For most people, that’s the way they like it.
The story ends, and they turn the page.
So life moved on, the way it does. I finished junior high and started high school. But everything I did, I figured Roger would have done better. It made me feel kind of like a shadow, two steps behind a guy who wasn’t even there to cast it anymore.
Fresh out of high school, I got drafted. Uncle Sam sent me to Vietnam, and I stayed there four years. That was the first thing I felt I did on my own, so it didn’t seem like such a bad deal to me. Of course, I couldn’t leave everything behind. I took Roger’s Louisville Slugger with me. Sometimes I used it on scruffy baseball fields . . . most of the larger bases had ball fields. Sometimes I took it into the jungle, but I never used it there. It was just something to help me keep away the bad dreams.
Funny to be in a jungle and dream about a desert, or a mummy, but it happened.
Over and over, night after night.
But after a couple years, I stopped dreaming about the mummy. I dreamed about the jungle instead, and the war. I was crazy enough to think that marked some kind of progress, but looking back on it maybe all I did was trade one bad dream for another.
Then I came home and slipped back into the world. I borrowed a car, drove around. Started doing some of the same things I’d done before I left. And then the dreams started to change again.
I dreamed about my brother, and Butcher’s Lake.
And the girl in the princess mask.
And the mummy.
I’d wake up sweating, with my head feeling like it was ready to crack. Finally one morning I didn’t go for a drive. I started looking at the newspaper classifieds instead. Figured it was time to find work, something new that would put the past behind me. For a while I even thought about college, because I could have used my G. I. Bill benefits.
But that whole plan changed one morning with a couple of knocks on the front door. It was Sheriff Cross. Older and grayer, but still built like a guy who could hold his own with just about anyone.
“Hey, Sergeant. Welcome home.”
“Thanks.” I knew I should have said more, since I was practically a kid the last time I’d seen him, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Got a minute?” he asked. “I’ve got something here I’d like to show you.”
“Sure.”
Sheriff Cross had a new leather wallet. He flipped it open. There was a deputy sheriff’s badge inside. He flipped the wallet closed and handed it to me. I took it from him.
“I think you’re the guy I’m looking for,” he said. “What do you think?”
“I don’t need to think. I’m in.”
“That’s what I like to hear. We’ve got some paperwork to fill out. An application . . . some other stuff. You’ll have six weeks up north in the training academy. You’ll have to pass a physical, some other tests. You can talk to the other guys about that. They can let you know what’s coming.”
“Sounds good.”
“I thought it would. Now let’s go down to the cop shop and I’ll introduce you around. This is going to work out fine.”
The town had changed while I was gone.
Actually, that’s an understatement.
What had really changed was the whole damn country.
It seemed like a century had passed since the lockstep America of the fifties. The sixties had definitely made their mark. And even though it was 1973, the sixties were holding on, the same way the fifties had right up until the time that JFK took that bullet down in Dallas. Even in our little corner of the world, it might as well have been the Summer of Love. Grass and acid and downers had come to town. Hair got longer; guitars got fuzzy. No one remembered Elvis or Mickey Spillane. Truth be told, most of my contemporaries didn’t remember Jack Kerouac, either.
But in the heart of the town, and the heart of America, not much was different. Same stores, same people, same crew cuts on the older guy who held the keys to the store. Every now and then some kid got hired, and there were a few twentysomethings checking groceries at the market or selling TVs over at Sears or working down at the bank in the teller’s cage. But they came and went. They didn’t stick around long enough to wear out the linoleum or pocket the keys to the store, like the old guard had. For them, it didn’t seem like ringing up corn flakes was a lifelong ambition, or moving a weekly quota of Magnavox consoles, or stamping deposits in the Christmas Club accounts. No. The twentysomethings would catch a whiff of sweeter possibilities and move on, and the old guys would grind out their cigs and put up a HELP WANTED sign, and some fresh face would take the bait and give the forty-hour grind a test-drive while the old guard grumbled about training another kid who wasn’t going to stay the course.
So, in that way, things were pretty much the same, it was just that the faces changed more often. Tote things in those terms, and you’d say that all that had really changed were the clothes and the haircuts and the vices. But around the corners, the town had gotten a little frayed.
Take Charlie Steiner’s house. Charlie’s mother had passed away when I was in high school. Then one day his father packed up his pickup and left the place behind. The house sat vacant the whole time I was in ’Nam, and it was the “20” for one of the first calls I rolled on after Ben Cross pinned a badge on my chest.
I still remember that night. Wind rustling through overgrown trees around the place as I pulled up the drive, no lights inside but a fire in the fireplace that cast flickering ribbons against windows dull with grime. I killed my lights as I cut off the dirt road that went out toward Butcher’s Lake, and I killed the patrol cruiser’s engine ten feet after that. We’d had reports of stoners using the place as a crash pad, and I didn’t want to leave them a way out if they had wheels.
The walk to the house was a long one. Not because I was worried about what I’d find inside. For the first time since the jungle I felt edgy. I mean, really edgy. I had a .38 strapped to my leg, but what I wanted in my hand was an M-16, or even Roger’s Louisville Slugger. Something familiar, something I could trust. It was a weird feeling, as if yesterday’s baggage were ready to bury me as deep as Charlie Steiner, right along with the new future I was building. I felt like I was on Charlie’s turf, and even though I knew he was six feet under in Potter’s Field, that night he cast a long shadow.
