Rabble Starkey (8 page)

But Gunther loved Mrs. Cox especially. She knew
about his eating habits and didn't fault him none, and always at Easter she brought over special decorated eggs with his name painted on, knowing eggs was one of the things he ate.

"Norman'll be gone," Veronica said to me. "He always goes out all over town on Halloween, soaping windows and stuff. Remember last year he got caught letting the air out of Dr. Briggs's tires?"

"Yeah, I heard the door bang earlier," I said. "I'm sure he's gone already." But at the same time I said it, my eyes were darting around, checking the bushes and such, to make sure he wasn't lying in wait.

"Come
on,
" said Gunther, all impatient, and he tugged at my gypsy skirt.

So we took his hands and headed across the yard, around the oak tree, to the Coxes'. On their porch we lifted Gunther up so's he could push the doorbell. It was one of them real chimey ones that played a sort of tune.

Mrs. Cox came, wearing an apron, and pretended like she didn't recognize Gunther. "It's a ballerina!" she exclaimed in a delighted voice. "Harold, come and see this
beautiful
ballerina with golden curls, right here on our porch!"

Mr. Cox, holding a newspaper, came into the hall and looked down over his glasses at old Gunther, who was hugging himself in excitement. It was the very first time that Gunther had ever been in disguise, except for when he was a baby and used to pull a blanket over his head and wait, giggling inside it, for us to find him.

"I declare," Mr. Cox said. "That surely is the most amazing ballerina I've ever seen! Do we have something to give him?"

"
Her,
" Mrs. Cox corrected him. "It's a
lady
ballerina, Harold. Can you do a little dance for us, miss?"

Gunther held out his arms, waving his wand, and danced about on the porch. Then he bowed politely and the Coxes clapped their hands. Mrs. Cox put a banana into his bag, and she gave miniature Hershey bars to me and Veronica.

Gunther was truly gleeful after they closed the door. While we was helping him down the steps, he said again and again, "They thought I was a lady! They did! They didn't know it was me!"

We took him to some more neighborhood houses. People who didn't know Gunther so well, or his diet, gave him Tootsie Rolls and Charleston Chews, but he didn't mind; for him the fun was in the ballerina disguise—everybody admired it so—and the presents dropped into his bag.

It was beginning to get cold, and as we left the McCarthys' porch we could see Gunther shiver inside his outfit.

"We oughta take him home now," I said to Veronica. "Then you and me, we can do some more. We can go over to—"

But Gunther grabbed at my hand. "We didn't go to Millie Bellows's yet," he said.

"That mean old thing? We don't want to go there, Gunther."

But good old Gunther, he stood firm. "I
like
Millie Bellows," he said.

I looked at Veronica, and she shrugged her shoulders under her gypsy shawl. "Well," she said, "okay. Let's go there, and that'll be the last one, Gunther. After that one we'll take you home."

He shivered again, and did a little dance, partly to warm up, and partly because he hadn't tired yet of being a ballerina, and beautiful. We took his hands once more and headed toward Millie Bellows's house, a place I most surely didn't want to go.

Most nights are quiet where we live. Maybe you hear a dog bark someplace, or far off on the highway a screech of brakes now and then. And always at night, except in the hottest part of summer, you can hear the trees move in the wind. But it's a quiet wind.

But Halloween night was different. It was different because we were out in it, and most often after dark we were always inside, doing homework, watching TV, reading, getting ready for bed.

Out in it, in the dark, we could hear new sounds in the quiet night. Someone's cat ran across a yard, silent as anything, but the shrubbery rustled when the cat disappeared into the bushes, maybe chasing a chipmunk. Across the road we could hear the thud as somebody pulled a window closed. We could hear our own feet scuffle through the dry leaves that was all over the ground.

And sometimes we could hear the sound of running feet and muffled laughing. All the kids in town was
out. Far down the road, under a porch light, we could see three people dressed as ghosts, with sheets over them, standing by a front door. Then, after the door closed, they ran down the steps and headed off in another direction, holding their sheet costumes up so they wouldn't trip over the dragging parts.

