by Jamie Gilson
“Oh, Harvey,” she sighed, “you ought to be a beer can for Halloween like last year.”
The genuine antique 1980 Pig Day T-shirt I was wearing didn’t count as a costume, even though I was sure it was pretty rare, probably worth hundreds of dollars to somebody. I bet they’d never even heard of one in Chicago.
“Seventh graders don’t dress up,” I told her. “That’s for babies.”
“Not even to trick-or-treat? You’re short. You could get by with it if you had on a mask.”
“I don’t want to trick-or-treat,” I lied. “Who needs to eat all that junk?”
“Mrs. Broderick is bringing apples to school. That’s not junk. She’s going to be Martha Washington with a cotton-ball wig.”
Explaining Halloween to Tom wasn’t going to be easy. I had to say something, though. It clearly wasn’t normal heading off to school on a warmish fall day with a skipping tube of toothpaste. Especially when, right off, we ran into Frankenstein, a banana, and the Queen of Hearts walking with a gorilla in a tutu.
This was the last day I’d be walking to school with Tom. Monday he’d be on his own from his new house on the other side of school. Probably I wouldn’t be seeing too much of him at all. I wasn’t in his math group, and he liked that best. Maybe he wouldn’t want to do any more drink-drank-drunk-but-not-think-thank-thunk stuff with me. Like Quint said, he probably didn’t need me for a friend. When he moved out, it was like my part of the project was over and I’d earned a grade like C-minus. Or even zilch.
“Boo!” A skeleton jumped out in front of us, and I almost shed my skin. I just wasn’t expecting it is all.
Tom looked stunned. “Why?” he asked me. Not a bad question.
“Well, on Halloween,” I told him, “little kids wear funny costumes.”
“Yes,” he answered. It was the yes that means, “I have heard what you said.” Nothing more.
“Halloween … is for scaring people,” I went on, acting out scaring. Boo! like the skeleton. But Julia looked about as scary as a piece of toast. Halloween was harder to explain than no kidding.
“Yes?” He waited, I expect, for something more.
Across the street, two Draculas raced down the sidewalk, their capes flapping, their faces green. They shrieked. They were Billy and Simon without bicycles.
I couldn’t for the life of me think why Halloween. Halloween just is. Every year it is.
“Tuan.” Julia tugged at his arm. “Look, there’s a fairy princess.” She pointed to a little girl who was carefully stepping out of a car in front of the school. The girl waved a silver wand with a star, so that the ribbons sewn to it rippled. “She’s a fairy princess—just like the one in your country who got divorced with all those babies.” The girl had long blond hair that reached almost to the ruffle of her pink net ballet dress. On her head was a crown of silver sequins.
“Fairy princess?” he asked.
“Fairy princess,” Julia said. “The wand gives it away.”
This was not, I was pretty sure, how Tom had imagined his greatest-great-grandmother to look. “Halloween,” I explained.
All around us swarmed ghosts, bees, hobos, Siamese twins. I wondered if two weeks before, Tom could possibly have imagined that Illinois would be like this. A four-foot red crayon skipped by while the mother of his country waved her wand at a brand-new Chevy station wagon.
None of the kids at the junior high were dressed up, but Ms. Ward wore a witch’s hat, had two teeth blacked out, and handed us each sacks of pumpkin seeds she’d roasted herself.
In art class we each got a small pumpkin to decorate. Manfred Chestnut’s dad had sent in a pickup truck full of runts just for cutting into scraggle-toothed smiles. Tom’s was different from everyone else’s. He didn’t know what a jack-o’-lantern was supposed to look like, and so he thought the long curved stem was its nose. Carving out tiny, tight eyes and feathery eyebrows close to the stem, he then cut in a long, sad mouth and a moustache with flipped-down ends. The art teacher held it up and said it was creative.
By one o’clock on Saturday, the real Halloween, Tom’s creative pumpkin was sitting with the boxes and sacks of the Nguyens’ stuff on our front porch, all set to move to the new house. Right next to the jack-o’-lantern was this fifty-pound bag of rice tied with a blue bow. We’d given it to the Nguyens for housewarming. One of those normal Uncle Ben’s rice boxes would last them only about two days, and so they thought it was a great gift. Carrying it out slung on my back, I’d decided not to put Santa Claus high on my list of career goals.