Lucky for me, Charlie’s shadow got shorter once I took charge of the situation. I banged through the front door and hit the occupants with my flashlight beam. A couple of the stoners rabbited through a back window, and two girls spread out on a mattress in front of the fireplace were so toasted on downers they didn’t even wake up. It was almost comical. Right away I forgot all about Charlie. I nudged those girls and shook them, and after about ten minutes I even got them up walking, but it was tough to manage the both of them. Before I could do anything about it one would wander off and find her way back to the mattress, and when I went to grab her, the other stumbled out the door and fell asleep in the weeds in front of the place.
I called it in to Jack Morrison, who was on duty back at the cop shop. He said he’d roll out and give me a hand with the girls. In the meantime, he told me to check out the rest of the place. Right away I knew what he meant.
He didn’t mean the house.
He meant Charlie Steiner’s pyramid.
By that time I’d cooled out. Still, you never know what you’ll find, and I’d tangled enough with Charlie in my dreams that I wasn’t looking forward to a walk up his own personal madman’s trail. But it was my job. So I checked behind the main house and found the little deer run path that led up to the A-frame. No lights out there except my flashlight, and the wind had died. If there had been a noise, I certainly would have heard it. A mouse skittering across the porch. A mummy’s padded footfall. Anything. I would have heard it.
But I didn’t hear anything that night.
I walked up to the A-frame.
I swung open the door.
I didn’t know wha
t to expect.
My flashlight beam skittered across the floor and over the walls. But it was just an empty room. There was nothing there at all. And that taught me something . . . at least for a while. Even though it was a lesson that didn’t stick, I held onto it—and that moment—for a few months.
For a while, it convinced me everything would be okay.
For a while, I actually believed that dreams were ephemeral.
About a month later, the sheriff called me up on a Sunday morning and asked me to go to breakfast down at the diner. Ben told me he’d bought the old Steiner place, and was thinking he’d fix it up and turn it into a rental. Maybe even look into moving into the place himself when he hit retirement age and was ready to get a little farther out of town. He said it seemed like a good investment, and that he’d make some money if nothing else.
“Sounds like a sweet deal,” I said. “I’m going to bank as much of my check as I can this year. Maybe one of these days I’ll have enough to start looking around for a place myself.”
“That’s a good plan,” Ben said. “Can’t be easy being under your parents’ roof again.”
“Well, I’m probably going to grab a studio apartment after I get a few more checks, but paying rent will definitely cut down on the savings. Can’t have it both ways, though.”
“Maybe I can help you out with that.”
“How do you figure?”
Ben took a sip of coffee. “The Steiner place needs a lot of work. I’m looking for someone to help me out with it. Way I see it, you could live there rent-free. Clear the brush around the place. Do some carpentry. Some painting. I’d come in on the weekends and help out. How’s that sound?”
I didn’t know what to say, but I knew I had to say something.
“Well . . . hey, it’s hard to turn down free rent.”
Ben nodded and set down his coffee cup. “Look, I know you have a history with Charlie Steiner, and this was his house. Maybe this isn’t the best move for you. If you have any second thoughts—”
“I know what you’re saying, Ben . . . but I’ll probably always have second thoughts. But I can’t bury the past, and maybe I shouldn’t try. Maybe what I need to do is confront it. You know, come to terms with it. And maybe working on that house will help me do that.”
“Okay . . . but if it doesn’t work out—”
“Then we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
We shook on the deal, and that was that. I moved into the Steiner house, and fortunately the night with the crash-pad girls was still fresh in my mind. I told myself everything would be okay, just as it had been that night, and if it wasn’t . . . well, I’d find a way to tell Ben that it wasn’t going to work, even if that was the last thing I wanted to do after the conversation we’d had.
The first week, I lay awake at night listening to every creak and moan the old house made, and it seemed like those old fears had moved in with me. But eventually, spending so much time in that old house made the worries I’d had about moving into the place seem as out-of-style as a teenager with a crew cut. And it got easier once I started to work on the place. I took one thing at a time, and focused in on each project. A few weeks went by, and I’d cleared all the brush around the house, even chopped a wider path up to Charlie’s pyramid so I could get up there with a wheelbarrow and some tools. I figured I’d use that pyramid as practice before I started on the main house.
To tell the truth, at first I was tempted to talk to Ben about knocking the pyramid down. After all, that had really been Charlie’s place. But if part of this deal was about confronting Charlie Steiner, then I knew I couldn’t do that. So I decided to work on it first.
I replaced a few broken windows, then gave the place a coat of paint inside and out. The further I got with work on the A-frame, the less I thought about Charlie and the past. Instead, maybe for the first time ever, I started to think about myself and what lay ahead of me. I didn’t know what that was going to be. Sometimes it was scary to think about it and sometimes it was exciting, but in the end it didn’t matter.
In the end, I didn’t think about myself for very long at all.
