Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre (49 page)

Mom had gone to a Halloween party, one that Maura so totally

did
not
want to go to, at the Stephenson’s house. It would be mostly middle-aged people playing old Alice Cooper songs and wearing

costumes rented from shops. And anyway, Maura didn’t want to

see her mom get drunk and whorey. Especially not at a party. Mom

waited exactly one month after the divorce to start whoring around and sloppily draping herself on guys at parties. It was
gross.

Then Mom would be hung over and insist on their going to

Sunday mass so she could skulk into confession. Anybody within

ten yards of the confessional could hear Mom crying in there. A real drama queen.

No, uh uh, not that party. But this wasn’t much better. Three teen girls wishing they were with three college boys instead of each other.

Maura stuck in her Green Man costume, tights and a plastic mask

with some fake plants stapled to it. The costume was left over from the school play, where they’d said, “You’re going to be the Green

Man” and she’d said, “Can’t I be the Green Girl?” and they said no, that’s not the legend.

“We have lame costumes,” Maura said, looking at Gwen’s. “Julie’s

JOHN SHIRLEY [371]

is kinda okay but . . . mostly just lame.” Everyone was sick of zombies by now . . .

Gwen had wedged herself into a ridiculous Catwoman outfit from

Batman Rising
, a costume she’d mostly made herself that was only going to make guys snigger behind her back. And Julie was in her

Evil Fairy outfit—she looked like Tinkerbell gone all zombie. They were drinking Jagermeister shots, which always made Julie sick. “If you drink enough shots, Julie,” Maura said, “you could throw up on yourself and it’d make your costume better.”

They all laughed at that. But somehow today Maura couldn’t feel

like she was part of anything even while she was laughing along with her friends. Gwen and Julie both looked so
loser
. Julie was so eager to try to be “edgy” with them but really she was just another Catholic girl, planning to go to Community college, have a job in a dentist’s office, and then get married and have kids.

Who’s the losiest loser here? Julie asked herself, thinking of the song by Princess Doggie.

Who’s the Losiest Loser here

Who’s the one with facebook fake up

Who’s the Losiest Loser here

Who’s the one with fucked up makeup

“Maybe me,” Maura said, taking a shot of tequila from the bottle

sitting on the Ouija board.

“Maybe you what?” Julie asked.

“Maybe I’ll get sick from mixing Jagermeister and tequila.” She

did a shot. “Oh yuck, that didn’t go down good.” Her stomach felt

like some hand was wrenching at it.

“What if your mom comes home early?”

Maura shrugged. “So what? She’ll be so drunk she won’t notice

what we’re doing. Or she’ll pretend she doesn’t.”

“We could find a party, there’s some, um, somewhere,” Julie

said.

“Where?”

“I don’t know. But there have to be. We can call around. There’s

that Laura Ginsler party, but she’s such a Miss Thang snobby-ass.”

“She is, too,” Maura said. “All T no shade.”

[372] AND WHEN YOU CALLED US WE CAME TO YOU

“I’ve still got half of that Hawaiian hesh ciggie,” Gwen said.

“Ciggie? Who calls them ciggies?” Maura said, rolling her eyes.

“You’re, all, like, in a bad mood,” Gwen said, rooting around in

her pocket-sized black taffeta-trimmed purse.

“Yeah I am in a bad mood. You should like that, you being all

goth and stuff. Goths dress like bad moods.”

“No, that’s not what it is.” Gwen ran her stubby fingers through

her red and black streaked hair. Then she went into one of her jolting changes of topic. “Oh! Let’s go on the roof!”

Julie blinked at her. “The roof?”

“Yeah! We can smoke up there and watch people on the street.

We could throw water balloons at people. We might get some guys

to come and check it out.”

“Oh God, listen to her,” Maura laughed. “You’re a worse whore

than my mom.”

“Not worse than mine.”

“Your mom just sleeps with your dad.”

“Uh, hello, that’s what you think. Do you have a ladder?”

It was a little cold on the roof, but it wasn’t raining, and was, actually, pretty tight up there, Maura thought.

