Johnny Halloween (12 page)
Authors: Norman Partridge
Of course, the candles in his father’s skull have long since burned out by the time Jerry revisits the cornfield with Chief Marlowe. They’re in a different clearing this time. This year’s winner is down on his knees. Jerry has a .38 in his hand. The kid who brought down the October Boy is big—he looks like a football player. His clothes are scorched, and so is his blond hair—it’s as if the kid slaughtered the October Boy in a blast furnace or something. Even weirder, the guy has a circle branded on one cheek. Jerry wonders how he got it…but he doesn’t wonder too hard.
After all, he’s got work to do.
It starts with a gun, and it ends with a shovel.
****
The Chief says, “You did all right tonight, kid.”
Jerry says, “Yeah.”
They’re alone now, just the two of them out in the cornfield. Just them and that dead boy at their feet, and a hole in the ground that’s waiting to become his cradle.
Jerry has a shovel. Marlowe has a couple of badges. He hands them over.
“Souvenirs,” he says. “You get your own tomorrow.”
“Sure,” Jerry says, pinning the badges to his shirt.
Marlowe grins, then turns his back and walks away. He’s almost to the edge of the clearing when he stops in a patch of moonlight. “One other thing,” he says.
“Yeah, Chief?”
“You work for the Harvester’s Guild now, Jerry. And that means there’s only one rule: we’ll take care of you…as long as you take care of this town.”
Jerry doesn’t hesitate.
“I can do that, Chief,” he says. “For a long, long time.”
****
And it’s strange how the night stretches out, expanding to contain all the work that needs to be done. Jerry Ricks gets busy. Digging that grave a little deeper. Rolling this year’s winner into it. Filling it in—working that shovel so his back feels the pure hurt of it, not to mention his bandaged hand.
It’s bleeding again—that cut he made when he stood face-to-face with the October Boy. The stained gauze is wet with rust-colored grime, and now and again a drop falls at Jerry’s feet or into the open grave. He leans on the shovel for a minute, and he watches one drop descend into the black hole, and then another, and he almost feels like he travels with them.
No lie. He sure enough took a test-drive through the darkness tonight. But Jerry doesn’t worry about that. In a way, it hardly seems real, all the things he’s done. It’s like all the things around here that no one ever talks about. All those things that happen and get shoveled into a thousand black holes.
And it doesn’t matter anyway. In a few more hours the sun will rise, and the night will move off somewhere else. A few more weeks, and Jerry’s wounded hand will heal. That’s the way it always is around here. The darkness opens up, and it pulls you down inside for a while. And you do what you need to do while it wraps you up in there, and then you crawl back once you’ve earned your time in the light. And sure, you spill some blood…but in the end you stitch up your wounds, and your skin scars over. And that’s just the way it is.
Everyone has scars.
Everyone around here, anyway.
Jerry knows that. He stares down in the hole. He wonders about that hunk of dead meat down there—he imagines it’s the one thing around here with wounds that never truly scar over. He wonders, too, if it’s already starting to change. Three feet of dirt on top of that corpse already. Another couple feet of good topsoil to go before Jerry tamps it down and turns his back on this night, leaving next year’s October Boy alone in a dirty cradle where it will sprout, and grow, and strain toward the light.
Jerry snatches the shovel from the earth. He gets busy again, scooping that topsoil, listening to the wind rustling through the corn. It’s a sound like sandpaper working over the night, scraping it down to the rising dawn. Jerry can almost hear the Boy’s voice in it—those same words that crossed his hacksaw grin just hours ago.
“We’ll settle this,” the Boy says. “Another night.”
That’s okay with Jerry.
He’ll be waiting.
He’s going exactly nowhere.
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