We Ride Upon Sticks

by Quan Barry

  So if we had to say what Tituba and Sue Yoon had in common? That’s easy. They were both artistes at heart. The teen girls crowding around the Salem Village parsonage during the long cold winter of 1691 gathered to listen to Tituba’s engrossing tales of the West Indies. Ultimately, it was Tituba’s storytelling prowess that saved her from a one-way trip to Gallows Hill. In turn, her narrative skills paved the way for others to save their own lives. In 1692, once a person was accused of being a witch, the only way out was to make up a story, to say that yes, the devil did come to me and bid me serve him. Tituba was the first to confess. It wasn’t lost on later historians that when she describes what the devil looks like, she describes a man who looks an awful lot like her master, the Reverend Samuel Parris, a tall pale man in a black coat.

  Both Sue and Tituba did their homework on the cultures they found themselves swimming against. They studied the local natives and beat them at their own game. If she were ever asked to describe the supernatural being Salem Villagers had called Old Boy, Sue Yoon, a naturalized American citizen, would know more about what America’s all-consuming devil looks like than the rest of us who were naturally born here under his glare. Think about it. Who hasn’t suckled long and hard for mindless hours at the pixilated teat of the Old Boy? Not to get all gross about it, but maybe we’re all full of his milk.

  * * *

  —

  The Salem Witches were one of the only teams we’d beaten the year before when we went 2-8. Simply put, they were the true Bad News Bears of the Northeastern Conference—they had hearts of gold but sticks of putty. The reason nobody ever talked about us being the Bad News Bears was that even though up until now we were reliably pretty terrible, nobody would ever say our hearts were in the right place. Who knows? Maybe we still had traces of the Old Boy left in our blood. Every year there were stories about the small-hearted antics the adults of Danvers pulled at the annual Town Meeting, the citizenry coming out en masse to vote down some widow’s pension. Like parent, like child. Before Emilio, we weren’t above intentionally high sticking or kicking the ball downfield when the ref wasn’t looking, maybe dropping it and whacking it into play so fast the ref didn’t notice we’d dropped it a few feet beyond the spot where she’d pointed. It wasn’t that we played dirty. It was just that during past seasons, with each additional loss, it was less and less fun. We had a tendency to turn on one another, start yelling about other people’s screwups, our teammates yelling at us in turn when we sucked. Now that we had Emilio on our side, we didn’t need to aim below the belt. There was less internecine bickering. Or so we thought.

  On the other end of the rainbow, the Salem Witches really seemed to believe it was all in how you played the game. They were like that village of cherubic Whos in Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas—each game day they woke up to no X-mas presents, but regardless each one was still standing out there on the field hand in hand singing. The Witches seemed totally fine with losing all season long and laughing all the way to last place. Maybe it had something to do with the rye crop, some blight that made the grain ferment on the stalk, causing a feel-good mass hallucination to sweep through their ranks. Or maybe their joie de vivre was because their mascot was fly!

  Or at least most of us thought so.

  “Really?” said Julie Minh. We were stretching before the start of play. There was a laissez-faire attitude hanging in the crisp autumn air, the atmosphere like a carnival’s. Over the weekend we’d turned our clocks back. Already the sky was looking as if it was getting ready to pack it in. Despite the early dark, on the field things were just starting to get interesting. It was Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts. From all appearances, the Witches lived for this. Each player was wearing a pointy black hat. The ref was cool with it because she had one on too. Some of the Witches were also sporting fake noses from which sprouted kitty whiskers. The ref did make one girl take off a long black tail she’d pinned to her kilt, but the girl just shrugged and pinned the tail on their coach. In addition to her hat, the ref was also carrying a small plastic broomstick that lit up with a flick of a switch. She turned it on each time she pointed out an infraction like advancing or high sticking.

  Julie Minh pulled on her quad and shook her head. In her eyes, it was straight-up pagan idolatry. You could take the girl out of St. Richard’s but you couldn’t take St. Richard’s out of the girl’s spiritual belief system. Heather Houston didn’t see it that way, but she did agree there was something a little bit tone deaf about adopting a symbol as your mascot for which hundreds of thousands of women (and men) across the globe had been erroneously killed.

