Hick - Andrea Portes [61]
But they never came. Not ever. Not a knock or a doorbell or even a prank to acknowledge her effort or the occasion. Just silence, like some unknown, unjustifiable shunning. Nothing. Tammy did that for three years straight and then just stopped. We never said anything to her about it, Dad and me, never mentioned it. We just kept it under wraps that it ever happened at all, like some shamey secret we all felt best to just sweep under the rug.
So then we stopped bothering to get Candy-Corn or Pixy-Stix or any other such disappointments. We just kind of chose to ignore that day until we just forgot about it altogether, which may account for why, the one time when someone actually did come round, we made such a fiasco of the thing.
Tammy was out at some dress-up party and my dad was sitting across from me at the kitchen table, reading a shamey-girdle magazine while I played solitaire. The doorbell rang and we looked at each other in stunned silence. Then someone outside yelled, “Trick or treat” and it dawned on us that it was, yup, Halloween and that we were, actually, expected to answer the door. So we kind of shuffled over to the door, side by side, opened it and looked out to find the strangest looking costume you thought must be a joke.
It was this green plastic deal, in the theme of an insect. It had the head of the insect inflated to about two feet diameter and rigged up above the actual head of the kid, making it look like he had two heads, one on top of the other. One human, one insect. This was made double-strange by the skinny, bug-eyed five-year-old enveloped within the costume, unaccompanied, out in the middle of nowhere in the brisk dark night. He might as well have alit from planet Zorg.
The green bug said it again: “Trick or treat,” and that sent me searching through the cupboards for an appropriate offering. After what seemed like an eternity of clacking, open and shut possibilities, I finally came up with an artichoke. I hurried back, expectant, with my great solution, and found my dad was giving this kid his shamey-girdle magazine, October issue.
We dropped these treats into the kid’s sack and smiled, waiting for him to go. But he didn’t. He just stood there staring at us, holding his sack outstretched, looking down into it, confused. Then he turned back slow and walked off into the night, carrying a sack with a shiny new shamey-girdle magazine and an artichoke.
If you think about that, you can keep yourself busy. Just throw yourself across the room and tell yourself stories.
That’s what you can do.
I have a special perfect story, it keeps coming.
I have a special favorite story where Glenda comes to me inside a bubble and grabs me and flies me down to Mexico inside her bubble-chariot. We pass over canyons, cliffs and coves with beaches slamming down waves into the rocks, with palm trees and white sand. We alight together and she smiles a big red smile with lipstick and flips her hair. She lets me down gently, squeezes my hand and floats away in her shiny plastic bubble, up into the blue sky, between the billowing clouds and up to heaven.
I wake up to Eddie scurrying around the room. I keep my eyes closed and pretend-sleep, not wanting him to start spouting sweet words, talking gentle and acting rough. All the sudden he grabs the keys off the chair, turns out the light and hurries out. Outside, I hear the gravel crunch under his boots, further and further away. And then the sound of an engine. The truck sits idle for a second, gearing up, then the wheels crunch backwards, off into the night, leaving nothing but silence.
I try sitting up but it’s no good. He’s got the ropes up, fastened this way and that, some kind of twiny web that seems too thrown together to work. But it works, all right.
I know what you’re thinking. Where’s all the tears I’m supposed to be crying? Where’s all the feeling sorry for myself, wishing I was never born and wishing I’d just stayed put in the first place?
I guess the answer is somewhere between Lusk and Jackpot.
Somewhere between Wyoming and Nevada,