by Mark Parker
So I was headed up Canyon, fully intending to go to the Ralphs Supermarket on Arroyo, when I observed some suspicious activity at the old liquor store on the corner of Orchard and Canyon (if you want it in cop-ese).
Suspicious isn’t the word for it. A couple of Mexican girls were coming out of the place. One was balancing a stack of cigarette cartons that was so high she couldn’t see over it. The other had a couple of plastic sacks that looked to be filled with liquor bottles.
I pulled into the lot, tires squealing. The girl with the liquor bottles had pretty good instincts, because she dropped them and rabbited. The strong smell of tequila and rum hit me as I jumped out of the truck—a less sober-hearted man would have thought he’d died and gone to heaven. Me, I had other things on my mind.
The girl with the cigarettes hadn’t gotten too far. She didn’t want to give up her booty. Cartons were slipping and sliding and she looked like a drunken trapeze artist about to take the big dive, but she was holding tough.
Tackling her didn’t seem like the best idea, but I sure didn’t want to let her work up any steam. I’m not as fast as I used to be. So what I did was I grabbed for her hair, which was long enough to brush her ass when she wasn’t running and it wasn’t streaming out behind her. I got a good grip first try; her feet went out from under her, she shrieked like a starlet in a horror movie who’s about to taste chainsaw, the smokes went flying every which way, and it was just damn lucky for me that she wasn’t wearing a wig.
“It wasn’t me!” she said, trying to fight. “I didn’t do it! It was some guy wearing a mask!”
“Yeah, right. And you’ve got a receipt for these cigarettes in your back pocket. Sorry…got you red-handed, little miss.”
I hustled her across the lot, stomping cigarette cartons as I went. That gave me a kick. God, I hate smokers. We went inside the store, and that’s when I saw what she’d meant when she said she hadn’t done anything.
The kid was no more than twenty, and—like the old saying goes—he’d never see twenty-one. He lay on the floor, a pool of dark blood around the hole in his head.
“We saw the guy who did it,” the girl said, eager to please, real eager to get my fingers out of her hair. “He cleaned out the register. He was wearing a mask…”
Dead eyes stared up at me. My right boot toed the shore of a sea of blood. Already drying, going from red to a hard black on the yellow linoleum. Going down, the clerk had tripped over a stack of newspapers, and they were scattered everywhere. My face was on the front page of every paper, ten or twenty little faces, most of them splattered with blood.
“…a Halloween mask,” she continued. “A pumpkin with a big black grin. We weren’t with him. We pulled in after it was over, but we saw him leaving. I think he was driving an El Camino. It was silver, and it had those tires that have the chrome spokes. We were gonna call you before we left, honest. We figured the clerk was already dead, and that we’d just take what we wanted and—”
“Let it lay.” I finished it for her, and she had the common decency to keep her mouth shut.
I just stood there for a minute, looking at the dead kid. It was like looking at myself thirty years ago. Like that poem about roads not taken. I almost envied him. Then I couldn’t see him anymore — I saw myself at eighteen, so I looked away.
At the papers, at my smiling face.
At the headline: HERO RESCUES BABY FROM WELL.
Some hero. A grinning idiot with blood on his face.
The Mexican girl couldn’t wait anymore. She’d run out of common decency and was starting to worry about herself again.
She opened her mouth.
I slapped her before she could say anything stupid. My fingers striking hard against her tattooed tears.
***
“The other girl got away,” I said. “I’ll bet she had the gun. Long black hair, about five-six, maybe a hundred pounds. Maybe a little more…it’s hard to tell with those baggy jackets they wear. Anyway, she probably tossed the weapon. We’ll beat the bushes on Orchard. That can wait until tomorrow, though.”
Kat Gonzalez nodded, scribbling furiously. She was one of ten deputies who worked under me, and she was the best of the lot.
“I’m leaving this in your hands, Kat. I mean to tell you, I’m all in.” I wanted to take a six-pack from the cooler, but I resisted the temptation. “I’m going home.”
Kat stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. “Sheriff…. Hell, Dutch, I know what happened here when you were a kid. This must feel pretty weird. But don’t let it eat at you. Don’t—”
I waved her off before she could get started. “I know.”
“If you need to talk—”
“Thanks.” I said it with my back to her, and the only reason it came out okay was that I was already out the door.
I stomped a few more cigarette cartons getting to my truck, but it didn’t make me feel any better. The night air was still heavy with the aroma of tequila and rum, only now it was mixed with other less appealing parking lot odors. Burnt motor oil. Dirt. Piss.
Even so, it didn’t smell bad, and that didn’t do me any good. Because it made me want something a hell of a lot stronger than beer.
I drove to Ralphs and bought the biggest bottle of tequila they had.
***
I was eighteen years old when I shot my first man.
Well, he wasn’t a man, exactly. He was seventeen. And he was my brother.
