December Park(118)

“They shoplift,” one of the man’s cronies shouted, evidently eavesdropping on our conversation.

“We’re not shoplifters,” I said.

“Maybe you boys should get on now,” said the man.

“Could you maybe ask your friends if they recognize him?” I said.

The man called to his friends from over his shoulder. “Any of you fellas ever see a young kid come in here buying cigarettes?”

A chorus of negatives rumbled from the front of the store.

“There you go,” said the man.

“If you could show them the picture.” I extended the piece of newspaper toward him.

“I told you boys to split,” he said.

We didn’t need further invitation. Without another word, Peter and I shoved out the front door and down the steps.

“Buncha dicks,” Peter murmured.

There was a man leaning against one of the hitching posts, dressed in dingy carpenter’s pants and an unbuttoned chambray shirt with the sleeves cuffed past his elbows. He eyeballed us as we went to our bikes. “Hey, amigos,” he said, his voice like sandpaper.

Peter and I glanced at him as we rolled our bikes across the gravel parking lot.

“You trying to buy cigarettes?” the man said amiably enough. The sun was directly in his eyes, causing his features to scrunch up into a grimace.

Thinking of all the plainclothes policemen hanging around town lately, I feared this might be a setup, even though this guy looked about as far on the other side of the law as one man can get. “No, thanks,” I said.

“How ’bout beer? You amigos want some beer?”

Peter stopped pushing his bike. “Yeah? You got beer?”

The man’s squinty face broadened into a smile. “Oh yeah. I got some I can sell you. Real cheap. Pennies on the dollar.”

“Where is it?” Peter asked. There was no beer anywhere in sight.

The man jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Behind the store. Lucky don’t like me undercuttin’ his prices, so’s I gotta keep out of eyeshot. Like, do it on the sly, right?” When neither of us moved in his direction, the man added, “They’re nice and cold.”

“Well, how much?” Peter asked.

“I’m a bargaining man. No one ever said I ain’t.” The man headed around the side of the store. His pepper-colored hair was short and arranged in matted whorls at the back. The collar of his chambray shirt was too big, and it hung down his back, exposing a creased, sun-reddened neck beaded with sweat.

Still pushing our bikes, we followed him. There was a second gravel parking lot back here and a large oil tank painted to look like a World War II submarine docked against the siding behind a fence of scraggly, leafless bushes. I relaxed a little when I noticed the six-pack of Coors tucked in the shade of some bushes.

The man stood before the beer, peering down. He had his back toward us, so I didn’t see what he was doing with his hands. Counting money, I assumed. I only had a buck and a half on me.

“You two amigos wanna see something?” said the man, glancing at us from over one shoulder.

Neither Peter nor I said a word. Suddenly, the color of the world changed. Things felt instantly wrong.

The man turned around. The front of his shirt was tucked up under his chin, and his pants were undone. A grayish-brown penis curled over the waistband of his briefs, wreathed in wiry black hair. It jerked upward as if tied to an invisible wire.

Peter and I turned and ran.

“Hey! Amigos! Come back! I was only joking!”

Once we had enough speed, we hopped on our bikes, blasted across the front parking lot, and sped through the trees. For one bloodcurdling moment, I wondered if the pervert might give chase.

“Holy shit,” said Peter. It sounded like he was struggling not to laugh or cry. “Can you believe it?” Then he did laugh, though it came out as a partially stifled squawk.

I kept seeing the pervert’s dick jerk upward, the image flooding me with shame, as if I had somehow caused it to happen. I couldn’t help but think my dad would be disappointed and possibly angry with me if he ever found out. I couldn’t comprehend why I felt this way.

“You think that guy’s the Piper?” I asked.

“I think he’s just a f*cking screwball pervert,” Peter opined. “But that whole store looked like it could’ve been filled with serial killers. Those guys were monsters, man.”

“Did you see that guy with the fishhook earrings?” I said as we got back on the deserted blacktop of Farrington Road. The sun was beginning its descent behind the western trees. “Even if the cops went there, those guys wouldn’t have told them a single thing.”

Peter looked toward the north, where Farrington Road narrowed and curved through the trees. “You wanna check out that old train depot?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

We rode until the pavement turned to gravel, then dead-ended on the outskirts of town. A single-story barnlike structure that had been vacant ever since the last train ran through our city in 1950, the railway depot squatted in the center of a gravel pit overgrown with bleached weeds and discarded mounds of garbage. The entire lot was surrounded by dense woodland.

The depot’s windows were veined with cracks and black with gunk, many of them boarded up like the windows of the Werewolf House. The peeling and weather-ruined fa?ade was marred by years of neon graffiti. The sagging roof bristled with falcons’ nests so massive and intricately constructed that they looked like booby traps. There was something akin to a bell tower sans bell in the center of the roof, giving the whole thing a sort of old-time Southern church look.