The Mall Page 38

  I studied her in astonishment. I wasn’t used to open hostility from strangers, and especially not from strangers who I’d once known. I could only stare at this slight wisp of a girl who wrapped herself in a cloak of oppressive darkness so overpowering it was like a physical presence that seemed to weigh even on me.

  She removed her glasses and massaged the bridge of her nose. Finally, she looked up with a great pronounced sigh that Atlas himself with the weight of the world on his shoulders would have had problems reproducing. Dark circles exaggerated the intensity of her eyes, the deepest, darkest eyes I have ever seen. Eyes of obsidian glass. Pools of crude oil they were, which seemed to catch fire as she realized I wouldn’t leave peacefully.

  Had her eyes always been that color?

  I met her fiery stare and countered with one of sympathy. I’d never lost anyone I loved, much less a parent, so I had no idea how it might affect me. “Look, I just wanted to tell you that what you did yesterday outside senior hall...” She glanced up. “That was impressive work.”

  She just gave me an undecipherable blank look.

  “By the way,” I mentioned as I started away. “They wrote on your locker door.”

  “Yeah, I know.” She gave me a shrug that seemed to say, “It’s beyond my ability to care,” before returning to her work.

  My time sufficiently wasted, I went back to the band hall, where I waited for practice to start along with the decent humans. During practice, a funny thing happened to me. My mind kept wandering to the wadded page Claudia had tossed over her shoulder and after rehearsal; I did something I never thought I would do. I went under the bleachers and wandered among the trash and mud and found that ball of paper. I felt weird doing it, like I had just copped a look through the door of the girl’s locker room or something. Nonetheless, I unraveled the paper and read the hideous scrawl that was her handwriting.

  “Death is a door window,

  Which we Where I stand on at the edge.

  All alone I am.”

  She had written the last line twice. The second one left an impression on the page more heavily than the first, and a long scraggly line had been drawn under the word “alone” all the way down to the bottom of the page, where the pen stroke had ripped through the page.

  The words sent a physical chill through me. I wasn’t much on poetry, but I knew healthy artistic expression didn’t look like this.

  I wadded up the page and tossed it into the garbage where the girl who had put it there had meant for it to stay. I couldn’t help feeling that I had glimpsed a part of Claudia that she had never meant me to see.

  As I started back to the building, I decided that maybe her writing was the sort of dark exercise that people did sometimes when they were alone. Perhaps, it was a way of purging her soul by putting those darkest fears down on paper then discarding them.

  But I was wrong.

  I would soon discover that Death wasn’t a fear for Claudia Anne Wicke.

  It was an obsession.

  Chapter 2 (Thursday, September 24th)

  Last summer I started work as a “bagger” for Comeaux’s Grocery. I quickly moved up to “stocker,” which suited me just fine as I didn’t have to deal with customers who said asinine things like:

  “Young man, please don’t put those cans on top of my carton of eggs.”

  Thanks for reminding me, old woman. I was just about to do that.

  Although I was supposed to quit the job when school started, I was able to convince Mom and Dad to let me work Saturdays (and some nights on Thursdays, the day the new shipments came in) as long as my grades didn’t suffer. So, with the addition of the varsity football games where the band played on Friday nights, I was a busy boy at the beginning of my junior year.

  The cool thing about working for Comeaux’s was that I was able to get discounts on books and magazines and stuff for Halloween.

  The last weekend in September, I was stocking the canned vegetables on a Thursday night when I heard, “Hey, Graves, your Halloween selection sucks.”

  I looked up and saw a shadowy figure gliding down the aisle past me.

  “Yeah well, what do you expect? This isn’t Eerie’s.”

  She stopped in the middle of the aisle, her back to me. The only sign that I’d intrigued her. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a Halloween warehouse store in Austin.”

  Of course, the selection at Comeaux’s Grocery was typical of a store its size. I figured I’d pick up a few of the essentials there—candy, glow sticks, black lights, maybe a cheap-looking paper skeleton. But I saved my money for the trip into Austin, which was around an hour away, where I would stock up on the unique, harder to get necessities.

