After passing the candy and the sewing department, the housewares and the paper goods, I found myself in the costume section, where I took a stand and examined my choices.
Frankenstein’s monster was one. He grinned evilly down at me, green face and all, and he was actually one of the tamer, prettier sights to greet my wondering eyes. In addition to the full-length, adult-sized and child-sized costumes that Nellie had hanging on hooks on the wall, there were also whole-head latex masks placed over foam “skulls.” She had those positioned in a gruesome long line right above my head—the masks up high enough to keep them out of the reach of little hands. It looked to me like a police lineup of humanity’s worst nightmares.
“Were costumes this scary when we were growing up?”
It was my own voice blurting out my thought.
“No way,” said a woman’s voice to my right. I glanced at her, and we exchanged ironic smiles. She said, “It looks like those pictures of car wrecks they made us watch in driver’s ed.”
I laughed, and then was absolutely dismayed to see that Melissa Barney stood on the other side of the woman, staring at me. Oh God, what a joke to be making in her presence! My laughter broke off abruptly enough to cause the other woman to cast another look at me. Unfortunately, it also inspired her to make another joke. “Or, maybe they look like people who were in terrible fires, and they didn’t get any plastic surgery? If any of these things come to my house on Halloween, I’m slamming my door and calling 911!”
How could I get her to stop, I wondered desperately, to shut up?
Melissa was coming toward me, and she’d heard it all. The reminders of terrible traffic accidents, of horrible injuries, even of calling 911.
Her thin, beautiful face was tense, her voice high and strained when she spoke. “You’re right. Whatever happened to Daffy Duck, for heaven’s sake!” Unlike the other woman, the stranger, Melissa wasn’t joking. Her eyes in their bruised sockets burned with real anger. “Or pretty little ballerinas? And Peter Pan and Captain Hook and Tinkerbell?” The intensity in her voice was building, and I thought she looked near tears. “If they’re going to be this horrible, why don’t they just make Ted Bundy masks and be done with it! . We’ll just dress our kids up in serial killer costumes, and turn them loose to terrorize the neighborhoods.”
I wanted to touch her, to calm her.
The other woman, who was apparently completely insensitive to other people’s moods, just laughed delightedly at Melissa’s tirade, and babbled her way right back into the conversation. “I guess we shouldn’t be so shocked,” she said, and then giggled. “I mean, my manicurist told me that she’s going to a Halloween party this year dressed as a disgruntled postal worker! She and her boyfriend are going to rent uniforms and carry toy semiautomatic rifles! little-bitty AK-47s! And I know this other couple, they’re going to put those fake meat cleavers over their heads and go as the Cleavers!” She let out a peal of laughter. “You know? Ward and June? From that old television show Leave It to Beaver?’
“I know,” I said repressively.
Any other time, I’d have laughed at that.
But Melissa Barney’s whole body was trembling beside me.
“I still have to buy costumes,” she said to me, her voice ragged with what sounded like exhaustion and anger and grief. “For the kids. Life goes on!” A wild laugh suddenly broke out of her, rising in a thin, hysterical syncopation.
Even the clod standing next to us had to notice that behavior.
She stared at Melissa, looked as if she had the thought that this lady was completely wacko, and she quickly backed off a couple of steps, then moved completely away from us, on down the line of costumes.
“Melissa,” I said tentatively.
“Mommy?”
A small child saved the situation. His little voice called our attention down to where he stood, grasping Melissa’s long cotton skirt. “What’s so funny, Mommy?” he asked, looking worried.
He was adorable, no more than three, red-haired as his mother, with a sweet little rosebud mouth and serious brown eyes. My throat closed at the sight of him and my knowledge of his loss. Did he really know? I wondered. Or did he persist in thinking that his father had gone off on a hike, and that he’d be coming home anytime now? Some small children did feel that way, I’d heard, and for years they lived their lives as if they were only waiting for their missing parent to burst through the front door calling, “I’m home! I love you! Did you miss me?”
Melissa knelt down and folded him tightly to her.
