by Paula Guran
Somebody scratched on the other side of the bedroom door, pleading to be let in. Their voice grew rough, loud as a shotgun, then faded to a faintly desperate purling. He heard a couple others as they managed to crawl up the stairway only to collapse at the top, one falling back down the steps, thrumming the banister.
Greenboy wanted to cry. Terror gathered thickly in his throat. His body twitched, trying to shake the sobs out. Yet he held them in, pressing burned fingertips hard against his chest as if they were the tab locks on the top of the barrel. He pursed his lips and managed only Shshshhhhhhhhh! Something was out there he still had to be respectful to. Not just the silence of those trying to hide, trying not to be noticed and sniffed out, but the sign of obedience to the incomprehensible.
Some adults began running away. Others folded down under the moss or sank, shrieks effervescing. Greenboy lifted the candle still burning at that window and brought it near to his face, so close it might have singed his eyelashes. The light made it harder to see outside. It blinded him to the dark, flashing onto his retinas until all he saw was flame.
The minutes ticked by. Soon it was after midnight. The squeals and wailing stopped, nothing on the lawn but ash. The wind had risen, carrying a norther. Soon it would be cold thereabouts. Happened sometimes even in the Deep South.
Greenboy wondered if his parents were among those to escape. He was certain Daddy deliberately fumbled with the keys, able to keep a presence of mind about that barrel of deadly cottonmouths. Maybe he’d slipped off the porch, taking Momma to the far edge of the crowd. They’d been part of the group the boy had seen running off.
He let himself think happy thoughts about the morning to be. Momma and Daddy would return. They’d slide the body away from the bedroom door. They’d shoot whatever snakes still slithered through the house. They’d pack up the kids and move away.
It occurred to him that the candles down the block hadn’t gone out. They still winked in windows or burned like steady eyes. But he was exhausted. Greenboy blew out the candle and closed the curtains. He turned to go to bed. Water swirled up in the carpet around his feet, sucking at them . . . hungry. And there was a stench welling up, so putrid it suffocated him, choking like bile in his throat.
The skirt around the bottom of the bed rustled. In another moment a long black snout came smiling out at him.
RIDING BITCH
K.W. Jeter
Jeter’s narrator’s problems involve more than Halloween—a lot more—but he does have a point about the holiday changing from a child-oriented celebration to an occasion for adults to get “all tarted up” or prove you can be a “beer-soaked trashbag.” Nowadays, the kiddies may still have their day, but the holiday has also become a carnival that allows grown-ups to assume different identities and exceed the bounds of usual propriety. Costumes and disguises, the presence of tolerant co-conspirators, the indulgence—even encouragement—of the community in the festivities are now, for better or worse, a part of our ever-evolving conception of the season. Of course death is always part of the concept . . .
A lot was still going to happen.
He would stand at the bar, he knew, locked in the embrace of his old girlfriend.
“Probably wasn’t your smartest move.” Ernie the bartender would run his damp rag along the wood, polished smooth by the elbows of generations of losers. “Sounds like fun at the beginning, but it always ends in tears. Trust me, I know.”
He wouldn’t care whether Ernie knew or not. The beer wouldn’t do anything to numb the pain. Not the pain of having a dead girl, whom once he’d loved, draped across his shoulders. Her left arm would circle under his left arm. When she’d been alive, whenever she’d conked out after too many Jägers and everything else, she’d always wrapped herself around him just like that, from the back. Up on tiptoes in her partying boots, just blurrily awake enough to clasp her hands over his heart.
He would knock back the rest of the beer in front of him, remembering how he’d carried her, plenty of nights, when there’d still been partying left in him. He’d shot racks of pool like this, leaning over the cue with her negligible weight curled on top of his spine like a drowsy cat, her face dropping close beside his, exhaling alcohol as took his shot, skimming past the eightball . . .