I collapsed into the porch swing, pushed off, and cruised back for about five minutes, waiting for Jeff to drive up in the van so we could load up. Project Tuan/Tom was almost over.
Next to me lay the two old rubbery masks I’d brought down from Pete’s closet. I mean, it was Halloween, kid stuff or not. I pulled on my favorite, a green-gray monster face with raw pink scars and gruesome fangs. I snarled to myself, and then, again, louder and meaner, as Julia flung open the porch door. She was still toothpaste, but now her tube was smeared with the Halloween candy that melts in your hands, not in your mouth.
“Is that you, Harvey?” she asked quietly.
“Narzak,” I growled. “I am Narzak the Nasty!” Leaping out of the swing, I lifted her up and tossed her, screaming, into the air. “Happy birthday, earthling,” I growled. Her party was set for two o’clock, and she was about to become the first earthling toothpaste tube in history to own a dog.
She didn’t know it yet, but she’d begged so hard and so long and Mom and Dad had said, “Absolutely no. No, no, a thousand times no,” so many times that they’d used up their supply. Mom’s parrot tulips were just going to have to look out for themselves.
When Tom swung out the door with a Sears shopping bag in each hand, I tilted my monster face back and grinned out from under.
“Halloween today also?” he asked. I nodded and tossed him a big-eared sad-clown mask with a fat nose that honked when you squeezed it. He slipped it on.
We’d had to explain birthday parties to Tom, too. They don’t have them in Vietnam, and he didn’t even know when his birthday was. Julia sat on the edge of the swing. “People give you presents on your birthday.”
“Julia!” I yelped.
“I didn’t say he had to.” Rocking the swing back and forth, she started to hum, “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to …”
“Happy birthday, Julia Trumble, happy birthday to you.” Quint dashed up the steps, a small suitcase in his hand. “Quint the Quintessential, here to startle, amuse, and confound your gullible guests!” He bowed. “Hi, Zilch. Surprised you’re not dressed as Humpty Dumpty. How you doing, Tuan? You’ve changed, somehow. I can’t put my finger on it.” He squeezed the clown’s rubber nose.
Jeff was late and Quint was early. I hadn’t figured on his seeing me in my mask. Mom was paying him fifteen dollars to entertain the party with his magic, to keep the first graders from pouring lemonade into the house plants and pulling the stuffing out of the living room sofa.
Tom’s father and grandmother came out the front door to wait for Jeff and their ride to their new home. Tom lifted his false face and spoke to them. They looked at him strangely and sat stiffly on the metal porch chairs. Ba Noi folded her hands in her lap.
“Oh, my, Julia, look, they’re coming.” Mom whipped out the front door, her cheek smudged with chocolate from the cake she was frosting.
A Raggedy Ann skipped up the front walk, orange yarn wig flapping, a red triangle painted on her nose, a birthday box under her arm. “Play outside in the leaves for a while, will you, dears,” Mom said, with a smile. “Quint, I’m delighted you’re early. Harvey, I didn’t recognize you. You must get something from the drugstore for that complexion. Perhaps your father has some Green-Off in stock.” Then she honked Tom’s red nose, waved at the Nguyens, and disappeared into the crepe-paper streamers. Quint followed her.
By the time Julia had torn the wrapping off a jumprope with
felt carrot handles, Quint was back on the porch. Around his shoulders he’d tied a black cape lined in satiny red. From his empty hand he produced a small bouquet of paper flowers and gave them to Raggedy Ann. She hid her face in her hands and giggled.
Ba Noi smiled, and then laughed, when she looked out to see a washing machine skipping up the sidewalk carrying a box tied with a silver bow. Sandy Lazar had his head and arms sticking through holes in a carton he’d painted white with black knobs. An old diaper hung out of a circle cut in front to swing open like a door.
“Sloosh!” he yelled at us, waving his arms. “Sloosh, sloosh!”
Quint dashed into the house again, but by the time Sandy had reached the porch, Quint was back to greet him. Opening the washer’s door, Quint stuck his arm in and pulled out red, yellow, green, purple, and polka-dotted scarves, one after the other after the other.
“Hey,” Sandy yelped. “Where’d those come from?” He almost fell on his face trying to bend over and look inside. But he was boxed in. While the kid-flow stopped for a while, Quint’s magic didn’t.
He threw a plain old rope into the air, and it came down with a knot in the middle. Tom and I tugged our masks off to see better. It was good to smell air again that wasn’t rubbery, and to feel that you weren’t hiding inside somebody else’s face.
