December Park(36)

Every day for the remainder of that month Keener could be found with a handful of his friends at the Generous Superstore, whitewashing over the vulgarities they had spray-painted on the walls. I saw them there as my friends and I walked home from school, careful to stay out of their sight. Once, I saw Carl Nance among them. He sat on the hood of his Aries K, wearing a leg brace and balancing a pair of crutches across his lap. This gave me some dark satisfaction.

I had to be careful and anticipated an ambush at every turn. Like a fugitive, I kept to the shadows, kept to the shade.

One Saturday afternoon as I studied a display of pocketknives at Toddy Surplus, I spotted Keener, Denny Sallis, and Kenneth Ottawa strutting past the front windows. I prayed they wouldn’t come inside. They paused just outside the store and lit cigarettes. A light snow was falling, and the sky beyond the parking lot was gray and brooding.

I sidestepped over to a rack of hunting gear, keeping my eye on the windows. When they ditched their cigarette butts onto the curb and entered the store, I felt a great waft of heat blossom up out of my coat. I faded toward the back just as Mr. Toddy, the pock-faced proprietor behind the counter, looked up and cleared his throat.

“Help you boys with anything?” Mr. Toddy asked Keener and his buddies.

“Just lookin’ around,” said Ottawa as he lazily spun a wire carousel displaying postcards, novelty magnets, and books of crossword puzzles. He wore a grease-stained military jacket and faded jeans. His jackboots left wet footprints on the linoleum.

I slipped down an aisle and stashed myself between two racks of old hunting coats. At the front of the store, Keener and Sallis snickered about something beside a display case of electronic equipment. Like a restless bear, Ottawa continued to rove around the store, absently picking up items off shelves, then shoving them back in place.

When Ottawa paused on the other side of the aisle where I was hiding, I glanced up at the antitheft mirror above the front door and saw that both Keener and Sallis were bent over one of the display cases with their backs to the front door. If Ottawa came around the aisle, I’d run in the opposite direction and head for the door. Hopefully I’d make it out before Ottawa could alert the other two.

But Ottawa meandered over to his friends, his boots still leaving wet tracks on the floor. The three of them muttered, and one of them—Sallis, I thought—tittered laughter like a hyena.

“Was there something in particular you fellas were looking for?” Mr. Toddy spoke up again.

From where I stood I couldn’t see him, but I could certainly sense an air of apprehension in his voice.

“Nope,” said Keener. He shoved his hands into his pockets. “Let’s beat it.”

They headed out. Before the door shut them out, I heard one of them mocking Mr. Toddy in a reedy parrot’s voice: “‘Was there something in particular you fellas were looking for?’” This was followed by guttural laughter.

I watched them cross the parking lot and walk up the sidewalk toward the highway. It was snowing harder now, and I soon lost sight of them among the crowd of holiday shoppers.

“Those boys friends of yours?” Mr. Toddy asked me after I’d come out from behind the rack of hunting coats.

“No, sir.”

“I don’t like them coming in here. You tell them I said so.”

“They’re not my friends.”

“They come in here again, I’m calling the cops.”

I nodded, then rushed out of the store.





On Christmas Eve, we celebrated Festa dei sette pesci, or the Feast of the Seven Fishes. The house was pungent with the scent of scungilli and fried codfish while my grandmother butchered eels in the kitchen sink. My dad and grandfather sat in the living room drinking Chianti as Dean Martin and Perry Como took turns crooning Christmas standards on my father’s old turntable.

I put the finishing touches on the Christmas tree and watched the snow spiral past the bay windows. Next door, Adrian’s house was completely dark. I wondered if he and his mother had traveled back to Chicago for the holidays.

Yet the following morning, as my family and I climbed into my dad’s car for Christmas mass, I saw Adrian sitting on the front stoop of his house. He was wearing flimsy-looking pajamas and fuzzy blue slippers.

My grandmother commented about how the kid was going to catch pneumonia sitting outside dressed like that, and wasn’t his mother paying any attention? I thought of Doreen Gardiner’s medicated stare and zombielike gait and decided that maybe paying attention was beyond her ability.

That night, we had the Mathersons over for Christmas dinner. They were a childless couple of middle age, plain and good—hearted. Mr. Matherson told the story about how a deer had gotten tangled in his Christmas lights one year and how he and my father and Charles had chased the deer up and down the street to try and get it untangled. I had been positioned on our front lawn with a broom; my dad had instructed me to swing the broomstick at the buck if it got too close. Mr. Matherson told the story every Christmas, as if none of us had ever heard it, let alone been there when it happened.

“Eventually,” said Mr. Matherson, smiling ruefully if not a bit drunkenly, “the thing took off into the woods, trailing about one hundred feet of colored bulbs behind it. It’s probably still out there to this day, its antlers strung up in lights.”

Just as coffee was served, my grandmother ushered me into the kitchen and shoved a ceramic plate into my hands. It was filled with struffoli, which were little balls of dough glazed in honey and covered with colorful round sprinkles.