  Claudia turned and I saw that she was actually wearing sunglasses inside the store. It was killing me not to take the shot, but I didn’t want to extinguish the possibility of an interesting conversation. (It had been a long night so far.)

  “Mom doesn’t let us decorate,” Claudia admitted.

  “Why not?”

  Giving a shrug, she replied, “We haven’t decorated since my father died.”

  She stood there and might have been looking in my direction, though I couldn’t actually see her eyes through the shades. So, I went back to stamping the cans of French-cut green beans with price stickers.

  She sighed and folded her arms. “So when are you going to this Eerie’s place?”

  “Sunday morning. You want to come with? I have my own car, y’know.”

  Claudia gave me a patronizing look. “And me without my box of cookies.”

  She’d caught me with my tail-feathers displayed. I turned back to the box of cream corn, before my face started to redden. “Listen, I don’t care what you do. I’m pretty much going anyway.”

  “What, like I want to spend a whole weekend stuck at home with my mother.” She put an icy lilt to the last word like it had a bitter taste. “Look, I better get back to the car before she starts thinking I made good on my threat to hitchhike back to DFW. Guess I’ll seeya on Sunday then.”

  I gave her a nod and a “seeya.”

  After she’d disappeared, I assessed how I felt about this. I was actually excited. I figured it must have something to do with sharing something you loved with someone you felt might appreciate it that way you do.

  Growing up, I simply loved the whole season. I love how after a long hot humid summer, the weather takes a change for the better and the breeze takes on that special snap that balances out the warmth of the blazing Texas sun. I wait expectantly for that sudden transformation of color the natural world around me undergoes, those reds and browns and the oranges. And then there’s the smells in the October air, of pumpkin pies and harvest bonfires and latex monster masks. I loved the spectacle and magic that produces that intangible quality just one step back from the sacred, like the dark interior of a magician’s top hat.

  Halloween had commanded my attention the very first time I saw a simple spider web covered skeleton dressed in a tuxedo and displayed within an old wooden coffin outside an old T G & Y store in Austin--y’know, the ones that don’t exist anymore--back before every display moved, made sounds and emitted smoke.

  It was only years later when a Great Aunt on my mother’s side—Mom’s side of the family was the one with the long life genes, while Dad’s had the bad ticker genes--passed away that I realized that the Halloween display I saw outside the TG & Y was, in fact, my first introduction to the concept of Death. That skeleton, something tucked away within every last one of us, is a reminder of our own mortality, of the hands of our internal clocks slowly ticking away toward our own personal expiration date.

  Though at the time, I didn’t understand my own fascination with Halloween, it dawned on me that perhaps the holiday was nothing more than the way we human beings cope with the Unknown--that dark inviting corridor due south of the end of our long walk through Life.

  A terrifying carnival-like journey with candy at the end.

  ***


  Halloween had been my favorite holiday since that first Batman costume I wore when I was eight and tore it on a bush leaping from the Bradley’s porch when their Pit bull got loose.

  I could remember every costume I’d ever worn, every character I’d ever become, every memorable night from my youth that I spent trick-or-treating door-to-door.

  When I was nine, I was a werewolf and diligently rehearsed my transformation in the weeks leading up to the night until I learned that Halloween night did not land on a full moon that year. Surely, that must be why I didn’t change as I had been led to believe I would.

  With the vivid recollections of an introverted child, I can clearly remember the year I became Torr the Avenger, the super-powered robot from “Manheim’s Machine,” a Saturday morning TV series that was popular the year I was ten.

  More than the costume I wore, my memories of my first encounter with injustice and the talk with my father are what return to me when I think back to that night.

