December Park(129)

I turned back to the one on the ground, crouching beside it. It was the one that we had carved our initials into. Scott and Adrian looked down at it from over my shoulders, and I knew they saw it, too.

“Christ,” Scott said. “That can’t be a coincidence, could it?”

Michael and Peter came around to the other side of the statue.

“Oh, boy,” Michael said.

“Maybe this one just fell over,” Peter rationalized.

It looked pretty much on purpose to me, although I kept my mouth shut. I stood, swiping dirt from my knees.

“Maybe Keener did it,” Scott said. “He and his friends sometimes come down here to smoke and drink, remember?” Then he spun around and raced over to a mound of upturned soil at the foot of a tree. He dropped to his knees and dug up the spot. Once he lifted out his bag of firecrackers, the relief was evident on his face.

“What about the rest of the stuff?” Peter said.

We checked our trash bags and the hidden beer cooler. As far as I could tell, everything was accounted for. It was mostly just garbage, anyway.

“The head’s gone.” Adrian was standing on the fallen statue, surveying the clearing. He pointed to the niche in the tree, where he usually sat. “I left it right over there.”

“It’s gotta be around here somewhere,” Michael said.

Adrian shook his head. “Someone took it.”

“That doesn’t seem like something Keener would do,” Peter said.

Suddenly, the woods around us seemed to obscure hidden dangers. The foliage had grown in so thick Keener and his friends could be hiding here right now, just yards away from us, and we wouldn’t have been able to see them. Or perhaps someone even more dangerous than Keener . . .

“It was kids,” Michael said. “Just some kids goofing off. We’re getting freaked out for nothing.” Yet it sounded like he was trying to convince himself of this most of all.

Again, Adrian shook his head. He stepped down from the statue. “It was the Piper. We took it from him first, and now he’s taken it back.”

For several seconds, no one said a word. The only sounds were of the birds in the trees and the bugs in the grass. Beyond the clearing, something splashed in the shallow brook, and we all jumped.

“Look,” Scott said finally. “Are we gonna stand around here scaring ourselves all day, or are we gonna blow stuff up?”





We decided to blow stuff up. Scott slung his sack of fireworks over one shoulder, and we crossed December Park. The park was desolate this afternoon, which was unusual for such a nice summer day, but in the wake of Tori Brubaker’s disappearance, it seemed the local teenagers had begun hanging out in shopping malls, movie theaters, and each other’s houses. Fear had reduced our humble city to a ghost town.

We cut into the otherworldly darkness of the Solomon’s Bend Road underpass, our footfalls rebounding off the black cobblestones. Michael unleashed a cry of sheer glee, and the sound seemed to crawl up the curved stone walls while simultaneously pulsing in our ears. Peter unloaded the pockets of his cargo shorts, dumping G.I. Joe figures onto the ground, and Scott rifled through the bag of firecrackers.

We wrapped one figure’s arms around a small cylindrical noisemaker with a fuse curling from the top. Peter set it down on the cobblestones and Scott lit it. When the fuse caught, Peter and Scott dispersed, giggling.

It exploded, the noise so loud in the curved stone chamber that it was like being inside the barrel of a giant gun. Clutching our ears, laughing so hard that tears spilled down our cheeks, we stumbled out onto Solomon’s Field, the stink of gunpowder still in our noses.

“I gotta see what’s left,” Michael shouted and ran back into the underpass. He returned moments later cupping pieces of the destroyed action figure in his hands, a look of utter fascination on his face.

Scott rolled some cherry bombs into the palm of one hand. One by one, we lit them and threw them into Drunkard’s Pond. Each one exploded with a resounding whumph! and sent water geysering into the air.

With one cherry bomb left, we decided to blow up the Park Closes at Dusk sign that had been staked into the grass. It was made of aluminum, so the most we hoped for was a sizable dent.

Michael stripped off one of his shoelaces and tied the cherry bomb to the front of the sign. Scott handed his lighter to Adrian, who looked down at it hesitantly.

“Go on,” I told him. “Just light it and run like hell.”

He crept over to the sign, flicked the lighter—it took him several times just to arrive at a flame—then lit the cherry bomb’s fuse.

“Run!” we all shouted.

Adrian dropped the lighter and sprinted toward us. His oversized glasses bounced on his face, and his mouth was peeled back from his teeth in a terrified grimace I found utterly hilarious.

The cherry bomb detonated with a boom that cracked the sky like thunder. One second the sign was a perfectly smooth aluminum rectangle; the next second, it was bent at a perfect ninety-degree angle. The shoelace whipped off into the air, and what remained of the cherry bomb’s shell rained down in charred, smoking remnants to the grass.

We cheered.





Market Square was alive. The carnival barkers catcalled to us, the wondrous odors of fried foods tantalized us, and a troop of girls wearing Holy Cross polo shirts giggled and pointed at us as we strutted by.