Halloween

by Paula Guran

  When Jo-Jo next became aware of the world around him, he felt strangely light-headed, or perhaps I ought to say light-shelled. Kids, can you say “dramatic irony”?

  Well, I’ll bet you could say it if you’d stop goggling at me like a bunch of strangled frogs. Oh, never mind.

  Anyhow, Jo-Jo felt different, very, very different from the innocent little pumpkin he used to be.

  “What has happened to me?” he asked. Then he did a double take. Had those words actually come out of his mouth?

  But pumpkins don’t have mouths.

  Jack o’ lanterns do.

  Jo-Jo was still coming to grips with an altered reality when he glanced to his left. There was something shiny there, something that looked like a small silver box. Jo-Jo had no way of knowing that this was a toaster. All he knew was that when he turned, he could see himself in the brightly polished surface.

  Oh, what a sight he was! For Jeremy Jinx’s mommy had taken all of the impotent rage she always kept bottled up inside her—a ferocious, long-smoldering rage which came from years of living under the regime of a repressive, patriarchal society—and had used it. And how had she used it? Why on carving the Halloween pumpkins, of course! She had given each of them the scowliest eyes and the pointiest noses and the biggest, widest, most sinister grins you can imagine.

  And what is a big, wide, sinister grin unless it’s full of big, sharp, nastily pointed teeth?

  “Wow,” said Jo-Jo, giving his reflection the once-over. “Cool.”

  “It won’t be cool for long, squashboy,” came an unfamiliar voice. Jo-Jo turned-very slowly and in a wobbly manner-to confront the other two pumpkins that Jeremy Jinx’s mother had also carved into jack o’ lanterns. The one that had called out to Jo-Jo looked a lot like him, only not quite so scary, but the other one—

  The other one was hollow and smashed and dead.

  Jo-Jo gasped at the shattered, oozing shell. “What—what happened to her?” he demanded.

  If a pumpkin could shrug, that’s exactly what the other jack o’ lantern would have done. “Mulch happens. The knife slipped. So the seed-scooping monster lost her temper and knocked the poor kid smack off the table by . . . ‘accident.’ ”

  “How awful!” Jo-Jo cried. Fat, slimy tears dripped from his freshly gouged-out eyeholes.

  “Save your tears for yourself,” the other pumpkin told him. “As soon as the seed-scooper comes back with the candies, it’s all over for us.”

  Jo-Jo didn’t understand.

  “Geez, sprout, didn’t anyone ever tell you?” the other pumpkin said. “Don’t you know what it means to be a jack o’ lantern?”

  So Jo-Jo told the other pumpkin all about the pumpkin patch back home, and old Farmer Nosferatu, and wise old Mister Hooty Owl’s stories. And when he was done, the other pumpkin was laughing fit to burst himself into a pile of puréed pie filling.

  “Funny, you don’t look green,” he said when he finally got control of himself. “And you believed those stories? Sprout, those are the sort of thing ‘most everyone tells you when you’re young because being young means being dumb as a rock and it’s fun to see just how many lies you’ll swallow before you wise up!”

  “Then it wasn’t true?” Jo-Jo said, and he sounded so sorrowful and pathetic it would’ve made a high school guidance counselor cry real tears. “Not a single word?”

  “Bless your blossoms, there’s some truth to what you were told,” the other pumpkin said. “All the best lies come wrapped up in half-truths so they’re easier to believe. Halloween is a magical time of year for us poor pumpkins. How else do you think you got the power to move yourself around like that, even a little, and to talk like we’re doing right now? But the magic doesn’t last and neither do we. Oh, they’ll use us to light up their Halloween night, all right! But how do you think they make us glow? Not by magic, nuh-uh. By fire.”

  Jo-Jo gasped. Fire was something he understood. It was something all vegetables understood without ever needing to be taught, a primal fear bred so deeply into every leaf and stem, fruit and flower, that it came to them as natural as soaking up sunlight and rain. Fire cooked. Fire killed.

  “That’s right, sprout, I said fire,” the other pumpkin went on. “Something called a candle. They lift off the top of your shell, stick that thing upright inside you, and then they set it aflame. And as soon as the first little spark of it catches hold and the fire blazes up in your shell, the magic’s over. You’re dead. Beautiful and bright, but dead.”

