When she finally did come down in her bathrobe, Mrs. Bamburg was holding the beer Jill had brought up earlier.
“What is all this?” she said, blinking at the streamers, the scarves thrown over the two lamps, the chairs set up for games.
“The party,” Jill said. “Remember?”
Mrs. Bamburg nodded without enthusiasm and turned into the kitchen, where she picked up the phone and called her friends one after another, telling them that the little shit manager had finally fired her. She told the story so many times, with the exact same words, that I felt like the earth might have gotten stuck and stopped rotating.
By seven o’clock, though it was fully dark, not one trick-or-treater had rung the bell. Ronnie had gone down to his room and Beth was doing math problems from his high school textbook. We’d even seen my brother and Eddie, in green fatigues and bleeding ketchup from their heads, walk right by our duplex with my dad. They were headed for the subdivision down the road, where it was rumored they were giving away full-size candy bars.
“It’s evil spirits,” Jill said, her eyes wide. “They are keeping people away from our party.”
“That’s crazy,” Beth said, pushing her glasses up on her nose. It was funny to see her doing math problems because everyone knew the real Pippi Longstocking would never do homework.
Jill walked into the kitchen, got out the turnip, and motioned for me to follow her around the side of the duplex. We walked next to where the siding met the cement foundation. We circled clockwise three times. I couldn’t keep up with Jill. She was upset not only that we’d worked so hard on the party and nobody was showing up, but also that kids right now could be biting into Mars bars filled with razor blades and M&M’s sprinkled with angel dust. Abruptly she stopped and swung around. I followed her three times counterclockwise around the duplex, all in an effort to ward off evil spirits.
We sat on the stairs in front of the house, the turnip beside us, the stars splattered above us. I took hold of her hand. Even though it was cold outside, her palm was warm and moist. Holding it was like holding a small, soft animal.
Jill decided that the problem was that we hadn’t advertised our party enough. We should go down by the main road and let everyone know. At the edge of Bent Tree, right by the mailboxes, we saw the girls from 4B. The older one was a cowgirl in a red felt hat and matching vest, and the younger one, who threw around a furry tail and meowed loudly, was a kitty cat.
“We’re having a party in 11B,” Jill said to the mother, a short-haired woman in a yellow trench coat. “We’ve got all kinds of safe, fun activities.”
The woman looked at the handmade poster with a drawing of Dracula in his coffin and then up at us. Unless she was deaf, she’d heard music blasting from Jill’s duplex and sometimes men having fistfights on the front lawn; this mother thought we were the sort of people that Jill wanted to have the party to protect the kids against.
“Thanks honey,” she said. “But I got to get these kids to bed.”
“Please come up.” Jill grabbed the woman’s arm.
“Maybe another time.” The woman moved away and hurried down the path toward her front door.
“Meow,” the little girl said, but then grimaced like a mean cat and hissed at us.
We walked across the road into the subdivision with the brick ranch houses. There was a girl in a Cinderella mask with tiny eyeholes jumping on a trampoline. A jeep drove past with a dead deer tied to the top. I thought it was a Halloween prank, but Jill said hunting season had just started and I had to get used to seeing deer sprawled out on the roofs of cars. Most of the ranches were decorated for Halloween with dried cornstalks tied to their mailboxes and jack-o’-lanterns that lit up their front doors. Jill passed fliers to a group of teenagers in hooded sweatshirts wearing zombie masks and carrying pillowcases full of candy and a father taking around his toddler dressed like a lion in brown pj’s, black whiskers drawn over the kid’s chubby pink cheeks.
When we walked back up and sat on the steps again, I could tell Jill was disappointed; nothing had turned out the way she’d planned.
“Kids might still come,” I said. “It’s not too late.”
