Halloween

by Paula Guran

  “About a minute later, I came out into the open between two big old chinaberry trees. There was a patch of grass between me and the next stand of trees. The woman made a gargling sound that ended in one of those fox-yips, and I looked up in that direction and saw that the clearing extended in a straight line up and down, like a path. Stars shone out of the patch of darkness between the two parts of the woods. And when I started to walk across it, I felt a grassy hump between two beaten tracks. The path into The Backs off Meridian Road curved around somewhere up ahead and wound back down through the shacks before it came to a dead end. It had to come to a dead end, because it sure didn’t join back up with Meridian Road.

  “And this was how I’d managed to lose sight of Dee Sparks. Instead of avoiding the path and working his way north through the woods, he’d just taken the easiest way toward the woman’s shack. Hell, I’d had to pull him off the path in the first place! By the time I got out of my sheet, he was probably way up there, out in the open for anyone to see and too excited to notice that he was all by himself. What I had to do was what I’d been trying to do all along, save his ass from anybody who might see him.

  “As soon as I started going as soft as I could up the path, I saw that saving Dee Sparks’ ass might be a tougher job than I thought—maybe I couldn’t even save my own. When I first took off my costume, I’d seen lights from three or four shacks. I thought that’s what The Backs was—three or four shacks. But after I started up the path, I saw a low square shape standing between two trees at the edge of the woods and realized that it was another shack. Whoever was inside had extinguished his kerosene lamp, or maybe wasn’t home. About twenty-thirty feet on, there was another shack, all dark, and the only reason I noticed that one was, I heard voices coming from it, a man and a woman, both of them sounding drunk and slowed-down. Deeper in the woods past that one, another grease-paper window gleamed through the trees like a firefly. There were shacks all over the woods. As soon as I realized that Dee and I might not be the only people walking through the Backs on Halloween night, I bent down low to the ground and damn near slowed to a standstill. The only thing Dee had going for him, I thought, was good night vision—at least he might spot someone before they spotted him.

  “A noise came from one of those shacks, and I stopped cold, with my heart pounding away like a bass drum. Then a big voice yelled out, Who’s that?, and I just lay down in the track and tried to disappear. Who’s there? Here I was calling Dee a fool, and I was making more noise than he did. I heard that man walk outside his door, and my heart pretty near exploded. Then the woman moaned up ahead, and the man who’d heard me swore to himself and went back inside. I just lay there in the dirt for a while. The woman moaned again, and this time it sounded scarier than ever, because it had a kind of a chuckle in it. She was crazy. Or she was a witch, and if she was having sex, it was with the Devil. That was enough to make me start crawling along, and I kept on crawling until I was long past the shack where the man had heard me. Finally I got up on my feet again, thinking that if I didn’t see Dee Sparks real soon, I was going to sneak back to Meridian Road by myself. If Dee Sparks wanted to see a witch in bed with the Devil, he could do it without me.

  “And then I thought I was a fool not to ditch Dee, because hadn’t he ditched me? After all this time, he must have noticed that I wasn’t with him any more. Did he come back and look for me? The hell he did.

  “And right then I would have gone back home, but for two things. The first was that I heard that woman make another sound—a sound that was hardly human, but wasn’t made by any animal. It wasn’t even loud. And it sure as hell wasn’t any witch in bed with the Devil. It made me want to throw up. That woman was being hurt. She wasn’t just getting beat up—I knew what that sounded like—she was being hurt bad enough to drive her crazy, bad enough to kill her. Because you couldn’t live through being hurt bad enough to make that sound. I was in The Backs, sure enough, and the place was even worse than it was supposed to be. Someone was killing a woman, everybody could hear it, and all that happened was that Eddie Grimes fetched another jug back from the still. I froze. When I could move, I pulled my ghost costume out from inside my shirt, because Dee was right, and for certain I didn’t want anybody seeing my face out there on this night. And then the second thing happened. While I was pulling the sheet over my head, I saw something pale lying in the grass a couple of feet back toward the woods I’d come out of, and when I looked at it, it turned into Dee Sparks’ Halloween bag.