Her breath wouldn’t smell of anything other than the formaldehyde or whatever it was that Edwin had pumped her full of, back at the funeral parlor. And it wouldn’t really be her breath, anyway, her not having any in that condition. He would gaze at the flickering Oly Gold neon in the bar’s bunker-like window, and swish another pull of beer around in his mouth, as though it could Listerine away the faint smell in his nostrils. The dead didn’t sweat, he would discover, but just exuded—if you got that close to them—an odor half the stuff hospital floors were mopped with, half Barbie-doll plastic.
“Those look like they chafe.”
Ernie the bartender would catch him tagging at the handcuffs, right where the sharp edge of metal would be digging through his T-shirt and into the skin over his ribs.
“Yeah,” he’d say, “they do a bit.” Should’ve thought of that before you let ’em strap her on. “I wasn’t thinking too clearly then.”
“Hm?” Ernie wouldn’t look over at him, but would go on peering into the beer mug he’d just wiped with the bar towel.
“I blame it on Hallowe’en,” he would explain.
“Hallowe’en, huh?” Ernie would glance at the Hamms clock over the bar’s entrance. “That was over three hours ago.” Ernie would lick a thumb and use it to smear out a grease spot inside the mug. “Over and done with, pal.”
“Couldn’t prove it around here.” The bar would be all orange-’n’-blacked out, with the crap that the beer distributors unloaded every year, cheap cardboard stand-up’s of long-legged witches with squeezed cleavage, grinning drunk pumpkins Scotch-taped to the wall over by the men’s room, bar coasters with black cats arched like croquet wickets, Day-Glo spiderwebs, dancing articulated skeletons with hollow eyes that would’ve lit up if the batteries hadn’t already run flat by the 30th, everything with logos and trademarks and brand names.
“Why do you let them put all that up, Ernie?”
“All what up?” The bartender would start on another mug, scraping away a half-moon of lipstick with his thumbnail. “What’re you talking about?”
He’d give up then. There’d be no point. What difference would it make? He’d shift the dead girl a little higher on his shoulder, balancing her against the tidal pull of the beers he would put away. The combination of low-percentage alcohol with whatever the EMTs would huff him up with, when they scraped him off the road and into their van, would wobble his knees. Hanging onto the edge of the bar, instead of trying to walk, might be the only good idea he’d have that night.
And not all the ideas, the weird ones, would be his. There would still be that whole trip the other guys in the bar would come up with, about the reason Superman flies in circles.
But everything else—that would still be Hallowe’en’s fault. Or what Hallowe’en had become. That was what he had told the motorheads, back when the night had started.
No—Cold lips would nuzzle his ear. You’ve got it all wrong.
He’d close his eyes and listen to her whisper.
It’s what you became. What we became. That’s what did it.
“Yeah . . .” He’d whisper to himself, and to her as well, so no-one else could hear. “You’re right.”
“I blame it all on Hallowe’en.”
“That so?” The motorhead with the buzz cut didn’t even look up from the skinny little sportbike’s exhaust. “What’s Hallowe’en got to do with your sorry-ass life?”
He hadn’t wanted to tell someone else exactly what. He hadn’t wanted to tell himself, to step through the precise calculus of regret, even though he already knew the final sum.
“It’s not me, specifically,” he lied. “It’s what it did to everything else. It’s frickin’ Satanic.”
That remark drew a worried glance from Buzz Cut. “Uhh . . . you’re not one of those hyper-Christian types, are you?” He fitted a metric wrench onto a frame bolt. “This isn’t going to be some big rant, is it? If it is, I gotta go get another beer.”
“Don’t worry.” Something he’d thought about for a long time, and he still couldn’t say what it was. Like humping some humungous antique chest of drawers out through a doorway too small for it, and getting it stuck halfway. He could wrestle it around into some different position, with the knobs wedged against the left side of the doorjamb rather than the right, but it would still be stuck there. “It’s just . . .”
“Just what?”
He tried. “You remember how it was when you were a kid?”
“Vaguely.” Buzz Cut shrugged. “Been a while.”
“Regardless. But when we were kids, Hallowe’en was, you know, for kids. And the kids got dressed up, like little ghosts and witches and stuff. The adults didn’t get all tarted up. They stayed home and handed out the candy.”
