Halloween

by Paula Guran

  “You’ll be home by ten, or you won’t be going anywhere again anytime soon. Got it? How old do you think you are, anyway?”

  “Twelve,” I said, with as much conviction as I could muster, and my mother flashed the sad look again.

  “If Peter tells you to jump off a bridge. . .”

  “Push him off.”

  My mother nodded. “If I didn’t feel so bad for him . . . ” she said, and I thought she meant Peter, and then I wasn’t sure. But she didn’t say anything else, and after a few seconds, I couldn’t stand there anymore, not with the wind crawling down the neck of my jacket and my mother still looking like that. I left her in the doorway.

  Even in bright sunlight, mine was a dreary neighborhood. The gusts of wind herded paper scraps and street-grit down the overflowing gutters and yanked the last leaves off the trees like a gleeful gang on a vandalism rampage. I saw a few parents—new to the area, obviously—hunched into rain-slickers, leading little kids from house to house. The kids wore drug-store clown costumes, Darth Vader masks, sailor caps. They all looked edgy, miserable. At most of the houses, no one answered the doorbell.

  Outside the Andersz’ place, I stopped for just a minute, watching the leaves leaping from their branches and tumbling down the wind, trying to figure out what was different, what felt wrong. Then I had it: the Mountain was out. The endless fall rain had rolled in early that year, and it had been weeks, maybe months, since I’d last seen Mount Rainier. Seeing it now gave me the same unsettled sensation as always. “It’s because you’re looking south, not west,” people always say, as if that explains how the mountain gets to that spot on the horizon, on the wrong side of the city, not where it actually is but out to sea, seemingly bobbing on the waves, not the land.

  How many times, I wondered abruptly, had some adult in my life asked why I liked Peter? I wasn’t cruel, and despite my size, I wasn’t easily cowed, and I did okay in school—not as well as Peter, but okay—and I had “a gentleness, most days,” as Mrs. Corbett (WhoreButt, to Peter) had written on my report card last year. “If he learns to exercise judgment—and perhaps gives some thought to his choice of companions—he could go far.”

  I wanted to go far from Ballard, anyway, and the locks, and the smell of lutefisk, and the rain. I liked doorbell ditching, but I didn’t get much charge out of throwing stones through windows. And if people were home when we did it, came out and shook their fists or worse, just stood there, looking at us the way you would a wind or an earthquake, nothing you could slow or stop, I’d freeze, feeling bad, until Peter screamed at me or yanked me so hard that I had no choice but to follow.

  I could say I liked how smart Peter was, and I did. He could sit dead still for twenty-seven minutes of a thirty-minute comprehension test, then scan the reading and answer every question right before the teacher, furious, hovering over him and watching the clock, could snatch the paper away without the rest of us screaming foul. He could recite the periodic table of elements backwards, complete with atomic weights. He could build skyscrapers five feet high out of chalk and rubber cement jars and toothpicks and crayons that always stayed standing until anyone who wasn’t him tried to touch them.

  I could say I liked the way he treated everyone the same, which he did, in a way. He’d been the first in my grade—the only one, for a year or so—to hang out with the Mack sisters, who were still, at that point, the only African-Americans in our school. But he wasn’t all that nice to the Macks, really. Just no nastier than he was to the rest of us.

  No. I liked Peter for exactly the reason my mother and my teachers feared I did: because he was fearless, because he was cruel—although mostly to people who deserved it, when it wasn’t Halloween—and most of all, because he really did seem capable of anything. So many of the people I knew seemed capable of nothing, for whatever reason. Capable of nothing.

  Out on the whitecap-riddled Sound, the sun sank, and the Mountain turned red. It was like looking inside it, seeing it living. Shivering slightly in the wind, I hopped the Andersz’ three stone steps and rang the bell.

  “Just come in, Fuck!” I heard Peter yell from the basement, and I started to open the door, and Mr. Andersz opened it for me. He had his gray cardigan straight on his waist for once and his black hat was gone and his black-gray hair was wet and combed on his forehead, and I had the horrible, hilarious idea that he was going on a date.

  “Andrew, come in,” he said, sounding funny, too formal, the way he did at school. He didn’t step back right away, either, and when he did, he put his hand against the mirror on the hallway wall, as though the house was rocking underneath him.

