by Jack Gantos
“No offense,” Bunny said matter-of-factly. “We talk about everyone this way. Tailors look at people and know the size of their suits. Dad looks at people and knows the size of their coffins. It’s just part of the funeral business. Every living person,” she sang in a radio jingle voice, “is just a breath away from a payday for us.
“Anyway,” Bunny carried on, changing the subject, “looks like Mrs. Custer returned to make her last stand.”
“Good grief,” Miss Volker cried out in frustration, and clawed at the air like a dog scratching a door. “Her name is Mrs. Custard. Not Custer! She may be the last dessert but not the last stand.” Swiftly she spun around and gave the radio a solid kick. It held its ground.
I had read about General Custer and how he and his troops slaughtered Indians on the Montana plains until the Indians had had enough of it. At the Battle of the Little Bighorn the Indians turned the tables on General Custer and slaughtered the troops right down to the last man standing—and then they killed him too. I could imagine that bloody battle as if I were the last man killed and scalped and I felt a pressure build up in my nose kind of like when a steaming teakettle is just about to whistle. I thought for sure I was on the brink of my old bloody nose blasts, but after a moment the pressure retreated. The dam of scar tissue in my nose was still holding strong, and I dropped down from the lowest joist and landed next to Bunny.
“Oh, not to change the subject,” Bunny said as she turned toward me, “but what are you wearing for trick-or-treating tonight?”
“The same as always,” I replied, plucking cobwebs from my hair. “My Grim Reaper costume.”
“Not that old thing,” she burst out, and stomped her little foot.
“But I love my Grim Reaper outfit,” I said, and struck a fearsome pose. “Everyone is afraid of the Messenger of Death knocking on their front door.”
“You have to come up with something new,” she demanded. “Something extra scary. Because I have something killer good, and I’m not telling you what it is just yet.”
“Well, how about I make a Hells Angel costume,” I suggested. “That’s scary.”
She made a blah face. “Come on,” she encouraged. “Think! Make it one step scarier. Use your noodle.”
I couldn’t really think of anything scarier than the gang of Hells Angels that had moved into Norvelt like a nest of angry hornets.
“Okay,” she said impatiently. “I’ll give you a hint—Gantos boy.”
“Spizz!” I shouted merrily. “Yes. I could be Spizz.” I turned and looked toward Miss Volker.
“That’s psychopathic,” she said, glaring at me and raising her leg back like a horse about to kick. “You should be ashamed to go as a menacing serial killer.”
I should have been, but it sounded so deranged I knew it would be the best costume in town. And besides, Bunny was jumping up and down and waving her sausage arms as if she were on fire.
“Yes, Killer Spizz!” she hollered. “Poisoner Spizz! Murderer Spizz!” Bunny stood on her tiptoes and grabbed my shoulder. “And,” she added, “I’ll even loan you his adult tricycle. My dad bought it from the town and is planning to weld a passenger seat on the back and charge tourists a buck to ride it on a tour of the remaining dead-old-lady houses.”
“That is shameful!” Miss Volker remarked. “This town is really going downhill fast.”
I smiled at Bunny. “And now I know what you are wearing for Halloween,” I said. She leaned forward and whispered in my ear.
“Dead old lady. But you better keep it to yourself because you-know-who won’t like it.”
“Yep,” I whispered back, then shifted my eyes toward Miss Volker, who was still glaring at me.
“Bunny,” she said harshly. “Take the wheelbarrow and haul this junk over to the Community Center. The two of you should be horsewhipped for making fun of dead old ladies.”
Bunny grabbed the coiled body of the tuba and heaved it into the wheelbarrow as if it were a brass octopus. Then she lifted the handles of the wheelbarrow and buzzed off like a small outboard engine at the back end of a river barge.
Once she left, Miss Volker turned to me. “Death may seem a million miles away from you,” she said with an icy voice, “but death has already reached my front porch and I don’t need some peewee serial killer knocking on my door with murderous shrieks of ‘Trick or treat!’”
