An excerpt from Urbantasm, Book Three: The Darkest Road:
I didn’t have a lot of time to put a costume together, but I dressed in black, combed my hair down as flat and straight as it would go, put on a dark pair of my tea shades, and some old lady rings my Grandmother Richter had given my mother. I wrote “OZZY” across the knuckles of both hands.
“That’s your costume?” my mother asked.
“The taste of bats is really salty!” I barked. “Really salty!”
When I hopped into Chris’ minivan, Shannon gave a snort at my costume. He had dyed his hair green and was wearing green plastic gloves. He held a huge coil of chicken-wire, wrapped in green ribbon across his lap.
I said, “What’s –”
“Sea serpent,” he said.
Chris had gone for a minimalist costume: a knife thrust into one side of his head and out the other, with blood dripping down his scalp and from the corners of his mouth. Nova wore a skeleton costume. Majenta, sitting in the way back, seemed to be dressed no differently than usual.
“What’s your costume?” I asked her.
“I’m a bat,” she said.
“Baller.”
We talked strategy on our way north, and Chillout Chris weirded me out with his ice-cold battle tactics.
“There’ll be a lot of little kids,” he was saying, “but they’re slow. They’ll be like in packs with their parents, and they’ll stick to the sidewalks. So, what we do is we cut across the lawns. That way, we can get up on the porch before they do, even if they’re ahead of us.”
“Brutal, man,” said Nova.
“I’m going to get so much fucking candy tonight,” said Chris. “And I’m gonna eat it all before tomorrow.”
Majenta didn’t say much. I couldn’t tell whether she was just her usual sullen self or if she objected to my presence on Omara’s behalf. It was hard for me to believe Chris that nobody cared about the break-up.
“Hey,” I said, “you invited Omara, right?”
I imagined Majenta rolling her eyes behind me.
“Yeah, we invited her!” said Chris. “‘I’m too old for that!’ she said.” Chris’ derision of Omara’s derision came through in his high-pitched imitation of her voice. “Ken would’ve come, but his dad needs his help at some event their family is hosting in Detroit or something.”
“What about Justin?”
“I haven’t seen Justin lately.”
When we started, the sun was still shining through the tattered hems of the clouds, casting its weak light upon the last of the leaves. Silver maples. Street after broad street had already filled with kids in costumes – Power Rangers, Batman and Robin, Will Smith and Carlton Banks, the Penguin and Catwoman, the occasional Barney – and they waddled just ahead of their parents from house to house. I expected to catch some dirty looks, but I didn’t. Yeah, we were old for trick-or-treaters, but at least we were wearing costumes. At least we weren’t pushing the little kids around. At least we didn’t trample the parkway beds of cabbage, pansies, and mums. Some of the kids trick-or-treating were older than we were. Some of them were stubble-chinned adults, plastic Hefty sacks stretched wide, cigarettes dangling from the fingers.
“Trick-or-treat!” they growled.
And they received their candy and moved on. There was an unspoken truth in the air. Anderson Park was a money neighborhood, and none of our neighborhoods were money neighborhoods. So Anderson Park got its snow plowed, its trash picked up on time, and life was good enough there that they were able to worry about things like which trees the city cut down, and whether feral cats were murdering baby bunnies. Not whether live electrical wires dangled through the trees, or whether you’d get chased down the street by murderous dogs, or whether the vacant house next door would explode in the middle of the night because nobody had turned off the gas after the last eviction. And so, on one night of the year, Halloween Night, the rest of Akawe went knocking door to door and collected its poverty tax in Snickers and KitKats. Anderson Park paid up, and didn’t fuss about it too much.
The longer we were out, the more people packed into the neighborhood, with lines of kids running from the porches to the sidewalks. We saw Wednesdays and Pugsleys, Leonardos, Michelangelos, Donatellos, and Raphaels, sometimes sporting shells made from green-painted trash can lids, Splinters and Quailmen, plenty of devils, an angel or two, Vito Corleone and Marlon Brando, Woody Harrelson and Buzz Lightyear, a Sufi and some Indian princesses, a lich holding his demilich buddy in his hand as he went, swinging it like a lantern, the usual motley of vampires, ghosts, clowns, witches, and Frankenstein monsters, a band of dancing zombies, a Cher Sarkisian, and a Cher Horowitz.
While a few sullen houses greeted us with lightless windows and drawn curtains, most of the porches glowed with pumpkins, candles, Tiki torches, faux cemeteries with cheeky epitaphs – “Izzy Dead” and “Barry D. Live” – and scarecrows planted among the gourds and cornstalks, and manic spectres with flickering eyes running from second-story windows down to the lawn, and howling demons, rattling bones, broomsticks, and evil trees.