  Me, Greg, and Sonny were trick or treating under the watchful eyes of my mother in a neighborhood not far from my own. My mother had stopped to talk to Mrs. Gordon and with the impatience of boys missing out on free candy, we begged to go ahead without her to finish off the last two houses on the block. After she’d agreed, I rushed down to the next house and was so happy with the top-notch chocolate bar I got that I didn’t notice that Sonny and Greg weren’t with me until I started down the steps.

  I ran through the yard guessing that they had gone on ahead to the next house when they appeared in front of me on the sidewalk. Sonny and Greg stood facing a pair of kids that looked to be at least three years older. While one of them got in Sonny’s face, the other snatched his official Spiderman Halloween sack away from him. When Sonny tried to take it back, the bigger kid laid his hand over Sonny’s face and shoved him backward to the pavement, laughing with the confidence of an experienced bully. When they turned and demanded Greg’s candy, he ran past me back the way we’d come.

  Then they turned to me.

  The one who was holding Sonny’s bag of candy turned to me and snarled, “What, you want to do something about it, shrimp?” They started away with the entirety of Sonny’s hard earned candy with no argument from me.

  Lying there on the sidewalk crying, Sonny refused when I tried to help him up. Moments later, my mom arrived with Greg and announced that trick or treating was officially over. Despite the fact that my pumpkin was nearly filled to the brim, I screamed and demanded to know why I was being cheated out of more free candy, ultimately having to be dragged home by my arm.

  That night, my father sat with me in the living room on the old leather couch. The silence was a physical presence, a stranger in our normally animated home. Dad—a man who, by that time, had already risen to the position of Sheriff within our county, and practiced at the art of speechmaking--contemplated the words he would utter for a good thirty seconds before he even opened his mouth. By his first breath I knew that in his eyes what I had done that night had been a serious offense, though I couldn’t for the life of me understand why. After all, it wasn’t me who had hurt Sonny.

  “Do you know what you did wrong tonight?”

  “But I didn’t do anything!” I exclaimed.

  “Exactly, you didn’t do anything. Your mother told me what happened,” he stated, fixing me with the sternest expression in his arsenal. “The worst thing you can do in the face of injustice is absolutely nothing.”

  I lowered my head and allowed the shame that had been nagging at me to finally take hold. “I didn’t know what to do,” I admitted, my lips starting to quiver.

  “Here’s what you never do. Never back down from a bully, no matter how overmatched you might feel. You stare them in the eye and if it comes to it, you fight back, especially in defense of a friend. Do you hear me, Paul? Always stand your ground!”

  Suddenly, it struck me that life wasn’t all fun and games anymore and I damn sure wasn’t Torr the Avenger. From my new position, the world looked a whole lot messier than when the night had begun. My eyes glazed over and I stared at the string of framed pictures on the wall. All those Graves’ relatives, Great Uncle Philip & John, and Grandpa Milton, seemed to be giving me a look of assessment. They all knew what I had done tonight and were disappointed in the next generation of the Graves family my Dad had produced.

  Dad and I had made a special trip to Sonny’s house so that I could give him half of everything I had collected that night from my stash of candy. Despite that gesture, the events of that Halloween when I was ten affected the way I was to view the world from that day forward.

  The child in me had begun to evolve and the fascination of treat or tricking for me lasted only one more precious year. Suddenly, at twelve, none of my friends wanted to don the capes anymore. My best friend Jimmy Barton told me he thought it was “stupid kid stuff.” Randy Theriot went one step further and simply decided the whole concept of Halloween was “gay.” (That sentiment had almost brought me and Randy to blows that day after school.)

  That was one of the worst Octobers of my life, wondering if I’d turned a corner and forever lost a part of that magic of being young, being a child.

  It was a teacher in my final year of middle school, Mrs. Fielding, who had made me realize that Halloween wasn’t only for children, when she had the whole class of Honors English participate in decorating the hallways a few weeks before the annual Fall Harvest Festival. The act of pasting those pumpkins and dangling those spiders had re-ignited the pilot light in me. My creative energy had been so strong, that I had even volunteered to draw the poster that would be stretched astride one side of the field at the varsity Homecoming game so that the football team could burst through it at the beginning of the game to the cheers of the hometown crowd.

