into near-adult near-obscenity. Of course, Kyle could easily have spiced his own phrasing up-he heard the F-word often enough from his Dad to know that nothing, nothing could top that one. But he also knew what his mother thought of the F-word, and the fatal sounds choked in his throat when he tried to slip them in between the two words. (He knew from close scientific observation of his father’s speech patterns that the F-word worked best like that, slipped in between two other words that weren’t that bad at all).
“Am f… — am not!”
“Then ya gotta do it.” Kyle glanced up the long stretch of street bordered by glowing porch lights and dotted at irregular intervals by an assortment of juvenile ghosties and ghoulies shouting ear-splitting choruses of “Trick or Treat” at each open doorway.
He let his gaze wander further upward, finally stopping at the dark house outlined in the evening light. Then he turned his attention back to Brady, at this point in his short life bravely disguised as a gory mummy trailing shrouds of ragged, dusty, pukey mummy-stuff (otherwise known as one of Mrs. Wilton’s old white sheets ripped into long strands and stained with mud and ground-in ketchup that Kyle could smell a dozen feet away-the odor threatened to break the illusion but somehow he didn’t care).
“Now?” Kyle’s voice took on a whining pitch that contrasted with his All-American-hero’s black and silver cowboy outfit, complete with hat, holster, and twin silver six-shooters.
Brady nodded. “Now…or you’re a chickenshit for life.”
Kyle nodded in return. That was the way it would be. Once branded, always branded. It didn’t matter that Brady was Kyle’s best friend in the world, or that they had lived their entire nine years side-by-side in two of the dozen or so homes that had dotted this part of the valley before new houses started cropping up all over, covering favorite fields with asphalt and concrete and boringly tame lawns, enclosing wild bike trails and impromptu baseball fields with faceless slump stone fences, appropriating for faceless new people the scattered oak trees just made for small boys to climb on lazy, sunny, summer afternoons. Kyle and Brady lived across Bingham Boulevard from the Charter Oaks, and even though Kyle would have died for Brady and Brady would have died for Kyle-they had actually promised in blood to die for each other-Kyle knew that if he chickened out now, Brady would be honor-bound tell all the guys at school on Monday. That was the way the world went.
“Kyle wouldn’t do it,” Brady would stage-whisper to Bobby Marx or Jimmy Sanderson or one of the other kids. “He was too chicken.”
Out of deference to the decorum of school-or more likely, out of fear of Miss Robinson’s sharp hearing, capable (as most of the boys knew to their sorrow) of penetrating like radar to even the farthest corners of the schoolyard-Brady would probably leave off the offending shit, but what was left would be enough to make life a living torment for Kyle. So in spite of his hesitation, he was already dismally aware that he really had no choice at all.
2
In fact, Kyle knew that had already used up his quota of choices for the night when Brady suggested that they cut short their Trick-or-Treating.
“This stuff’s for babies,” Brady announced after only ten minutes of raiding outstretched bowls filled with little squares of Dubble-Bubble gum and glittering, cellophane-shrouded lollipops. “And besides, I found out where Mom hid our stuff this year.” He reached into his mummy-bindings, fumbled in a hidden jeans pocket, and pulled out a handful of paper-wrapped candies. “I got lots more in my room.”
Kyle really wanted to Trick or Treat some more. His white pillowcase was nowhere near full-in fact, he could still see part of the bottom seam when he angled the impromptu cloth bag just so. And, unlike Brady, he had never quite been able to figure out where his mother hid the small packets of Sugar Babies she was handing out this year. He knew from past experience that the piddling collection of sweets he had garnered wouldn’t last until tomorrow night. Kyle wanted to keep on. He wanted to find a group of little kids and tag behind them, gleaning the rich benefits when all the adults would gush “Oh, how cute” or “Isn’t she an angel” at one of the kids and then hand out double helpings to all the other Trick-or-Treaters at the door as well. He had tumbled onto that trick the year before and was eager to try it out again.
But no, Brady had decided otherwise. Brady had bigger ideas, Brady was the one who made the rules, and who was Kyle to argue?
3
“Let’s check out the haunted house,” Brady said abruptly as the boys finished the fifth house on Oleander Place.
It was just past sunset, with enough light to see the grey-white gleam of sidewalks sandwiched between swathes of green-black lawn and the darker asphalt.
“There isn’t one.”
“Sure there is.” He pointed up the road at the new houses. “We can Trick-or-Treat until we get to the top.” He lowered his voice to what he hoped was a menacing tone. “To the haunted house.”
“It’s not haunted, just empty,” Kyle said, knowing as he did so that the truth wouldn’t faze Brady’s imagination.
Brady shot Kyle a withering glance and Kyle felt his head nodding, distantly, as if it were someone else’s head nodding yes to someone else’s best friend’s question.
“Okay,” the fearless cowboy sighed. “Let’s go.”
That was it. The decision was final.
For a couple more houses, Brady went through the motions of little-kid Trick-or-Treating. He even grinned outrageously when one old guy pretended to be horrified by Brady’s mummy costume and acted like he was going to barf in Brady’s candy bag, hunching his shoulders over the opened bag and whoop- ing like he was about to spew his guts up. But Kyle could tell that Brady’s heart was somewhere else, and he waited apprehensively for the moment when Brady would look at him and say, “Come on, let’s ditch this stuff.”
And all too soon, Brady did.
So, without really knowing why, certainly without wanting to, a lone black-and-silver suited cowboy trudged up the hill behind a tattered, shambling mummy. His head bowed, his feet dragging, Kyle was the only kid on the street no longer excited by Halloween.
4
The empty house stood dark and ragged-looking in the end lot. The yard angled away on either side to form a truncated wedge, like a piece of pie with the house in the center and the point nibbled away by the sidewalk. The houses on either side were lit with yellow porch lights and haphazardly carved Jack o’ Lanterns grimacing wickedly along the walkways. But the house at the end seemed to swallow, not reflect, the light. In spite of the brightness and the activity along the rest of Oleander, it remained aloof, distant, coldly unaffected.
Kyle stood in front of the house and looked at it. The two windows visible from that angle stared blankly and blackly at him.
Eyes, Kyle thought, unaware of how stereotyped the image was. Eyes glaring at me, waiting to open, wanting to open and get me. He shivered.
“Hey, Brady,” he began, but just then a troupe of clowns and fairy princesses cut from the house on the left across to the house on the right. Kyle noticed that the kids avoided the dark stretch of sidewalk in front of 1066 and dashed straight across the road instead. As they passed a dozen feet away, silhouetted by the house lights from below, Brady grabbed Kyle’s arm and pulled him into the shadow of a huge tree on the corner of the lot.
