by Peter Straub
“Did you start playing again?” I asked, taking notes as fast as I could.
“We never stopped,” Hat said. “You let the people deal with what’s going on, but you gotta keep on playing.”
“Did you live in the country?” I asked, thinking that all of this sounded like Dogpatch—witches and walking dead men.
He shook his head. “I was brought up in town, Woodland, Mississippi. On the river. Where we lived was called Darktown, you know, but most of Woodland was white, with nice houses and all. Lots of our people did the cooking and washing in the big houses on Miller’s Hill, that kind of work. In fact, we lived in a pretty nice house, for Darktown—the band always did well, and my father had a couple of other jobs on top of that. He was a good piano player, mainly, but he could play any kind of instrument. And he was a big, strong guy, nice-looking, real light-complected, so he was called Red, which was what that meant in those days. People respected him.”
Another long, rattling burst of explosions came from Eighth Avenue. I wanted to ask him again about leaving his father’s band, but Hat once more gave his little room a quick inspection, swallowed another mouthful of gin, and went on talking.
“We even went out trick-or-treating on Halloween, you know, just like the white kids. I guess our people didn’t do that everywhere, but we did. Naturally, we stuck to our neighborhood, and probably we got a lot less than the kids from Miller’s Hill, but they didn’t have anything up there that tasted as good as the apples and candy we brought home in our bags. Around us, folks made instead of bought, and that’s the difference.” He smiled at either the memory or the unexpected sentimentality he had just revealed—for a moment, he looked both lost in time and uneasy with himself for having said too much. “Or maybe I just remember it that way, you know? Anyhow, we used to raise some hell, too. You were supposed to raise hell, on Halloween.”
“You went out with your brothers?” I asked.
“No, no, they were—” He flipped his hand in the air, dismissing whatever it was that his brothers had been. “I was always apart, you dig? Me, I was always into my own little things. I was that way right from the beginning. I play like that—never play like anyone else, don’t even play like myself. You gotta find new places for yourself, or else nothing’s happening, isn’t that right? Don’t want to be a repeater pencil.” He saluted this declaration with another swallow of gin. “Back in those days, I used to go out with a boy named Rodney Sparks—we called him Dee, short for ‘Demon,’ ’cause Dee Sparks would do anything that came into his head. That boy was the bravest little bastard I ever knew. He’d wrassle a mad dog. He was just that way. And the reason was, Dee was the preacher’s boy. If you happen to be the preacher’s boy, seems like you gotta prove every way you can that you’re no Buster Brown, you know? So I hung with Dee, because I wasn’t any Buster Brown, either. This is all when we were eleven, around then—the time when you talk about girls, you know, but you still aren’t too sure what that’s about. You don’t know what anything’s about, to tell the truth. You along for the ride, you trying to pack in as much fun as possible. So Dee was my right hand, and when I went out on Halloween in Woodland, I went out with him.”
He rolled his eyes toward the window and said, “Yeah.” An expression I could not read at all took over his face. By the standards of ordinary people, Hat almost always looked detached, even impassive, tuned to some private wavelength, and this sense of detachment had intensified. I thought he was changing mental gears, dismissing his childhood, and opened my mouth to ask him about Grant Kilbert. But he raised his glass to his mouth again and rolled his eyes back to me, and the quality of his gaze told me to keep quiet.
“I didn’t know it,” he said, “but I was getting ready to stop being a little boy. To stop believing in little boy things and start seeing like a grown-up. I guess that’s part of what I liked about Dee Sparks—he seemed like he was a lot more grown-up than I was, shows you what my head was like. The age we were, this would have been the last time we actually went out on Halloween to get apples and candy. From then on, we would have gone out mainly to raise hell. Smash in a few windows. Bust up somebody’s wagon. Scare the shit out of little kids. But the way it turned out, it was the last time we ever went out on Halloween.”