I was working with Ben Cross the night the call came in. Since starting at the cop shop I’d been on day shift with the sheriff, and by this time he was breaking me in to work swings. That way, I’d have my mornings free and could work on the house before clocking in at three, and Ben could come by and do some work of his own after he clocked out without having to worry about crowding my space. That way we could double-shift projects during the week. The plan was to work together on weekends on stuff that took two pairs of hands, and we’d get the place in shape faster. It made sense, and I knew going in that I’d take swing shift over graveyards any day. I’d pulled those shifts a few times and they made for a long night of patrolling empty streets, rattling doorknobs, and (mostly) trying to stay awake until the sun came up.
It was July. Not too hot for that time of year, with the possibility of a summer storm blowing in. It was around ten p.m. and neither one of us had had any dinner. We were talking about where to catch a bite when the main line rang. Ben wasn’t on the phone more than a minute. And he didn’t say much besides “yeah” or “uh-huh” before he finished with the important one: “I’ll check it out.”
He cradled the receiver and shot me a look.
“What’s the deal?” I asked.
“You know that guy who owns the dairy farm out by the county two-lane?”
“You mean Vince Kaehler?”
“Yeah, that’s the one. His ranch backs up against Butcher’s Lake on the north side. He found a stretch of downed barbed-wire this afternoon. Turned out some of his stock got loose. A couple cows wandered up the dirt road that skirts the lake, and Vince spent the evening rounding them up. He just got back to the house after fixing his fence. Says he saw a campfire down there by the water, heard some loud rock ’n’ roll and some screaming, like a party was going on.”
“Loud rock ’n’ roll? He actually said that?”
“Well, what he really said was goddamn loud hippie music, but that’s close enough.”
“Yeah. Well . . . Vince is a Merle Haggard kind of guy.”
“Uh-huh.” Cross smiled. “And he didn’t say party. He said orgy.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No . . . not even a little bit.”
Quiet hung there between us, but just for a second.
“So you want to roll with me on this one?”
“Sure, boss,” I said, and we strapped on the hardware.
Of course, at that point it hardly seemed worth it. I mean, strapping on our guns or rolling on the call at all. I figured I was in for an instant replay of crash-pad night at Charlie Steiner’s. Maybe I’d even find those same two stoner girls who’d been asleep on the mattress in front of Charlie’s fireplace that night, only tonight they’d be snoozing on a couple of air mattresses out in the middle of Butcher’s Lake.
Man, was I ever wrong.
Dead wrong.
I killed the lights before I pulled up to the rusty guardrail by the eucalyptus grove. The night really wasn’t that much different than that Halloween back in ’63 when I’d met up with Charlie Steiner. But I wasn’t really thinking about Charlie on this night.
Part of that had to do with living in his house. It seemed the creep factor around the place had reached the point of diminishing returns, as if the work I’d done there had exorcised his spirit. The other part was easier to explain, because it didn’t have anything to do with a ghost of the past—it was all sensory input and gut reaction as Ben Cross rolled down his window and a couple specific varieties of noise spilled up that black little path that led to Butcher’s Lake.
Laughter. Lots of it. And all of it male.
And music. A transistor cranked up to ten, playing Iron Butterfly.
“Goddamn,” Ben said. “It is hippie music.”
I couldn’t argue. I couldn’t return the joke, either.
Because I wasn’t listening to the music. The sound of that laughter reached down and grabbed me by the balls. It was over the edge and more than a little mad, reminding me of party sounds I’d once heard in the jungles of Vietnam. We’d run across a village another platoon had raided looking for Cong. We’d come upon them at dusk, tipping back bottles of Cutty Sark, partying with VC soldiers who were dead and others who wished they were.
Those weren’t good memories.
And the laughter I heard that night at Butcher’s Lake brought them back.
Of course, I didn’t mention any of that to Ben Cross.
There was only time to size up the situation and move forward.
That’s what we did. We didn’t take the trail through the eucalyptus grove. We figured we’d cut around to the dirt access road that led to the lake and block it with the cruiser, just in case the laughing crew had wheels. That way we’d pen them in, because there was only one way out of there.
I backed up, then started down the dirt road. I thumbed the lights, pushing in the knobbed rod until the headlights died. That left the parking lights, which were just bright enough to get me down the road. I knew where I was going: this was the same road I took to the Steiner house. When I hit the forked cutoff down to the lake itself I knew I’d gone far enough, because there was a solid-panel Dodge van parked about halfway down the fork, alongside a couple of choppers.
“Bikers,” Ben said. “Shit.”
We ran the plates. The Dodge had been reported stolen three days before, more than two hundred miles away. The choppers were registered to a couple of bikers with gang affiliations and rap sheets a mile long. With my Spidey senses already tingling, this didn’t surprise me. I don’t know if Ben had a clue before the hard news came over the squawk-box, but he didn’t look happy. Any way you sliced it, the idea we were in for an easy time of it rousting a bunch of partying teenagers had definitely gone south in a big way.
We got out of the car.
That laughter was still there, hanging on the wind like a coming storm.
Ben said, “Watch yourself.”
I said, “You do the same, boss.”
HALLOWEEN: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre Page 5