  Mrs. Fielding gave me back Halloween. She taught me that I could enjoy Halloween again by giving someone else what I once treasure, that dark fantasy one night of the year that when I was allowed to shed the bonds of who I was the other three hundred sixty-four days of the year and become someone else.

  Unfortunately, the next year, of course, everything changed again.

  This time permanently.

  ***

  It had been a typical Tuesday morning in the Graves house. I had just wolfed down a bowl of my favorite Peanut Butter Crunch cereal and was rushing through the brushing of my teeth. If I ran too late, Dad would sometimes leave me to catch the bus.

  I was not yet fourteen but too old to ride the dreaded “yellow dog.” Dad would usually drop me off at school on the way to the station as long as he didn’t have to go in early for a meeting or some other emergency. Today there was nothing happening. It was just another day.

  Defiantly routine.

  These were before the days of Mom’s gainful employment at the bank and she was uncharacteristically sleeping in. She had been visited by a particularly violent migraine sometime in the middle of the night and had taken her medication. Dad had just gone up to kiss her goodbye as was their ritual.

  Trying to keep to the routine.

  The TV was still on in the living room as I usually had it turned on while I was eating breakfast. Mom usually went around behind me and put my cereal bowl in the sink and turned the TV off. Not this morning.

  Fracture in the routine.

  Dad told me in a low voice as he passed by the bathroom to grab my books or he was going to leave me. I rinsed out my mouth and grabbed my backpack and swung around the banister and down the steps.

  I heard my father grumble my name as he found the TV on. He stomped into the living room and grabbed the remote off the coffee table. Then there was silence.

  The volume of the TV actually increased.

  When I reached the kitchen, I saw my father, his back to me, shoulders slumped watching the cable news station. From around him, I could see smoke and buildings on the screen. The reporter’s voice had an edge that made the hair on the back of my neck rise to attention. It held t
he quality of a scared animal.

  “Dad?”

  My father didn’t seem to hear.

  It was at that moment that the second plane hit the tower.

  The remote slipped from his fingers and bounced off the coffee table with a startling clunk.

  I must have gasped, because he snapped his fingers at me and said in a voice that was louder than I was used to, “Go in the kitchen, Paul.”

  But I couldn’t move.

  “What..?” I murmured. Suddenly I felt all of the past ten years drain out of me and I was four again. I stepped over to him and his arm folded over my shoulder and pulled me tightly to his side. I could smell the aftershave lotion on his hands and beneath that the musky smell of his uniform that was still a day’s journey from the washer. It was a reassuring smell in the sudden unfamiliar turn the morning had taken.

  Then I realized with slowly dawning horror that I had just witnessed in real time the deaths of thousands of human lives. And it had been no accident. No commuter plane flying off course.

  Our world, our protective bubble had been pierced. We would never be quite the same again.

  Two thousand nine hundred and seventy-four people had died that morning, not including the monsters who had orchestrated the attacks.

  Dad had wanted to go to New York and help with the search and rescue alongside hundreds of other law-enforcement volunteers, but he realized that his job as Sheriff wouldn’t allow him such freedom. He had responsibilities to protect his own community.

  In an effort to return to normal, children were encouraged to observe the customs of Halloween and go trick-or-treating, though not outside their neighborhoods. The costumes of the season were rescue workers like firemen and police officers. Superheroes were acceptable as well, but I don’t recall a single scary monster mask that year.

  We had already seen the face of the monster.

  I didn’t decorate the yard that year, but Mom did have her annual Halloween party as usual and I have to say that it was probably the most attended one she’s ever given. Instead of our typical horror movie, we watched Raiders of the Lost Ark. Together as a group, we booed the Nazis whenever they would come on screen. It comforted us all to watch a movie where the enemy was so definitive and the victor was clear.