  “I went up to the bag and touched it to make sure about what it was. I’d found Dee’s bag, all right. And it was empty. Flat. He had stuffed the content into his pockets and left the bag behind. What that meant was, I couldn’t turn around and leave him—because he hadn’t left me after all. He waited for me until he couldn’t stand it any more, and then he emptied his bag and left it behind as a sign. He was counting on me to see in the dark as well as he could. But I wouldn’t have seen it at all if that woman hadn’t stopped me cold.

  “The top of the bag was pointing north, so Dee was still heading toward the woman’s shack. I looked up that way, and all I could see was a solid wall of darkness underneath a lighter darkness filled with stars. For about a second, I realized, I had felt pure relief. Dee had ditched me, so I could ditch him and go home. Now I was stuck with Dee all over again.

  “About twenty feet ahead, another surprise jumped up at me out of darkness. Something that looked like a little tiny shack began to take shape, and I got down on my hands and knees to crawl toward the path when I saw a long silver gleam along the top of the thing. That meant it had to be metal—tar paper might have a lot of uses, but it never yet reflected starlight. Once I realized that the thing in front of me was metal, I remembered its shape and realized it was a car. You wouldn’t think you’d come across a car in a down-and-out rathole like The Backs, would you? People like that, they don’t even own two shirts, so how do they come by cars? Then I remembered Dr. Garland driving away speeding down Meridian Road, and I thought You don’t have to live in The Backs to drive there. Someone could turn up onto the path, drive around the loop, pull his car off onto the grass, and no one would ever see it or know that he was there.

  “And this made me feel funny. The car probably belonged to someone I knew. Our band played dances and parties all over the county and everywhere in Woodland, and I’d probably seen every single person in town, and they’d seen me, too, and knew me by name. I walked closer to the car to see if I recognized it, but it was just an old black Model T. There must have been twenty cars just like it in Woodland. Whites and coloreds, the few coloreds that owned cars, both had them. And when I got right up beside the Model T, I saw what Dee had left for me on the hood—an apple.

  “About twenty feet further along, there was an apple on top of a big old stone. He was putting those apples where I couldn’t help but see them. The third one was on top of a post at the edge of the woods, and it was so pale it looked almost white. Next to the post one of those paths running all through The Backs led back into the woods. If it hadn’t been for that apple, I would have gone right past it.

  “At least I didn’t have to worry so much about being making noise once I got back into the woods. Must have been six inches of pine needles and fallen leaves underfoot, and I walked so quiet I could have been floating—I’ve worn crepe soles ever since then, and for the same reason. You walk soft. But I was still plenty scared—back in the woods there was a lot less light, and I’d have to step on an apple to see it. All I wanted was to find Dee and persuade him to leave with me.

  “For a while, all I did was keep moving between the trees and try to make sure I wasn’t coming up on a shack. Every now and then, a faint, slurry voice came from somewhere off in the woods, but I didn’t let it spook me. Then, way up ahead, I saw Dee Sparks. The path didn’t go in a straight line, it kind of angled back and forth, so I didn’t have a good clear look at him, but I got a flash of that silvery-looking sheet way off through the
trees. If I sped up I could get to him before he did anything stupid. I pulled my costume up a little further toward my neck and started to jog.

  “The path started dipping downhill. I couldn’t figure it out. Dee was in a straight line ahead of me, and as soon as I followed the path downhill a little bit, I lost sight of him. After a couple more steps, I stopped. The path got a lot steeper. If I kept running, I’d go ass over teakettle. The woman made another terrible sound, and it seemed to come from everywhere at once. Like everything around me had been hurt. I damn near came unglued. Seemed like everything was dying. That Halloween stuff about horrible creatures wasn’t any story, man, it was the way things really were—you couldn’t know anything, you couldn’t trust anything, and you were surrounded by death. I almost fell down and cried like a baby boy. I was lost. I didn’t think I’d ever get back home.

  “Then the worst thing of all happened.