My friends and I ranged up and down the fanciest streets. On Red Arrow, at an angular mansion of raw stones and slate shingles, with a copper conservatory at the back like the house from Clue, we got the hugest Butterfingers and 3 Musketeers bars.
In front of a more ordinary house on Peterson, an Evil Dead shack that Quanla would have admired had been erected in the front yard, while a man revved a (chainless) chainsaw and roared dismembering threats at the local kids while his wife dropped handfuls of candies in their sacks and pillowcases.
Across the street, an experimental Christian congregation had set up a pavilion where they gave away popcorn and hot cider to the kids, and beer to the adults, and tiny stapled tracts for everybody.
“I’m gonna try for a beer!” said Nova.
“Don’t waste our time,” snapped Chris. “It’s getting late. There’s still candy to get got, but we’ve only got a half-hour left!”
The neighborhood got wild in the last minutes of trick-or-treating.
The sun went down and the temperature dropped. Sharp and gusting wind became rain, then sleet, then snow. A lot of parents, not wanting to get out of their cars in this mess, idled down the streets alongside their kids going door to door. It all turned into a traffic jam amid the narrow streets. A few parents got fed up with waiting and drove over the curbs and across lawns as the last of the trick-or-treaters dove out of their way.
“This shit’s getting nuts,” said Nova. “Wanna head back? My bag’s full, and people are running out of candy anyway.”
Everyone agreed except Chris. Chris would’ve kept on trick-or-treating until November 1st if he could have.
“It’s good to be high on life,” he said. “It’s better to be high on sugar.”
But we’d gotten turned around. The streets of Anderson Park twisted around parks, streams, and parkways. It didn’t help that the porch lights were all out, now that almost every house had exhausted its cache of candy. Nearly all of the remaining light came from the taillights of angry cars trying to escape from the neighborhood.
We thought we were making our way back toward South Street and Chris’ minivan, but we must have gone the wrong way because we found ourselves away from the crowds and approaching the expressway.
“I want to go this way,” said Majenta.
She was standing at the mouth of a slim drive – barely a road – that turned and vanished between tall, skeletal trees.
“That is not going to get us back to the car,” said Shannon.
“Is it even safe?” asked Chris.
Majenta scoffed.
“It’s Anderson Park,” she said.
Nova laughed.
“Vote?” said Majenta.
“No way,” said Chris.
Shannon shook his head.
“I’m cold,” he said. “That’s two of us, Maj.”
“Okay. All in favor? Come on, who wants to?” asked Majenta.
I was cold. I was tired. But I also wanted to score some easy points with Majenta. Maybe she’d tell Omara how dope I’d been during trick-or-treating.
I raised my hand.
Nova imitated me, straining for heaven like a first-grader who just aced his spelling quiz and knows all the shit in the world.
Majenta flashed a rare smile.
“The Salty Allard Brothers vs. the Rest of Us. We’re going.”
The asphalt track cut between the overhanging trees and vines, all of them leaf naked, before dumping us in a frosted parking lot. Anderson Park was one of Akawe’s “rich” neighborhoods. And this was a country club. But now it was, like seemingly everything else, abandoned. The stripped tennis courts had been riven by wide cracks packed with gray weeds. The old clubhouse had been incinerated, nothing left but a Stonehenge of blackened columns. Someone had dumped an old couch at the end of the parking lot, and it was rapidly being covered with a coat of rimey snow. Beyond all of this stretched a golf course, all of it waist-deep in dead grass and studded with yearning cottonwoods, and watched over by the ever-blinking red lights of distant radio towers.
“I know where we are, yo,” said Nova. “My uncle used to go golfing down here. This is Ruth Golf Course. I didn’t know it was shut down, though.”
“Looks like it’s been shut down a while,” said Shannon.
“It’s beautiful,” said Majenta.
All I could think was that – yes – this was beautiful, and here I was on another – accidental – nightwalk, but Omara wasn’t here, and why isn’t Omara here? Then I remembered. She’s at home studying. She’s too old for trick-or-treating. And also, she dumped me.
I kicked a mound of snow. Majenta looked at me.
“It is beautiful,” I said.
She blessed me with another smile, but I knew that her mere smiles wouldn’t put me back together with Omara.
I swallowed some snot and my throat hurt. I could feel myself getting sick as we walked. It was time to come in out of the cold.