There was just one cloud in the blue-black night sky. “That cloud

is shaped like a Band-Aid,” Gwen said. And it was. The thin dirty-

looking cloud was stretched over the blister-like moon but didn’t

hide much. The cloud gave the moon a red halo, like blood on a

bandage, and seemed to make the face of the man in the moon stand

out more sharply, so you could see every bit of it, even the crinkle lines at the corners of his eyes . . .

Or maybe it was just the Hawaiian weed making it seemed that

way. She saw the lips of the man in the moon move, then. Yeah, the hesh, probably.

She sighed and turned to look at Gwen and Julie. Gwen’s four

water balloons were sacrifices made from the four condoms she kept in her purse. She’d carried them for months; hopelessly, really, so not much of a sacrifice. Gwen and Julie sat crosslegged just above the front edge of the roof, their feet right by the rain gutter, looking down at the JOHN SHIRLEY [373]

street. Across the street two groups of small children were walking along in costume, shepherded by parents and older siblings. The

children tittered and waved their plastic candy bags. Some of them ran, and skidded to a stop when they were reined in by their parents.

Orange glows studded the row of houses irregularly, where people

had put out jack-o’-lanterns. Across the street the Castlemans had a more elaborate display, with Styrofoam tombstones and one of those dancing skeletons with the wanly glowing bones and hot coals for eyes.

“What if they dug down under those fake tombstones,” Maura

said, “and found real bodies under each one?”

“Ha-a-a,” Gwen cackled. “That’d be awesome . . . ”

“Awesome . . . ”

“Who said that?” Maura asked, looking down in the bushes. She

half expected to see Cliff there, trolling them.

“Said what?” Julie asked, looking at her.

“I thought I heard a man’s voice say
awesome
after Gwen did.”

“She’s going crazy crazy
cra
-zyyyyy, ” Gwen chanted, making a scared face and pointing at Maura.

They all three cracked up at that. When that calmed down, Maura

said, “That hesh is good. Is there any left?”

“Just a whatsit, what my dad calls it . . . a roach.” Gwen held it up in her black gloved fingers and looked at it so close her eyes almost crossed. “Teensy.”

“That skeleton can dance, like on a motor,” Julie said. “I didn’t

know they could do that.”

“Oh yeah, they got all kinds that move around now,” Maura said,

suddenly bored again. “Skeletons that come down on strings and

shit. Wish I hadn’t mixed Jager and tequila. I’m like, about to spout orange goo.”

“You feel sick?” Julie asked. “You should drink a glass of water.”

Her mom was a nurse and some of it had rubbed off.

“You could suck the water out of one of these condoms,” Gwen

said seductively, holding up a water-bloated oblong of blue latex that sloshed in her palm. Condoms were their water balloons.

Maura laughed and then said, “Don’t make me laugh, I might

puke.”

[374] AND WHEN YOU CALLED US WE CAME TO YOU

But that made them laugh more.

Maura looked back at the dancing skeleton Halloween decoration,

and saw it was now dancing to the edge of the Castleman’s yard.

“Wow, it can move forward and backwards too, look . . . ”

They stared. Gwen said, “Whaaaaat? It must be on a rail or

something.”

“Wow, that’s a good illusion,” Julie said. “Really really good. Looks so real.”

“I think you said the same thing three times, Julie . . . Oh! Here comes Cliff, get the condoms ready . . . ”

“Eee-ewww, with
Cliff?
” Gwen asked, screwing up her face.

“I mean the balloons, retard.”

“I know you did. Here’s one balloon for you and one for you.”

Cliff was walking down the sidewalk toward Maura’s house. He

was tall and awkward; he had narrow shoulders and wide hips and

the sagging pants he wore, to be all hip-hop, just made his hips look worse. He had his hair teased up in a faux hawk and he was wearing his worn-out Oakland Raiders jacket open over a Necro T-shirt. He

had one hand in his coat, where he concealed a bottle in a paper

sack, probably a forty of that horrible ale he liked. As he walked, Cliff kept staring at that dancing skeleton in the Castleman’s yard.

The Halloween decoration looked like it was making little warning

runs at him, as if it was preparing to rush him. He just looked at it and laughed. Even from here Maura knew he was stoned, the way he

gaped and stared and laughed.

“He hasn’t seen us,” Julie said.