  The Claw wasn’t having it. “It’s badass,” It said. Some of us got the impression the Claw was moving a toothpick from side to side in Its mouth as It spoke. “They’re just one letter away from being the kind of women you all should be.”

  Maybe. But what the rest of us loved about the Witches’ mascot was that it was a mascot made for girls. There were no other team mascots that featured a woman. Everything was either male or at best gender neutral, like the Peabody Tanners, which nine times out of ten you couldn’t help but picture as a guy. Maybe a witch wasn’t such a great mascot for Salem’s football team, but that’s what made it doubly awesome. We were tired of constantly being referred to in the Danvers Herald as the “Lady Falcons.” Nobody ever called Log Winters and the rest of his bumbling crew the “Gentlemen Falcons.” It was about time there was a girl mascot, even if the girl was a symbol of womanhood gone somewhat awry.

  Too bad for them, but we beat the Salem Witches 4-0. In goal, Mel Boucher fell asleep standing up, le Splotch left all alone to think about what It was having for dinner. When at 3-0 Coach Butler tapped her heart with her finger, we dredged up the little bit of compassion we’d buried there for a rainy day. Though the Salem Witches were our namesake sisters in darkness, it was as if we were playing a team of sprites. They ran around the field in the fading light smiling and high-fiving each other despite their mistakes, their hats casting shadows on the ground ten feet tall. Maybe that was their magic. Having fun and enjoying one another’s company. Being lifted up even when you were being beaten down.

  * * *

  —

  After the game, we were ravenous in every way possible. Mel Boucher, whose grandparents lived in Salem, suggested a Papa Gino’s over in the East India Mall by the second-run movie theater. We couldn’t pack up our gear fast enough. Coach Butler said she was heading back to Oniontown, and did anyone need a lift?

  “Where?” asked Becca Bjelica, but then whacked herself on the side of her head in true I-could’ve-had-a-V-8 fashion, remembering that Oniontown was just a nickname for Danvers. In addition to a big yellow onion, Danvers was also known for the Danvers Carrot, a shorter variety of the regular carrot, and for Danvers State Mental Hospital, a gothic monstrosity on a hill off Route 1 where the craziest of the crazy got sent and where many truly unfortunate and highly litigious things happened to them. With its gargoyles and flying buttresses, the joint had horror flick written all over it. Danvers State would get shut down years later when civilized people finally conceded it should have been shuttered long ago.

  As we were loading up our gear, Abby Putnam told Coach Butler it was cool—we could fit Heather and Julie Minh in the cars we had. Back then nobody cared about seat belts or distracted teen drivers cruising the streets in overcrowded automobiles. Driving around with eight people to a backseat was small potatoes compared with other things we had going on up our sleeves. Just a few weeks before, Coach Butler had noticed the blue strips tied around our arms.

  “It’s for team spirit,” explained Jen Fiorenza.

  “Yeah, don’t worry, be happy,” added Mel Boucher, le Splotch doing a little jig. Marge narrowed her eyes but seemed to buy it.

  Now, with twilight coming on and Halloween night in the city of Salem on the horizon, she looked us over carefully as if checking us for ticks. “T
wo words, ladies,” she said. We all leaned forward the way you would if you were listening. “Be. Good.”

  “For sure,” responded Jen, a beat too fast. The Claw sat atop her head doing Its best Mount Rushmore impression, the Claw being, like Mount Rushmore, a national treasure safely beyond reproach. Marge sighed, obviously smelling something, but puttered off in her Subaru anyway.

  In Papa Gino’s, Sue Yoon pulled out her smokes. It was pretty ballsy. We still had on our uniforms, our shirts dark blue for away games and our light-blue plaid kilts for either home or away. “Let’s just get three large pepperoni,” said Abby Putnam.

