December Park(20)

“They’re brand-new,” Peter retorted. “I’m not gunkin’ them up.”

“Yeah, but they look like they glow in the dark. We’re supposed to be incognito.”

“Christ.” Peter squatted and sighed, examining his new white sneakers . . . and then proceeded to smear them with shoe polish. He paused halfway through coating the second one to regard his work. “My mom’s gonna shit birds.”

Michael produced a map from within his knapsack, unfolded it, and splayed it out on the nearby bench. It was a map of Harting Farms, and even in the poor lighting I could see that Michael had marked a number of locations in either bright red or green marker. There were too many to count.

“Jesus, that’s a lot of stops,” I said.

“At least twice as many as last year,” Scott added.

“I’m feeling particularly vindictive this year,” Michael said.

He took the holiday seriously, and if you dissed him at one point during the year, he would remember. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he actually kept a journal of all these betrayals.

Peter gazed down at the map as he gave the shoe polish to Michael. “Red and green,” Peter commented, snatching a roll of toilet paper from the knapsack so he and Scott could clean the shoe polish off their hands. “This is Halloween, not Christmas.”

Michael gave himself a Hitler moustache with the shoe polish before handing me the canister. “Mischief Night,” he corrected. “It’s better than Halloween.”

“Why the different colors?” Scott asked.

“They’re color coded in order of importance,” said Michael. “The red are the hot spots, the priority. Like, we gotta hit those. If we have time, we hit the green.”

“You’ve got my house on there, you dick,” Peter said.

Michael nodded. “I was gonna tell you about that. I’ve had a few issues with you this past year. Sorry.”

“I’ll give you issues.” Peter licked his thumb, then rubbed it against one of the red marks on the map.

“Okay, then. So we got one less house to hit this year.” Michael zipped up the knapsack and gave it to Scott. “Hide it beneath your cape.”

Scott swung the knapsack onto his back while I held his Dracula cape out of the way. Once he’d situated it on his shoulders, I draped the cape over it. “Does it look stupid?” Scott asked, craning his neck to see the large black lump on his back.

“Well, it’s not inconspicuous,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Michael interjected. “You just look like a hunchback.”

“But I’m Dracula, you idiot.”

“Okay, so you’re Dracula. With a hunchback.”

I joined Peter, who was still examining the map, and said, “Okay. So where do we start?”

Michael slapped Peter’s hand away and ran his finger down the grouping of red X’s along Cypress Avenue. It was the residential neighborhood behind the Generous Superstore plaza. “We’ll start here and work our way north so that we loop back around this way and end the night heading south toward the city limits.” His finger stopped at the edge of Harting Farms, where on the map our city was separated from Glenrock by a swath of undeveloped land. “Sound good?”

“It’s a lot of ground to cover,” I said. “Maybe we should take our bikes.”

“No way,” Michael admonished. “No bikes on Mischief Night. We go on foot. We’ve always gone on foot. It’s tradition. Besides, the time it would take to go back home and get our bikes—”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “But we should get going.”

“Yeah,” said Peter, dropping his Batman mask over his face.

Michael clapped and gave us his grandest smile. “Okay, then! Let’s move out, boys!”

Like ninjas, the four of us crept into the darkness of the nearest neighborhood.





That night, my friends and I toilet papered all the houses designated red and even a few marked green on Michael’s map, egged some of the cars that sped along the streets, and dropped water balloons on unsuspecting perambulators from the bridge on Solomon’s Bend Road.

A few entrepreneurial adults staged their traditional counterattacks. Teddy Boru’s dad threw eggs at young trespassers from his bedroom window. Old Mr. Vandenberg, the hermetic desperado who lived in one of the dilapidated duplexes along Shore Acre Road, sprung out from behind a holly bush, wrapped in a white bedsheet and donning a rubber Frankenstein mask.

“If it wasn’t so far out of the way, I’d love to hit the Keener farm tonight,” Michael said as he chucked an egg over the hedgerow that lined the property in front of the McGee house on Prosper Street. The McGee girls were pudgy and freckle-faced with piercing green cat’s eyes and mouths crowded and gleaming with braces. All three had turned down Michael’s invitation to the homecoming dance, thus making the list.

“Old man Keener catches you on his property, he’ll blow you off it with a shotgun,” Scott said.

“And his son’s even crazier,” added Peter.

Nathan Keener was the youngest of three boys and undoubtedly the craziest. His family lived along the Cape on a tract of farmland that overlooked the Magothy River. It was a shitty-looking house with rusted cars up on blocks on the weedy front lawn. There were scarecrows posted along the long driveway, their clothing and potato-sack faces riddled with buckshot.