  “Nooooooo!” Jo-Jo wailed. And he rocked back and forth on the kitchen table, because the magic of Halloween had given him the power to move himself around like that, in a most un-vegetable-like manner. More tears streamed from his eyeholes and he wiped them away frantically.

  Then he realized something. What was he using to wipe away his tears?

  “Where in heck did these come from?” he asked, holding up a pair of prehensile leaves. They trembled before his eyeholes, having burgeoned from the ends of a pair of sturdy pumpkin vines that had somehow erupted from the sides of his shell.

  The other pumpkin chuckled. “Beats me, sprout. More of that ‘magic of Halloween’ crap in action, I guess. They say that if you want something bad enough, tonight of all nights, you get it. Anything short of wanting to save your own life, that is. Candle or no candle, we’ve only got until dawn.”

  “But I never wished for these,” Jo-Jo protested, waving his vines about wildly.

  “Hey, some things you want without knowing you want them,” the other pumpkin said. “Some things, the magic knows you want them before you know it yourself.”

  Jo-Jo grew thoughtful. He continued to study his miraculous leaves and vines, flexing them testing them, reaching out with them, using them to pluck at the corners of the sodden newspapers still covering the kitchen tabletop. The leaves were very dexterous, just like human hands, only somehow Jo-Jo knew that the vines he’d grown instead of arms were much stronger than human arms.

  “I guess the magic does know best,” he said at last. ”There is one thing I want to do before I go, and I won’t so much mind dying after I’ve done it.” As the other pumpkin watched, Jo-Jo began to shake and shiver, then all of sudden he sprouted two more vines, right out from under himself. Using his leaves, he laid hold of the table and let himself drop over the side just as his rapidly growing leg-vines reached their full size.

  “Hey, sprout, what do you think you’re—?” the other pumpkin began to ask. Just then the kitchen door swung open and Jeremy Jinx’s mommy came in with a couple of fat, white candles in her hands.

  The other pumpkin saw Jo-Jo’s vines snake back up onto the table top, lay hold of the carving knife and the scooping spoon, and drop from sight again just before he heard Jeremy Jinx’s mommy begin to scream.

  The end.

  What’s that, Tommy? What do you mean, it can’t be the end? Sure it can! Who’s telling this story, huh? I’m only doing what your Mommy and Daddy want, shielding you, sheltering you from all the icky-sticky details. Why should I have to tell you what happened next, what Jo-Jo did with that carving knife and that scooping spoon and those candies? Can’t you guess what little Jeremy Jinx found sitting on the front porch steps, waiting for him when he came home from school that day? It was a surprise, I can at least tell you that. A gaping, grinning surprise with a candle burning oh, ever so brightly inside!

  Surely you don’t need me to tell you what it was, do you? I didn’t think so. Or to tell you what it was that little Jeremy Jinx found smeared all over the sharp, pointed, nastily carved teeth of the jolly jack o’ lantern that sat on the other side of the front porch steps? A child’s imagination is such a precious gift, dearie me, yes. Use it, yard-apes.

  But what’s that tapping at the door? Could it possibly be Jo-Jo the Jolly Jack o’ Lantern, come to call? No, it’s just your Mommy and Daddy, here to take you home again, thank God. Give Auntie Elspeth a kiss and— Oh, fine, no kiss, just try to stop screaming, okay?

>   Bye-bye, darlings. Happy Halloween.

  STRUWWELPETER

  Glen Hirshberg

  Der Struwwelpeter (1845) by Heinrich Hoffmann is a book of ten cautionary tales in verse meant to teach children that misbehavior had consequences. Despite a subtitle of “Merry Stories and Funny Pictures,” Herr Hoffman’s consequences were dire indeed: play with matches and you will burn to death, suck your thumb and a sadistic tailor will cut it off, refuse to eat your soup and you’ll dies of starvation in less than a week . . . “Struwwelpeter” is one of the milder story-poems. “Shock-haired” Peter doesn’t comb his hair, clean his face, he never cuts his filthy nails, so people loathe him. Glen Hirshberg’s Peter is disliked too, and the author chooses a haunted house and Halloween—its spookiness, its supernatural possibilities—to tell masterfully us his story. You’ll find, however, that Halloween has little to do with the real horror of “Struwwelpeter.”

