This was going to be our story, I told myself. Not my parents. That’s why I’d gotten myself sick. Fifty-thousand years from now, Grace and me were going to come to the Big Chief, to remember. It was going to be better than any stupid football game.
Her mom dropped us off, slipped Grace a five for concessions, then went home to sit at her kitchen table some more. According to Grace, since her dad left five months before, all his money mounded in front of the television like that was going to make up for him being gone, that’s mostly what her mom did: sit there and stare, like she was trying to backtrack to where this part of her life had started.
My parents felt sorry for her, they said, and then would hold each other’s hands, like to show they were different, they were better.
I held the door of the Big Chief open for Grace, already had our tickets.
It wasn’t a horror movie, either.
After Marcus, none of us went to the horror movies any more, even though it was almost Halloween and there was always one playing. We were still watching them after lights out at home, of course, but on videotapes we’d smuggle from our big brothers’ rooms, handle with extreme caution, like, if we dropped them, if that plastic cracked, the blood was going to come out.
We were still getting our scares, I’m saying.
But, with Grace, it was a love movie, where the girl looks and looks like she’s not going to get the guy, then, surprise again, she does.
I could sit through it. For her.
Maybe it would give her some ideas, even.
The theater was just usual-full for a Friday showing. Maybe six or eight seats between everybody, some movie with screaming playing next door.
I sat between Grace and that scary movie—her word—and held the popcorn on my knee for us, and, I admit, I kind of got into our movie. The girl’s dad in this one was trying to find her the perfect husband. He felt he owed her or something, because her mom wasn’t around to help her. But he was overdoing it, was pulling in everybody from his office, where he was boss, and then his friends’ sons, and on and on, when the guy the girl really loved was the guy who fixed the copy machine at her dad’s office.
I mean, I got into it, but I was also tracking the movie next door, of course. Trying to time to the screams. Trying to imagine if we were over there, how tight Grace would be clinging to me. How her knee would probably be up on my thigh and she wouldn’t even be aware it was happening.
But this wasn’t bad, either.
She kept having to bat the tears from her eyes, and had pretty much forgotten the popcorn altogether. Not me. I never forget the popcorn.
With the Big Chief, too, if Willard’s working the counter, he’ll even slip you a free refill if you promise not to make a mess he’ll have to clean up later.
Right when the movie was winding up for its final pitch, I whispered to Grace about our empty box, slithered out to the lobby for more. Willard fixed me up, and even let me peek into the other theater.
It was mayhem in there. Chainsaws and werewolves, it looked like—no, werewolves with chainsaws. The chocolate and peanut butter of the horror world. I didn’t even realize I was holding my breath until my eyes started burning.
It was all older kids in there, though. If I’d taken Grace in there, there would have been a timer over my head, just counting down to when the first senior leaned forward, whispered advice to me that Grace would have to pretend not to hear. And then things would just get worse and worse, and it’s not like I could fight any of them and win, so it would be a coke-throwing thing, and I’d probably get banned for the month again.
No, the love movie was the better choice for us. Definitely.
I got back just in time for the end.
Instead of a marriage, it was back to the office. The dad had hired the copy guy into the office, and now, with everybody watching, was promoting him up and up and up, to next in line to run the place, the girl just standing there beaming, crying, her whole world coming together just the way it should.
Grace was crying right along with her.
From where I was I could see her cheeks, shiny and wet, her eyes closed to try to hold the rest of the happiness in.
When I brushed her arm, climbing back into my seat, she jumped, and started coughing like she was going to throw up.
She ran out hiding her face and I followed, and Willard fixed her up with water and she hid in the Ladies until just before the horror movie let out.
And that was it.
My dad was waiting for us at the curb like every time, the car filled with his menthol smoke, and I held the door for Grace again and she just kept batting her eyes.
“Good movie?” my dad asked back, meaning completely different things, and I nodded just to shut him up.
Two weeks later it was Halloween.
Because we were in eighth grade, none of us dressed up, of course. And because the Big Chief was the Big Chief, none of us went there either. Not yet. Soon we’d be high schoolers, though, we knew, and none of the high schoolers ever died from holding their breath.
The kid who got castrated, he was supposed to have been thirteen or fourteen. Maybe that was why they were safe. Why we weren’t.
Anyway, because of what happened at the last Halloween party for our class (my dad’s menthols, Lucas’s dad’s beer, some light bulbs in the basement somehow unscrewed), this year the guys were going one way, the girls another. Most of the girls had signed up to chaperone the first-and second-grader trick-or-treating.
Where the guys went was the old graveyard behind the convent. Of course.
I called Grace before, to just mention it casually, where we were headed, so she could get how brave that made us, how we might not be making it back, all that, but she was already gone with her second-grader.
“Look for Bo Peep,” her mom said, instead of goodbye. Because she wanted us to be happy, I knew. Because she remembered how your heart can swell when you’re in eighth grade.
I met up with everybody in the alley ten minutes later and we were gone, my dad’s menthols safe in my chest pocket. I’d sneaked one at a time all week.