In that moment of seeing the child—of staring down at their matching red heads—everything about the trail crossing suddenly got more personal to me. It was odd, really, but more than my own history with God’s Highway, more than the power of Melissa’s appeal to me, more even than our scare with David, the appearance of this child brought home to me exactly what might be at stake at that quiet, modest intersection of a hiking trail with a highway.
The little boy was staring past his mother’s shoulder to a point in back of me. I started to turn around to see what it was, when something furry suddenly brushed against me.
Startled, I jumped as if somebody had touched an electric current to me, and I shrieked. Totally humiliating. If I’d wanted to go unnoticed, that wasn’t the way to do it.
There was a small, masked, furry creature standing behind me.
“Oh!” I said to the short creature. It was a “wolfman,” complete with a hairy latex mask that covered the whole head, and bloody fangs and gleaming red eyeballs. Below that was a T-shirt, blue jeans, and tennis shoes. “You scared the sh—Schopenhauer out of me.”
“Kwool!” breathed Melissa’s little boy.
“Growl,” said the hideous creature. “Grruph!”
It lunged at the little boy, who screamed in delighted terror.
“Vic!” Melissa said in a sharp, scolding voice. “Stop that!”
She got up from her kneeling position and placed a hand on top of the wolfman’s head, and then tugged until she had pulled the mask entirely off of him. Revealed was another redheaded boy, this one more like seven or eight years old, another pint-sized clone of his pretty mother. What had their father looked like, I wondered? Was he a redhead, too, or had he been, physically, the odd man out in this vibrantly colored family?
“Hi, Mom,” the wolfman … Vic … said, calmly.
His little brother reverently touched the furry mask in his mother’s hands and murmured “Kwool” again, in an awed voice. He looked up pleadingly, “This one!”
“No, you can’t have one like this, Stevie, it’s ridiculous, you’re far too young, it’ll give you nightmares—”
“No, it won’t!”
“He already has nightmares, Mom.”
“It won’t, it won’t! I want to be the woofman!”
“Vic,” she said to the older one, who seemed to me to be almost too calm, too mature for a kid his age. “Take your brother and make him look at more appropriate costumes. He can have something from Sesame Street, or Barney, maybe, but no monsters. I won’t pay for any monsters!”
“Okay, Mom, okay,” he said soothingly.
The older brother took his younger sibling by a reluctant hand. He leaned over and whispered something in the little one’s ear, making him giggle. Then Vic clamped a hand over his brother’s mouth and quickly moved him away from us, the little one still giggling behind the hand. Melissa didn’t appear to notice the byplay between them, but I wondered what they were up to.
My shriek had attracted the attention I didn’t want.
“Jenny, is everything all right?” asked Nellie Kennedy, appearing between us. “Melissa, dear, are you finding what you need?”
A few minutes later found the three of us crowded into Nellie’s back office, Nellie having quickly intuited that it was her friend Melissa and not I who needed succor. Now the older woman sat behind her desk, Melissa had the other chair in front of it, and I was perched on a corner of it, tellin
g them all about my two-days’ worth of investigation into the trail crossing. Nellie, who’d been at the Dime Store all day, hadn’t heard about the blockade of the highway near her home until I explained it, and they were both horrified to hear of David’s injuries.
“Beaten, Jenny?” asked Nellie, looking disbelieving.
“Well, that’s what the doctor thought, but maybe David got dragged a ways by his bike, and it just left odd-looking bruises on him. Or maybe he actually got hit by a car, and he just doesn’t remember it.”
“You see what I mean now.” Melissa had her feelings under a little control now, but still looked awfully shaky and vulnerable to me. Now she turned that intensity once again on the issue of the crossing. “You’ve almost had a death in your own family—”
“Well, I don’t know that—” I started to demur on both counts: death and family, but she wouldn’t let me finish.
“Your friend, David, he could have been killed,” she insisted.
