December Park(98)

We spent the remainder of that week—that first week of summer vacation—not hearing a word from Adrian Gardiner. It was like he’d vanished. We pretended it didn’t bother us. In the daytime, my friends and I prowled the city, not letting the pall of the Piper impinge upon us, ruin us, frighten us. We biked to the Cape and threw rocks at the barges that turtled through the murky waters. We ran relay races between the stone hovels at the bottom of Milkmaid Street, pounding divots into the dirt with our sneakers.

We rode out to the Blue Pirate Restaurant, which was an old weatherworn tavern near the Shallows, and listened to the garrulous laughter of the shipyard workers and watermen who patronized it. Sometimes they left dirty magazines in the cabs of their trucks. One afternoon, the proprietor of the Blue Pirate, a tattooed and crinkle-faced swashbuckler in his own right, turned on his hose and chased us away, his booming laughter following us down the boulevard like cannon fire.

Each night, after splitting from my friends, I found myself pulling circles on my bike in the street outside the Gardiners’ house. Lights flicked on and off in different parts of the house. One night I stayed out a few minutes past curfew only to ignite the ire of my grandmother, who peeked out the front door and shouted my name.

I returned her cry with one of my own—“I’m right here!”—before pedaling up the driveway, pitching my bike in the ivy alongside the house, and going inside.

I was itchy. Agitated. I watched shitty black-and-white horror films on TV late at night. Every noise in the house reminded me of that phone call from Adrian about the stranger outside. I couldn’t stop thinking of the man I thought I saw standing in my yard that night after waking up from a nightmare.

Another afternoon, it was just Peter and me heading to the Juniper Theater on our bikes to catch a double feature. Darby Hedges was showing Prophecy and It’s Alive. It seemed we were in store for hours of mutated killers, and we couldn’t have been happier about it.

“How long do you think this curfew is gonna last?” Peter asked. We were biking past Tiki Tembo, a Chinese restaurant with garish stone lions positioned outside the entranceway.

“I guess until they catch the guy,” I said.

“What if they never catch the guy? I mean, they can’t have us in at nine for the rest of our lives, right?”

“Just until we’re eighteen.”

“I don’t know if I can wait that long.” He smoked a cigarette down to the filter, then cast it in the gutter. “I f*cking hate this town. It’s like an extension of my house. A bunch of strangers telling me what to do. I don’t belong here.”

“Do you ever think about what you’re going to do after high school?”

“What do you mean?”

“About college, I guess,” I said. I thought about the AP English class I’d reluctantly be starting in the fall.

“Fuck if I know,” he said. “I just want to get out of here.”

“Yeah. Me, too. So you better not leave without me.”

“No way, man. We’ll leave together. We can go someplace cool, like New York City or Las Vegas. Get an apartment. It’ll be awesome. You could write your stories, and I could become the world’s greatest blackjack player.”

I laughed. “That would be cool.”

“So let’s promise. Neither of us leaves without the other.”

I touched my nose and said, “I promise.”

Peter did the same. Then he spat on the sidewalk while we pedaled uphill. “If I don’t get out of here someday, I feel like I’ll go crazy.”

“Maybe that’s what happened to the Piper,” I suggested. “Maybe Michael’s theory is totally wrong, and the killer isn’t someone new to town but someone who’s been here all his life and was never able to get out.”

“Yeah, man, I can believe that. It’s this town, this whole city. I can see it making someone into a monster. Someone like the Piper couldn’t happen in a city like Baltimore or anywhere else. Only here.”

“Harting Farms is like Sugarland’s train village,” I said.

Two summers ago, Michael had set up a model train village in his basement using his father’s old Lionel locomotives. He’d organized several dozen plastic army men throughout the landscape, their plastic rifles pointing at the wedges of hand-carved buildings while troops of green men prepared to hijack the trains.

“Like an entire world set up on a table in the middle of nowhere,” I went on. “In the middle of someone’s basement.”

“Yeah, that’s good. Model train set. Shoot,” Peter continued, grinning, “you remember when Michael brought the garden hose through the basement window to flood the village? He called it a tsunami and wound up soaking all his father’s law books.”

“He hit the fuse box and blew the power out in the house, too.”

“No, the fuse box thing was when he tried to make an indoor swimming pool in the basement,” Peter corrected.

I laughed. “I thought his old man was gonna kill him.”

“It was the same summer we found that old water heater in the woods, and Michael tried to cut it in half to make a bobsled, remember?”

“That’s right.”

“Goddamn, that was fun.” Peter shook his head and rose off the seat of his bike, his back arching like a cat’s. I could tell something was on his mind.