Gwen put a finger over her lips to signal for quiet, and then

crept across the roof, hunched down, toward the porch, carrying the condom water balloon. She raised the balloon; it jiggled obscenely in her hand as Cliff walked across the lawn, just missing a patch of dog waste, toward the front door.

Then Julie giggled and Cliff looked up—he saw her. “Whoa, are

you guys having a—”

Whatever stupid thing he was going to say was cut short by the

impact of a water balloon, hitting him just above the crotch and

bursting nicely. “My aim is truuuuuue!” Gwen shouted triumphantly.

JOHN SHIRLEY [375]

Maura and Julie were throwing theirs; Julie missed, was probably

not really trying to hit Cliff. Maura got him in the left leg as he backed away, hollering, “Oh that
blows
! You guys buh-
low
!”

“Trick or fucking treat, Cliff!” Maura yelled, laughing.

Then, backing up, he blundered right into the dog poo, and knew

it immediately. German shepherd poo. Big. “Oh fuuuuuuuck! That

so blows! Oh my fucking God! You bitches made me step in dog

shit!”

The girls laughed, Julie with her hand clamped over her mouth,

Gwen almost falling off the roof in her mirth.

“Use the hose to wash it off!” Julie shouted, tittering between

words, pointing at the hose by the front door. “The hose!”

“No way! You guys are gonna nail me again!”

“We’re out of condoms, you’re safe, retard!” Maura yelled.

“If we’re out of condoms we’re
not
safe,” Gwen said, as Cliff went to use the hose. “So sad. So sad.”

As if Gwen ever needs one,
Maura thought.

She looked at Julie who was automatically covering her braces

with her hand as she laughed at Cliff—he was hopping around on

one foot trying to use the hose to spray the poop off a shoe.

A few minutes later, Cliff was on the roof, sitting with them,

hugging his wet legs, his forty of cheap ale beside him. He’d gotten most of the poo off so he only smelled a little and the cloud of smoke from the marijuana he’d brought made it go away. He passed them

his pipe; Maura and Gwen took a hit. Julie said, “Nuh uh, I had

enough already. I would but I’m afraid I might fall off! I mean we’re on a
roof . . .
”

“ ‘She paid the price of smoking dope,’ ” Cliff brayed. “ ‘Girl falls off roof, news at eleven!’ ”

He and Gwen laughed and Julie smiled, covering her braces with

her hand again, but Maura was feeling depressed and cold all of a

sudden. She looked down at the Castleman’s yard. Something was

missing. No skeleton. “Where’s that skeleton gone? Did they take it in?”

Gwen looked at the house where the skeleton had capered.

“Must’ve. He’s gone! That sucks ass. He was the cutest guy around

here.”

[376] AND WHEN YOU CALLED US WE CAME TO YOU

Julie laughed and said, “Don’t be mean to Cliff . . . ”

She said something else too, and Cliff replied, but Maura wasn’t

really hearing what any of them said, now. A feeling of weight was spreading, pushing down on her from above, as if the atmospheric

pressure was suddenly all mad heavy; sounds were hushed and

distant, as if they couldn’t fully make it through the thick, laden air.

A movement drew her to look, with difficulty, to the left—and

she saw the skeleton from the Castleman’s yard climbing up onto the roof of the porch.

Hallucination. The dope.

But she didn’t believe it was the dope. Especially when Gwen

yelled, loud enough to penetrate the thick air. “How’d they make that thing climb up here!” Even that shout came out muted, like a voice heard when you’re swimming underwater.

As Maura watched, the skeleton pulled itself up like a gymnast

from
Cirque du Soleil
: up and then a flip and it landed neatly on the roof—but it didn’t come at them, though Cliff and Julie were

screaming and Gwen was laughing hysterically. It kept going upward.

It jumped into the air, spinning around, a perfect ballet pirouette, its bony fingers waving like ribbons in a wind, singing to itself in some forgotten language. It sounded like some guttural old language from Europe, like you’d expect Vikings to talk.

Up the wicked skeleton went, dancing its way into the air, defying gravity. Was it a flying machine, a balloon?

She knew it wasn’t. Something was whispering to her . . . something was explaining . . .

She heard Cliff shout, “Awesome, fucking awesome!”

And the whispering male voice said, as it had before, “
Awesome . . . ”

But it meant something else. Maura felt awe when she saw those

the skeleton summoned.