  “I heard her die. It was just a little noise, more like a sigh than anything, but that sigh came from everywhere and went straight into my ear. A soft sound can be loud, too, you know, be the loudest thing you ever heard. That sigh about lifted me up off the ground, about blew my head apart.

  “I stumbled down the path, trying to wipe my eyes with my costume, and all of a sudden I heard men’s voices from off to my left. Someone was saying a word I couldn’t understand over and over, and someone else was telling him to shut up. Then, behind me, I heard running—heavy running, a man. I took off, and right away my feet got tangled up in the sheet and I was rolling downhill, hitting my head on rocks and bouncing off trees and smashing into stuff I didn’t have any idea what it was. Biff bop bang slam smash clang crash ding dong. I hit something big and solid and wound up half-covered in water. Took me a long time to get upright, twisted up in that sheet the way I was. My ears buzzed and I saw stars—yellow and blue and red ones, not real ones. When I tried to sit up, the blasted sheet pulled me back down, so I got a faceful of cold water. I scrambled around like a fox in a trap, and when I finally got so I was sitting up, I saw a slash of real sky out the corner of one eye, and I got my hands free and ripped that hole in the sheet wide enough for my whole head to fit through it.

  “I was sitting in a little stream next to a fallen tree. The tree was what had stopped me. My whole body hurt like the dickens. I had no idea where I was. Wasn’t even sure I could stand up. Got my hands on top of the fallen tree and pushed myself up with my legs—blasted sheet ripped in half, and my knees almost bent back the wrong way, but I got up on my feet. And there was Dee Sparks, coming toward me through the woods on the other side of the stream.

  “He looked like he didn’t feel any better than I did, like he couldn’t move in a straight line. His silvery sheet was smearing through the trees. Dee got hurt, too, I thought—he looked as if he was in some total panic. The next time I saw the white smear between the trees it was twisting about ten feet off the ground. No, I said to myself and closed my eyes. Whatever that thing was, it wasn’t Dee. An unbearable feeling, an absolute despair, flowed out from it. I fought against this despair with every weapon I had. I didn’t want to know that feeling—I was eleven years old. If that feeling reached me when I was eleven years old, my entire life would be changed, I’d be in a different universe altogether.

  “But it did reach me, did it? I could say no all I liked, but I couldn’t change what had happened. I opened my eyes and the white smear was gone.

  That was almost worse—I wanted it to be Dee after all, doing something crazy and reckless, climbing trees, running around like a wild man, trying to give me a big whopping scare. But it wasn’t Dee Sparks, and it meant the worst things I’d ever imagine were true. Everything was dying. You couldn’t know anything. you couldn’t trust anything, we were all lost in the midst of the death that surrounded us.

  “Most people will tell you growing up means you stop believing in Halloween things—I’m telling you the reverse. You start to grow up when you understand that the stuff that scares you is part of the air you breathe.

  “I stared at the spot where I’d seen that twist of whiteness, I guess trying to go back in time to before I saw Dr. Garland fleeing down Meridian Road. My face looked like his, I thought—because now I knew that you really could see a ghost. The heavy footsteps I’d heard before suddenly cut through the buzzing in my head, and after I turned around and saw who was coming at me down the hill, I thought it was probably my own ghost I’d seen.

  “Eddie Grimes looked as big as an oak tree, and he had a long knife in one hand. His feet slipped out from under him, and he skidded the last few yards down to the creek, but I didn’t even try to run away. Drunk as he was, I’d never get away from him. All I did was back up alongside the fallen tree and watch him slide downhill toward the water. I was so scared I couldn’t even talk. Eddie Grimes’ shirt was flapping open, and big long scars ran all across his chest and belly. He’d been raised from the dead at least a couple of times since I’d seen him get killed at the dance. He jumped back up on his feet and started coming for me. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

  “Eddie Grimes took another step toward me, and then he stopped and looked straight at my face. He lowered the knife. A sour stink of sweat and alcohol came off him. All he could do was stare at me. Eddie Grimes knew my face all right, he knew my name, he knew my whole family—even at night, he couldn’t mistake me for anyone else. I finally saw that Eddie was actually afraid, like he was the one who’d seen a ghost. The two of us just stood there in the shallow water for a couple more seconds, and then Eddie Grimes pointed his knife at the other side of the creek.

