At school that week they studied bats. It was obvious that the teachers were starting to think about Halloween, too. The teacher handed out sheets of paper covered with line drawings of a bat, little numbers and lines pointing to the parts of its body. They talked about caves, and the definition of “nocturnal,” which immediately struck Jessy as a useful word. She wanted to be a nocturnal creature, and she was sure she would be, if she didn’t have to get up for school in the morning.
“I’m thinking about a story,” she told Karma at lunch. “It’s about a girl whose sister runs away and becomes a rock star.” That was something that had popped into her mind the other night, listening to the radio after the thunderstorm.
“Why did she run away?” Karma asked, already excited. The brother of a kid they knew had run away, and it had caused a lot of excitement. Even though he wasn’t gone long, it had practically turned them both into rock stars all by itself.
“Well, you’d have to leave to become a rock star,” Jessy said. “And Twyla always says she can’t wait to get away from here. And then she comes back on Halloween and helps the little sister drive some ghosts out of their house.”
After school, they played pretending that they were cheerleaders, and they were going to a keg party after the game. All the boys were getting too drunk, and they had to keep their wits about them. Eventually, they ended up in a pretend field, like the gravel pits that Twyla always talked about, but the invisible boyfriends had disappeared, and they were mad at them anyway. So then they had to pretend to walk back to town.
Eventually they came to the spot where the hotel was, on the dirt frontage road on the west side of town.
“We could call for a ride,” Karma said.
“Are you kidding?” Jessy replied. “I’ll be grounded for the rest of my life if my parents find out about this.”
Once they got safely to their make-believe house, they climbed up on Jessy’s bed, their legs hanging over the side.
“That was a close call,” Karma said. “I can’t wait until we go to college. I’m going to date nothing but older men.”
“I think I’m still a little drunk,” Jessy said, flinging herself backward. Then they segued smoothly back to themselves and their real lives.
“Have you decided on a costume yet?” Jessy asked.
“My Mom wants me to go as a hippie,” Karma frowned. “Just because it would be so easy.”
“That’s no fun at all.”
“I know. I might as well be a hobo again.” She thought for a minute. “I was thinking about Harpo Marx.”
“That's a good idea,” Jessy said, respectful. Last summer the TV channel from the city had played a week of Marx Brothers movies, and they watched them every day.
“Yeah, but it wouldn’t be scary.”
“It’s hard to do scary.”
“Yeah.”
Not only did their costumes have to be something they could make themselves, but their parents had to approve whatever they came up with. They didn't want to waste a lot of time on an outfit and then not be allowed to leave the house in it.
They got out the Jack-o-Lantern Box and sifted through what they'd left inside it. Jessy toyed with the ghost mask, the innocent O’s of its open mouth and wide eyes staring up at her. Even if they couldn’t wear it, it shouldn’t go to waste.
“I have an idea,” she said.
First they hung the ghost mask on the front door, with a white paper cut-out of a ghost body below it, shaped with curves, like a two-dimensional sheet. That got them on a roll, so they gathered up scraps of cloth from the bag under the sewing machine, took the old grey cloak from the box, and stuffed the scraps into the middle of it. They tied around it with a piece of twine, so that it looked, roughly, like a head -- a raggedy, scarecrowy one -- atop a dangling body of uneven cloth. Then they hung it from one of the trees in Jessy’s front yard, near the walkway to the house, with another piece of twine.
When that was done, they went into the empty living room to read MAD magazines. Jessy reached under the sofa, where the stack was, all the covers falling off. That’s where they kept all the communal books: the hefty Christmas catalogs, that they’d keep until they got the new ones in November; the People’s Almanac; the big dictionary with its thick, pebbly white cover. She pulled out the magazines and they sprawled out on the floor with them.
Jessy started re-reading one of her favorite articles, a mock catalog for hippies.
“Maybe a hippie isn't such a bad costume,” she said.
“Yeah,” Karma said. “If it wasn't just wearing the same clothes my mom wears all the time.”
Twyla yelled in the door when she came in, and leaned down to see what they were reading. She kind of snorted.
“You don’t even know what a head shop is,” she said.
“I do so,” Jessy insisted. She did, sort of, from reading about them in MAD, and from hearing Twyla talking with her friends. There was a head shop a couple of towns away, where they got the feathered clips they hung in their hair, and where Twyla had bought a t-shirt with a nickel-like picture of an Indian head and the word “Piute” on it, which she didn’t really understand, although she pretended to.