“True. So?”
“So you’ve got three hundred and sixty-four other days, including Christmas, to act like a cheap bimbo, or to prove that you’re a beer-soaked trashbag. Why screw around with Hallowe’en?”
“Dude, you have got to stop thinking about stuff like this.” Buzz Cut went back to wrenching on the bike. “It’s messing up your head.”
He couldn’t stop thinking about it, if pictures counted as thought. Didn’t even have to close his eyes to see the raggedy pilgrimage, the snaking lines of pirates and bedsheeted ghosts and fairy princesses, and the kids you felt sorry for because they those cheap store-bought costumes instead of ones their mothers made for them. All of them trooping with their brown paper grocery bags or dragging old pillowcases, already heavy with sugar loot, from the sidewalk up to the doorbell and back out to the sidewalk and the next house, so many of them right after each other, that it didn’t even make sense to close the door, just keep handing out the candy from the big Tupperware bowl on the folding TV tray. And if you were some older kid—too old to do that stuff anymore, practically a sneering teenager already—standing behind your dad and looking past him, out through the front door and across the chill, velvety-black night streets of suburbia, looking with a strange-crazy clench in your stomach, like you were first realizing how big and fast Time was picking you up and rolling and tumbling you like an ocean wave, head over heels away from the shore of some world from which you were now forever banished—looking out as though your front porch were now miles up in the starry-icy air and you could see all the little kids of Earth winding from door to door, coast to coast, pole to pole, stations of a spinning cross . . .
No wonder these guys think I’m messed up. He had managed to freak himself, without even trying. Like falling down a hole. He tilted his head back, downing the rest of the beer, as though he could wash away that world on its bitter tide.
“So how’s the nitrous set-up working for you?”
Blinking, he pulled himself back up into the garage. Around him, the bare, unpainted walls clicked into place, the two-by-four shelves slid across them as though on invisible tracks, the cans of thirty-weight and brake fluid lining up where they had been before.
He looked over toward the garage door and saw the other motorhead, the redhaired one, already sauntered in from the house, picking through the butt-ends of a Burger King french fires bag in one hand.
“The nitrous?” It took him a couple seconds to remember which world that was a part of. At the back of his skull, a line of little ghosts marched away. An even littler door closed, shutting off a lost October moon. “Yeah, the nitrous . . .” He shrugged. “Fine. I guess.”
“You guess,” said Buzz Cut. “Jesus Christ, you pussy. We didn’t put it on there so you could guess whether it works or not. We put it on so you’d use it. Least once in a while.”
“Hey, it’s okay.” They’d both ragged him about it before. “It’s enough to know I got it. Right there under my thumb.”
Which was true. Even back when he and the motorheads had been installing the nitrous oxide kit on the ’Busa, he hadn’t been thinking about ever using it. The whole time that the motorheads had been mounting the pressurized gas canister on the right flank of the bike—“Serious can of whup-ass,” Buzz Cut had called it—and routing the feeder line to the engine, all 1298 cubic centimeters of it, they’d been chortling about how much fun would ensue.
“There’s that dude with the silver Maserati Quattroporte, you see all the time over around Flamingo and Decatur. Thinks he’s bad ’cause his machine can keep up with a liter bike.”
“Hell.” A big sneer creased Red’s face. “I’ve smoked the sonuvabitch plenty of times.”
“Not by much. That thing can haul ass when it’s in tune and he’s not too loaded to run it through the gears.” Buzz Cut had tapped an ominous finger on the little nitrous can, tink tink tink like a bomb. “But when this shit kicks in, Mister Hotshot Cager ain’t gonna see anything except boosser taillight fading in the distance.” He had looked away from the bike and smiled evilly. “Won’t that be a gas? For real?”