I could see now, though, that there were Pintos and Mustangs lining the street in front of Jill’s duplex, and I could hear Lynyrd Skynyrd blasting out the windows. No children would be coming to our party. We went back inside, where her mother was slow-dancing with a guy in an Indian kurta. We could see his red chest hairs poking out the top of his shirt. Her mother, who’d been drinking ever since she got up, pressed into the man like a soft stick of butter, her mouth attached to his, and I could see by the way her cheek shifted that his tongue was fully in her mouth.
“That’s so gross!” Jill said, pulling me up the stairs. Two women and a man sat on her bed smoking. She told them to get out, that she needed to do her homework, but they ignored her and kept talking, the man explaining how to make dandelion wine.
We wandered back downstairs.
A few people wore costumes. Sandy, dressed like a bunny, in rabbit ears and an aerobics leotard, was talking to a man wearing purple-tinted glasses and love beads. She’d taken on more shifts at the nursing home so she could pay her own rent. Most of the other outfits were half-committed—a guy in a funny hat and a girl wearing rhinestone sunglasses. I saw that my father was in the corner. I’d told him earlier about the kids’ party and though it hadn’t worked out how we wanted, I was still glad he had come. He wore his wire-rim reading glasses and a surplice from when he’d been a minister. At first I thought he had come as a priest but then I saw that he carried a gold-trimmed book and realized he was supposed to be Prospero from The Tempest. I waved to him from across the room and he waved back. He was talking to a man with a mustache.
I didn’t like the look of the man. Any guy who looked like Charles Manson even a little gave me the creeps, and I could tell by the way the man kept holding his hands up to replicate a rifle that he was telling my dad about hunting trips. Before we left the rectory, my dad might have come to a party like this to actually minister to lost souls, to tell them they were not alone, that there was a halo of presence around each of us and while you might feel separate from God, this was only an illusion. Now he was more like an anthropologist doing fieldwork. By the way he laughed and shook his head I could tell he was interested and amused by the man’s story.
Jill and I pushed through the crowd and went back outside. It was dark and the tops of the trees blew left and then right; nearly all the leaves were off now and the evergreens sat smoky in the darkness. The mountain was above us, wild and unknowable. I was cold in my white leotard and painter pants. I had made myself a unicorn horn out of tinfoil and attached it to my forehead with masking tape, but it had bent sideways and looked less now like a magical horn and more like someone had stuck a knife into the side of my head.
Jill was Victoria Winters from Dark Shadows in a black dress with a lace collar.
“This is the dress my mama wore to the funeral.”
“Doesn’t it give you the creeps to wear it?” I asked her.
“Yeah,” she said. “But aren’t you supposed to have the creeps on Halloween?”
“I guess,” I said. I sounded noncommittal, but what she said hit me hard. She wanted to honor the dead even if it made her uncomfortable.
We watched people moving in the windows like fish in an aquarium.
“Do the speech,” I said.
“I don’t feel like it,” she said.
“Oh come on,” I said. “It will make us feel better.”
“You think so?”
“Do it!”
“My name is Victoria Winters,” Jill began. “My journey is beginning. A journey that I hope will open the doors of life to me, and link my past with my future, a journey that will bring me to a strange and dark place, a world I’ve never known.”
Later, back in my own bed, trying to fall asleep, I heard a voice. This time I knew it wasn’t a spirit. Jill stood
outside my window in her nightgown. I went down and opened the door. It had warmed up a bit, so the ground sent up a fine bluish mist.
“My mother split to get beer,” she said, “but she’s still not home.”
“Was that before the fight or after?”
As the party was breaking up, two guys had gone at it in the street under the dusk-to-dawn lights.
“After,” Jill said.
“Maybe she decided to spend the night someplace else?”
“Maybe,” Jill said.
“Do you want to come in?” I said. “I’ll sleep on the floor and you can sleep on my bed.”
She shook her head.
“Beth might wake up.”
“She can come too.”
Jill shook her head again.
“She’ll come back,” I said.
“I hope so.” Jill turned back toward her duplex but then paused.
“Do you think I could talk to your father?”
“Why?”
“He’s a preacher, right?”
“He was one.”
