December Park(12)

I groaned and rolled my eyes. A few months ago, he had checked out a book called 101 Elephant Jokes from the public library. These jokes were so bad, they couldn’t properly be called jokes, yet Peter thought they were just about the funniest things ever committed to paper. He never passed up an opportunity to spout one of these pearls of comedy.

“Please,” I said, though I couldn’t help but grin, too. “Please don’t . . .”

“Hide in the grass and make a noise like a peanut.”

“Brilliant,” I said.

Peter laughed.

“You’re a rhino rod chomper,” I told him.

“Just once,” he said, and we were both laughing now. “I needed the money.”

“All right, all right,” I said.

“Chomp.” He glanced over his shoulder at the distant boat dock and said, “Come on, Angie. Let’s head over there. I don’t wanna miss Sugar sinking the cow.”

Together we trampled the reeds on our way across the snowy white dunes. As we closed the distance, the dock materialized through the diminishing fog. I recognized Michael Sugarland’s voice issuing down the beach, and I heard more laughter. The sounds of the music grew louder, too: what I’d initially thought was a tape or CD was actually Sasha Tamblin playing an acoustic guitar on one of the dock pilings.

Peter and I mounted the dock and crossed the weather-warped and moss-slickened planks.

“Intruders,” crooned Michael from the far end of the dock. For the sake of the moment, he’d adopted a very thick and very bad German accent. “Zee fog is great. Identify yourselves!”

“Immigration,” Peter shouted.

Michael responded with a series of yelps, whoops, and catcalls in his bad German drawl.

Scott Steeple stood with the Lambeth twins midway down the length of the dock. They watched Sasha Tamblin strum a Pearl Jam song on his guitar.

Sasha was dark-skinned, with a low brow and tight black curls. His profile was severe and hawkish, and his eyes were small, black, deeply recessed. He played and sang well, much better than I could play. Jonathan Lambeth said something to him and Sasha laughed, exposing perfectly white teeth.

Sasha nodded at Peter and me as we paused beside Scott. “Hey,” he said, stunting his final strum with his hand.

“Hey, Sasha,” I said.

Sasha glanced down at his fingers, which were splayed along the fretboard. He arranged them in a C major chord and strummed it once. Then he fingered a hard G chord and picked the strings while sliding his pinky on the high E higher up on the fretboard. He played a few bars in this style, bending in a unique fashion a deep note on the G.

“That’s pretty cool,” I said. “Did you write that?”

“It’s Dave Matthews,” Sasha said.

“Who’s that?”

“You haven’t heard of the Dave Matthews Band? It’s good stuff. Folkie but . . . modern, I guess. Original. They got a horn player and a violin.” He played a bit more without looking at his hands. “Who do you listen to?”

I shrugged. “Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden.” I was also into Metallica, U2, Nine Inch Nails, Jesus Jones, Van Halen, and the Talking Heads, with a mix of Springsteen and Mellencamp thrown in for good measure. I also maintained a secret love affair with Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, Creedence Clearwater Revival, John Lennon’s solo recordings, and, like a dirty little secret, ABBA.

“Cool.” Sasha proceeded to strum with ease the opening chords of Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters.”

Michael Sugarland stood at the edge of the dock, his birdlike chest, pale and hairless, puffed out in bravado, his miniscule nipples like twin bug bites. In all the years I’d known him, which had been the majority of my life, he’d maintained the unimposing physique of a sapling. His ribs protruded beneath the taut flesh of his chest cavity, and his belly button poked out from his abdomen like the thumb of a hitchhiker. His sandy hair was always trimmed and meticulously combed and parted to the right.

Michael rested one elbow on the head of the enormous ceramic bovine beside him. The life-sized cow was painted in alternating stripes of blue and gold. He’d busted off the shiny pink bulb of the cow’s udder and cupped it now in both hands like Oliver Twist asking for more porridge. As Peter and I approached, he placed the udder on his head and grinned at us like a jack-o’-lantern.

“Mr. Sugar the Cosmic Booger,” Peter said. “You’re going to catch pneumonia dressed like that, you moron.”

Michael wore a pair of floral Jams and a Swatch watch and nothing else. To the best of my knowledge, Michael Sugarland did not own a single article of clothing that hadn’t ceased being fashionable at least a decade earlier.

Peter motioned to the ceramic cow. “And how the hell did you get this thing out here?”

Michael saluted us, then stood rigidly at attention. His teeth were vibrating in his skull from the cold. “Can’t t-t-tell you that, s-s-sir. Top s-s-secret information, s-s-sir.”

Peter waved him off. I could tell he was fighting more laughter. So was I. “Very well, soldier. Go about your business.”

“Check it out,” Michael said, reverting to his own naturally squeaky voice. He bent and gripped the lip of the gaping hole at the bottom of the ceramic cow where its udder had once been. “It’ll fill up with water and sink like a stone.”