The Empire of Ice Cream (29 page)

“He was kind of creepy looking,” said Jim, “and I never saw him around here before.” He yawned and lay back on the pillow. “We'll have to find out who he is.”

“How?” I asked. I sat there for a long time, waiting for his answer.

“Somehow,” he said, and turned over. I knew he was almost asleep.

The antenna cried mercilessly all night, and I tossed and turned, thinking of the man in the white car, my fear in the library, and spying Mrs. Graves's tit. I could sense the evil as it crept forward day by day, dismantling my world, like a very slow explosion. I woke and slept and woke and slept, and it was still dark. The third time I awoke to the same night, I thought I heard the sound of pebbles jangling in soda cans. The plan had been to let George out after whoever it was taking the ladder, but I didn't move, save to curl up into a ball.

The next day, Halloween, was clear and cool and blue. My mother had to leave for work early, so Nan made us breakfast. Jim told Mary and me to request oatmeal instead of eggs, so the latter would be there to steal later on and use for ammo on the night streets. I could tell Mary was excited because she wasn't being Mickey and wasn't counting or doing any of her strange antics, but instead pumping Jim for a rundown on how the coming night would be. She had always before gone trick-or-treating with our mother and this was to be her first time on the loose with us. The ugly oatmeal came, lumps of steaming khaki, with raisins in it, no less, and we all forced it down. Meanwhile, Jim held forth on the strategies of the holiday.

“The idea,” he told Mary, “is to get as much candy as possible. You want candy, wrapped candy. If you get a candy bar, that's the best—a Hershey bar or a Milky Way. Mary Janes are okay if you don't mind losing a few fillings, little boxes of Good & Plenty, Dots, Chocolate Babies, packs of gum, all good. Then you've got your cheapskate single-wrapped candy—root beer barrels, butterscotches, licorice drops—not bad, usually given out by people who are broke, but what can they do? They're trying.

“You don't eat anything that's not wrapped, except for Mr. Barzita's figs. Some people drop an apple in your bag. You can't eat it, but you can throw it at someone, so that's okay. Once in a while a mother will bake stuff to give out. Don't eat it, you don't know what they put in it. It could be the best-looking cupcake you ever saw, with chocolate icing and a candy corn on top, but who knows, they might have crapped in the batter. I've seen where people will throw a penny in your sack. A penny's a penny.

“You always stay where we can see you. If someone invites you into their house, don't go. When we tell you to run, run, 'cause kids could be coming to throw eggs at us. If you hear someone shout ‘Nair bomb,' run like hell—”

“What's a Nair bomb?” asked Mary.

“Nair is that chemical stuff women use to take the hair off their legs. Kids pour that stuff into balloons and then throw it at you. If you get hit on the head with it, all of your hair will fall out. If it gets in your eyes, it could blind you for a while.”

Mary nodded.

“I'm going to give you two eggs tonight. Save them until you see someone you really want to get. Aim for the head, cause if it hits their coat, it will probably bounce off and smash on the ground. Or you can throw it at the house of someone you hate. Who do you hate?” Jim asked.

“Will Hickey,” Mary said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“We'll egg his house tonight for sure,” said Jim. “Maybe I'll put one through his front window. One more thing: kids will try to steal your sack of candy. Don't let them. Scream and kick them if they try to. I'll come and help you.”

“Okay,” said Mary.

Then we went in and said goodbye to Nan before leaving for school. She was at her table in the little dining area. Heaped on the table were three enormous piles of candy—one, rolls of Sweet Tarts, another, Mary Janes, the last, miniature Butterfingers. She took one from each pile, stuffed them in a little orange bag with a picture of a witch on a broomstick on it, and twisted the top. Pop was sitting there in his underwear watching her, chewing a Mary Jane.

School was endless that day. We usually had a holiday party in the classroom on Halloween, but not that year. It was cancelled because Krapp had to give us a series of standardized intelligence tests. It was a day of filling in little bubbles with a number two pencil. The questions started off easy, but soon became impossibly strange. There were passages to be read about sardine fishing off the coast of Chile and math problems where they showed you a picture of a weird shape and asked you to turn it around in your mind 180 degrees before answering questions about it.

