December Park(9)

I had thought it was perfect and had handed it off to my grandmother with a sense of real pride and achievement.

While she had proclaimed that it was very well written, she opined that the Caller was probably hoping to receive submissions of a more palatable nature. “No dead children, in other words,” she’d said but not unkindly.

My desk drawers were filled with such stories about werewolves and vampires, ghosts and goblins. Some were shameless rip-offs of other stories I’d read, though I emulated the plot and style in order to learn how the author had been so effective in transporting the reader. Other stories were wholly mine, salvaged from the depths of my own creativity. Last spring, I had purchased the newest edition of the Writer’s Market, and only recently had I begun sticking Post-it notes on some of the pages, where the entries detailed the submission guidelines for various genre magazines.

I wanted more than anything to be a writer.

By the time I was ready to leave the house, my grandparents had retired to the den to watch television. I kissed them both on the tops of their heads before slipping out into the night. I had a cigarette between my lips before I reached the end of the flagstone walk. I fished my dirt bike out from the dense wall of ivy that clung to the side of our house and hopped on, my feet quick to pedal, my backside never touching the seat.

It was jarringly cold. The residential streets were dark and poorly lit, and there were hardly any cars on the road. Deciding to take the shortcut instead of sticking to the main roads, I rolled up the Mathersons’ driveway, cut across their lawn, and whipped through a stand of hemlock trees that loomed tall and dark against the backdrop of night.

A moment later, I was thudding along a dirt path through the woods, my bike rattling while my teeth chattered. The woods here weren’t too dense, letting the occasional porch lights shine through the thicket so that I felt like Magellan being guided by stars. I’d used this shortcut an inexhaustible number of times in the past, typically at night, but it was never the same. The woods were always moving, always shifting.

I cleared the trees at a fine pace, bursting out onto an open field. It was mostly scrubland and unkempt bluegrass, but it made for tough negotiation on a weary, tire-bald dirt bike. To the east, the field sloped gradually down into a small valley surrounded by more woods. A small white farmhouse, abandoned for as long as I’d known it, sat in the center of this valley, obscured on this night by a heavy veil of mist. All I could make out was the light of the solitary streetlamp on the edge of the property, boring an eerie pinpoint of yellow illumination through the fog.

My friends and I called it the Werewolf House, because it looked just like the run-down cottage in a werewolf movie we’d seen a few years ago at the Juniper.

Beyond the Werewolf House was the Butterfield homestead. After a heavy snowfall, the Butterfield family farm accommodated countless neighborhood children hefting colorful plastic sleds and chucking snowballs packed frozen with ice at one another. But it was fall now, and that meant the farm would be crowded with pumpkins, squash, Indian corn, cider in unlabeled plastic jugs, and a grand assortment of fruits and vegetables.

There were Holsteins, massive lazy things, at the far end of the property, and if your fists were packed with reeds, you could approach them and feed them through the slats in their pens, their purple mucus-coated tongues lolling from their steaming mouths to wrap around the reeds like the tentacle of an octopus. While they ate, you could put your palms against their smooth-haired flanks and feel the heat radiating from them.

I pumped my legs harder, the reeds whipping against my shins, my face down against the freezing wind. The cold caused tears to burst from my eyes, and wind shear caused them to stream along my temples where they froze. Once I cleared the thickest of the reeds and could see the dim sodium glimmer of the streetlamps up ahead through the thinning fog, I knew I could let up on the pedaling without fear that my tires and chain would catch in the tall grass and jerk me to a sudden halt.

A pair of headlights appeared off to my left, maybe one hundred yards away. An instant later I heard the coughing growl of the vehicle as it sped toward me. At first I thought nothing of it. It wasn’t unusual for people to come off-roading in this field, particularly at night. Instead, I focused my attention on the glowing specks of the streetlamps along the road ahead of me. The reeds receded, giving way to frozen, ribbed dirt. It was like riding over a giant rib cage.

The pickup swerved, and I lost sight of its headlamps in my peripheral vision. Yet I still heard its engine, a bit louder than it had been a moment before. I didn’t realize that the vehicle was closing in on me until its headlights forced my shadow to stretch out on the cold black earth ahead of me. I thought I could feel the heat from the headlights across my back.

I chanced a glance over my shoulder. It was a pickup all right, and its driver was not concerned with spinning donuts in the field. The truck was directly behind me about twenty yards away and quickly closing the distance. Crazily, I heard Mr. Pastore, telling me to head straight home and no dillydallying.

I faced forward again, my legs pumping like machinery, my breath wheezing up my throat. I swore I could hear, even over the growl of the truck’s engine, the reeds whipping against the massive front grille and the tires biting into the solid, frozen earth, crushing stones into powder.

I was nearly to the street. For some ridiculous reason, I associated reaching the street with home base in a game of tag, until it occurred to me with a pang of hopelessness that pickups went faster on paved roads.