The Best Halloween Ever

by Barbara Robinson

  THE BEST HALLOWEEN EVER

  Barbara Robinson

  This book is for my best boys — my grandsons, Tomas, Marcos, and Lucas

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Introduction

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  About the Author

  Other Books By Barbara Robinson

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  “It isn’t fair!” Charlie said, and he was right.

  “Having no Halloween is the worst thing that could happen!” he said, but he was wrong.

  There was one worse thing, and we heard about it in the morning announcements at school....

  1

  It was the principal’s idea, but it was the Herdmans’ fault, according to my mother.

  “Don’t blame Mr. Crabtree,” she said. “It wasn’t Mr. Crabtree who piled eight kids into the revolving door at the bank. It wasn’t Mr. Crabtree who put the guppies on the pizza. It was one of the Herdmans, or some of the Herdmans, or all of the Herdmans … so if there’s no Halloween this year, it’s their fault!”

  Of course the Herdmans couldn’t cancel Halloween everywhere. That’s what I told my little brother, Charlie. Charlie kept saying, “I can’t believe this!”—as if it was unusual for the Herdmans to mess things up for everybody else.

  It wasn’t unusual. There were six Herdmans—Ralph, Imogene, Leroy, Claude, Ollie, and Gladys—plus their crazy cat, which was missing one eye and half its tail and most of its fur and any good nature it ever had. It bit the mailman and it bit the Avon lady, and after that it had to be kept on a chain, which is what most people wanted to do with the Herdmans.

  I used to wonder why their mother didn’t do that with them, but, after all, there were six of them and only one of her. She didn’t hang around the house much anyway, and you couldn’t really blame her—even my mother said you couldn’t really blame her.

  They lived over a garage at the bottom of Sproul Hill and their yard was full of whatever used to be in the garage—old tires and rusty tools and broken-down bicycles and the trunk of a car (no car, just the trunk)—and I guess the neighbors would have complained about the mess except that all the neighbors had moved somewhere else.

  “Lucky for them!” Charlie grumbled. “They don’t have to go to school with Leroy like I do.”

  Like we all do, actually. The Herdmans were spread out through Woodrow Wilson School, one to each grade, and I guess if there had been any more of them they would have wiped out the school and everybody in it.

  As it was they’d wiped out Flag Day when they stole the flag, and Arbor Day when they stole the tree. They had ruined fire drills and school assemblies and PTA bake sales, and they let all the kindergarten mice out of their cage and then filled up the cage with guinea pigs.

  The whole kindergarten got hysterical about this. Some kids thought the guinea pigs ate their mice. Some kids thought the guinea pigs were their mice, grown gigantic overnight. They were all scared and sobbing and hiccuping, and the janitor had to come and remove the guinea pigs.

  All the mice got away, so I guess if you were a mouse you would be crazy about the Herdmans. I don’t know whether mice get together and one of them says, “How was your day?”—but if that happens, these mice would say, “Terrific!”

  “So was that it, Beth?” Charlie asked me. “The mice and the guinea pigs? Was that, like, the last straw, and then everybody said, ‘All right, that’s it, the last straw … no Halloween’? Was that it?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I think it was everything else.”

  There had been a lot of everything else because Labor Day was late, so school started late. Parents had an extra week to buy their kids school shoes and get their hair cut; kids had an extra week to finish the fort or tree house or bike trail or whatever else they’d been building since June; and teachers had an extra week to pray they wouldn’t have any Herdmans, I guess… . And of course the Herdmans had an extra week, too, to tear up whatever they’d missed during the summer.

  That turned out to be a lot and, as usual with the Herdmans, it wasn’t always things you would expect them to do.

  The police guard at the bank said that he had seen them come in. “Can’t miss them!” he said. “So I went right over and stood by the big fish tank. I figure, if I see a bank robber coming I’ll defend the money, but if I see those kids coming I’ll defend the fish.” He shook his head and sighed. “Didn’t occur to me to hang around the revolving door.”

  Nobody got hurt and everybody got out all right, but they had to call the fire department to take the door apart, and they had to close the bank till they got the door back up.

  The fire chief said he never saw anything like it. “Two kids,” he said, “maybe even three kids might go in that door at the same time to see what would happen, but this was eight kids! What you had was one section of a revolving door full of kids. Couldn’t move the door forward, couldn’t move it back, had to take it down . . . unless, well, you couldn’t just leave them in there.”

  This was supposed to be a joke, but most people thought it would have been a great opportunity to shut the Herdmans up somewhere, even in a revolving door.

  It would have been a great opportunity, except that by then it wasn’t Herdmans in the door. It was eight different kids, including Charlie.

  “Why?” my father asked him. “Why would you follow the Herdmans anywhere, let alone into a revolving door?”

  Charlie shrugged and looked up at the ceiling and down at the floor and finally said he didn’t know. “It was just that they were all around,” he went on. “There were Herdmans in front of us and Herdmans in back of us, and then Ralph said, ‘Let’s see how many kids will fit in the door,’ and so . . . ” He shrugged again.