  “The dead are not altogether powerless.”

  —Chief Seattle

  This was before we knew about Peter, or at least before we understood what we knew, and my mother says it’s impossible to know a thing like that anyway. She’s wrong, though, and she doesn’t need me to tell her she is, either.

  Back then, we still gathered, afterschool afternoons, at the Andersz’ house, because it was close to the locks. If it wasn’t raining, we’d drop our books and grab Ho Hos out of the tin Mr. Andersz always left on the table for us and head immediately toward the water. Gulls spun in the sunlight overhead, their cries urgent, taunting, telling us, you’re missing it, you’re missing it. We’d sprint between the rows of low stone duplexes, the sad little gardens with their flowers battered by the rain until the petals looked bent and forgotten like discarded training wheels, the splintery, sagging blue walls of the Black Anchor restaurant where Mr. Paars used to hunker alone and murmuring over his plates of reeking lutefisk when he wasn’t stalking 15th Street, knocking pigeons and homeless people out of the way with his dog-head cane. Finally, we’d burst into the park, pouring down the avenue of fir trees like a mudslide and scattering people, bugs, and birds before us until we hit the water.

  For hours, we’d prowl the green hillsides, watching the sailors yell at the invading seals from the top of the locks while the seals ignored them, skimming for fish and sometimes rolling on their backs and flipping their fins. We watched the rich-people sailboats with their masts rusting, the big gray fishing boats from Alaska and Japan and Russia with the fishermen bored on deck, smoking, throwing butts at the seals and leaning on the rails while the gulls shrieked overhead. As long as the rain held off, we stayed and threw stones to see how high up the opposing bank we could get them, and Peter would wait for ships to drift in front of us and then throw low over their bows. The sailors would scream curses in other languages or sometimes ours, and Peter would throw bigger stones at the boat-hulls. When they hit with a thunk, we’d flop on our backs on the wet grass and flip our feet in the air like the seals. It was the rudest gesture we knew.

  Of course, most days it was raining, and we stayed in the Andersz’ basement until Mr. Andersz and the Serbians came home. Down there, in the damp—Mr. Andersz claimed his was one of three basements in all of Ballard—you could hear the wetness rising in the grass outside like lock-water. The first thing Peter did when we got downstairs was flick on the gas fireplace (not for heat, it didn’t throw any), and we’d toss in stuff: pencils, a tinfoil ball, a plastic cup, and once a broken old 45 which formed blisters on its surface and then spit black goo into the air like a fleeing octopus dumping ink before it slid into a notch in the logs to melt. Once, Peter went upstairs and came back with one of Mr. Andersz’ red spiral photo albums and tossed it into the flames, and when one of the Mack sisters asked him what was in it, he told her, “No idea. Didn’t look.”

  The burning never lasted long, five minutes, maybe. Then we’d eat Ho Hos and play the Atari Mr. Andersz had bought Peter years before at a yard sale, and it wasn’t like you think, not always. Mostly, Peter flopped in his orange beanbag chair with his long legs stretched in front of him and his too-long black bangs splayed across his forehead like the talons of some horrible, giant bird gripping him to lift him away. He let me and the Mack sisters take turns on the machine, and Kenny London and Steve Rourke, too, back in the days when they would come. I was the best at the basic games, Asteroids and Pong, but Jenny Mack could stay on Dig Dug forever and not get grabbed by the floating grabby-things in the ground. Even when we asked Peter to take his turn, he wouldn’t. He’d say, “Go ahead,” or, “Too tired,” or, “Fuck off,” and once I even turned around in the middle of losing to Jenny and found him watching us, sort of, the rainy window and us, not the TV screen at all. He reminded me a little of my grandfather before he died, all folded up in his chair and not wanting to go anywhere and kind of happy to have us there. Always, Peter seemed happy to have us there.

  When Mr. Andersz got home, he’d fish a Ho Ho out of the tin for himself if we’d left him one—we tried to, most days—and then come downstairs, and when he peered out of the stairwell, his black wool hat still stuck to his head like melted wax, he already looked different than when we saw him at school. At school, even with his hands covered in yellow chalk and his transparencies full of fractions and decimals scattered all over his desk and the pears he carried with him and never seemed to eat, he was just Mr. Andersz, fifth-grade math teacher, funny accent, funny to get angry. At school, it never occurred to any of us to feel sorry for him.