He had supposed so, out loud, just to shut the two of them up. Neither motorhead, Buzz Cut or Red, had a clue about potentialities. How something could be real—realer than real—if it just hung there in a cloud of still could happen. Right now, the only way that he even knew the rig worked was that the motorheads had put the ’Busa on the Piper T&M dynamometer at the back of their garage and cranked it. Stock, they’d gotten a baseline pull of 155 point nine horsepower. Tweaking the nitrous set-up with a number 43 jet, they’d wound up at 216 and a half, with more to go. “Now that’s serious kick,” Buzz Cut had judged with satisfaction.
It didn’t matter to him, though. He sat in his usual perch on the greasy workbench, where he always sat when he came by the motorhead house, adding empty beer cans to the litter of tools and shop catalogues, and thought about the way their heads worked.
They didn’t work the way his did. That was the problem, he knew. Nobody’s did. Or maybe mine doesn’t work at all. He had to admit that was a possibility. There’d been a time when it had—he could remember it. When it hadn’t gone wheeling around in diminishing circles, like a bike whose rider had been scraped off in the last corner of the track. Gassing on about Hallowe’en and nitrous oxide buttons that never got punched and somehow that made it all even realer than the little ghost kids had been—
Inside his jacket, his cellphone purred. He could have burst into tears, from sheer relief. He dug the phone out and flipped it open.
Edwin calling, from the funeral parlor. He didn’t have to answer, to know; he recognized the number that came up on the postage-stamp screen. And he didn’t have to answer, to know what Edwin was calling about. Edwin only ever called about one thing. Which was fine by him, since he needed the job and the money.
“I’ll see you guys later.” He pocketed the phone and slid down from the workbench. “Much later.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Buzz Cut had finished with his customer’s bike, standing back from it and wiping his hands on a shop rag. “Maybe next Hallowe’en.”
“So what is the big deal?” Behind Edwin, the grandfather clocks lining the hallway ticked like ratcheting crickets. “You take it from here, you take it to there. You drop it off. And you get paid.” Edwin’s manicured hand drew out an eelskin wallet; a finger with a trimmed, glistening nail flicked through the bills inside. “So why are you making it so hard on yourself?”
The tall clocks—taller than him, way taller than Edwin—were part of the funeral parlor decor. They had been Edwin’s father’s clocks, back when the old guy had run the place, and Edwin’s grandfather’s, who had started it all. Edwin had inherited the family business, right down to the caskets in the display room. You could hear the clocks all over the place, in the flower-choked foyer and past the softly murmuring, endlessly repeating organ music in the viewing rooms. Maybe they reminded the custome
rs in the folding chairs of eternity, or the countdown to when they’d be lying in a similar velvet-lined box. So they had better talk to the funeral director on the way out and make arrangements.
“I don’t know . . .” He looked down the hallway. Past Edwin’s office was the prep room, where the public didn’t go, where it was all stainless steel and fluorescent bright inside, and smelled chemical-funny. Edwin had taken him in there one time, when it had been empty, and shown him around. Including the canvas-strapped electrical hoist mounted on the ceiling, that Edwin’s father had installed when his back had gone out from flipping over too much cold dead weight. “This is kinda different . . .”
“What’s different?” Edwin’s face was all puffy and shiny, as though he hadn’t actually swallowed anything he drank—the glass with the melting ice cubes was still in his hand—and now the alcohol was leaking out through his skin. “It’s the same as before.”
“Well . . . no, actually.” It puzzled him, that he had to explain this. “Before, there was like a van. Your van. And all I had to do was help you load it up, and then drive it over there.”
“The van’s in the shop.”
That didn’t surprise him. Everything about the funeral parlor was falling apart, gradually, including Edwin. Things stopped working, or something else happened to them, and then they were supposedly getting fixed but that never happened, either. Which was the main reason that all the funeral business now went over to the newer place over on the west side of town. With a nice big sweep of manicured lawn and a circular driveway for the mourners’ cars, and an overhang jutting out from the glass-walled low building, so the casket could get loaded in the hearse without the flowers getting beaten up on a rainy day. All Edwin got was the occasional cremation, because the oven his father had installed was right there on the premises, in a windowless extension behind the prep room.