  “Hey, Mr. Andersz,” I said, wiping my feet on the shredded green mat that said something in Serbian. Downstairs, I could hear the burbling of the Dig Dug game, and I knew the Mack sisters had arrived. I flung my coat over Peter’s green slicker on the coat rack, took a couple steps toward the basement door, turned around, and stopped.

  Mr. Andersz had not moved, hadn’t even taken his hand off the mirror, and now he was staring at it as though it was a spider frozen there.

  “Are you all right, Mr. Andersz?” I asked, and he didn’t respond. Then he made a sound, a sort of hiss, like a radiator when you switch it off.

  “How many?” he muttered. I could barely hear him. “How many chances? As a teacher, you know there won’t be many. You get two, maybe three moments in an entire year . . . Something’s happened, there’s been a fight or someone’s sick or the soccer team won or something, and you’re looking at a student . . . ” His voice trailed off, leaving me with the way he said ‘student.’ He pronounced it “stu-DENT.” It was one of the things we all made fun of, not mean fun, just fun. “You’re looking at them,” he said, “and suddenly, there they are. And it’s them, and it’s thrilling, terrifying, because you know you might have a chance . . . an opportunity. You can say something.”

  On the mirror, Mr. Andersz’ hand twitched, and I noticed the sweat beading under the hair on his forehead. It reminded me of my dad, and I wondered if Mr. Andersz was drunk. Then I wondered if my dad was drunk, wherever he was. Downstairs, Jenny Mack yelled, “Get off!” in her fighting voice, happy-loud, and Kelly Mack said, “Good, come on, this is boring.”

  “And as parent . . . ” Mr. Andersz muttered. “How many? And what happens . . . the moment comes. . . but you’re missing your wife. Just right then, just for a while. Or your friends. Maybe you’re tired. It’s just that day. It’s rainy, you have meals to make, you’re tired . . . There’ll be another moment. Surely. You have years. Right? You have years . . . ”

  So fast and so silent was Peter’s arrival in the basement doorway that I mistook him for a shadow from outside, didn’t even realize he was there until he pushed me in the chest. “What’s your deal?” he said.

  I started to gesture at Mr. Andersz, thought better of it, shrugged. Footsteps clattered on the basement stairs, and then the Macks were in the room. Kelly had her tightly braided hair stuffed under a black, backward baseball cap. Her bare arms were covered in paste-on snake tattoos, and her face was dusted in white powder. Jenny wore a red sweater, black jeans. Her hair hung straight and shiny and dark, hovering just off her head and neck like a bird’s crest, and I understood, for the first time, that she was pretty. Her eyes were bright green, wet and watchful.

  “What are you supposed to be?” I said to Kelly, because suddenly I was uncomfortable looking at Jenny.

  Kelly flung her arm out to point and did a quick, ridiculous shoulder-wriggle. It was nothing like her typical movements; I’d seen her dance. “Vanilla Ice,” she said, and spun around.

  “Let’s go,” Peter said, stepping past me and his father and tossing my mac on the floor so he could get to his slicker.

  “You want candy, Andy?” Jenny teased, her voice sing-songy.

  “Ho Ho?” I asked. I was talking, I suppose, to Mr. Andersz, who was still staring at his hand on the mirror. I didn’t want him to be in the way. It made me nervous for h
im.

  The word “Ho Ho” seemed to rouse him, though. He shoved himself free of the wall, shook his head as if awakening, and said, “Just a minute,” very quietly.

  Peter opened the front door, letting in the wind, and Mr. Andersz pushed it closed, not hard. But he leaned against it, and the Mack sisters stopped with their coats half on. Peter just stood beside him, his black hair sharp and pointy on his forehead like the tips of a spiked fence. But he looked more curious than angry.

  Mr. Andersz lifted a hand to his eyes, squeezed them shut, opened them. Then he said, “Turn out your pockets.”

  Still, Peter’s face registered nothing. He didn’t respond to his father or glance at us. Neither Kelly nor I moved, either. Beside me, Jenny took a long, slow breath, as though she was clipping a wire on a bomb, and then she said, “Here, Mr. A,” and she pulled the pockets of her gray coat inside out, revealing two sticks of Dentyne, two cigarettes, a ring of keys with a Seahawks whistle dangling amongst them, and a ticket-stub. I couldn’t see what the ticket was from.