  “Think they’d serve us a pitcher of beer?” asked Little Smitty. Dream on, we all collectively thought in our own particular idioms. Ain’t nobody serving us as long as you’re around. She didn’t argue the point. Little Smitty was the size of a twelve-year-old, though that night back in July when we’d partied up at Camp Wildcat, she’d had the liver of a horse.

  A few of us bummed Parliaments off Sue, folks some of us didn’t even know smoked (here’s looking at you, Girl Cory and AJ Johnson!), the smoke perfectly rippling out of their mouths like air bubbles from a fish.

  “It’s my birthday,” said Julie Minh, reaching for the pack. Jen Fiorenza clapped her on the back and handed her the cigarette she already had going. Julie Minh pinched it between her fingers as if her fingers were a pair of tweezers and the cigarette the wishbone in the game Operation, holding it tight lest a red buzzer go off. She raised it to her lips and took a tiny puff, the cherry sizzling just for an instant. Predictably, she drew the smoke only into her mouth and not into her lungs, the smoke quickly spurting out her lips like water in a spit take.

  “You have to inhale,” said Abby Putnam without even looking, her eyes still on the menu.

  Julie Minh tried a second time. They say if someone’s coughing, it means that at the very least, they’re also taking in air. We kept that thought in mind as we sat through the next five minutes of her hacking into her napkin. When she finally stopped coughing, she looked around at us, her closest friends in all the world. “I’m eighteen,” she croaked. “Deal with it, mother fuckers.” The way she split the expletive up into two separate words made us laugh so hard Becca Bjelica’s tampon came out.

  The Marks didn’t appear until Becca was back from the bathroom and our first pizza arrived. They said they were starved, so we let them have a couple slices of ours. There were four of them in their group. In time, we would learn three of them were named Mark. It made things easier. One was a shaggy blond, one a redhead, the remaining two with dark hair. Were they cute? To varying degrees, maybe. They all had a broadness in the chest that signaled they weren’t in high school but were actual men. When the waiter led them to the booth next to our table, we felt our world tilt in their general direction, like when someone sits down next to you on a really soft sofa and you fall toward the dent where they’re sitting.

  “What are you all supposed to be?” said Redheaded Mark.

  “Duh, we’re a field hockey team,” said Girl Cory. All four of them looked at her, nodded deeply, then kept looking. We weren’t sure they’d even heard her. She might have said, we’re flesh-eating proctologists, and they would’ve nodded just as reverently all the same.

  “Where are your sticks?” said Blond Mark. We couldn’t tell if he meant anything skeevy by it or not.

  “It’s her birthday,” said Jen Fiorenza, changing the subject. She accidentally elbowed Julie Minh in the left boob, though she was aiming for the ribs.

  “Happy birthday,” said Brunet Mark. “How old are you?”

  “She’s twenty,” said Mel Boucher, fast as lightning on her feet. It was good thinking. If she’d been twenty-one, then where was our pitcher of beer? The Marks weren’t drinking either, so chances were they were also hovering somewhere around the two-oh mark.

  “You here for the parade?” said Redheaded Mark.

  “Maybe,” said Girl Cory, sensing that the evening needed her help if it was ever going to get going.

  “Cool,” said Brunet Mark.

  We chatted, shared food, tried to act more sophisticated than we were by eating the anchovy pizza Brunet Mark had ordered without making a face. There were high levels of flirtation in the air. A Geiger counter set on titillated would’ve been going nuts. Brunet Mark had taken an interest in Julie Minh, complimenting her on her crucifix, then reaching inside his shirt and pulling his own out. AJ Johnson was suspicious, wondering if he had a thing for Asian girls, but it was Julie Minh’s birthday and AJ wasn’t going to rain on her parade. For the most part we could still breathe. They weren’t smothering us with a hard sell. For them, they were probably underage too and totally stoked to have arrived in a strange town and landed on a group of girls including one real stunner and another with boobs big enough to give local Boston personality Busty Heart a run for her money.