He finished off the gin in his glass and reached down to pick the bottle off the floor and pour another few inches into the tumbler. “Here I am, sitting in this room. There’s my horn over there. Here’s this bottle. You know what I’m saying?”
I didn’t. I had no idea what he was saying. The hint of fatality clung to his earlier statement, and for a second I thought he was going to say that he was here but Dee Sparks was nowhere because Dee Sparks had died in Woodland, Mississippi, at the age of eleven on Halloween night. Hat was looking at me with a steady curiosity which compelled a response. “What happened?” I asked.
Now I know that he was saying, It has come down to just this, my room, my horn, my bottle. My question was as good as any other response.
“If I was to tell you everything that happened, we’d have to stay in this room for a month.” He smiled and straightened up on the bed. His ankles were crossed, and for the first time I noticed that his feet, shod in dark suede shoes with crepe soles, did not quite touch the floor. “And, you know, I never tell anybody everything, I always have to keep something back for myself. Things turned out all right. Only thing I mind is, I should have earned more money. Grant Kilbert, he earned a lot of money, and some of that was mine, you know.”
“Were you friends?” I asked.
“I knew the man.” He tilted his head and stared at the ceiling for so long that eventually I looked up at it too. It was not a remarkable ceiling. A circular section near the center had been replastered not long before.
“No matter where you live, there are places you’re not supposed to go,” he said, still gazing up. “And sooner or later, you’re gonna wind up there.” He smiled at me again. “Where we lived, the place you weren’t supposed to go was called the Backs. Out of town, stuck in the woods on one little path. In Darktown, we had all kinds from preachers on down. We had washerwomen and blacksmiths and carpenters, and we had some no-good thieving trash, too, like Eddie Grimes, that man who came back from being dead. In the Backs, they started with trash like Eddie Grimes, and went down from there. Sometimes, some of our people went out there to buy a jug, and sometimes they went there to get a woman, but they never talked about it. The Backs was rough. What they had was rough.” He rolled his eyes at me and said, “That witch-lady I told you about, she lived in the Backs.” He snickered. “Man, they were a mean bunch of people. They’d cut you, you looked at ’em bad. But one thing funny about the place, white and colored lived there just the same—it was integrated. Backs people were so evil, color didn’t make no difference to them. They hated everybody anyhow, on principle.” Hat pointed his glass at me, tilted his head, and narrowed his eyes. “At least, that was what everybody said. So this particular Halloween, Dee Sparks says to me after we finish with Darktown, we ought to head out to the Backs and see what the place is really like. Maybe we can have some fun.
“Well, that sounded fine to me. The idea of going out to the Backs kind of scared me, but being scared was part of the fun—Halloween, right? And if anyplace in Woodland was perfect for all that Halloween shit, you know, someplace where you might really see a ghost or a goblin, the Backs was better than the graveyard.” Hat shook his head, holding the glass out at a right angle to his body. A silvery amusement momentarily transformed him, and it struck me that his native elegance, the product of his character and bearing much more than of the handsome suit and the suede shoes, had in effect been paid for by the surviving of a thousand unimaginable difficulties, each painful to a varying degree. Then I realized that what I meant by “elegance” was really dignity, that for the first time I had recognized actual dignity in another human being, and that dignity was nothing like the self-congratulatory superiority people usually misto
ok for it.
“We were just little babies, and we wanted some of those good old Halloween scares. Like those dumbbells out on the street, tossing firecrackers at each other.” Hat wiped his free hand down over his face and made sure that I was prepared to write down everything he said. (The tapes had already been used up.) “When I’m done, tell me if we found it, okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
3
“Dee showed up at my house just after dinner, dressed in an old sheet with two eye-holes cut in it and carrying a paper bag. His big old shoes stuck out underneath the sheet. I had the same costume, but it was the one my brother used the year before, and it dragged along the ground and my feet got caught in it. The eye-holes kept sliding away from my eyes. My mother gave me a bag and told me to behave myself and get home before eight. It didn’t take but half an hour to cover all the likely houses in Darktown, but she knew I’d want to fool around with Dee for an hour or so afterwards.