  “That was all I needed, baby. My legs unfroze, and I forgot all my aches and pains. Eddie watched me roll over the fallen tree and lowered his knife. I splashed through the water and started moving up the hill, grabbing at weeds and branches to pull me along. My feet were frozen, and my clothes were soaked and muddy, and I was trembling all over. About half way up the hill, I looked back over my shoulder, but Eddie Grimes was gone. It was like he’d never been there at all, like he was nothing but the product of a couple of good raps to the noggin.

  “Finally, I pulled myself shaking up over the top of the rise, and what did I see about ten feet away through a lot of skinny birch trees but a kid in a sheet facing away from me into the woods, and hopping from foot to foot in a pair of big clumsy shoes? And what was in front of him but a path I could make out from even ten feet away? Obviously, this was where I was supposed to turn up, only in the dark and all I must have missed an apple stuck onto a branch or some blasted thing, and I took that little side trip downhill on my head and wound up throwing a spook into Eddie Grimes.

  “As soon as I saw him, I realized I hated Dee Sparks. I wouldn’t have tossed him a rope if he was drowning. Without even thinking about it, I bent down and picked up a stone and flung it at him. The stone bounced off a tree, so I bent down and got another one. Dee turned around to find out what made the noise, and the second stone hit him right in the chest, even though it was his head I was aiming at.

  “He pulled his sheet up over his face like an Arab and stared at me with his mouth wide open. Then he looked back over his shoulder at the path, as if the real me might come along at any second. I felt like pegging another rock at his stupid face, but instead I marched up to him. He was shaking his head from side to side. Jim Dawg, he whispered, what happened to you? By way of answer, I hit him a good hard knock on the breastbone. What’s the matter? he wanted to know. After you left me, I say, I fell down a hill and ran into Eddie Grimes.

  “That gave him something to think about, all right. Was Grimes coming after me, he wanted to know? Did he see which way I went? Did Grimes see who I was? He was pulling me into the woods while he asked me these dumb-ass questions, and I shoved him away. His sheet flopped back down over his front, and he looked like a little boy. He couldn’t figure out why I was mad at him. From his point of view, he’d been pretty clever, and if I got lost, it was my fault. But I wasn’t mad at h
im because I got lost. I wasn’t even mad at him because I’d run into Eddie Grimes. It was everything else. Maybe it wasn’t even him I was mad at.

  “I want to get home without getting killed, I whispered. Eddie ain’t gonna let me go twice. Then I pretended he wasn’t there any more and tried to figure out how to get back to Meridian Road. It seemed to me that I was still going north when I took that tumble downhill, so when I climbed up the hill on the other side of the creek I was still going north. The wagon-track that Dee and I took into The Backs had to be off to my right. I turned away from Dee and started moving through the woods. I didn’t care if he followed me or not. He had nothing to do with me any more, he was on his own. When I heard him coming along after me, I was sorry. I wanted to get away from Dee Sparks. I wanted to get away from everybody.

  “I didn’t want to be around anybody who was supposed to be my friend. I’d rather have had Eddie Grimes following me than Dee Sparks.

  “Then I stopped moving, because through the trees I could see one of those grease-paper windows glowing up ahead of me. That yellow light looked evil as the Devil’s eye—everything in The Backs was evil, poisoned, even the trees, even the air. The terrible expression on Dr. Garland’s face and the white smudge in the air seemed like the same thing—they were what I didn’t want to know.

  “Dee shoved me from behind, and if I hadn’t felt so sick inside I would have turned around and punched him. Instead, I looked over my shoulder and saw him nodding toward where the side of the shack would be. He wanted to get closer! For a second, he seemed as crazy as everything else out there, and then I got it: I was all turned around, and instead of heading back to the main path, I’d been taking us toward the woman’s shack. That was why Dee was following me.