  Our bills came at the same time. As if viewing the goings-on in an after-school special, we watched with prurient interest as Brunet Mark reached over and swiped the check off our table, then we continued to follow the developing story line as he and his friends got up and headed to the counter to pay. There was a moment of silence as the act hung in the air. Were they villains or were they gentlemen? Somewhere a door slammed shut, snapping us out of our internal reverie. Silently we took up arguing among ourselves about what such chivalrousness could mean.

  It means by the time this night is over, one of us has to put out, thought Little Smitty.

  Collectively we shivered at the prospects of this, some of us shivering with excitement and most of us shivering with dread. The whole time Boy Cory just sat there wondering how much a cab would cost to take him back to Oniontown.

  “If that’s what you want, I’ll pay for it,” said Girl Cory, but the Claw gave both Corys a look that said, don’t you dare.

  Abby’s shivering was the straw that broke the camel’s back. “Let’s go,” she said in a low voice, thinking, nobody’s putting out on my watch. There was something in her demeanor that told us she meant business. We stood up and grabbed our coats. There was a side exit next to a picture of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa. No alarms sounded when Abby pushed the door open. Quietly we filed back out into the late-October air of Salem and whatever else would have us. Yeah, most of us thought, it’s better this way. You could smell the ocean from where we were, the sound of seabirds wheeling overhead like our better angels.

  * * *

  —

  The Marks had been sophomores from Bridgewater State, home of Bristaco, the Bridgewater State Bear. They’d heard through the grapevine that Salem was the place to be for Halloween, so they’d driven all the way up I-93 from Plymouth County. Blond Mark, Redheaded Mark, Brunet Mark, and Guy Whose Name We Didn’t Catch. Aside from footing the bill for our ’za, they’d also proven to be useful in other ways. Guy Whose Name We Didn’t Catch said the parade wouldn’t get going until eight and that it’d start on Congress Street. Thanks to Guy, we now had plans, though we still had an hour to blow.

  “I totally know what we should do,” said Sue Yoon. She tightened the drawstring around her hood. We were all wearing our booster swag, fleece-lined navy-blue pullovers that said DANVERS FALCONS FIELD HOCKEY in cursive on the back. “The official witch of Salem’s got a store somewhere around here,” said Sue. “Let’s check it out.”

  “Who?” said Julie Minh.

  “Her name’s Laurie Cabot,” said Sue.

  “And what is she?” Julie Minh demanded.

  “The official witch of Salem,” said Boy Cory, repeating Sue’s words as was his job anytime his nana, who was hard of hearing, was visiting.

  “No way, José,” said Julie Minh.

  “It’s your birthday,” said Mel Boucher. “Live a little.”

  “My God, we’re here—it was just around the corner,”
said Sue.

  “See?” said Little Smitty. “It was meant to be.”

  We were standing in front of a large plate-glass window in a row of shops. The one next door sold marijuana paraphernalia, the shop two doors down was a store exclusively hawking stuff for cats. It was amazing what people would spend their money on. In the window of the Official Witch Shoppe we could see all kinds of candles and books, pendants, dream catchers, scarves, long black robes, mortars and pestles. Sue tried the door. That’s when we saw the sign.

  CLOSED FOR THE HOLIDAY.

  BLESSÉD SAMHAIN!

  “Well, I never,” said Smitty. “If it’s a goddamn holiday, then why’d we have school?”

  We weren’t the only ones standing outside the shop. Already there were groups of people out on the street, gaggles of folks dressed up like Ewoks or the California Raisins, two guys who were somehow walking around inside a papier-mâché canoe, a sign around their necks claiming they were French fur traders.

  “Well, that was a bust,” said Abby Putnam.

  “Thank God,” said Julie Minh.

  “Let’s just walk around the Wharf,” said Heather Houston.

  “Roger that,” said Becca Bjelica, though secretly she wished we were back at Papa Gino’s as her back was starting to hurt.

  Pickering Wharf was a pedestrian walkway along the marina that abutted Salem Harbor. Mostly it consisted of restaurants and shops, ice-cream stands, and carts selling tacky jewelry. In the years to come, it would get a makeover and become more upmarket, but Halloween ’89 it still had an air of seediness.