Willie died on Halloween night in 1959. He was wearing a rubber skull mask that glowed in the dark, and “Endless Sleep” was playing on the radio when I shot him. He’d shown up at the store on the corner of Canyon and Orchard—it was a little mom-and-pop joint back then. With him was another boy, Johnny Halowenski, also wearing a mask.
A pumpkin face with a big black grin.
They showed up on that warm night in 1959 wanting money. The store had been robbed three times in the last two months, each time during my shift. The boss had said I’d lose my job if it happened again. I’d hidden my dad’s .38 under the counter, and the two bandits didn’t know about it.
Skullface asked for the money. I shot him instead. I didn’t kill him, though. Not at first. He had enough spit left in him to come over the counter after me. I had to shoot him two more times before he dropped.
By then Pumpkinface had gotten away. I came out of the store just in time to see his Chevy burning rubber down Orchard, heading for the outskirts of town. There wasn’t any question about who he was. No question at all. I got off a couple more shots, but none of them were lucky.
I went inside and peeled off the dead bandit’s skull mask. I sat there stroking my brother’s hair, hating myself, crying.
Then I got myself together and called the sheriff’s office.
When the deputies arrived, I told them about Johnny Halowenski. I didn’t know what else to do. They recognized the name. L.A. juvie had warned them about him. Johnny had steered clear of trouble since moving to our town, and the deputies had been willing to go along with that and give him a break.
But trouble had caught up with Johnny Halowenski in a big way.
I knew that, and I laid it on. My dad had been a deputy before he got too friendly with the whiskey bottle, and I knew it was important to get things right, to make sure that Halowenski wouldn’t be able to get away with anything if the cops caught up to him.
I told the deputies that Halowenski was armed and dangerous.
I told the deputies that Halowenski took off his mask as he climbed into the Chevy, that there could be no mistake about his identity.
Everything I said ended up in the papers. There were headlines from Los Angeles to San Francisco about the Halloween murder/robbery at a liquor store near the border and the ensuing manhunt.
One paper mentioned that the suspect’s nickname was Johnny Halloween. After that I never saw it any other way. Almost every year I’d see it a few times. In FBI wanted posters. In cheap magazines that ran stories about unsolved crimes. And, on
Halloween, I could always count on it turning up in the local papers.
Johnny Halloween. I leaned back against my brother’s granite tombstone and stared up at the night sky, trying to pick out the name in the bright stars above.
Drinking tequila, thinking how I’d never seen that name where I wanted to.
On a tombstone.
***
I knew he’d show up sooner or later, because we always met in the cemetery after the robberies.
Johnny came across the grass slow and easy, his pistol tucked under his belt, like the last thing in the world he wanted to do was startle me. I tossed him the bottle when he got near enough. “Let’s drink it down to the worm,” I said.
He didn’t take a drink, though. He would have had to lift his mask, and he didn’t seem to want to do that, either.
“Miss me?” he asked, laughing, and his laughter was bottled up inside the mask, like it couldn’t quite find its way out of him.
“It’s been a while,” I said. “But not long enough to suit me.”
He tossed me a thin bundle of bills. “Here’s your cut. It’s the usual third. I don’t figure you’ve still got my dough from the last job. If I could collect interest on it, it might amount to something.”
I didn’t say anything to that. I didn’t want to rise to the bait.
“Well, hell…it’s good to see you too, Dutch. The old town hasn’t changed all that much in thirty years. I went by my daddy’s house, and damned if he isn’t still driving that same old truck. Babyshit-brown Ford with tires just as bald as he is. Seventy-five years old and still drives like a bat out of hell, I’ll bet. How about your daddy? He still alive?”
I pointed two graves over.
“Yeah, well…I bet you didn’t shed too many tears. The way he used to beat the hell out of you and Willie. I’m here to tell you, man could have earned money, throwin’ punches like those—”
That hit a nerve. “Just why are you here, Johnny?”
Again, the bottled-up laugh. “Johnny? Hell, that’s a kid’s name, Dutch. Nobody’s called me that in twenty-five years. These days I go by Jack.”
“Okay, Jack. I’ll stick with the same question, though.”
“Man, you’re still one cold-hearted son of a bitch. And I thought you’d gone and mellowed. Become a humanitarian. Do you know that your picture made the Mexico City dailies? Sheriff rescues baby from well. That took some kind of big brass cojones, I bet.”
My face had gone red, and I didn’t like it. “There wasn’t anything to it,” I said. “I found the baby. I’m the sheriff. What was I supposed to do?”
We were both quiet for a moment.
“Look, Johnny—Jack—I’m tired. I don’t mind telling you that the years have worn on me, and I don’t have much patience anymore. Why don’t you start by giving me your gun. I’m going to need it for evidence. I’ve already got one suspect in custody—nobody will ever connect what happened tonight to you. So you can figure you got your revenge, and you can tell me how much money you want, and we can get on with our lives.”