“Then up and down the streets we go, knocking on the doors where they’d give us stuff and making a little mischief where we knew they wouldn’t. Nothing real bad, just banging on the door and running like hell, throwing rocks on the roof, little stuff. A few places, we plain and simple stayed away from—the places where people like Eddie Grimes lived. I always thought that was funny. We knew enough to steer clear of those houses, but we were still crazy to get out to the Backs.
“Only way I can figure it is, the Backs was forbidden. Nobody had to tell us to stay away from Eddie Grimes’s house at night. You wouldn’t even go there in the daylight, ’cause Eddie Grimes would get you and that would be that.
“Anyhow, Dee kept us moving along real quick, and when folks asked us questions or said they wouldn’t give us stuff unless we sang a song, he moaned like a ghost and shook his bag in their faces, so we could get away faster. He was so excited, I think he was almost shaking.
“Me, I was excited too. Not like Dee—sort of sick-excited, the way people must feel the first time they use a parachute. Scared-excited.
“As soon as we got away from the last house, Dee crossed the street and started running down the side of the little general store we all used. I knew where he was going. Out behind the store was a field, and on the other side of the field was Meridian Road, which took you out into the woods and to the path up to the Backs. When he realized that I wasn’t next to him, he turned around and yelled at me to hurry up. No, I said inside myself, I ain’t gonna jump outta of this here airplane, I’m not dumb enough to do that. And then I pulled up my sheet and scrunched up my eye to look through the one hole close enough to see through, and I took off after him.
“It was beginning to get dark when Dee and I left my house, and now it was dark. The Backs was about a mile and a half away, or at least the path was. We didn’t know how far along that path you had to go before you got there. Hell, we didn’t even know what it was—I was still thinking the place was a collection of little houses, like a sort of shadow-Woodland. And then, while we were crossing the field, I stepped on my costume and fell down flat on my face. Enough of this stuff, I said, and yanked the damned thing off. Dee started cussing me out, I wasn’t doing this stuff the right way, we had to keep our costumes on in case anybody saw us, did I forget that this is Halloween, on Halloween a costume protected you. So I told him I’d put it back on when we got there. If I kept on falling down, it’d take us twice as long. That shut him up.
“As soon as I got that blasted sheet over my head, I discovered that I could see at least a little ways ahead of me. The moon was up, and a lot of stars were out. Under his sheet, Dee Sparks looked a little bit like a real ghost. It kind of glimmered. You couldn’t really make out its edges, so the darn thing like floated. But I could see his legs and those big old shoes sticking out.
“We got out of the field and started up Meridian Road, and pretty soon the trees came up right to the ditches alongside the road, and I couldn’t see too well anymore. The road looked like it went smack into the woods and disappeared. The trees looked taller and thicker than in the daytime, and now and then something right at the edge of the woods shone round and white, like an eye—reflecting the moonlight, I guess. Spooked me. I didn’t think we’d ever be able to find the path up to the Backs, and that was fine with me. I thought we might go along the road another ten-fifteen minutes, and then turn around and go home. Dee was swooping around up in front of me, flapping his sheet and acting bughouse. He sure wasn’t trying too hard to find that path.