  “Thank you, Jenny,” Mr. Andersz said, but he didn’t take the cigarettes, hardly even looked at her. He watched his son.

  Very slowly, after a long time, Peter smiled. “Look at you,” he said. “Being daddy.” He pulled out the liner of his coat pockets. There was nothing in them at all.

  “Pants,” said Mr. Andersz.

  “What do you think you’re looking for, Big Bad Daddy?” Peter asked. “What do you think you’re going to find?”

  “Pants,” Mr. Andersz said.

  “And what will you do, do you think, if you find it?” But he turned out his pants pockets. There was nothing in those, either, not even keys or money.

  For the first time since Peter had come upstairs, Mr. Andersz looked at the rest of us, and I shuddered. His face looked the same way my mother’s had when I left the house: a little scared, but mostly sad. Permanently, stupidly sad.

  “I want to tell you something,” he said. If he spoke like this in the classroom, I thought, no one would wedge unbent paperclips in his chalkboard erasers anymore. “I won’t have it. There will be no windows broken. There will be no little children terrorized—”

  “That wasn’t our fault,” said Jenny, and she was right, in a way. We hadn’t known anyone was hiding in those bushes when we toilet-papered them, and Peter had meant to light his cigarette, not the roll of toilet paper.

  “Nothing lit on fire. No one bullied or hurt. I won’t have it, because it’s beneath you, do you understand? You’re the smartest children I know.” Abruptly, Mr. Andersz’ hands flashed out and grabbed his son’s shoulders. “Do you hear me? You’re the smartest child I’ve ever seen.”

  For a second, they just stood there, Mr. Andersz clutching Peter’s shoulders as though trying to steer a runaway truck, Peter completely blank.

  Then, very slowly, Peter smiled. “Thanks, Dad,” he said.

  “Please,” Mr. Andersz said, and Peter opened his mouth, and we all cringed.

  But what he said was, “Okay,” and he slipped past his father and out the door. I looked at the Mack sisters. Together, we watched Mr. Andersz in the doorway with his head tilted forward on his neck and his hands tight at his sides, like a diver at the Olympics getting ready for a back flip. He never moved, though, and eventually, we followed Peter out. I was last, and I thought I felt Mr. Andersz’ hand on my back as I went by, but I wasn’t sure, and when I glanced around, he was still just standing there, and the door swung shut.

  I’d been inside the Andersz’ house fifteen minutes, maybe less, but the wind had whipped the late afternoon light over the horizon, and the Mountain had faded from red to gray-black, motionless now on the surface of the water like an oil tanker, one of those massive, passing ships on which no people were visible, ever. I never liked my neighborhood, but I hated it after sundown, the city gone, the Sound indistinguishable from the black, starless sky, no one walking. It was like we were someone’s toy set that had been closed up in its box and snapped shut for the night.

  “Where are we going?” Kelly Mack said, her voice sharp, fed up. She’d been sick of us, lately. Sick of Peter.

  “Yeah,” I said, rousing myself. I didn’t want to soap car-windows or throw rocks at street signs or put on rubber masks and scare trick or treaters, exactly, but those were the things we did. And we had no supplies.

  Peter closed his eyes, leaned his head back, took a deep breath of the rushing air and held it. He looked almost peaceful. I couldn’t remember seeing him that way. It was startling. Then he stuck one trembling arm out in front of him, pointed at me, and his eyes sprung open.

  “Do you know . . . ” he said, his voice deep, accented, a perfect imitation, “what that bell does?”

  I clapped my hands. “That bell. . .” I said, in the closest I could get to the same voice, and the Mack sisters stared at us, baffled, which made me grin even harder, “raises the dead.”

  “What are you babbling about?” said Kelly to Peter, but Jenny was looking at me, seawater-eyes curious and strange.

  “You know Mr. Paars?” I asked her.

  But of course she didn’t. The Macks had moved here less than a year and a half ago, and I hadn’t seen Mr. Paars, I realized, in considerably longer. Not since the night of the bell, in fact. I looked at Peter. His grin was as wide as mine felt. He nodded at me. We’d been friends a long time, I realized. Almost half my life.

