by Gordon W. Mennenga
Night descended on our little town, throwing a cold deep purple blanket over tree and tower. Halloween made us crazy, made us say things that hadn’t been said. My little brother Robby had stuffed straw up his sleeves, an earnest attempt at becoming a scarecrow or a human torch. My sister Stella was a bossy majorette with skinned knees and rouged cheeks. She kept whacking my brother with her baton every time he said, “Give me the money” instead of “trick or treat” when we’d practiced for the night’s adventure.
I assumed the role of a hobo, a giddy king of the road, counting on admiration and sympathy for generous fistfuls of candy. Who could deny a child with his grandfather’s corncob pipe clenched between his teeth, a bandana stuffed with old socks, tied to a hickory stick? Uncle Chet’s greasy felt fedora sat heavy on my head. The idea that being fearless and free struck me as a good thing.
After the sun deserted the horizon, we set out anticipating great sweet treats and a good look into peoples’ houses. Jack-o’-lanterns winked and beckoned. You couldn’t have Halloween without fire. Cloaked in our new identities, we welcomed the rules of darkness. We could say shit and fuck, we could spit, and we could pee in the bushes. We left our parents, Mick and Mona, with a pile of Bit-O-Honeys, our traditional giveaway treat, our mother slapping at our father’s hand, saying he’d had enough treats for one night.
To me my mother said, “Roy, you’re responsible. Bring ‘em back alive.” Our neighborhood was an open road, every trickster was on their own.
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Tug and Dorothy Henderson, our first stop, usually gave out Good & Plentys. We always made the same choice when it came to sticking out our hands or sticking out our open paper bags. Drop in the hand or drop in the bag. The hand was better because you could see what you were getting, but most people went for the bag so you couldn’t see how cheap they were. At every house it was hand or bag, bag or hand. Dorothy Henderson, the tallest woman in town, went for the hand and the G & Ps were ours.
Next Mrs. Somes who gave out quarters. Her husband had hanged himself in their garage, and this had turned her hair white. When my brother said, “Give me the money,” she laughed at his little gravelly voice and gave him an extra quarter. We tiptoed past the garage, imagining the rope dangling from the beam, afraid of breathing in what was left of a dead man’s last breath.
We met other kids on the sidewalk, our classmates and cousins, a few out-of-towners, and Kenny McQueen who was a forty-year-old crotch itcher who didn’t wear a costume. The Fessler twins, reeking of mother love, showed up dressed as tap-dancing sailors. Their squeaky laughter was both annoying and entertaining. No one talked about school, or being cautious or about little Toby Lister’s recent disappearance because we were on a mission of no regret.
Mr. Stark, the barber, was passing out combs, the Giffords handed out their usual undercooked yellow mystery cupcakes, Spud Handy stood in his doorway with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other and let us take the full-bar Butterfingers he’d stuck in his waistband. Then it was taffy, sucker, taffy, sucker with a few Tootsie Rolls and Dots tossed in. Our bounty was piling up, our bags crackling against our legs as we hurried from house to house, soaking up the crisp night air.
Stella, in moments of unbridled joy, tossed her baton up into the stratosphere as any good majorette would do, and we imagined it finding some distant orbit and never coming back. She was good at tossing but not good at catching.
The Kramers came up big with super-sized blue and red popcorn balls, and the Swans hit us in our hands with homemade fudge—gulped and gone before we were off their creaky porch. Our breath formed quick clouds that put us in mind of some smoking we’d like to do. The Coopers gave out plastic whistles in a risky move because you could hear kids joyfully blowing their lungs out all over town, deep into the night. The sidewalks were crowded with copycats of every kind. Too many pirates and nurses, a few cowboys, a stumbling bunch of tinfoiled robots. Stella said “shit” each time she met another majorette. Robby got some candy corn caught in his whistle and declared it broken and became a sobbing scarecrow with the sweetest drool in the world.
The Framptons: yellow apples with brown spots. Shuemans: Necco wafers. Warfields: a crumbling Fig Newton. On to the Harshbargers for our once-a-year peek at Floyd Harshbarger in his iron lung. It was like his head was sticking out of a space ship. We wondered how he pissed or scratched his nose or if he ever planked his wife. Mrs. Harshbarger served up huge sugar cookies with orange and black icing. She started reminiscing about every Halloween since she’d been born—how one year it had snowed and one year, when she was a small girl, she’d gone trick or treating on horseback. Our exit was less than graceful when she asked us if we’d like to say hello and thanks to Mr. Harshbarger.
The Popkins: we passed on them because of the cat hair on the cookies the year before. My sister claimed she had dreams about trying to get cat hair off her tongue while being chased by a pack of hairless cats. The Gelmans, the Ubbens, the Blackfords, the Biebers. When each door opened we got a whiff of the supper we were interrupting: liver and onions, ham hodgepodge, roast beef, bean soup, meatloaf, tuna patties, candied yams, chocolate chip delight. We dodged the Lutheran parsonage because Rev. Zumwalt and his mail order wife gave out tiny New Testaments and the promise of sweet salvation, no candy. Too much religion makes you hungry for candy.
We headed for home when the cold bled through our costumes, and our desire to count our treats became our sugary engine. Our parents watched as we emptied our bags onto the kitchen table, each of us guarding our loot, ignoring the certainty of tooth decay and the dentist’s hairy hands.
There were surprises in my bag: a walnut, an unwrapped throat lozenge, a piece of cinnamon toast, a postcard from Nova Scotia, a skeleton key, a ten-penny nail, a shoe horn, a wax harmonica. Too many pencils – one from a French funeral home, as if we’d actually use it. Plenty of Sugar Babies, too many Hershey kisses, not much Lik-A-Made, bubble gum galore. Candy wrappers littered the floor as we filled our mouths with gluey globs, our cheeks pushing against our noses.
In each pile there was one simple surprise: a shiny .22 long rifle shell with a bronze tip. Mick and Mona, in unison, asked, “WHAT IN GOD’S NAME IS THAT?” and “WHO IN GOD’S NAME?” We grabbed our bullets, fought off our parents and in the end each of us owned a Halloween bullet. Stella’s disappeared before dawn, Robby rolled his around in his mouth for a few days then flattened it with a hammer on the sidewalk.
I still have mine.
Sometimes you just have to eat the treats and treasure the tricks. Forever and ever. Amen.
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GORDON W. MENNENGA grew up in a small Iowa town where he learned to look and listen. His work has been featured on NPR and published in Epoch, Post Road, Epiphany Literary Journal, and Necessary Fiction. He recently made his first appearance on Spotify. Gordon has taught fiction writing and film studies at DePauw University, Coe College, and Oregon State University. He often serves on the faculty of the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. Gordon earned an MFA degree from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and still calls Iowa City his home. gordonwmennenga.com.
Union Spring Literary Review 