“You know,” he said, “I hadn’t thought about you for years and years. And then I saw that picture in the paper, and damned if I wasn’t surprised that you’d actually gone and become a cop. Man, oh man, that idea took some getting used to. So I said to myself, Jack, now you’ve just got to go see old Dutch before you die, don’t you?”
He knelt before me, his blue eyes floating in the black triangles of that orange mask. “See, I wanted to thank you,” he said. “Going to Mexico was the best thing that ever happened to me. I made some money down there. Had a ball. They got lots of pretty boys down there, and I like ’em young and dark. Slim, too—you know, before all those frijoles and tortillas catch up to ’em. You never knew that about me, did you, Dutch? Your brother did, you know. I had a real hard-on for his young ass, but he only liked pussy. You remember how he liked his pussy? Man, how he used to talk about it. Non-fucking-stop! Truth be told, I think he maybe liked the talkin’ better than the doin’. And you so shy and all. Now that was funny. You two takin’ your squirts under the same skirt.”
“You got a point in here somewhere, or are you just trying to piss me off?”
“Yeah. I got a point, Dutch.”
Johnny Halloween took off the pumpkin mask, and suddenly I had the crazy idea that he was wearing Willie’s skull mask beneath it. His blue eyes were the same and his wild grin was the same, but the rest of his face was stripped down, as if someone had sucked all the juice out of him.
“It’s what you get when you play rough with pretty boys and don’t bother to wear a raincoat,” he said. “AIDS. The doctors say it ain’t even bad yet. I don’t want it to get bad, y’see.”
I stared at him. I couldn’t even blink.
He gave me the gun. “You ready to use it now?”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry,” I said, and I was surprised to find that I really meant it.
“Let me help you out, Dutch.” That wild grin welded on Death’s own face. “See, there’s a reason it took me so long to get to the cemetery tonight. I had to swing past your place and talk to Helen. Did a little trick-or-treating and got me some Snickers. Nothing more, nothing less. And when I’d had my fill, I told her everything.”
There was nothing I could say….
“Now, I want you to do it right the first time, Dutch. Don’t drag it out.”
…so I obliged him.
***
It took two hours to get things done. First I heaved up as much tequila as I could. Then I drove ten miles into the desert and dumped Johnny Halloween’s corpse. Next I headed back to the cemetery, got in Johnny’s El Camino, and drove two miles north to a highway rest stop. There were four or five illegals standing around who looked like they had no place to go and no way to get there. I left the windows down and the keys in the ignition and I walked back to the cemetery, hoping for the best.
On the way home I swung down Orchard and tossed Johnny’s pistol into some oleander bushes three houses up from the liquor store.
My house was quiet. The lights were out. That was fine with me. I found Helen in the kitchen and untied her. I left the tape over her mouth until I said my piece.
I didn’t get through the whole thing, though. Toward the end I ran out of steam. I told her that Johnny and Willie and me had pulled the robberies because we hated being so damn poor. That it seemed easier to take the money than not to take it, with me being the clerk and such a good liar besides. I explained that the Halloween job was going to be my last. That I’d been saving those little scraps of money so we could elope, so our baby wouldn’t have to come into the world a bastard.
It hurt me, saying that word. I never have liked it. Just saying it in front of Helen is what made me start to crack.
My voice trembled with rage and I couldn’t control it anymore. “Johnny took me over to his house that day,” I said. “All the time laughing through that wild grin. He had me peek in the window…and I saw Willie on top of you…and I saw you smiling….”
I slapped Helen then, just the way I’d slapped the Mexican girl at the liquor store, like she didn’t mean anything to me at all.
“I was crazy.” I clenched my fists, fighting for control. “You know how I get…. Everything happened too damn fast. They came to the store that night, and I was still boiling. I planned to kill them both and say I hadn’t known it was them because of the masks, but it didn’t work out that way. Sure, I shot Willie. But I had to shoot him three times before he died. I wanted to kill Johnny, too, but he got away. So I changed the story I’d planned. I hid Willie’s skull mask, and I hid the gun and the money, and I said that Willie had been visiting me at the store when a lone bandit came in. That bandit was Johnny Halloween, and he’d done the shooting. And all the time that I was lying, I was praying that the cops wouldn’t catch him.”
I blew my nose and got control of myself. Helen’s eyes were wide in the dark, and there was a welt on her cheek, and she
wasn’t moving. “I was young, Helen,” I told her. “I didn’t know what to do. It didn’t seem right—getting married, bringing a baby into the world when I couldn’t be sure that I was the father. I wanted everything to be just right, you know? It seemed like a good idea to use the money for an abortion instead of a wedding. I figured we’d just go down to Mexico, get things taken care of. I figured we’d have plenty of time for kids later on.”
That’s when I ran out of words. I took the tape off of Helen’s mouth, but she didn’t say anything. She just sat there.
I hadn’t said so much to Helen in years.