Everything seemed spooky and strange. A bush would move, and Veronica and me, we would jump, all startled, thinking someone might be hiding there. The wind blew the tree branches so that their shadows moved on the road in the moonlight, dark and scary, so different from the normal tree shadows in daytime.

Gunther tugged at us and we found ourselves nearing Millie Bellows's little house. Vines hung down from her porch roof. In summer they were shiny green, and we pretended they was poison ivy because we found Millie Bellows so poisonous herself; but of course it was only regular old vines, planted there for shade once and overgrown now because no one ever thought to trim them back. And probably years ago none of her husbands ever had the time, they was all so busy dying off one by one.

The vine leaves was all papery now, in October. Lots of them had fallen off, but the ones that still hung there was rustling against each other like the newspaper pages heaped on the couch Sunday mornings.

Millie Bellows, crabby old evil-tempered thing, hadn't turned her porch light on. Everybody left their porch lights on for Halloween, to guide the ghosts and gypsies. But not Millie Bellows. Not her. She probably
hoped the kids would trip on their costumes, or on her rickety porch steps, and skin their knees. She probably hadn't even fixed any treats to give. She probably hoped no one would ring her bell.

But we lifted Gunther up so's he could, and when he mashed the button we could hear it buzz inside the house. There was a light on inside—we could see it through the curtains—and a TV playing. Even though he was chilly, Gunther was still prancing about, all cheerful, waiting to do another ballerina dance when the door opened. But the door didn't open, and we didn't hear no footsteps inside.

"She probably couldn't hear it, with the TV going," Veronica said, and she pushed the doorbell again, hard and long. "She's hard of hearing, being so old."

I didn't really believe that. Well, maybe she
was
hard of hearing, but what I thought was that she was just sitting all hunched up in front of the television, ignoring us. Shoot, the only time she ever paid attention to us was when she called scoldings from her porch—scoldings we didn't even need.

"She won't come," I muttered to Veronica while Gunther pranced, singing to himself, around the porch. "She hates us."

"Well, she did bring that Jell-O," Veronica said, calling my attention to the day that Mrs. Bigelow went away to the hospital.

"Hah. Melty old Jell-O," I said. "Here, let me ring it one more time." And I pushed the doorbell, holding it down with my thumb for a long, loud time. It was awful dark on the porch. Even with the moonlight
outside, the creepy old vines made Millie Bellows's porch awful dark, and we could hear Gunther bumping into chairs as he twirled around in his ballet shoes.

"Shh! I think she's coming!" Veronica said. We all three stood still and listened. Sure enough, we could hear her shuffling toward the door. If I walked that way, Sweet-Ho would say, "Rabble, lift your feet, honey." But I suppose you can't fault someone so old for their walking habits. Maybe by the time you're ninety years old, you just keep grabbing onto the ground with your feet for fear you might be plucked up to heaven any minute when you're not dressed for it.

"Get ready to do your dance here in front of the door, Gunther," Veronica whispered. Gunther hitched up his droopy tights and got into his dancing position. Millie Bellows, muttering, pulled the door open so the light fell out onto the porch just like a spotlight falling over a dancer on a stage. Veronica and me, we hung back in the shadows, holding our bags and Gunther's.

"Trick or treat!" called out Gunther happily, and he danced about.

Suddenly out of the darkness in the yard something came shooting through the air. It missed Gunther, but it caught Millie Bellows, who was so hunched over she wasn't much taller than him, and she fell over on her knees, jarring the table in the hall behind her. We could hear glass break. Veronica ran forward to where Millie Bellows was crouched on the floor holding her head. But me, I turned and ran into the yard.

Once I got down the porch steps I could see a figure, even though he was dressed in black and running. I dropped the bag I was holding and ran after the figure—through Millie Bellows's yard and up the road, my feet pounding. Instead of my sneakers I was wearing these dumb black sandals of Sweet-Ho's because I thought they was gypsy-like, and I couldn't run as fast as usual because they was too big. But I set my mind to fastness and forgot everything else. I forgot the flapping sandals and I paid no attention when my shawl fell off my head and shoulders and dropped on the ground. I pulled my mask off my face so's I could see better and I kept my eyes firm on that black figure up ahead.