I realized right before handing one of the exams in that I'd meant to skip an answer I didn't know, but instead filled that bubble in by mistake, so that all my answers from then on would really be for the following question. I felt a fleeting moment of remorse as I put the test in Krapp's hand.

On the playground at lunch break, Tim Caliban told me his theory of taking those kinds of tests. “I don't even bother reading the questions,” he said. “I just guess. I've got to get at least some of them right.”

Back in the classroom, in the afternoon, Patricia Trepedino, the smartest girl in the class, referred Krapp to question number four. “It says,” she said, “concrete is to peanut butter as …”

“Yes,” said Krapp, checking his sheet.

“Chunky or plain?” she asked.

He stared at her with the same blank look that Marvin Gompers wore after telling us in third grade he was made of metal and then ran headfirst into the brick wall behind the gym. Finally, Krapp snapped out of it and said, “No talking or I will have to invalidate your test.”

The lingering twilight finally breathed its last, and that first moment of true night was like a gunshot at the start of a race, for, instantly, frantic kids in costumes streamed from lit houses, beginning their rounds, not to return until they had reached the farthest place they could and still remember how to get home. My mother and Nan stood at the front door and waved to us as Jim led the way, dressed in a baggy flannel shirt, ripped dungarees, a black skullcap, and charcoal beard. Mary followed him in her jockey outfit, and I brought up the rear, stumbling on the curbs and across lawns because the slits in my skull mask drastically limited my view. Even though it was cold and windy, before we had climbed two front stoops and opened our bags, my face was sweating. I could hear every breath I took, and each was laced with the hair-raising stench of molded plastic. Finally, when I walked into a parked car, I decided to only pull the mask down when arriving on a house's front steps.

We traveled door-to-door around the block, joining with other groups of kids, splitting away and later being joined by others. David Kelty, dressed like a swami, with a bath towel wrapped in a turban around his head, eyeliner darkening his eyes, and a long, purple robe, followed along with us for a dozen houses. The Farley girls were angels or princesses, I couldn't tell which, but their costumes, made from flowing white material, glowed in the dark. President Kenny Stutton was dressed in his Communion suit, a button on the lapel that said
VOTE FOR KENNY,
and his sisters were ghosts with sheets over their heads. Reggie Wilson was a robot, wrapped in silver foil, wearing a hat with a light bulb sticking out the top that went on and off without a switch; and Chris Hacket wore the army helmet of his father, who'd gotten hand grenade shrapnel in his ass and lost three fingers in Korea.

We worked the trick-or-treat with a dedication that rivaled our father's for his three jobs, systematically moving up one side of the street and then down the other. Our pillowcases filled with candy. Old lady Ripici gave out Chinese handcuffs, a kind of tube woven from colored paper strips. You stuck a finger in each side and then couldn't pull them out. That's how we lost David Kelty. He was left behind, standing on the lawn, unable to figure out that you just had to twist your fingers to free them. The slow, the hobbled, the weak were all left behind as we blitzkrieged Pine Avenue, moved on to Sylvia, and covered Manhassett.

When we finished with the last house on the last street in that part of the development, we took the secret trail through the dirt hills, through the waist-high weeds, to the path that led around the high fence of the sump, and came out on the western field of Southgate, just beyond the basketball courts. In the moonlight, a strong wind whipping across the open expanse and driving tatters of dark clouds above, we met up with Tim Caliban and some of his friends. We rested for a while there and stuffed chocolate and licorice into ourselves as sustenance for the next leg of the journey.

Just as we were getting ready to head east toward Minerva Avenue on the other side of the school field over by the woods, we were attacked by Stinky Steinmacher, Justin Wunch, and about twenty other dirt eaters. The eggs flew back and forth. President Stutton took one in the face and went down on his knees in tears. Someone yelled that Wunch had Nair bombs and we fled. Jim had Mary by the hand, and I was right behind them. As we ran around the back of the school, I looked over my shoulder to see the enemy swarming toward Kenny. His sisters, the horrible dumplings, had also abandoned him and were gaining on me. We would learn the next day that they beat him with flour socks until he went albino, split his lip, and stole his sack of treasure. Then Stinky peed on him. Any other night of the year such brutality would have been considered an outrage, but not on Halloween when even our parents sided with Darwin.