A skeleton charged up the steps.
“Hi, Ina,” Julia told it. “My mother is paying Quint to make us laugh.”
Quint tickled one of the skeleton’s broad white ribs, and the skeleton laughed. He was earning his money.
“Teach me magic?” Tom asked him.
“Sure. Just sit Zilch up there on the porch railing, wave a wand, give him a push, and he’ll disappear.” He laughed like that was supposed to be a big joke.
All of the kids had arrived, and so Julia started ripping off the rest of the wrapping paper. She got a mechanical camel, a set of paints, a book, and a loaf of plastic French bread that laughed when you picked it up. Quint headed to the other end of the porch to set up his magic table.
I grabbed the neck of his cape and pulled him over to the corner.
“Listen, I don’t know why you’re doing it, but would you stop trying to keep the kid from being my friend.”
“He doesn’t need a friend. He’s got math.” He smoothed the wrinkles out of his cape. “Besides, my uncle Wayne’s right, you know. They don’t belong here.”
“I guess you’re mad that he’s better in math than you.” Quint couldn’t keep up with him. Couldn’t begin to. Mr. Tandy let us go at our own speed, and Tom’s was so fast it was like he had jets on his ankles.
“No way. He just studies more. I could do it easy if I tried.”
The little kids were getting restless, tearing paper, taping ribbons on each other’s noses. The skeleton was starting to cry.
“One thing,” he went on, “they’re going to leave this town. They aren’t Win, they’re Nguyen, and they can’t pretend different. The grandmother,” he nodded toward her, “can’t talk to anybody. The father hardly says anything. The kid is going to math himself into orbit way above you. Then they’ll leave. You’ll see. My uncle’ll get that job, and—”
“Quint!” Julia called. “Aren’t you going to put on a show?”
“And you’ll be best in Mr. Tandy’s class again. Gifted. Big deal.”
Tom was standing behind his father, just waiting for the van to come and take them away, not a part of the party anymore.
“Harvey, it’s time!” Mom said from the kitchen. “Come help.” So I hurried in to get the big present, glad after all that Jeff was late. This I wanted to see. Mom handed me the cardboard carton with Julia’s new singing sensation in it, and I headed back to the porch, carrying the box high above my ears so the kids couldn’t see inside. I set it on Quint’s magic table like she told me.
He was blowing and twisting balloon animals, handing out yellow poodles and orange swans. When the sleeping-dog box was settled, though, he held his arms out wide and announced, “Here now is the grand astonishment of the day. Small wonders, cross your legs and sit tight!” The washing machine squatted, unable to sit. Julia rolled her tube up to her waist to free her knees. “Ladies and gentlemen!” He bowed deeply. “I, Quint the Quintessential, magician extraordinaire, will now attempt to produce from simple, everyday balloons, one Genuine Carnivorous Canine!”
The cross-legged kids in front of him blinked and gasped. Taking a small pink balloon from a sack, he puffed it full. Over and over he made the same shape, twisting them together to make a whole batch of what really did look like a string of hot dogs from the butcher’s. “And what, my clever friends, are these?”
“HOT DOGS!” they yelled, pleased they could tell.
“Absolutely correct. Now, I have on this table, one box, completely and totally empty.” He pointed to it with a wand.
“Show us inside,” the skeleton called. But Quint went on. “Completely and totally empty. But, when I drop in this string of magic see-through hot dogs …” He tossed them lightly into the box. “… and you say the magic word—frankfurter—those hot dogs will, in one magic instant, turn into … but, let’s hear that word!” He whipped the kids into action with his arms.
“FRANKFURTER!” they yelled.
“I can’t hear you.” Quint cupped his ear, trying to catch the word.
“F R A N K F U R T E R !” they yelled again, stretching their heads far forward to make it louder.
The box made a strange, sniffly sound.
Quint nodded to Mom. And they must have worked it out ahead of time because, as he waved a wand, she reached in and lifted out the carnivorous canine puppy. Brown and fuzzy, with a white spot under his chin, he was so new you couldn’t tell what kind he was. He yelped, though, and it was clear the fur wasn’t stuffed with foam.
“Happy birthday from Dad, Harvey, and me,” Mom told Julia, who shrieked and struggled to her feet so she could clutch him.
“His name,” Quint announced grandly, “is Frank.”