At the bend in the road he ducked into the woods. I was so close by then that I could still see the bushes moving where he had pushed through, and I went into the woods at the same place. But then I couldn't see nothing anymore—just thick trees and bushes. I stopped and stood still. For a minute I could hear someone breathing hard—I thought he was right there beside me—but then I realized it was my own breath. My heart was pounding, too, and I had a stabbing pain in my side from running so hard. But everything was quiet, and I knew I had lost him.

After a minute I turned and pushed back out to the road. There wasn't no point to chasing on through the woods. He could be anywheres.

I jogged back to Millie Bellows's house and on the way I picked up my mask, which was lying there in the road with its elastic busted. Farther down was my
shawl, all dusty, and beside it something small and black. When I picked it up I could see it was a hat of some sort, and I rolled it up inside the shawl and carried them with me.

The door was still open and I could hear Veronica's voice inside. When I went in I had to step over a mess of broken glass, and I could tell from a handle on the floor that it had been a pitcher. Lying on the doorsill I could see the stone that the person in black—I knew it had to be Norman—had thrown.

I found Veronica in the front room, holding a dishtowel to Millie Bellows's face and patting at her as she lay on the couch. There wasn't any blood, just a swollen-up place by her eye.

"I called my daddy on the phone," Veronica said, "and he'll be right here."

Gunther was standing close by, with his ballerina mask pulled down so's it dangled around his neck. He was holding one of Millie Bellows's hands.

In the corner some newscaster on TV was talking, and then he showed a film of a building with its side blown out by a bomb. I went over and turned the television off. "He got away," I said. "I chased him but he got away."

In a chair beside the TV I spied a folded-up afghan all crocheted in shades of green and brown, a lot like one that Gnomie used to have. I took it over to the couch and spread it out over Millie Bellows's legs where they was sticking out from her flowered housedress. Then I reached under and pulled her slippers off and tucked the afghan around her gnarly old feet.
It struck me that Millie Bellows wasn't talking none, wasn't sputtering evil-tempered comments like she surely had a right to. "Is she okay?" I asked Veronica.

Before she had a chance to answer, Mr. Bigelow came hurrying through the front door and over to the couch. He knelt down and examined Millie Bellows's face. Then he felt for her pulse, even though he's not no doctor or anything. He looked real careful at her little squinchy blue eyes.

"Millie," he said in a gentle, sort of joking voice, all reassuring, "I do believe you must have nine lives, like a cat." He put his arm under her shoulders and helped her to sit up.

She squinted around. "Where are my glasses?" she asked.

Gunther reached over to the table and handed them to her. "They're kinda busted," he said, sadly.

The glass wasn't broken, but the gold frame was all bent on one side. She tried to put them on, but you could tell it hurt when she touched her face, and finally she just held the glasses in her lap.

"Well," she said crossly, "how do you expect me to
see
anything?"

Mr. Bigelow took the glasses and pried at the bent part until he straightened it some. Then, real careful, trying not to touch the swollen-up place, he put them onto her. She blinked and looked around the room. "What was it broke?" she asked loudly. "I heard something break."

I ran to the hall by the front door and picked up the handle that was lying there in the pieces of broken
glass. I took it back to her. "It's sharp at the end," I said, trying to be helpful. "Be careful."

Sitting up, Millie Bellows had been trying to get herself in order and to look dignified, but when she took that handle from me, and peered at it through her bent glasses, her face just sort of fell apart. She started to cry. "My mother's wedding-gift pitcher," she said. "It sat there upon that hall table all my life!" She turned the handle over and over in her hands.

"Me and Veronica'll try to mend it for you," I told her. "We'll use Elmer's glue." I knew we couldn't, but I thought it might make her stop crying if I said that.

Mr. Bigelow hugged her tight around the shoulders. "Millie," he said, "I have the car outside. And I'm going to run you over to the hospital so they can take an X ray. You look just fine to me, but we want to be sure."

She looked all confused, but she gave the handle back to me and swung her legs down to the floor. "Here," I said. "I have your slippers here." I knelt down to put them back on her feet.