She was always good at making me feel guilty about my morbid ideas. “Maybe I should be horsewhipped,” I said contritely, and ambled toward her to gently inch the tape from around her wrist and flashlight without peeling off any papery old skin. I knew I should be sorry because there wasn’t anything funny about what had happened to all the sweet old Norvelt ladies.
“Now that Mrs. Custard is back,” I observed, trying to find something upbeat to say, “it means you aren’t the last old lady alive in Norvelt, so Spizz can’t marry you.”
“That’s good for me,” she agreed without sounding agreeable. “But it could be bad for Mrs. Custard.”
“What do you mean?”
“What if he comes back and does her in like he did all the others?” she suggested.
“He can’t come back here,” I said, shocked at the thought. “He’d be spotted.”
“And they’d hang him,” she said, and grotesquely stretched her neck over to one side and stuck out her tongue.
“That’s awful,” I remarked.
“Sure is,” she agreed. “Because he deserves even worse.”
“Worse than hanging?” I cried out.
“Way worse,” she said coldly. “He deserves to have me tormenting him for all the days of his life.”
Then she gave the Philco a ferocious kick from behind and it fell over onto its face. “Finally!” she proudly declared, and rubbed her hands together with the satisfaction of a job well done. “It took me a few tries but I put it six feet under for good.”
2
When I returned home Mom was sharpening a kitchen knife against a whetstone and had a loose sack of purple beets to peel and slice. I could tell right away that she was peeved just by the deliberate way she set down the knife and stone and roughly wiped her hands on her apron. It wasn’t the knife that worried me. When she was angry her eyes were sharper than any blade.
“I want to talk to you about something I found in your bedroom,” she said seriously. “Something very important.”
“Something mature?” I ventured to ask. “Or immature?”
“Immature!” she promptly confirmed, and in an instant picked up the knife and brought it down on a beet with so much force it split in two and shot both ways across the length of the countertop.
Oh cheeze, I thought as I followed her down the hall, what could she have found? There was a long list of taboo stuff hidden in my bedroom. If she’d found anything, I hoped it was just the dried-out roadkill squirrel I kept in my winter boot or the blacksnake skull I found by the garden.
My hoard of dead animal pieces was the least problematic of my secrets. If she discovered the BB gun Bunny Huffer gave me to shoot Hells Angels roaring loudly past my front yard, then I would be grounded for life. But I was too afraid to shoot at them, even though Bunny said it might lead to some good business for her dad. Also, I knew BBs would just bounce off their tough gray skin that looked like rhinoceros hide, and as I ran away they would track me down and then cut out my tongue and turn me into one of the fiendish tattooed baby doll mascots they barbwired onto the front of their Harleys.
So, instead of using the BB gun outside, I had made a secret BB gun target in my bedroom out of a big piece of cardboard. I drew a pretty lousy picture of a Nazi helmet sitting on a grinning skull. I had painted bull’s-eyes inside the skull’s eye sockets and they were now pocked and shiny with copper BBs from where I had shot them so many times. I knew if Mom found the BB gun and target, it would immediately remind her of me shooting Dad’s sniper rifle at the drive-in on the first day of summer vacation and blowing myself off the picnic table an
d bursting all the capillaries in my nose and bleeding like a stuck pig. At that moment I wasn’t sure who would hurt me the most: the Hells Angels or my own mom.
Please, I begged silently as I followed Mom down the hall, if you don’t find the BB gun and target, I promise I’ll bend the rifle barrel in a U-shape and just shoot myself in the chest.
But her temper was not scalding-hot because of anything I was worried about. It was something much worse.
She marched directly into my room and with a quick jerk of her hand lifted the corner of my mattress and slid it around to one side. What she revealed made me stiff with fear, and I struck a terrified pose like a plaster cast of one of those lava burn victims at Pompeii. She had found my banned stash of Classics Illustrated comic books.
“I thought I told you to read the real classics,” she said sternly, and gave me a piercing look. “Especially now that school is shut down.”