“Yes,” I had to admit to her, “I guess you’re right about that, but it’s not the same thing as what happened to your husband or to that little girl who died. I mean, this was purposeful, having to do with … I don’t know what, exactly … but it wasn’t a case where somebody simply ran a stop sign and hit a pedestrian. It wasn’t like that, you see.”
“Any way you look at it,” she said, shaking her head in disagreement with me, “that intersection is dangerous and deadly. Are you going to help me shut it down, you and your foundation? What have you decided?”
“I’m almost certain we will help you—”
“Yes!”
“Wait,” I cautioned her, holding up my hand to make her halt before she ran me down, though I smiled as I did it. “What I started to say is, we’ll probably … definitely … help you find a way to improve it, but I don’t know about closing it down, Melissa. And, I’m really sorry, but the truth is we can’t do anything more until after the festival. We’re swamped, Melissa, I’m sorry to delay you, but it’s just going to have to wait until after next weekend.” When I saw how distraught she looked, and how prepared to launch into another attempt to get me involved more quickly, I said, “However—”
She and Nellie both looked up, sharply.
Melissa’s right hand lay on top of Nellie’s desk, on top of the papers there, and Nellie was patting it now and then as though to comfort the younger woman. Although Nellie wasn’t saying much—leaving the talking to Melissa and me—her face showed her involvement, her sympathy.
“I’ve thought of a couple of things you might do in the meantime.”
“Tell me!” Melissa commanded.
“First, how about making some warning signs to post on the trees on either side of the trail? You could come over to Judy’s House—we have tons of poster board and colored markers, not to mention computerized printing, if you want to make signs that way—and you can work on them there. Our volunteers would probably be glad to pitch in a few minutes here and there. Or bring your boys, let them help you. It might be a cheap, easy, temporary fix.”
“Okay,” she said, nodding. “Okay. What else?”
“Would you like to have a booth at our festival?”
She looked surprised, puzzled, as well she might be.
“What I mean is, I could arrange for you to have a booth, like any of the charities who will be there. If you could think of a special … something, I don’t know what … to sell or to display, some gimmick, in other words, you could use the booth to promote your cause. Educate people about the need for safety at the trail crossing. Get them to sign a petition, if you want to. Gather ideas. Any money you collect, you’ll get to keep for your cause. Would you be interested in doing that?”
“Yes, absolutely, I want to,” she said.
“But what would you do at a booth, Melissa?” asked Nellie.
Her boys had come in quietly while we were talking. The little one had crawled up in his mother’s lap, and the older one—Vic—now sat cross-legged on the floor near her. He said, “You could do your pumpkins, Mom.”
“I could, couldn’t I?” she said, looking thoughtfully at him.
“Oh, yeah,” chimed in her youngest. “Your punkins are really kwool!”
Melissa explained for Nellie and me: “I’m a sculptor, you know. And it just happens that I am something of a Michelangelo of the pumpkin-carving world.” For the first time since I had met her, a real smile touched her face, and I saw it mirrored in the faces of her sons, especially in Vic’s sad and worried eyes. “Aren’t I, boys?” Vigorously, they nodded their agreement with that assessment. “In fact, I probably carve the world’s best jack-o’-lanterns. I think they really are good enough that I could charge money for them. But where will I get the money to pay for them, before I carve them and sell them? And how many would I need? And—”
We spent the next few minutes happily ironing all that out, with Nellie generously offering to sponsor the booth, which meant forking out enough money for dozens of pumpkins, for which Melissa would pay her back out of the proceeds. The point of this booth wasn’t necessarily going to be the amount of money it earned, as it was the number of people it enlisted to Melissa’s pet cause. Or, maybe the real point of it was to give her something meaningful to do, to bridge her anguish, even if the bridge only held up for a week of preparation and the weekend of the fair. I didn’t try to organize it for her—the volunteer assistants she’d need for decorating the booth and for taking money and for cleaning up, and so forth—preferring to leave her with a lot to do, to keep her occupied. Besides, I had a big enough load of responsibility of my own, without adding her booth to it.