  The bank manager was mad because of his door, and the bank guard was mad because he picked the wrong thing to guard, but nobody blamed him. How could he know what the Herdmans were going to do? Most of the time, I don’t think even the Herdmans knew what they were going to do.

  I don’t think they planned to mix up the mice and the guinea pigs until they happened to see some guinea pigs, and I don’t think

  they decided to find some kids and shove them into a revolving door until they happened to see the door and a bunch of kids all at the same place at the same time.

  There probably wouldn’t have been any trouble at the pizza parlor either if Mr. Santoro hadn’t introduced a new variety— sardine pizza—and that wouldn’t have caused any trouble if Boomer Malone didn’t have to get rid of his guppies.

  Boomer started out with two guppies in a fishbowl, and by the next week he had about a hundred guppies in jars and bottles and bowls. Mrs. Malone told my mother that she even found guppies in ice cube trays.

  Boomer’s original idea had been to sell the guppies, but he finally had to pay Leroy Herdman fifty cents to take them away. According to Gladys, they were going to dump all the guppies into their bathtub and then charge kids a quarter to come and see

  the guppies go down the drain, all at once.

  “It won’t hurt them,” Gladys said. “They’ll just go wherever the water goes and swim around. They’ll like it.”

  Maybe so, but it never happened. Before they got the guppies home to the bathtub, Leroy and Claude and Gladys stopped in the pizza parlor, saw six sardine pizzas on the counter, and immediately swapped guppies for the sardines.

  Nobody ever did think t
hat sardine pizza would be a success but, as Mr. Santoro said, “After that, sardine pizza didn’t have a chance.”

  The customers agreed. One man said he didn’t think he’d ever eat any kind of pizza again. “Wasn’t looking,” he said, “ . . . took a bite, and the next thing I knew there was half a guppie in my mustache.”

  So there really wasn’t any last straw, but by the time school finally started, so many

  people were so mad at the Herdmans for so many reasons that you knew something was going to happen.

  “It’s got to stop!” the mayor said . . . but nobody knew that “it” was going to be Halloween.

  2

  It was only natural for people to blame our principal, because Mr. Crabtree didn’t like Halloween in the first place. He didn’t want anyone to wear costumes to school or put up Halloween decorations or have homeroom parties, and every year he sent home a note that said Halloween would not be an acceptable excuse for tardiness or late homework or headaches or stomachaches or failure to stay awake in class or anything else.

  One year Eugene Preston went trick-or-treating without a flashlight, fell over the Johannesons’ birdbath, and broke his ankle, and Eugene was scared to come to school.

  He even had a dream about it. “Mr. Crabtree took away my crutch,” he said, “and he made me hop everywhere—up and down the stairs and outdoors for recess—and he made me play basketball. In my dream I kept telling him that I had a broken ankle, and he just kept hollering, ‘No excuse! No excuse!’“

  “Well, that’s just silly,” my mother said when Charlie told her about Eugene’s dream. “Mr. Crabtree didn’t say anything about broken bones. He was just saying don’t stay up past your bedtime and don’t forget your schoolwork and don’t eat a lot of candy and get sick. What’s wrong with that?”

  Nothing, if you were a mother … but these were the exact things that Charlie and I expected to do on Halloween. Actually, these were the exact things we did do on

  Halloween, except for eating too much candy. We never ended up with too much candy and neither did anyone else, thanks to the Herdmans.

  They were around every corner and behind every tree on Halloween. They didn’t dress up—they didn’t have to, because they looked like Halloween all the time. Sometimes kids even dressed up like them. They didn’t go trick-or-treating—but they didn’t have to do that either as long as everyone else did, collecting candy and gum and money for the Herdmans to take away from them.

  Of course this meant that they had more time than the rest of us. They didn’t have to pick out or invent costumes, try them on, and cut holes to see out of. They didn’t have to be polite to the neighbors and say thank you and only take one trick-or-treat candy. They didn’t have to stay on their own block and come in at 8:30 … so they were free to run all over town, starting fires and breaking windows and moving street signs and stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down.

  Although they had done all these things at one time or another, they had never done all of them at once, which was about the only good thing you could say for them.

  “Well, at least they didn’t set fire to the hospital,” people would say if they set fire to something else, and when they ran off with the Rotary Club cake (it had “Rotary Club—Happy Halloween!” spelled out in M&M’s, and it was supposed to serve eighty-five people so I don’t know what they ate instead), everybody said “Well, at least it was a cake they stole. It wasn’t somebody’s life savings.”

  Last year they jimmied open the cages at the Animal Rescue and let all the dogs and cats out. The dogs and cats didn’t know it was Halloween, or why everybody had on sheets and rubber noses and aluminum foil underwear … and kids didn’t know where all the dogs and cats came from, so there was a lot of barking and yelling and crying.

  Naturally there were parents trying to find their kids and police trying to get things under control, and the dog officer trying to collect whatever animals he could get hold of, along with the Fire Rescue truck and paramedics with dog-bite medicine.

  There wasn’t anything for the paramedics to do because nobody got bitten and nobody got scratched, but they did have to rescue Alice Wendleken.

