rack of lights on the roof was dark, and I couldn’t see anyone behind the wheel.

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  I nodded, staring at my hands in my lap. I had refused to be taken to the hospital. I’d just wanted to go home. “Your gun,” I said, the word gun sticking to the roof of my mouth like peanut butter. “I’m sorry. I took it from your room. It’s . . . it’s b-back th-there in—”

  He reached out and pulled me against him. His clothes were wet. I smelled his aftershave and the sweat and fury
and confusion and sadness on him. Like a child, I sobbed uncontrollably against his chest while he held me and smoothed back my damp hair.

  “Shhh,” he whispered. “It’s okay. Shhh.”

  When he finally let me go, I smeared the tears from my face and saw a figure standing on our front porch. The figure wore a police uniform.

  Clearing his throat and running a thumb along the rim of his lower eyelids, my father said, “I should go inside and see to your grandparents. Do you want to come in or sit out here awhile longer?”

  I couldn’t face my grandparents in whatever condition they were in. What did they already know? Had someone told them what had happened? Or had this cop just been sent here to babysit until my dad got home?

  “I don’t want to go inside just yet.”

  He squeezed my shoulder. “Do you want me to stay with you?”

  “No, it’s okay. I’m okay.” I looked at him. “I don’t understand what happened, Dad.”

  “Neither do I,” he said, and he nearly lost it and broke down again, too.

  When he got out of the car, I felt the vehicle rise on its shocks. Fathers are big, heavy things, I thought. He closed the door gently, then walked like a man to judgment up to the front porch. He spoke briefly with the officer before going inside. Lights went on in the kitchen.

  The officer came down from the porch and cut across the yard. On his way to the squad car, he glanced at me from over his shoulder, and I immediately recognized him as the suspicious-looking cop who’d been following me.

  Around midmorning, two men in suits came and asked me questions while I sat with my father at the kitchen table. I told them everything we’d done that summer and all the things we’d learned, starting with the locket Adrian had discovered in the culvert beside the road last fall. I told them about finding the statue head in the Werewolf House, the railway depot where Jason Hughes’s bike was hidden, and ultimately how we had arrived at the abandoned Patapsco Institute.