Hallowed (3 page)

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.  About ten yards away, Sonny and Greg stood facing a pair of kids that looked to be at least three years older.  One of them got in Sonny’s face, while the other snatched his Batman Halloween sack away from him.  When they 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 snarled, “Get over here and gimme your candy, shrimp!”

Instead, I just kept my ten yards distance and watched as 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.

With no argument from me, they started away with the entirety of Sonny’s hard earned candy.

Only then did I go to Sonny’s aid.

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 literally dragged home.

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.”

Many years later, my uncle would express the same thought to me, just in different words.  “Paul, the only thing necessary for evil to get a foothold in this world is for good men to do nothing.”

Now, under the hard gaze of my father, 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 treasured, that dark fantasy one night of the year that I was allowed to shed the bonds of who I was the other three hundred sixty-four 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 my friends had already begun to view the dreaded “yellow dog” as too unfashionable and had left me behind.  Dad drove to work and 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.

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 offered its background noise in the living room as I usually had it 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 the 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 popular 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 bad guys 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.

In the real world, the horror wasn’t always so obvious.

Turned out Claudia didn’t always wear black.

She showed up at our house wearing jeans and a faded dark blue shirt with a caption which read: “Brucie’s Drive-Thru Mortuary.”  And on the back: “Eternal Rest Shouldn’t Take All Damn Day.”

Mom squinted at the shirt.  No reaction.  She then looked Claudia in the eye and actually asked, “That’s not a real place, is it?  It’s a joke shirt, right?”

Claudia looked at me and said, “I don’t care what you say.  Your mom has
not
lost her sense of humor.”

While I protested my innocence, Mom gave me a shove.  “Now see.  That’s the Claudia I remember.  Always instigating.”

Mom gave Claudia a fierce hug, and Claudia seemed to hold on a minute longer after Mom loosened her grip.  Mom actually dragged the heel of a hand across her face as she turned back to unloading the dishwasher.  Claudia chose to ignore it.

“Mother told me that you were working at the bank?  How’s that going?”

“It has its days.  Good and better.”  That was my mom, ranging from positive to manic.  She had worked at Haven Secure Savings and Loan for the past four years as a loan officer.  Both she and Dad had been raised to assume that a mother stays home with her children. Once I started school, she had made the decision to go back to work.

Mom had eventually taken a job from friends of the family that owned the bank when the stresses of Dad’s job and being alone in the house had become too much to bear.  Raising a son like me must have been tough, but being alone was a much harder chore.  Ironically, now that Dad had retired, he was the one alone most of the day while Mom worked, but somehow he didn’t seem to have as much of a problem finding things to do around the house.  Maybe it was that inherently male thing that allows us to get along autonomously without social interaction that kept Dad busy.

Or maybe it was the long “honey-do” lists that Mom gave Dad every week.

“So where’s Dad?” Claudia then asked Mom.

Though Dad owned two trucks, he spent more time with the less reliable of the two, a 1975 Ford Wrangler.  In Texas there are two kinds of men: Chevy lovers and Ford lovers.  Leave it up to Dad to come up with a third option--a Chevy lover who nonetheless owns a Ford as well, just so he can prove to Ford owners just how screwed-up their trucks really are.

One of the favorite pastimes we shared as father and son was coming up with new and more creative acronyms, which included such gems as:  Fix Or Repair Daily; Fast Only Rolling Downhill; Fails On Race Day; Found On Road Dead; and his personal favorite lately has become: Foulin’ up Our Retirement Daily (though I’m sure that the word “foul” wouldn’t have been his first personal choice).

He wore his martyrdom like a badge of honor and worshipped in the two-car temple of oil-stains every Saturday and Sunday morning, cursing at the top of his lungs every time someone within earshot passed on the street just to get his point across.  This morning I believe he was completing air-intake manifold transplant surgery and was just closing up.

Claudia folded her arms and watched him for a good sixty seconds before he noticed that he had an audience.  “Laudie Laudie, it’s Claudie.”  He scooped her up in his arms and, after he’d set her down, gave a single swat to her bottom for good measure.  After he had done it, he must have realized from the blush on her face that such displays were past the age of acceptability for a sixteen year old girl, because that was when he really started in on her.  He asked her about the boy situation in DFW and about whether or not she had a boyfriend yet, etc. etc.

Dad was never the type to alter his personality for appearances sake.  He would have said, “I am who I am and who my father was before that.  If someone doesn’t get me, then that’s their problem.”

Just the same, the spectacle of my father teasing a teenage girl just because he knew her well enough to know what bugged her embarrassed me, so I decided to take the opportunity to go spot-clean my car.

A 1978 Pontiac Grand Prix.  Cadillac Green.  V-6.  A/C.  Power windows.  AM/FM Cassette.  Oh, I even had a 10 CD changer installed in the trunk in July.  My baby.  My first car.

“What the hell is this?”

I turned to find Claudia scowling at me.

“This is how you’re getting to Austin and, if you stop right now, how you’ll be getting back home.”

Claudia stuck her head inside the cab and wrinkled her pointy little witch nose.  “What’s that smell?  Is that hot sauce?”

“I’m getting it.  Just hold your horses.”  I grabbed up a handful of taco wrappers and shoved them into the garbage bag I was carrying. 

Before I could stop her, Claudia sprayed something into the seat cushions.

“Hey!  What are you doing?”

She held up the can of Secret deodorant.  “Strong enough for a man but made for a woman.”

I stuck my nose into the headrest of my imitation velour seat.  One whiff and I cringed.  “Oh yeah.  This is much better.” 

“It stinks!  I’m not riding in a stinky car!”

I begrudgingly collapsed behind the wheel, making a conscious effort to breathe through my mouth.  I lowered the windows.

“I guess you know that we’re going to have to ride all the way to Austin with the windows down now.”

As we drove away, I glanced up in my rear-view mirror and caught a parting glimpse of Mom and Dad standing just inside the shadow of the garage, arms linked around each other’s waists with enormous smiles on their faces.

Parents.