  Like everything else in Alice’s life, her Halloween costume always had to be better than everyone else’s—more original and unusual, or more beautiful and sparkly. When Alice said “Trick or treat!” she wanted people to gasp at the wonder of her, and maybe applaud.

  That year she was a hot dog, with the bun and the mustard and all. At the last minute she thought it would be more realistic if she smelled like a hot dog, so she cut one up into little pieces and glued them inside the bun part of her costume.

  It was realistic all right. Once the dogs got a whiff of Alice they thought she was lunch, and they all joined in, snuffling and sniffing and licking her.

  Somebody called Mrs. Wendleken, but by the time she got there the police had Alice out of her costume, wrapped up in a blanket, and sitting in the police car. Mrs. Wendleken didn’t see that—what she saw was the remains of the costume, mostly the mustard part and pieces of the bun, and a lot of dogs sitting around licking their chops.

  Mrs. Wendleken said later that of course she knew the dogs hadn’t eaten Alice up, leaving nothing but pieces of mustard and hot dog bun. “But think how it looked!” she said. “Naturally I got a little excited.”

  My mother said hysterical was more like it, “ … wanting all those dogs locked up for observation, in case they were mad instead of just bewildered!”

  “Don’t forget the Herdmans,” I said. “She wanted them locked up, too.”

  Of course none of that happened, so Mrs. Wendleken was furious. She stayed furious, too, and when she heard about the guppies and the revolving door, she said it was obvious that the Herdmans were out of control and there was no telling what they would do this year on Halloween.

  She wasn’t the only one.

  The police chief said the Herdmans and Halloween together always gave him nightmares, and this year looked like it could be the worst one yet.

  Then the fire chief chimed in. “Do you know what happens to other fire departments on Halloween?” he said. “Other fire departments get false alarms … a lot of false alarms. I’d love to get false alarms on Halloween! What I get is little Herdman fires.” It was true, he said, that the Herdmans never seemed to set fire to anything important, “ … but I can’t count on that. This could be the year they happen to burn down the First National Bank.”

  The druggist said he was going to board up his windows, and Mr. Kline at the hardware store said he was going to sleep in the back room, just in case. And the next thing we knew, the mayor said, “This has got to stop!” … and he did mean Halloween.

  He announced it at the Rotary meeting—”No Halloween”; and he announced it at the town council meeting—”No Halloween”; and then it was in the newspaper, on the front page—”MAYOR CANCELS HALLOWEEN.”

  … out of concern for public safety, the article said, and to avoid possible damage to property. Local merchants will neither purchase nor stock the usual supply of Halloween candy.So that was it... no Halloween, no candy.

  Charlie said he was going to have Halloween anyway. He said he was going to put on a costume and go trick-or-treating and everything, but he really wasn’t. Neither was I. Nobody was, because we couldn’t have Halloween all by ourselves.

  You have to have kids on one end of Halloween, to look forward to it and get scary books out of the library and cut up pumpkins and get dressed up and then, as soon as it’s dark, go trick-or-treating with your friends.

  Then you have to have grown-ups on the other end of Halloween, to give you the old sheets and pad you with pillows and fasten you together with safety pins and hang around the house to hand out candy and, of course, supply the candy.

  “It isn’t fair!” Charlie said, and he was right.

  “Having no Halloween is the worst thing that could happen!” he said, but he was wrong.

  T
here was one worse thing, and we heard about it in the morning announcements at school.

  3

  The morning announcements are pretty boring, but you can usually find something else to think about. While Mr. Crabtree drones on about bus schedules and PTA notices, you can think about lunch or your science project or why Boomer Malone’s retainer looks like Dracula fangs.

  But that day there was big news.

  “I’m sure you’re all aware,” Mr. Crabtree said, “that there will be no Halloween activities in our town this year … specifically, there will be no trick or treat. There will be no candy handouts—in fact, no candy at all.”

  There was one loud groan all over the school and a babble of complaints, but Mr. Crabtree ignored it. “This is owing,” he went on, “to widespread misconduct by, I’m sorry to say, some of our Woodrow Wilson students.”

  “He means the Herdmans,” Alice Wendleken hissed, as if everybody didn’t already know that. Then Alice turned around and glared at Imogene Herdman, which Alice would never do if she wasn’t four rows and seven seats away.

  “No Halloween!” Imogene yelled, so I guess the Herdmans didn’t read the newspaper. “Who says?”

  Mr. Crabtree was still talking, so Mrs. Hazelwood said, “Sh-h, Imogene … the mayor says … now sh-h-h.”

  “The mayor and who else?” Imogene looked at the PA speaker. “Him?”

  “Everybody else,” Alice said, “and it’s your fault. You and Leroy and Gladys and Claude and all of you and your misconduct!”

  I thought Alice was being too brave for her own good—now she would have to stay after school and clean the blackboard or dust erasers or mop the floor or write half a book or something till the coast was clear of Herdmans.

  But maybe not, because Imogene didn’t lunge across four rows and seven seats and smack Alice flat, right on the spot. She didn’t even look mad. She looked really pleased with herself, as if misconduct was a hobby and the Herdmans were very good at it … which they were.