Dunc's Halloween

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Duncan—Dunc—Culpepper barreled down the alley, his knees coming up past his waist, his arms pumping like pistons. He was frantically chasing his best friend for life, Amos Binder.

It was a Friday, the night before Halloween.

“This way,” Amos shouted over his shoulder. “Hurry!”

Dunc pounded with Amos across a street, through someone's garden, and over a fence. He barely escaped being splattered by a dump truck and got shredded when he accidentally stomped on the tail of a very
angry tomcat and spindled on the Mackersons' steel picket fence. Finally, just as it seemed his lungs would burst, they collapsed on the front steps of the Kowalskis', panting.

Amos took a stopwatch out of his pocket and studied it under the cold light of a full moon. He shook his head. “Too slow—that took thirty-seven seconds.” He wheezed, fighting for breath. “We'll need to cut it down to thirty-five if we want to stay on schedule.”

Dunc was blue, fading to red. “Amos, tell me again. Why are we doing this?”

“It will take rehearsal runs to hit all the good candy houses tomorrow night.”

“I'd settle for less candy and more breath. My throat feels like someone rubbed it down with oven cleaner.”

“No pain, no gain.” Amos looked at the watch again. “If I hadn't tripped over the Winterses' garden hose, I think we would have made it.” He rubbed his head. “What does it mean, that word Winters yelled at us?”

Dunc shrugged. “I don't know—I've
never heard it before. Something to do with a truck, I think. Or maybe rotten vegetables. The thing you've got to remember is, tomorrow night will be even worse. The streets will be filled with little kids.”

“We can hurdle them—two feet, at the most three. It's easy to clear them.”

“We'll be carrying bags of candy. That's a lot of extra weight.”

“I've got that part all figured out.” Amos took a street map out of his pocket. “This red line is our route. See these blue squares?”

“Yeah.”

“They're storage points. All we have to do is toss the candy in as we run by. That way we can travel light.”

“And you figure we can hit every good place in town?”

“Sure. I've labeled each distance with the minimum amount of time it should take us—if we run fast.”

“How fast?”

“Really fast.”

“Amos …”

“We have to run sixty miles an hour.”

“Sixty miles an hour? Are you crazy? We can't run that fast!”

Amos shook his head. “Don't be so negative. If we start at exactly eight thirty we'll finish at ten forty-seven. Of course, we'll have to minimize the time we spend at each door—two seconds max—but if we shorten ‘trick-or-treat' to ‘trick-r-treat,' we can save a tenth of a second per house. We need to reach Mrs. Krippner's house before the late news is over.”

Dunc stared at Amos for a moment, then shook his head and sighed. “All right.… What happens now?”

“The next stop is the Andersons'—they always have those really good caramel apples. Then comes the Bigelows—they give out the full-size candy bars, not those little dinky ones. After that is Herb and Judy Fenson, they always have … oh, wait a minute. We'd better not go there.” He took a pen out of his pocket and crossed them off.

“Why not?”

“They're kind of mad at me.”

“Kind of?”

“I was out walking Scruff the other day—”

“You were walking Scruff? You two hate each other!” Scruff was the Binder family collie. He spent much of his time trying to take chunks out of Amos.

“I have to walk him because Amy won't.”

“I thought she liked to walk Scruff.”

“She likes me not liking to walk Scruff more.” Amy was Amos's older sister. She felt about Amos the same way most people feel about foot fungus, and she worked hard to find names for him that included the word
butt
. Like
butthead, buttface, buttwad
. Her favorite was
buttbrain
, and she once told Amos that if she had nuclear capabilities, his room would be vaporized.

“Anyway,” Amos continued, “we were about two blocks from our house. Exactly six hundred and thirty-seven feet from Melissa's front walk—I've measured it from every angle within a half mile—when I heard a phone ring. It was Melissa's ring. You know, the one ring followed right away by that all-important second ring?”

Dunc nodded. Amos was in love with Melissa.
He swore that Melissa's ring was different from everybody else's. Dunc had given up arguing with him about it a long time ago. It didn't pay. Melissa spent almost all of every waking moment not thinking of Amos. As a matter of fact, she did not know Amos at all.

“There was a repairman on the top of the pole in front of Herb and Judy's corner grocery with a phone in his hand. I started up after him as fast as I could—you have to answer before that second ring or you'll lose them—and I forgot that I was still holding Scruff's leash. He came up after me, whining and choking and growling. Halfway up the pole, I let go of the leash so he wouldn't strangle.”

“That was nice. Instead of hanging him, you splattered him on the concrete.”

“No. He grabbed my pant leg. My belt gave out, and my pants worked like a parachute as he dropped to the ground.” Amos shrugged, remembering. “It wasn't Scruff that was the problem—it was the telephone man.”

“What happened to him?”

“He saw me scrambling up the pole, and just because I was screaming with my pants off, he thought I was crazy. Some people are such poor judges of character.”

Dunc waited. “And?”

“He climbed to the top of the pole to get away from me and tried to balance there.”

“Tried?”

“When I reached for the phone, he fell one way and I fell the other. I landed in the Johnsons' compost pile across the street. He fell through the awning of Herb and Judy's, right into the watermelon stand. He goes into surgery tomorrow to get the seeds removed from his ears. They're sprouting.”

“Poor guy.”

“What about me? I never did get to talk to Melissa, and I'll be spitting compost until I die. What do they put in that stuff, anyway?”

It comes from horses
, Dunc thought, then he shook his head. It was better that Amos didn't know.

Dunc studied the map. The red line ran everywhere. It would have been much easier
to highlight the places they
weren't
going to go.

“Melissa probably wanted to find out what I'm wearing to the Halloween party tomorrow night. She'll want to recognize me.”

“Right.”
And the moon
, Dunc thought,
rides on the back of a large turtle
.

A sudden long, lonely howl cut the night.

“What was that?” Dunc asked, shivering.

“I'm not sure I want to know.” Amos looked—and tried not to look at the same time—around them on the dark street.

“It sounded like a dog. Sort of.” Amos shrugged.

“A dog about as big as a Chevrolet, maybe.” Dunc shook his head. “I don't know what it was, but it wasn't a dog.” He had been kneeling and he stood up. “Right. Let's go home.”

“Home? What about the rest of the route?”

“Forget about the rest of the route.”

“But what about the candy?”

“Amos, anything that can howl like that will think
we're
candy. Let's go home.”

Amos began to fold the map, then shook his head. “I didn't spend a whole year working on this to get scared away by a big dog.” He stood up.

“Amos …”

“It should take us forty-two seconds to reach the Andersons'. Let's go.”

“Amos—”

But Amos was gone, sprinting down the street. Dunc held back for half a second, shook his head, then followed.

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