That last Halloween (from Villains from the Gallows Tree)

 

We have no business dressing up like we do or going around fully armed for a war that should not happen on a day like this, when historically all the neighborhood gangs call a truce.

We just don’t trust it.

Even if Dave wasn’t as tall as he is, he’d stand out, and me, a year older, though a half foot shorter, I do, too.

Dennis comes as a ghost; Dave as a vampire; I dress up like a mummy, though Dennis says I mostly look like a zombie and holds both his hands over his sheet-covered head so, I don’t eat his brains.

Dave says I’ll need all the brains I can get; but he thinks eating Dennis’ brains won’t help me.

Coming to First Street, I say, is a mistake.
This is Dave’s idea.

First Street has all the best stuff and he wants to stay on the Clifton side of our street this year since last year when we went to the Paterson side we nearly got shot – not by some out of control street gang; a hot head older guy with a biker costume who called us hippies and told us to get the fuck out and we left.

The next day we read about him in the Morning Call after someone reported him to the cops, blaming his bad moon on his year in Korea where he nearly got killed.

Clifton has his kind, too. But I haven’t heard about them killing anyone, so I figure we’re safe in that quarter.

Sometimes you can’t read people just by how they decorate for Halloween.

My uncles don’t decorate at all, and they own carbines from the war. The only people they want to shoot are black people, convinced they will sweep over the border from Paterson the way the communists did from China in Korea.

Thank God it hasn’t happened yet, or we’d have no Halloween.

It’s First Street Gang I’m scared of. They never keep their word about anything, and they hate us more than they hate any of the other gangs, even those near Curry Park, who everybody hates.

Maybe the First Street Gang has good reason to hate us, we living so close to them, rubbing them the wrong way too often – sometimes even by accident. Neighbors always hate each other, as least that’s what my uncles say.

We try to steer clear of those houses in which we know members of the gang live, knowing if we don’t, word will get back about us being out, and someone will think we’re up to something, and this being that will lead us to a fight somewhere later in the night.

The woman who hands out candy at this house looks at Dave and me – not so much at Dennis – and asks us if we aren’t a little too old to be trick or treating, when nearly everybody else in the crowd barely comes up to my chest, and barely up to Dave’s belt.

I get it into my head that maybe we would to send Dennis up to collect for the three of us. We try this at the next house. Dennis comes back saying the lady there would only give him enough for one. Dave suggests we split what Dennis gets causing Dennis to howl, “No Way!”

He stomps off to go trick or treating with other kids where he won’t stand out like we do.

We’re still standing on the sidewalk with a dirt bomb hits Dave. He being so big he’s the easiest target to hit.

When we go to retaliate, the kids who attacked us vanish in a pack of trick or treaters and we know better than to try and sort them out.

The Morning Call report about gangs of kids on the Paterson side ripping off treats from smaller kids, and the last thing Dave and I need are cops thinking we’re doing that, so we wait, walking up the street to see if we can catch up with Dennis before he vanishes completely, and we won’t be able to talk him out of the few bars of candy he collects.

He’s not interested in candy anyway; all he wants are the coins some people hand out instead, people who’ve collected pennies in change and are too cheap to go to the store and buy candy to give. Some years, we’d wait until the trick are treating is over to egg those houses. Dennis knows which is which, but goes to all of them, thinking he can trade the candy he goes in some houses for the coins most kids don’t want. He figures he can get rich.

When we get to Lakeview Avenue, we run into the parade, a stumbling and bumbling collection of mostly tots making the long march from the Catholic school playground to Nash Park, dressed up as everything from Zorro to Mickey Mouse, and are all hoping to get one of the prizes the organizers hand out when the parade ends. Most of them – especially the very small ones – never make it to the end of the parade, and many win prizes not for the costumes they wear, but for endurance.

We follow the parade for a block, thinking Dennis might hook up with it, then change our minds knowing Dennis would never settle for the cheesy prizes they offer when he can con some kid out of cold hard cash.

We wander down to 2nd Street and begin to get nervous -- not about the wimpy gang that claims everything from Weiss’ Foodtown to the 2nd Street Deli as their turn. They don’t count for much and most us do whatever we want here.

No, I’m nervous because the old lady in the first house is right. We are too old to trick or treat. This is the last year we can get away with one of the most sacred traditions of our live, and we’re missing it just because we’re missing Dennis, and I want to kill the kid, I want to leave him to his own fate, whatever fate that might be. I want to get back to what we do best and hope we get as much as we got all the other years.

Dave looks scared about his brother, so I keep my big trap shut, as we make our way to Vernon and the deli, then town to Trenton where Dave stops and asks me which way I think we should go.

I want to tell him of a very, very warm place he can go.

But I keep my big trap shut about that, too, and shrug.

This is a pilgrimage. If he wants to get us lost, beat up or busted, let him. I’m only out here for the candy.

He turns right onto Trenton Avenue, convinced that Dennis has gone home.

I know better; I know Dennis.

Still, I follow behind Dave, eyeing the Halloween displays on all the porches, and all the doorbells we should be ringing, other kids are ringing, and all the candy they’re getting and we’re not.

When we get to the drug store on Crooks, we stop.

A large crowd of kids over flows the corner into both streets, shouting loud with all the typical signs that in the midst of them, framed and encircled by them, a fight transpires.

This is no gang fight.

Whoever it is, fights one on one like a Caseous Clay boxing match, except with us in this neighborhood, we have no rules or referees, and kids often get hurt.

Dave know something right away, and charged into the crowd, using his long arms to peal away the people blocking his way. He is taller than the crowd and can see the core of the storm. And when he gets near the center, he yanks his brother, Dennis out.

“Let me go! Let me go!” Dennis yelps, taking swings at Dave, his arms too short to reach anything except the arm that hold him. He strikes and strikes, Dave retains his grip until we are across Tr4enton in front of the large gray Victorian house where Dave dumps him on the lawn.

Dennis’ nose is bleeding and his eye already looks dark like the man Caseous Clay beat, sagging a little, the shards of his ghostly sheets shred around him, bleeding, too.

Dave scolds him, as he always scolds him when Dennis does things like this, Dennis interrupting to say they tried to take his money and he couldn’t let him, he saying how he earned it, how he traded for it, and how they had no right to take it.

Across the street, the mob moves on, trolls and goblins, ghosts and witches, slipping back into the dark the way all mobs do, without shame or repentance, cling to some shred of self-righteousness none of them have earned. 

They vanish b ack into the night to ring bells and beg treats, smearing chocolate over their mouths while ignoring the blood on their hands, one or some or many maybe even luck enough to ring the one bell behind which the man with the carbine waits, the man with a memory of war, in which no side won.

Dave helps Dennis to his feet, and the three of us head up the street to home, already too old, already ware of the vast void next year’s Halloween will leave in our lives.