The graveyard, as it turned out, was still the graveyard. Crooked headstones, weeds as tall as us, and, when we first got there, a couple of sophomores making out on the concrete bench. We ignored them, or pretended to pretty well, but I guess they could tell. Then it was just us and the grossest cigarettes ever invented. And the town, spread out before us.
Marcus was buried back wherever he’d lived before. Not here. And it wouldn’t have been in this graveyard, anyway. This was just for people who died a hundred years ago, before the convent got condemned and haunted.
According to the seniors, there was a zombie nun who still carried a candle around in there.
We didn’t believe them even a little bit. But we didn’t get any closer than the graveyard, either. The reason we knew the nun wasn’t in there was that she’d been in our dreams already for years, her candle going out right when she got close to us.
So we sat on the headstones like they were nothing, and we blew smoke up into the inky-purple sky, and, squinting like outlaws at the full moon, we held our cigarettes up to Marcus, wherever he was. Like we’d even really known him.
We were pretending he’d been the best of us, that he was some tragedy.
We’d been the ones who paid for his ticket that night, though.
Soon enough, like always happened, I took a drag too deep, that green smoke filling my lungs, and I had to stagger off into the bushes, to throw up. Because it had to be some kind of bad luck to throw up on a hundred-years-dead person. It might be like giving them a little bit of life. Just enough.
I fell through the trees, finally got to the little cliff we’d used to drop our action figures from to test our bandanna parachutes, and I splashed my dinner all down that scar of white rock.
When my eyes could see again, what they saw was the east end of Saginaw Street, right before it hits St. Francis.
&n
bsp; Five years ago, this was the best candy street of all. It was all old people, who only got to see kids on Halloween, pretty much. Better, they’d forget you almost as soon as you left, so you could go back to that same well again and again. Sometimes we’d trade masks, mix and match costumes, but I don’t think they’d have busted us anyway. Or cared.
Saginaw Street was still doing good business, too. Was still the place to be if you hated your teeth.
I stood up to go back to the graveyard, and, if I’d just done that half a second sooner, I’d have never seen the shepherd’s crook cresting over the Frankensteins and ghost heads. It was navigating through them, moving down the sidewalk.
Bo Peep.
Grace.
I smiled, nodded to myself, pinched the hateful menthol back up to my lips.
There she was, all right. Her second-grade robot holding her hand. Cars moving slow and heavy alongside her—all the parents who were driving their kids instead of walking them. That’s cheating, though. If you want the candy, you’ve got to earn it.
I waved my arms as big as I could then remembered one of them was glowing. I balanced my cigarette on a rock behind me then stood up again, waving bigger, and yelling.
By now Grace’s second-grader was moving up a sidewalk, his silver tubed arms and legs making him look like he was going to topple over with every step.
And she heard me, somehow.
Because of love, I think.
At first it was only her head angled over, like being sure, but then she turned around, her lungs filling with hope.
I jumped, jumped, but what she fixed on instead of me was one of the parents creeping past.
She leaned forward as if she hadn’t heard something all the way and the dad behind the wheel leaned out the open passenger window, holding out a white bow, the kind that goes on a good Bo Peep costume.
Grace looked back to her second-grade robot, still cued up for some grandparent candy, and the way she looked I could tell she was timing it. That she felt she had to, because what was this dad going to do with a Bo Peep bow, right?
Right.
She lifted the front of her big skirt, kind of ran out to the car, and, because I was a good almost-boyfriend, I kept my eye on her second-grade robot for her, watched him stiff-arm his plastic pumpkin up to Miss Massey, who used to teach English, and always tied verses of poetry to her candy.
Once upon a time the poem on my candy had told me the fields were white, the fields were long, the fields were waiting, and I’d always wanted to ask her for the rest of it, but never had the nerve.
By the time I looked back to Grace, she was in the passenger seat of the car, and it was pulling away slowly, no rush at all. Just melting back into the parade.
“No,” I said—what about the robot?—and started to step forward but my foot stabbed into open space and I had to balance back hard, my arms windmilling in space.
I fell back, ran along the cliff for the next break in the trees, the last piece of road before the highway opened up, and I got there just in time for the driver to look right through the bushes at me, and nod.
It was the dad from the movie, the one Grace had wished into our world.
He smiled his winning smile, his trustworthy smile, his smile with the sharp, sharp corners, and that was the last time anybody ever saw Grace Lynn Andrews, except as a photo on the news for two states in every direction, and it was the last cigarette I ever smoked, too, and it was the last year Halloween was the same for any of us.
It was also three months to the night before I crept out my window one Wednesday after lights out, and filled one of my mom’s good glasses with kerosene from the lamp her mom had given her, balanced it all the way downtown in the cold.
It wasn’t cold for long, though.
The Big Chief had just been waiting for somebody to burn it to the ground.
I stood there beside it and I held my breath as long as I could, the skin of my face drawing tight in the heat, my heart shaped exactly like two hands holding each other, and when I finally turned to go home, Lucas was there, and Thomas, and Trino, and they hid me, and they never told, and I’ll never leave this town, I know.
Not for the usual reasons, though.