“These are the classics,” I said reverently, and reached toward them. “It says Classics on the cover—see? They’re educational.”
“Not comic book versions,” she replied sharply. “I meant the whole original book.” She pointed to a stack of dog-eared paperbacks she had pulled from the lending library shelf at the Community Center.
I knew what she meant. I wasn’t stupid. I glanced at Moby-Dick. It was thicker than our old family Bible. Then there was The Deerslayer. Pudd’nhead Wilson. The House of the Seven Gables.
“The Classics Illustrated versions are just as good,” I said lamely.
“No they are not,” she shot back. “It’s like saying being an immature boy is the same as being a grown man.”
“But I’m a boy,” I argued. “I should be doing immature boy things.”
“And then you’ll stay a boy forever. Believe me, I don’t want to raise a big baby in this house. These,” she said firmly as she pointed toward the real books, “are the kinds of classics you read as a boy and they mold you into a man. Those,” she said with a sneer as she pointed toward the spread of Classics Illustrated, “are what cheaters and idiots read.”
“But these books get me excited,” I replied, defending myself.
“It’s unfortunate that it takes so little,” she said in a voice laden with scorn. She leaned over the bed and with both hands gathered up the comics as if they were a loose deck of filthy cards.
“You aren’t going to ground me for this?” I asked meekly.
She cocked her head to one side and an amused smile drew up the corners of her mouth. “Reading these junky books must have turned you into a special kind of dumb boy,” she said while with her knee she pushed the mattress back into place. “I wasn’t even thinking about grounding you until you brought it up.”
That was really stupid of me.
“No, I won’t ground you,” she continued, “but I’m just putting you on notice that if you do something this pathetic again, I will ground you.”
“I don’t want to be pushy,” I said meekly, “but what are you going to do with my comics?”
“I’m going to make you take them down to the Community Center and donate them to the Norvelt tag sale—that’s about all they are good for.”
“Okay,” I said glumly. When she left the room I looked through the stack. I still hadn’t read my Classics Illustrated Moby-Dick and thought of hiding it, but I knew she would search my room after I left the house for Halloween, so it was better to do what she demanded.
I put on my baggy old-man work clothes to look like Spizz and slipped my comics collection into a bag with some Spizz costume props. As I sheepishly ventured outside onto the front steps Mom was lighting the Halloween candles in the carved pumpkins. She looked up at me and asked, “Where is your Grim Reaper costume? I bought you a new mask after you lost the last one.”
I felt more than a little shifty inside. “I think I’ve outgrown that old costume,” I said. “It’s too young for me.”
“Then what are you wearing?” she asked, and gave me a puzzled look.
After the comic book issue I really didn’t want to tell her, but I didn’t want to lie either. She despised liars more than comic books. So with a carefree wave of my hand I casually said, “Oh, I’m just going as silly old Mr. Spizz.”
“Spizz!” she shot back, and stared up at me with such stunned disbelief she burned the tip of her finger on a match.
“Yeah,” I said cheerfully, “Bunny thought it was a fun idea.”
“Honey,” she said right back, “you know Bunny has a dark imagination from working with her dad on dead bodies all the time, so her judgment may not be the best. Do you know what I mean?” she asked, wanting me to know exactly what she meant.
“I don’t think it’s a terrible idea,” I said with a shrug, trying not to look her in the eyes. “After all, it’s Halloween. I’m supposed to look scary so that ancient spirits and ghosts don’t carry me away.”
“I think you’ve already gotten carried away,” she remarked. “It’s in the worst taste possible to dress up as Mr. Spizz, given all the murders that man committed. But,” she said, raising her hands palms out, “it is your choice what to wear or not—I’ll leave it up to you because I think you are mature enough to make the proper decision.”
Her stern face was like a stopwatch staring at me as the seconds ticked off while I struggled to make my “proper decision.” Of course I knew she wanted me to change my mind and make a mature choice, but Bunny would kill me just so she could bury me in one of those bombproof caskets. Then I had a sharp idea.