“I need advice on how to remove the curse on us.”
“I thought you hated the Christers?”
“I’m desperate!” she said. “Besides, your dad’s got the power.”
It was true. Though he wasn’t a minister anymore, his hands still held a sense of holiness left over from when he’d baptized babies and given wafers away during communion. Sometimes I’d watch his hands at the dining room table or as he read the newspaper; his hands reminded me how we’d once been held together inside a circle of grace. He could still calm my little brother by touching his head, and by putting his hands on the two men from the party, he’d broken up the fight.
“You can talk to him in the morning.”
“OK,” Jill said reluctantly.
After she left, I lay in bed listening to my father snore across the hall and to the occasional truck rattling down on 419. I knew Jill thought if she could break the curse, her mom might come back.
I knew Jill was worried about kidnapping, but her biggest concern, and mine too, was sex slavery. There was a long history of sex slavery, one Jill and I had studied. I had noticed that older boys liked to talk about gory scenes in horror movies, and that Phillip and Eddie enjoyed pretending to shoot people, but Jill and I spent much of our time talking about girls held captive by men. Most horrifying were the Manson girls, particularly the one near our own age named Snake. There was the girl in California chained to the toilet in the day and kept in a box during the night. The crazy thing was, the thing we could not get our mind around no matter how hard we tried, was that even during the trial, she was calling her captor on the phone. We often told each other that David Cassidy wanted us as his sex slave. We wrote this in notes and folded them up in intricate triangular patterns and tossed them to one another in health class.
Jill knocked on our door early, before my dad had gone to work, while he was still drinking coffee. She said she needed a private word with him and they went out onto the deck and closed the sliding glass door.
I knew Jill wouldn’t tell him her mother was missing—she was too afraid of social services—but she’d ask about the curse. I felt embarrassed for her because my father didn’t believe in spells. When parishioners talked about ghosts he’d roll his eyes. But my dad listened to Jill and when she’d finished, he took both her hands in his own and shook his head slowly.
After he’d gone I asked Jill what he’d said.
“If God exists,” she said, “he doesn’t hate anybody.”
I nodded.
“Actually he wasn’t very helpful. I was hoping for concrete things I could do to break the curse.”
“Like what kind of things?” I asked.
She looked at me seriously.
“Like throw an egg in a river or search for a bird’s feather.”
That afternoon we walked duplex to duplex looking in basement windows. Did the inhabitants seem like people who would keep sex slaves? A guy who lived alone in one of the lower duplexes was high on our list of possible sex-slave masters, but when we looked into his basement all we saw was an exercise bike and a poster of Liberace. What about Dwayne? Jill shook her head. She was convinced that the person who kept a sex slave wouldn’t risk bad behavior; it would be a quiet guy, a guy who always ordered the same thing every time he went into Long John Silver’s.
We walked out into the subdivisions. Under one carport was a large wooden box, but when we got closer we saw that the box held tools and a lawn mower. Another split-level had a row of mums that Jill thought looked suspicious, and I didn’t like the lawn jockey, his black face painted beige. Across the street, we spotted a man coming out of his front door, heading for his station wagon. He was wearing a wide tie and a powder-blue leisure suit. I thought the leisure suit alone made him a candidate, but when Jill saw that he carried a Bible she was more convinced than ever that the man might be hiding a sex slave.
After a few days, the Bamburgs grew accustomed to their mother being gone. As Beth pointed out, it wasn’t as if they saw her much anyway. Life with parents was unnatural and full of rules, and it was only when their mother was gone that the Bamburg children could live as they pleased, cozy and chaotic as puppies in a box.
Jill nailed sheets to the ceiling, tenting the living room, and spread blankets and pillows over the shag. The television was on day and night. Nixon, who to my dad’s horror had won the election, was always on the screen, his huge head smiling down at us like a distant emperor, as we played Operation and Mystery Date.