“Gotta go,” I announced, edging off Nellie’s desk.
“Will David be all right?” she asked.
“Yes, I think so, thank you.”
“What will the police do about it?”
“Right now they’re looking into First Things First—”
Melissa’s face turned swiftly toward me, registering shock. “What did you say?”
Hungry and worn out by then, and sore from all of my many scrapes and tumbles, I really didn’t want to explain about Lewis Riss and FTF to her and Nellie right at that moment, though of course I did.
They reacted quite strangely, I thought.
I expected both women to be dismayed at the news that the militants were back to support the cause of a pristine trail. Instead, Nellie looked downright happy, but then maybe she hadn’t been one of the property owners who opposed God’s Highway. I didn’t know; we’d never talked about it. And I was much too tired to ask right then.
Melissa looked dismayed, all right, but it was an unhappiness that exceeded any bounds I might have anticipated. She looked literally sick at the news; I even thought, for a moment, that she might actually throw up, the way she got so white, and the way one hand flew to cover her mouth and the other to clasp her abdomen.
“Mom?” her oldest son asked her, jumping to his feet.
Both Nellie and I said, “Melissa?”
She put her left arm around Vic, drawing him close to her, and she bent her head to her youngest boy, Stevie, so that her face was hidden in his hair. At that worst of all possible moments, the poor little kid chose to announce: “Mommy! Vic bought me the woofman costume out of his own allowance money! I’m gonna be a woofman!”
So that’s what they were up to, I thought, and I held my breath for them, hoping she’d let them get away with it.
“No!” Their mother’s head snapped up. “I said, no!”
“Mommy!” Stevie’s face screwed up, but it wasn’t clear—possibly not even to him yet—if he was going to cry or throw a tantrum. “Vic bought it for me! It’s mine! I’m gonna be woofman for Halloween!”
“Mom, he really wants it—”
“And I really don’t want him to—”
“Daddy will let me!” the little one said, furiously.
There was a deathly sad silence in the small office.
“I’m
sorry, Mom,” Vic started to say, in a tiny voice.
“No, it’s okay,” she said, blinking hard, and her words came out ragged with emotion. Still, she hugged both boys, each with a separate arm. My heart ached for her valiant effort. “Vic’s right. Daddy would let you. And Daddy would be proud of Vic for being so generous to his little brother. I’m being … I don’t know what I’m being, boys. Crazy. Overprotective, maybe.”
Her older son continued to look devastated, stricken.
Which was how I felt—and Nellie, too, no doubt—just looking at them. I decided that nobody else was going to die at the intersection of God’s Highway and the state road, not if I could help it. And maybe that was also the moment when I dived into a deeper understanding of “our” David, who had lost not just his father, but also his mother before he was even seventeen years old. I thought I’d had sympathy, empathy, whatever you want to call it … but whatever it was I’d thought I’d felt before, I felt it stronger now.
Oddly enough, it was Bill Kennedy who saved the day.
In his shuffling way, big Bill ambled into the doorway of the office, grinning in a way that seemed like a physical non sequitur to the atmosphere within. Then he brought out from behind his back two orange plastic pumpkins filled to their brims with candies and toys of all sorts.
“Merry Christmas!” said Bill. “Ho, ho, ho!”
The children’s faces lifted instantly from gloom to glee.
Which brought smiles to the three of us women, as well.
As I left, a few minutes later, I gave Bill a kiss on the cheek and murmured, “Thank you, Santa.”
13
ACHING EVERYWHERE I HAD MUSCLE OR SKIN, I EASED MY TIRED OLD body into a black vinyl booth at the Beantown Diner, which was fatteningly located right on my path home. I still didn’t have a Halloween costume. I hadn’t been able to do any business with Nellie. The only way to redeem that Friday night would be to ingest every greasy bit of a double cheeseburger, fries, and malted and, what the hell, maybe hot cherry pie à la mode, too. I’d gamed weight while working on the festival, because I’d loaded up on too many of those comfort plates from the diner, and too often late at night.