December Park(11)

“You know,” Peter said, climbing out of the truck, “I like this place best in the fall when it starts getting cold.”

While the Shallows was certainly at its most beautiful in the autumn months, this was also where we gathered to watch the celebratory fireworks from Annapolis over the water every Fourth of July and swim in the sweltering heat of an August afternoon.

We walked down the slope of the dunes toward the beachfront. I noticed a milky funnel of light rising off one of the many docks and, closer to us, the flickering of a single tiki torch, the flame almost lifelike in the way it danced from the torch’s crown. Along the beachfront, a cream-colored glow could be seen in the windows of the clapboard shanties. The occasional silhouette passed before these windows, though the occupants never paid us any attention. At that moment, a lone dog howled from somewhere across the beach.

Something like three thousand miles away, the Seattle grunge scene had managed to penetrate my group of friends; there was a conference of plaid flannel shirts and canvas army jackets arranged in a semicircle in the wet sand near the foot of the water. Some of my friends even wore scuffed jackboots mined from their fathers’ old wardrobes.

As Peter and I approached, they were attempting to coax a bonfire to life with little success. While I considered these fifteen or so acquaintances to be my friends, I had never hung out with them on a one-on-one, day-to-day basis as I did with Peter Galloway, Scott Steeple, and Michael Sugarland. The others were good for filling in the background at parties and sharing beers in someone’s garage, but they were not my close friends. I was fine with that. I preferred my small circle of intimates.

“Galloway! Mazzone!” someone boomed from the crowd of fire starters.

A can of Mountain Dew catapulted toward my head. I managed to catch it, more out of startled reflex than skill.

“You guys look like a bunch of cavemen,” Peter said, selecting a can of soda from a cooler that was wedged in the sand. “Those logs are too wet to light.”

I glanced around. “Where’s Michael?”

“He’s out on the dock,” Brian Dassick said, jerking his chin in the direction of the rickety old dock that extended into the water. He was sitting on his knees, poking the damp logs with a long stick. “I heard you got into some deep shit with Nozzle Neck, Mazzone.”

I said, “Yeah?”

“I heard you threw him over a desk when he went to collect an assignment.”

“Who told you that?”

“Does it matter? It’s true, isn’t it?”

“Not exactly.”

Brian frowned. “What’s that mean? Either it happened or it didn’t.”

I watched him poke at the mound of logs with nothing to show for it but a few streamers of smoke. “It didn’t. People like to exaggerate. I just didn’t do the assignment, that’s all.”

“And you got kicked out of his class for that?”

Following the altercation, my guidance counselor, the principal, and my father decided that I would be transferred from Naczalnik’s class to Mr. Mattingly’s class. Mattingly was new to Stanton, and I had yet to earn a reputation with him. “What makes you say I got kicked out? Maybe I wanted a change of scenery.”

Brian snickered. “Yeah, right.”

Peter kicked some sand over the struggling bonfire. “I told you, Brian, those logs are too wet.”

Popping the tab of my soda, I wandered down to the water. The black sheen of the bay unfolded before me. Fog had settled on the water, making it impossible to see the lights of the watermen’s lighthouse and beyond that the blinking lights of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge far off in the distance.

I recalled two summers ago when a small fixed-wing plane tried to avoid striking the bridge and plummeted to the water below. Miraculously, all on board survived. It was on the TV news, and there had been a write-up in the Caller. In the photographs it looked like a partially submerged seesaw, one wing, shiny and white in the sun, jutting at an angle out of the water. The metal gleam of a propeller blade poked from the surface of the water like the dorsal fin of a mechanical shark.

I’d wanted my father to take me over the bridge before the water was dredged and the airplane was removed, so I could see it down there in the water firsthand. He didn’t take me, though, and I resorted to the memory of the photos in the news to quench the thirst of my curiosity of the matter.

Peter came up beside me. “Hey, you okay?”

“Sure. Why?”

“I don’t know. You seem messed up about something.”

I was still thinking of the dead girl. The sight of her had troubled me more than I would have thought. Looking at Peter, I could tell it didn’t weigh as heavily on him. “I’m cool,” I said, wondering if he could see through my lie.

Peter turned and gazed down the length of the beach.

I looked, too. Floating ghostlike in the sheen of fog, a cone of light shifted around at the end of one of the docks. Something splashed in the water. There were people moving out there, and the fog made their laughter seem closer than it actually was. Faintly, I heard music drifting down the beach to us, although I couldn’t recognize it. It was hollow and unsettling. A loon cried out.

Peter took a swig of his soda. When he cleared his throat, he said, “Okay, I’ve got a good one. How do you catch an elephant?”