  “Well, hello, all of you,” he’d say, as if talking to a litter of puppies he’d found, and we’d pause our game and hold our breaths and wait for Peter. Sometimes—most times—Peter would say, “Hey” back, or even, “Hey Dad.” Then we’d all chime in like a clock tolling the hour, “Hey Mr. Andersz,” “Thanks for the Ho Hos,” “You’re hat’s all wet again,” and he’d smile and nod and go upstairs.

  There were the other days, too. A few, that’s all. On most of those, Peter just didn’t answer, wouldn’t look at his father. It was only the one time that he said, “Hello, Dipshit-Dad,” and Jenny froze at the Atari and one of the floating grabby things swallowed her digger, and the rest of us stared, but not at Peter, and not at Mr. Andersz, either. Anywhere but there.

  For a few seconds, Mr. Andersz seemed to be deciding, and rain-rivers wriggled down the walls and windows like transparent snakes, and we held our breath. But all he said, in the end, was, “We’ll talk later, Struwwelpeter,” which was only a little different from what he usually said when Peter got this way. Usually, he said, “Oh. It’s you, then. Hello, Struwwelpeter.” I never liked the way he said that, as though he was greeting someone else entirely, not his son. Eventually, Jenny or her sister Kelly would say, “Hi, Mr. Andersz,” and he’d glance around as though he’d forgotten we were there, and then he’d go upstairs and invite the Serbians in, and we wouldn’t see him again until we left.

  The Serbians made Steve Rourke nervous, which is almost funny, in retrospect. They were big and dark, both of them, two brothers who looked at their hands whenever they saw children. One was a car mechanic, the other worked at the locks, and they sat all afternoon, most afternoons, in Mr. Andersz’ study, sipping tea and speaking Serbian in low whispers. The words made their whispers harsh, full of Z’s and ground-up S’s, as though they’d swallowed glass.

  “They could be planning things in there,” Steve used to say. “My dad says both those guys were badass soldiers.” Mostly, as far as I could tell, they looked at Mr. Andersz’s giant library of photo albums and listened to records. Judy Collins, Joan Baez. Almost funny, like I said.

  Of course, by this last Halloween—my last night at the Andersz house—both Serbians were dead, run down by a drunken driver while walking across Fremont Bridge, and Kenny London had moved away, and Steve Rourke didn’t come anymore. He said his parents wouldn’t let him, and I bet they wouldn’t, but that isn’t why he stopped coming. I knew it, and I think Peter knew it, too, and that worr
ied me a little, in ways I couldn’t explain.

  I almost didn’t get to go, either. I was out the door, blinking in the surprising sunlight and the wind rolling off the Sound through the streets, when my mother yelled, “ANDREW!” and stopped me. I turned to find her in the open screen door of our duplex, arms folded over the long, gray coat she wore inside and out from October to May, sunlight or no, brown-gray curls bunched on top of her scalp as though trying to crawl over her head out of the wind. She seemed to be wiggling in mid-air like a salmon trying to hold itself still against a current. Rarely did she take what she called her frustrations out on me, but she’d been crabby all day, and now she looked furious, despite the fact that I’d stayed in my room, out of her way, from the second I got home from school because I knew she didn’t really want me out tonight. Not with Peter. Not after last year.

  “That’s a costume?” She gestured with her chin at my jeans, my everyday black sweater, too-small brown mac she’d promised to replace this year.

  I shrugged.

  “You’re not going trick or treating?”

  The truth was, no one went trick or treating much in our section of Ballard, not like in Bellingham where we’d lived when we lived with my dad. Too wet and dismal, most days, and there were too many drunks lurking around places like the Black Anchor and sometimes stumbling down the duplexes, shouting curses at the dripping trees.

  “Trick or treating’s for babies,” I said.

  “Hmm, I wonder which of your friends taught you that,” my mother said, and then a look flashed across her face, different than the one she usually got at times like this. She still looked sad, but not about me. She looked sad for me.

  I took a step toward her, and her image wavered in my glasses. “I won’t sleep there. I’ll be home by eleven,” I said.