“What are you going to be for Halloween?” Jessy asked.
“Still grounded.” Twyla dropped herself onto the sofa, looking exhausted and exasperated.
“No, I mean it. Why don't you want to dress up?”
“Because I'm not a little kid. It's bad enough, I’ll probably have to do the Trick or Treat for UNICEF again, which is so stupid. And then there’s usually a party at the church afterwards, to keep us from going out and soaping windows.”
“Are you going to soap any windows?”
Twyla glared at her. Jessy knew you that don’t reveal your plans ahead of time, only afterwards, when it was a fate accompli, but she still thought Twyla could tell her. Last year, a bunch of guys Twyla knew had toilet-papered a bunch of teachers' houses, and they hadn’t even gotten caught. Twyla claimed that she hadn’t taken actual part in this, but Jessy didn't trust her at all.
“Listen,” Twyla said, suddenly softening. “If you ever do stuff like that, stick to things that are annoying, but that don’t do any actual damage. Like, soap on the windows will wash off, but shaving cream on a car is trouble. If you get caught, it’s better to be a nuisance. That’s not a real crime.”
Jessy couldn’t imagine her and Karma doing anything like that, but she nodded.
“And no fire,” Twyla added.
“What?”
“Drunk boys and fire are a really bad idea.”
Jessy nodded wisely. “I bet.”
“One year, a couple of guys set a fire in Mr. Jensen’s yard.” That was the chemistry teacher, who was known for being really hard-nosed.
Jessy sat up and folded the magazine shut.
“Is the party really that bad?” she asked. “I mean, nobody I know is having a Halloween party. That sounds kind of fun.”
“Did you ever read that Agatha Christie book?”
“Which one?”
“You know. The one with the bobbing for apples.”
Jessy felt a little shuddery, but she didn’t let on.
“I haven’t gotten around to it,” she said. She liked most of the mysteries that she’d read, but just hearing about the apple-bobbing murder creeped her out.
“All it does is get your hair wet, and ruin your eye makeup,” Twyla said. “And it’s dangerous, leaving those buckets lying around.” Her voice sounded sly, because she knew what Jessy was thinking.
“Which Agatha Christie is that?” Karma asked, after Twyla left. They’d both read And Then There Were None, which had been just about as disturbing as they wanted.
“It’s a mystery about a Halloween party,” Jessy told her. “Someone gets drowned in the bucket of water, that they used for bobbing for apples.”
She imagined putting her head over the water, thinking it was safe. Like when she was little and hadn’t ever wanted
to put her face in the water when she washed her hair. It had made her feel claustrophobic, knowing that she wouldn’t be able to breathe, even if she really didn’t need to breathe right then anyway. It was too easy to imagine someone coming up behind her and holding her head down.
“Did you see what they did to the tree?” their dad said when he got home. Their mom marched out to the porch and stared at it.
“What is that?”
“It's a hanged man,” Twyla said, like it was obvious.
“That's the most morbid thing I've ever seen,” their mom said, then turned to their dad. “Don't you think they should take that down?”
“It certainly looks like Halloween,” he said, so it got to stay.
That night, Jessy pulled out her secret notebook, flipping past the notes on the merits of vampires versus ghosts, and the page full of potential titles: The Spiders in the Churchyard, The Phantom in the Snow.
It had always been easy before. She just sat down and wrote something. But for some reason, this year it was a lot harder.
She started to write a description of the little sister getting ready for trick or treating, and drinking a glass of pineapple-coconut juice. It was hard to describe, though, and that nagged at her. Then she wrote a little scene about a car pulling up, the big sister getting out of the car in a black leather jacket, her hair all big and teased-up, like photos she’d seen in Twyla’s magazines. But she couldn’t figure out how to fit some ghosts into it.
After her bedtime, she watched a shadow move behind the haunted house window shade. She stared at it for a long time. Tonight she wasn’t hearing anything in the house, but imagined something outside, like the shadow was scratching at the wall, the way Cupcake did at the door when she wanted to come back inside. Jessy lay awake, while all around her, it just got later and darker.
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Part Two: Johnny the Hangman
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The Jack-o-Lantern Box Page 19