“Frank Furter?” she asked, suspiciously.
“One and the same.”
“It is not. His name is Fluffy.” She gave the dog a pythonlike squeeze.
“If you hug him too tight his tail will come off,” I warned her. “And Fluffy is a dumb name for a dog.”
She put the puppy on the floor, holding the kids back with her arms and one outstretched leg.
“Here, Frank,” Quint called. The dog wagged its tail, which didn’t even look loose.
“Here, Fluffy,” Julia called, and the puppy waddled toward her, pausing only to lower its fluffy bottom to wet the floor.
“Ready to go?” Jeff Zito bounded up the front walk. “Sorry to be late. I had a long wedding reception. Beautiful ceremony, though.” He stopped at the top of the porch steps and looked around him. An orange swan popped. Julia picked up Fluffy for him to see. “And I’ve come in the middle of yet another celebration. Happy birthday, Sunshine,” he told Julia, patting her on the cap.
The Nguyens stood and greeted him. Figuring this was it, I picked up the rice to save it from carnivorous canine attack. When I lifted it, rice poured out of a hole that hadn’t been there when I’d set it down. I covered the flow fast so nobody would notice.
“Anything wrong?” Quint asked with an innocent smile.
I shook my head. That hole hadn’t been made by magic.
Tom gathered up a couple of shopping bags, ready to start off for the van, but he stopped and put them down. Reaching into his jacket pocket, he took out his sack of marbles, poked in it for a minute, and pulled out the big blue cat’s eye.
“Happy birthday, Julia,” he said. “Happy birthday to you.”
10
The Snow Dragon
I DON’T KNOW why they didn’t let him go with them. I mean, she’s his mother, after all. I would have bugged everybody until they took me along. What’s one day of school? If you’ve got a sore throat, they keep you home and don’t think a day’s such
a big deal. But when Tom’s father told him to do something, he did it. I never heard him try to argue out.
They’d been in their new house three weeks, and Tom’s mother and the baby were finally flying into Chicago on that same early Saturday morning plane. Jeff had decided to drive them to Chicago this time on the day before the flight so the Nguyens could go shopping for groceries. They’d stay overnight with friends of his. There were a lot of things Ba Noi missed eating that she couldn’t get at Quackenbush’s grocery store. She longed for them even though she knew, Tom said, that “the tree is now a boat. It cannot be a tree again.” This meant, I think, that she understood things, even food, wouldn’t ever be the same as in Vietnam. Still, she really wanted to eat some squid again—or octopus, I couldn’t quite tell which.
That’s because Tom had drawn pictures, and we’d looked in dictionaries and a batch of cookbooks in the library. Finally we’d come up with a list of groceries to give Mr. Quackenbush. Most he didn’t have, didn’t even know where to order.
So, squid (or octopus), bamboo shoots, lemon grass, and rice paper were all on the list they took. And so was a kind of fermented fish sauce Tom called nuoc man. That Ba Noi wanted more than anything. They were going to buy bottles and bottles of it at a Vietnamese grocery store in Chicago.
On Friday, Nam Nguyen got a day off from work, Ba Noi bundled up to go traveling and grocery shopping and talking to people who could understand her words, and Tom came to our house to spend the night.
For two days it had been snowing, the first snowfall of the year, coming down slow but steady. Tom liked to look at it, but he wasn’t used to its cold. He’d never felt snow before, only seen pictures of it.
After we’d worked straightening the stockroom, I got him to go down to the basement to play a few games with Felix. No verbs, though. No kidding.
The snow fell like crazy—fat, wet flakes that settled in clumps. Julia and her friends were out rolling around in it as Tom and I headed downstairs. We started off with one of Pete’s Zagnab programs. I was just about to locate the treasure, too, when I typed in that I wanted to turn (L) instead of (R) and Felix said, SORRY ABOUT THAT, HARVEY, YOU HAVE JUST FALLEN PLOTCH INTO A PIT OF TEN-HEADED, YELLOW-LIPPED, DIRTY-TOENAILED, SLIME-GREEN SERPENTS. YOU ARE DEAD, DEAD, DEAD—ALMOST. And when I couldn’t find the steps back up the pit’s scummy sides, Felix called me a DROOLING, DITHERING DOLT. Then he let me know I’d been serpent-swallowed and said, OK, HARVEY, CARE TO PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER AND TRY AGAIN?