“Well,” I said in a very mature voice, “I had thought of going as a Russian nuclear missile but then figured the missile would be too scary for little kids, so I settled on the less distressing Spizz outfit.”
“You do realize,” she slowly warned me, as if she were crushing each of my false words under the heel of her shoe, “that bad choices lead to bad consequences.”
“Bad choices don’t matter anymore,” I said flippantly. “Since we’re all going to be blown up anyway.”
Her eyes seemed to ignite with fury. “Choice is not about how we die,” she said with contempt, “but about how we choose to live.”
After that, what else could I do? I leaped off the top step and hit the ground running. “Don’t worry,” I said over my shoulder. “Nothing bad will happen. I promise.”
“Your promise is what I fear most!” she hollered.
I broke out into a scary Spizz laugh as I ran across our dark yard and down the black hill. Halloween was a time to live it up!
Two minutes later I was the one mostly full of fear. When I entered the Community Center I went downstairs to the basement to drop off my comic-book collection. I passed by the old office Spizz had used when he worked for the Norvelt Association for the Public Good. He had a big title but was really just the town maintenance man. All day he rode his adult-sized tricycle around and gave tickets to people for not mowing their grass often enough or for not picking up rubbish on the street in front of their houses.
I noticed the door to his moldy old office was cracked open, and then I saw a flashlight beam sweeping the room. I kept my eyes on the door as I quietly tiptoed over to the table and set my classics down where donations were stacked.
I could feel my pulse pounding against the wall of scar tissue in my nose. The police had not captured Mr. Spizz yet. Mr. Greene had printed a Crime Blotter notice in the Norvelt News that an “unknown source” reported Mr. Spizz had taken the train to New York City and was operating a mobile hot dog stand on a different corner each day. A week later, Mr. Greene printed a report that said Mr. Spizz was in Chicago and had applied for a janitorial job at a home for retired nuns. Every day there was a different rumor about where he was. But no one really knew for sure. He could be anywhere.
He could even be back in Norvelt, I thought, as I heard clumsy noises coming out of his office. Cabinet drawers were jerked open and things were being tossed about like someone was looking for something valuable in there. I got up s
ome courage and edged toward the door when suddenly the flashlight was snapped off.
I didn’t wait around to see who stepped out and I definitely wasn’t going in. The place smelled like death and gave me the creeps, so I turned and took off. Anyway, it could have been anyone who worked at the Community Center. Maybe it was the new town custodian who took Spizz’s old job. He was probably getting a putty knife and other special tools to scrape up all the sick-tasting Halloween candy and black licorice gum kids always spit on the church steps and jammed into people’s door locks.
When I showed up on Bunny Huffer’s front porch it was decorated with tall funeral-parlor candles and fake dead children in cardboard coffin boxes. One of the dead kids looked a little too much like me. There was even blood coming out of his nose. Bunny must have drawn the face because she was a good artist.
Twisted, I thought, and when I went to give it a pinch Bunny jumped out from behind a massive wreath of dried corncobs. I yelped and staggered back. She was dressed in an Indian costume with a feather headdress and a hard plastic hatchet with a sloppy line of fake blood on the edge.
“I ambushed you,” she yelled in a voice that blasted out of her. “You are D-E-A-D!”
“What happened to the D-E-A-D old-lady costume?” I asked, gasping for air.
“My mom thought it was too mean,” she replied unhappily. “But on the good side,” she sang, reaching up to touch the stiff turkey feathers, “this headdress makes me look about twice as tall. I’m really tired of being so short, and when you dress up as a dead old lady you are as short as it gets—I mean, what could be shorter than being horizontal? Besides, even if the new lady’s name is Mrs. Custard, I still like thinking of Custer’s last stand, so the Indian costume works great.”
“But now I’m stuck as Spizz the Killer,” I complained. “We were supposed to go as a pair—a theme pair for ‘Murder in Norvelt.’”
“Get over it,” she said with a shrug. “Now bring your Girl Scout cookies and tin of 1080 and let’s get you ready.”