In the flames that night before anybody got there, I saw a boy, the front of his pants wet with blood, and I saw Marcus, wearing his swim goggles, and I saw a pale white shepherd’s crook ahead of them, leading them through, leading them on.
Someday she’ll come for me too, I know.
I’ll be waiting.
ing, waiting for the sun to glint off some elk horn, Junior tracked himself back, stepping in his own boot prints when he could. And it’s not that he didn’t understand: coming out an hour before dawn, walking blind into the blue-black cold, some of the drifts swallowing you up to the hip, it wasn’t the same as watching football on the couch.
The bear tracks they’d seen yesterday hadn’t helped either, he supposed.
Since then, Junior was pretty sure Denny wasn’t so much watching the trees for elk anymore, but for teeth.
He was right to be scared, too. Junior was pretty sure he had been, at that age. But at some point you have to just decide that if a bear’s going to eat you, a bear’s going to eat you, and then you go about your day.
One thing Junior knew for sure was that if he’d been in walkie contact with his dad, then there wouldn’t have been any meets at the truck.
Junior was doing better, though. It was one of his promises.
So he eased up to the truck, waiting for Denny to spot him in the mirror. When Denny didn’t, Junior knocked on the side window, and Denny led him fifteen minutes up a forgotten logging road, to a thick patch of trees he’d probably stepped into for the windbreak, to pee.
“Whoah,” Junior said.
It was a massacre. The bear’s dining room. At least two winters of horse bones, some of them bleached white, some of them still stringy with black meat.
Junior had to admit it: this probably would have spooked him, twenty years ago.
Hell, it kind of did now.
“They’re supposed to be asleep,” Denny said. “Right?”
Junior nodded. It was his own words. The tracks they’d seen yesterday, he’d assured Denny, would lead them to a musty den if they followed them.
“Let’s go work the Line,” Junior said, and Denny was game.
The Line wasn’t the one that separated the reservation from Canada, but from Glacier Park. It was just across the road from Chief Mountain.
Twenty-five years ago, Junior had popped his first buck there, across a clearing of stumps he’d been pretending just needed tabletops to make a proper restaurant. That had been his secret Indian trick to hunting, back then: to not hunt. The same way you never find your wallet when you’re actually looking for it.
Just, keep a rifle with you.
Junior dropped Denny off right at the gate, told him to walk straight up the fence, and keep an eye out.
“Check?” Denny said into his walkie, stepping out, gearing up.
“Check,” Junior said into his walkie, his own voice echoing him.
“Just walk back to Chief mountain if you lose the fence,” Junior told Denny. “You’ll hit the road first. I’ll be up at that other pull-out. Maybe you’ll scare something my way, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Denny said, looking at the tree line with pupils shaped like bears, Junior knew.
Junior left him there, pulled over a quarter mile or so up the road.
He hadn’t been lying about them scaring elk or some whitetail into each other’s paths, either. It was how he’d learned to hunt, his uncles pointing down this or that coulee, telling him to slip down there, make some noise, they’d shoot anything that spooked up.
Denny wasn’t just a brushdog, though.
Really, Junior was half-hoping to scare something over to him. Every animal on the reservation, it knows to run for the Park when Bambi shooters are in the forest.
The kid de
served an elk this year, or a nice buck. Something to hook him into this way of doing things, instead of all the other ways there always were, in Browning.
Junior pulled his gloves on, locked the door, and beat his way through the brush, keeping his rifle high like he was a soldier fording a river, not a latter-day Indian with a burned arm and forty-percent disability.
Maybe a half hour into it, half-convinced the world was made of trees all blown over into each other, the ground under his boots tilted up sharply. Junior followed, eager for an open space.
Like was supposed to happen, the trees thinned the windier it got—the higher Junior got—until he stepped out of the crunchy snow, then onto the blown-flat yellow grass of … not quite a meadow, but a bare knob, anyway. One of a hundred, surely, if you were flying above. But, standing on it, it was the only—no, it wasn’t the only one: directly to the west of Junior, like a mirror image, like he’d walked up to his own reflection, was another bare knob.
Except this one, it had a little pyramid of black rocks right at the very crest.
Junior looked away to search his head for the word, finally dredged it up: cairn.
Like what you arrange over your favorite dog, when the ground’s frozen and you can’t cut into it with a shovel. Like what you put over your favorite dog for temporary, promising the whole while to come back in Spring, do it right.
But you never do, Junior knew.
Because you don’t want to have to see.
Except—who would bury a dog way the hell out here?
Maybe this was some super-old grave, some baby from the Lewis and Clark clown parade.
Or maybe it was older. Maybe it was real.
Junior brought his rifle up, leveled the scope on the cairn and steadied the crosshairs against the wind, gusting like it knew Junior was trying to draw a bead.
The rocks looked just the same, only closer up now, and trembling, the scope dialed up to 9.
Trembling until they smudged out, anyway.
Junior took an involuntary step back, pressing the scope harder into his right eye socket—stupid, stupid, he said to himself—and then got things focused again.
When there was just blackness again, a fabric texture to it, Junior lowered the scope, looked across with his real eyes.
After the People Lights Have Gone Off Page 2