“After we walked about a mile down Meridian Road, I saw headlights like yellow dots coming toward us fast—Dee didn’t see anything at all, running around in circles the way he was. I shouted at him to get off the road, and he took off like a rabbit—disappeared into the woods before I did. I jumped the ditch and hunkered down behind a pine about ten feet off the road to see who was coming. There weren’t many cars in Woodland in those days, and I knew every one of them. When the car came by, it was Dr. Garland’s old red Cord—Dr. Garland was a white man, but he had two waiting rooms and took colored patients, so colored patients was mostly what he had. And the man was a heavy drinker, heavy drinker. He zipped by, goin’ at least fifty, which was mighty fast for those days, probably as fast as that old Cord would go. For about a second, I saw Dr. Garland’s face under his white hair, and his mouth was wide open, stretched like he was screaming. After he passed, I waited a long time before I came out of the woods. Turning around and going home would have been fine with me. Dr. Garland changed everything. Normally, he was kind of slow and quiet, you know, and I could still see that black screaming hole opened up in his face—he looked like he was being tortured, like he was in Hell. I sure as hell didn’t want to see whatever he had seen.
“I could hear the Cord’s engine after the taillights disappeared. I turned around and saw that I was all alone on the road. Dee Sparks was nowhere in sight. A couple of times, real soft, I called out his name. Then I called his name a little louder. Away off in the woods, I heard Dee giggle. I said he could run around all night if he liked but I was going home, and then I saw that pale silver sheet moving through the trees, and I started back down Meridian Road. After about twenty paces, I looked back, and there he was, standing in the middle of the road in that silly sheet, watching me go. Come on, I said, let’s get back. He paid me no mind. Wasn’t that Dr. Garland? Where was he going, as fast as that? What was happening? When I said the doctor was probably out on some emergency, Dee said the man was going home—he lived in Woodland, didn’t he?
“Then I thought maybe Dr. Garland had been up in the Backs. And Dee thought the same thing, which made him want to go there all the more. Now he was determined. Maybe we’d see some dead guy. We stood there until I understood that he was going to go by himself if I didn’t go with him. That meant that I had to go. Wild as he was, Dee’d get himself into some kind of mess for sure if I wasn’t there to hold him down. So I said okay, I was coming along, and Dee started swooping along like before, saying crazy stuff. There was no way we were going to be able to find some little old path that went up into the woods. It was so dark, you couldn’t see the separate trees, only giant black walls on both sides of the road.
“We went so far along Meridian Road I was sure we must have passed it. Dee was running around in circles about ten feet ahead of me. I told him that we missed the path, and now it was time to get back home. He laughed at me and ran across to the right side of the road and disappeared into the darkness.
“I told him to get back, damn it, and he laughed some more and said I should come to him. Why? I said, and he said, Because this here is the path, dummy. I didn’t believe him—came right up to where he disappeared. All I could see was a black wall that could have been trees or just plain night. Moron, Dee said, look down. And I did. Sure enough, one of those white things like an eye shone up from where the ditch should have been. I bent down and touched cold little stones, and the shining dot of white went off like a light—a pebble that caught the moonl
ight just right. Bending down like that, I could see the hump of grass growing up between the tire tracks that led out onto Meridian Road. He’d found the path, all right.
“At night, Dee Sparks could see one hell of a lot better than me. He spotted the break in the ditch from across the road. He was already walking up the path in those big old shoes, turning around every other step to look back at me, make sure I was coming along behind him. When I started following him, Dee told me to get my sheet back on, and I pulled the thing over my head even though I’d rather have sucked the water out of a hollow stump. But I knew he was right—on Halloween, especially in a place like where we were, you were safer in a costume.
“From then on in, we were in no-man’s-land. Neither one of us had any idea how far we had to go to get to the Backs, or what it would look like once we got there. Once I set foot on that wagon track I knew for sure the Backs wasn’t anything like the way I thought. It was a lot more primitive than a bunch of houses in the woods. Maybe they didn’t even have houses! Maybe they lived in caves!
“Naturally, after I got that blamed costume over my head, I couldn’t see for a while. Dee kept hissing at me to hurry up, and I kept cussing him out. Finally I bunched up a couple handfuls of the sheet right under my chin and held it against my neck, and that way I could see pretty well and walk without tripping all over myself. All I had to do was follow Dee, and that was easy. He was only a couple of inches in front of me, and even through one eye-hole, I could see that silvery sheet moving along.