For the first days, we feasted on strips of bacon and chocolate milk and searched for Mrs. Bamburg in all the subdivisions along the highway. Jill decided that her mom had entered Parallel Time and was running a home for lost dogs in a big house in the country, pulling burrs out of long-haired dogs and giving the small, nervous ones lap time. People left Bent Tree all the time, Jill reasoned; it was in the very nature of the place that souls who completed their trials drifted out and new sinners, like my family, made their way in.
After we ran out of bacon and chocolate milk, Jill heated up frozen pizzas and pot pies. We downed sugar by the spoonful, first granulated, then the confectionary. The Bamburg kids ate through the canned soup, the tuna fish, even the condensed milk, which they spread like jelly on saltines. On the two-week anniversary of Mrs. Bamburg’s disappearance, Jill served boiled potatoes covered with corn syrup and passed around a jar of maraschino cherries.
“All that’s left,” she said, “is this bar of dark chocolate and a half bottle of apple cider vinegar.” She sat on the floor with her legs crossed and her back curved, her spine sticking up through the material of her turtleneck sweater. Jill broke the chocolate into four parts. I passed mine to Beth, who looked at me gratefully before popping both squares into her mouth.
“If only we could photosynthesize,” Beth said, “all our problems would be over.”
“You could go to the food pantry at First Baptist.”
“Take food from the Christers? Have you lost your mind completely?”
I’d forgotten how much Jill hated the born-agains. To her, taking their handouts was worse than starving.
“I could sneak food from home,” I said.
“Would you do that?” Jill said. “It would only be until I start working.”
The next day, after we got back from school, I slipped two cans of ravioli and a couple of bananas under my shirt. As I came into the Bamburgs’ duplex, not bothering to knock, Jill and her sister and brother gathered around me, looking round-eyed like the possum that ate out of our garbage can. Jill didn’t even bother heating up the food; she just opened the can and split the ravioli three ways on the Pyrex plates. They each moved to a far corner of the tent, gulping down the food quick as hungry dogs.
The system worked well enough until my mother noticed a bulge in my jeans. I pulled out the jar of peanut butter and roll of Ritz crackers sunk down my pants. Her eyebrows arched up. I knew i
f I told her the Bamburg children were hungry, she’d let me take anything I wanted. My mother was funny that way. While she looked down at everybody who lived in Bent Tree, she’d been the first to bring a casserole down to 1B when she heard the old lady who lived there broke her hip. She’d even let Sandy do her and Eddie’s laundry in the basement while their machine was broken. But I also knew if she found out Mrs. Bamburg was missing, she’d call the police.
At first I’d argued for calling the police myself, but Jill told me that the last time their mom left, they’d all ended up at a foster home with a lady who raised German shepherds in her backyard.
I told my mom: “We’re having an indoor picnic.” It was a lame excuse but better than nothing.
“We don’t have money to feed the neighborhood,” she said, turning me around and opening the cabinet so I could put the items back up on the shelf.
When I walked in empty-handed, the Bamburgs were disappointed. Beth started to cry. I told them that after dark I’d drop food out my bedroom window. While my mother watched All in the Family, I smuggled a loaf of bread and a stick of butter upstairs. Then I made the signal, turning my lights on and off three times. Jill, who’d been waiting in the shadows beside her duplex, ran barefoot over the yellow grass to pick up the bread.
Ronnie stopped going to high school. At first Jill nagged him, saying they’d get busted if he didn’t show up. But he claimed he’d told the ladies in the front office that his family was moving to Florida and they’d wished him well and taken his name off the register. Jill didn’t like him hanging around the duplex all day, and she warned him that if he went outside during school hours, he’d blow it for all of them. Beth, on the other hand, loved school, and Jill had no trouble getting her up, making sure she showered and that her clothes were clean. Jill told me that if a kid came to school for too many days with stained clothes and dirty hair, the guidance counselor called child protection. Jill filled out the free-lunch form for her and Beth. In the cafeteria, she wolfed down everything, even the disgusting Salisbury steak and gross gelatinous gravy.
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