Damned

XXXVII

On a whim, I didn't take any of my storm troopers or Mongol hordes with me trick-or-treating. If I can trust them — if I won them fair and square — I don't know anymore. Besides, there are only so many people you can fit into a Lincoln Town Car, and despite what my mom says, an entourage can be too large. At the last minute, I couldn't even wear the Hitler mustache because Tiger Stripe ate it; and then I didn't want to take my kitty and risk his coughing up some big Nazi hairball on somebody's front stoop. In the end it was just us, Archer and Emily, Leonard, Babette, Patterson, and me, going door-to-door. The Dead Breakfast Club.

That said, I did wear the belt of King Ethelred II, the dagger of Vlad III, the hook with which Gilles de Rais murdered so many children. Emily, dressed as a fairy princess, wears the diamond ring of Elizabeth Bathory. Leonard trades everyone for their candy corn. First we went to the town where Archer had last lived, someplace with houses lined up along streets brimming with alive children. Maybe some are dead children, returned like us for a few hours of nostalgia. For one millisecond I could swear I saw JonBenet Ramsey wearing sequined tap shoes and waving hi to us.

Surrounded as we are by the marauding packs of costumed urchins, it's unsettling to know that some of these diminutive living goblins will die in drunk-driving accidents. Some little cheerleaders and angels will develop eating disorders and starve to death. Some geishas and butterflies will marry alcoholic husbands who beat them to death. Some little vampires and sailors will stick their necks through nooses or get shanked in prison riots or be poisoned by jellyfish while on dream vacations snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef. Of the lucky superheroes and werewolves and cowgirls, old age will bring them diabetes, heart disease, dementia.

On the porch of one brick house, a man answers the doorbell, and the group of us shout, "Trick or treat!" in his face. As he gives us chocolate bars, this man effuses over Emily's fairy costume… Babette's bejeweled Marie Antoinette outfit… Patterson as a Greek foot soldier. As his eyes settle on me, the man scans the strip of Hello Kitty condoms twisted around my neck. Placing a candy bar in my bloodstained hand, the man says, "Wait, don't tell me……" He says, "You're supposed to be that girl, the movie star's kid, who got choked to death by the psycho brother, right?"

Standing beside me on the man's porch, Goran wears a turtleneck sweater and a beret. Goran smokes an empty pipe. Even shielded behind heavy, horn-rimmed spectacles, Goran's sultry eyes look wounded.

It's possible that Satan scripted this moment. Or it might really be happening.

"No, sir," I tell the man. "I happen to be Simone de Beauvoir." Motioning to Goran, I add, "And this, of course, is the much-celebrated Monsieur Jean-Paul Sartre."

Even now I'm lost. Was I just being clever and compassionate, or was I reading smart-ass dialogue written by the Devil? Leaving the porch, our group continues down the street. Almost without notice, Archer has veered away in a different direction, so I sprint after him to collect him and herd him along with the rest of us. Catching him by one black leather sleeve, I tug for him to follow me, but Archer only continues to walk in the opposite direction, clearly on his own mission, putting more and more distance between the two of us and the larger group of our peers. Abandoning the Breakfast Clubbers. Without further words, I follow until the streetlights occur only irregularly, then not at all. We continue until the concrete sidewalk ends, until the houses end and the two of us are walking along the gravel shoulder of an empty, dark road.

Archer looks at me and asks, "Maddy? Are you okay?"

Is he being concerned, or is he playing a role? Is Satan writing our walk? I don't know, so I don't respond.

A wrought-iron gateway rises near us in the shadows, and Archer turns into it. We pass through a wrought-iron fence, and we're instantly surrounded by tombstones, treading on mown grass, listening to crickets chirp. Even in near-total darkness, Archer marches without a false step. Only by clutching the sleeve of his leather jacket can I follow, and even with such guidance I'm stumbling over grave markers. I'm kicking aside bouquets of cut flowers, my high-heeled shoes wet from the damp.

Archer comes to an abrupt stop, and I collide with his legs. Not saying a word, he stands looking down on a grave, the stone carved with a picture of a sleeping lamb, engraved with two dates only a year apart. "My sister," Archer says. "She must've gone to Heaven, because I ain't ever seen her."

Beside the grave a second stone bears the name Archibald Merlin Archer.

"Me," says Archer, tapping the second stone with the toe of his boot.

We stand there, silent. The moon hovers, throwing a weak light over the scene around us, countless headstones spread in every direction. Moonlit grass covers the ground. Uncertain how to respond, I study Archer's face for clues. The moonlight glows blue in his Mohawk and glints silvery off his safety pin. Finally, I say, "Your name was Archie Archer?"

Archer says, "Don't make me punch your lights out."

The night after his baby sister was buried, Archer explains how he'd returned to the grave site. That night a storm was rolling in, pushing along thunderclouds, so Archer had hurried to shoplift a spray bottle of herbicide, the aerosol kind used to kill weeds and grass. He'd spritzed his motorcycle boots until the leather was sodden, and then walked to the newly mounded grave. Once there, his boots squishing and squirting poison with every step, Archer had done a primitive shuffle, a rain dance in the last hour before the storm would hit. He'd pirouetted and leaped. His leather jacket flapping, he'd cursed, craning his neck and rolling his eyes. Stomping his toxic feet, Archer had ranted and bellowed, bounding and capering in the growing onslaught of wind. With the storm building, he'd pranced and cavorted and gamboled. He'd raved and howled. As the first raindrops touched his face, Archer had felt the air surrounding him crackle with static electricity. His blue hair had stood to its full, straight-up height, and the safety pin in his cheek had sparked and vibrated.

A white finger of light had zigzagged down from Heaven, Archer says, and his whole body had cooked around the oversize safety pin. "Right here," he says, standing beside his sister's tombstone, on the spot which would become his own grave. He smirks and says, "What a rush."

In that swath of mown grass extending over a dozen graves in either direction, that allèe, a ghost of Archer's dance steps still lingers. There, a new generation of grass, greener, softer, like the first fresh blades grown to cover a battlefield, this new grass traces every toxic footstep Archer left before being struck down by lightning. Everywhere he'd stomped his poisoned boots, he says, the grass had died, and it was only now growing back, reseeded, to erase his late-night choreography.

There, only days after he'd been rendered a giant heretical, sacrilegious shish kebab skewered around his own red-hot piercing, in time for his own funeral, his final words had already surfaced as poisoned yellow letters clearly legible in the manicured green. Even as the pallbearers bore his casket to the grave, they marched across these last angry dance steps, this shuffling, stumbling path which spelled — in dead-yellow letters too tall for anyone except a deity to read: Fuck Life.

"Two kids in one week…" says Archer, “… my poor mom."

In the silence which follows, I begin to hear my name streaming on the nighttime breeze, as thin as the distant smell of candle flames cooking carved pumpkins from the inside. From somewhere over the nighttime horizon, a chorus of three faint voices seems to call me. In the distant, faraway dark, three different voices chant repeatedly: "Madison Spencer… Maddy Spencer… Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer…" With this siren's song entrancing, captivating, luring me into the unknown, I stagger in pursuit of the bait. I'm edging between tombstones, hypnotized, listening. Thoroughly pissed off.

Behind me, Archer calls, "Where are you going?"

I have an appointment, I call back. I don't know where.

"On Halloween?" Archer shouts. "We've all got to be back in Hell by midnight."

Not to worry, I shout to reassure him. Still drifting, dazed, in pursuit of the mysterious voices, drawn along by the sound of my own name, I call back to Archer, "Don't worry." Distracted, I shout, "I'll see you in Hell……"