  Of course, I didn’t say that. “A long time ago,” I told the Macks, feeling like a longshoreman, a lighthouse keeper, someone with stories who lived by the sea, “there was this man. An old, white haired-man. He ate lutefisk—it’s fish, it smells awful, I don’t really know what it is—and stalked around the neighborhood, scaring everybody.”

  “He had this cane,” Peter said, and I waited for him to go on, join me in the telling, but he didn’t.

  “All black,” I said. “Kind of scaly. Ribbed, or something. It didn’t look like a cane. And it had this silver dog’s head on it, with fangs. A doberman—”

  “Anyway . . . ” said Kelly Mack, though Jenny seemed to be enjoying listening.

  “He used to bop people with it. Kids. Homeless people. Whoever got in his way. He stomped around 15th Street terrorizing everyone. Two years ago, on the first Halloween we were allowed out alone, right about this time of night, Peter and I spotted him coming out of the hardware store. It’s not there anymore, it’s that empty space next to the place where the movie theatre used to be. Anyway, we saw him there, and we followed him home.”

  Peter waved us out of his yard toward the locks. Again, I waited, but when he glanced at me, the grin was gone. His face was normal, neutral, maybe, and he didn’t say anything.

  “He lives down there,” I said, gesturing to the south toward the Sound. “Way past all the other houses. Past the end of the street. Practically in the water.”

  Despite what Peter had said, we didn’t head that way. Not then. We wandered toward the Locks, into the park. The avenue between the pine trees was empty except for a scatter of solitary bums on benches, wrapping themselves in shredded jackets and newspapers as the night nailed itself down and the dark billowed around us in the gusts of wind like the sides of a tent. In the roiling trees, black birds perched on the branches, silent as gargoyles.

  “There aren’t any other houses that close to Mr. Paars’,” I said. “The street turns to dirt, and it’s always wet because it’s down by the water. There are these long, empty lots full of weeds, and a couple sheds, I don’t know what’s in them or who owns them. Anyway, right where the pavement ends, Peter and I dropped back and just kind of hung out near the last house until Mr. Paars made it to his yard. God, Peter, you remember his yard?”

  Instead of answering, Peter lead us between the low stone buildings to the canal, where we watched the water swallow the last streaks of daylight like some monstrous whale gulping plankton. The only boats in the slips were two sailboats, sails furled, rocking as the waves slapped against th
em. The only person I saw on either stood at the stern of the boat closest to us, head hooded in a green oil-slicker, face aimed out to sea.

  “Think I could hit him from here?” said Peter, and I flinched, looked at his fists expecting to see stones, but he was just asking. “Tell them the rest,” he said.

  I glanced at the Macks and was startled to see them holding hands, leaning against the rail over the canal, though they were watching us, not the water. “Come on, already,” Kelly said, but Jenny just raised her eyebrows at me. Behind her, seagulls dipped and tumbled on the wind like shreds of cloud that had been ripped loose.

  “We waited, I don’t know, a while. It was cold. Remember how cold it was? We were wearing winter coats and mittens. It wasn’t windy like this, but it was freezing. At least that made the dirt less muddy when we finally went down there. We passed the sheds and the trees, and there was no one, I mean no one, around. Too cold for any trick or treating anywhere around here, even if anyone was going to. And there wasn’t anywhere to go on that street, regardless.

  “Anyway. It’s weird. Everything’s all flat down there, and then right as you get near the Paars place, this little forest springs up, all these thick firs. We couldn’t really see anything.”

  “Except that it was light,” Peter murmured.

  “Yeah. Bright light. Mr. Paars had his yard floodlit, for intruders, we figured. We thought he was probably paranoid. So we snuck off the road when we got close and went into the trees. In there, it was wet. Muddy, too. My mom was so mad when I got home. Pine needles sticking to me everywhere. She said I looked like I’d been tarred and feathered. We hid in this little grove, looked into the lawn, and we saw the bell.”

  Now Peter turned around, his hands flung wide to either side. “Biggest fucking bell you’ve ever seen in your life,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?” said Kelly.

  “It was in this . . . pavilion,” I started, not sure how to describe it. “Gazebo, I guess. All white and round, like a carousel, except the only thing inside was this giant white bell, like a church bell, hanging from the ceiling on a chain. And all the lights in the yard were aimed at it.”