Authors: Bryant Delafosse
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.
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.
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.