We begged our way up Minerva and the street beyond that, and the farther we went away from our own neighborhood, kids would break off and head back toward more familiar ground. Once when we left Mary standing on the sidewalk by herself for a minute, a kid tried to steal her sack, but she was able to keep him off by swinging her curtain rod/jockey whip until Jim got to her and pummeled the kid. We ended up taking his sack and splitting it three ways. Still, the run-in had made Mary nervous and she had to sit down on the curb for a while, mumble some numbers, and have a cigarette. The rest of the group went on without us. While we were waiting for her to relax, a bunch of Jim's junior high friends came by, and, just like that, he left me in charge of Mary and went off with them.

By then it was late, and the street we were on, which I didn't know the name of, was deserted. Many of the houses had turned their lights out as a sign they had either gone to bed or were out of candy. That was the way Halloween always went, one minute it was a colorful celebration of chaos, candy gathering, and cruelty, and the next, when you weren't watching, it had laid back and gone to sleep. It was now far quieter, but more eerie, for in sleep, all that was left on the streets were its nightmares. I told Mary to get up and she did. I vaguely remembered the direction home, and we started off, walking quickly, sticking to the shadows so as not to be noticed. We passed darkened houses whose trees were hung with wind-whipped strands of white toilet paper, smashed jack-o'-lanterns in the road, broken shells and the iridescent film of egg splatter reflected under streetlights where a battle had taken place. The scarecrows again took on a sinister aspect, and every shadowy form startled me, brought to mind the prowler and Charlie and worse.

We traveled back three streets, turning right and left and right, trying to home in on the school as a point of orientation, while the temperature dropped drastically.

Mary hadn't worn a coat or a sweat shirt, having felt that without people seeing her baggy shirt, no one would be able to make out that she was Willie Shoemaker. It hadn't mattered, because kids kept asking me all night, “Hey, what's your sister supposed to be?” The guesses ranged from baseball player to clown to janitor, but no one hit on a jockey, even when she had heard one of them mention it and replied, “They're coming around the back turn …” Anyway, I stopped and gave her my hooded sweat shirt.

Crossing the school field was a harrowing event, and we kept to the dark of the perimeter fence, so as to remain inconspicuous. Instead of striking out across the field and the lit basketball courts and front drive, I opted for the path that went around the sump. It took a little longer, but that vision of Kenny Stutton being attacked and the fact that Mary was with me made me cautious. The overgrown weed lot was lonesome enough to make me shiver, and the dirt hills were a strange, barren moonscape, but once I saw the street on the other side, I felt we were going to be okay. It was right then, as we stepped down onto the pavement, that lurching into the glow of the streetlight came a true monster; a hulking form with a red and blistered face, its hair sloughing off, leaving huge bald spots. The creature whimpered as it tottered forward, its hands out in front of it. Mary put her arms around me, pressing her face to my side, and I stood, unable to move, my mouth open. Then I realized it was poor Peter Milton, half-blind and suffering the effects of a Nair attack, trying to grope his way home. We let him pass, and then continued on.

As we came down a side street that opened onto Pine Avenue, I finally relaxed. Mary wasn't holding my hand anymore as she could sense my ease and was more calm herself. All we had to do was get to Pine and turn left and walk down seven houses. I wondered where Jim had gone and what adventures he had met and then gave myself over to thinking about the moment when I would empty my sack onto the dining room table, spilling out all that was right and good into a huge pile.

Mary interrupted me by pulling on my shirt. “Pipe smoke,” she said.

I stopped walking and looked up. At that very moment, down on Pine, I could see from the aura of a streetlight no more than twenty yards away, that old white car pull away from the curb in the direction of our house. Grabbing Mary by the arm, I led her through a hole in the hedges we had been passing, and whispered to her, “Don't make a sound.” We stood, motionless, and waited. Only when I heard the car turn around and recede into the distance toward Higbee did I motion to Mary to return to the street. “Run,” I told her, and took her hand. We sprinted around the corner onto Pine and all the way home. She'd been right: pervading the air at the spot where the two roads intersected was that smoldering scent of the man with the white coat. A relentless spirit, it pursued us to our doorstep.