The Matador in the Bulrush part two

It took a full twenty minutes of slow saunter and stuttered steps before I finally met up with the toque wearing vampire, the princess with her tiara pointing crooked from her ear muffs and a small snot-sickle hanging from a nostril, and the Zombie undead who was shivering so much I was sure he would shake his sisters frozen make-up from his face. It’s funny now, but no matter how slow I walked, they efficiently timed their own to a speed that would ensure them the safety of staying a few steps behind.

We were four houses away when the Cree Zombie, who looked suspiciously like he had copied his look from one of the carved totems, said “This is as far as we go.” I made myself a mental note to ask him later if Totem poles were actually stacked faces of Cree Zombies.  I watched as they all took their places, hiding behind the last parked car with its iced windows and snow covered hood, bending low in unison so their presence in the empty vacuum of neighborhood would go unnoticed.

A few seconds later I was standing on the sidewalks edge, looking ahead at their house. It was dark, black and grey, with windows that seemed to have never been gifted the sunlight of day. The path to the door was blanketed with a thin layer of smooth untraveled snow. I looked back at my friends and had to smile when I saw their collective heads suspended above the car’s trunk, bobbing up and down like floating apples, not one of them willing to miss a second of our adventure. I stepped from the sidewalk and made my way to the door. As I placed my foot on the first step I felt its wood give in to my weight, creaking loudly in protest, the unwelcome visitor of me. Up two more steps and I was removing my mitten and knocking on the door, wishing beyond reason that no sound of me would be heard. And then a dim light floated in the black paned window to my left, looking to me as if a lazy firefly was making its way to the door. I heard the locks twist and click and just as I slid my mask over my face the door opened.

The planet I lived on stopped turning. Everything around me froze to a permanent photograph, a black and white grainy Polaroid  and curling on its edges. In front of me stood Joshua, dressed in pajamas decorated with a plethora of race cars. He was holding a candle that barely illuminated his frowning face. We both stared at each other, trapped in the jaws of our second, shocked at what each was seeing. And then a voice came from beyond the door, deep within the recess of uncharted rooms and far from the light of Joshua’s candle.

“What that be Yon? ..be ..thet…knocking and such…what is doin Yon?

Joshua was looking at me, not removing his gaze as he answered just loud enough so that only the ears owned next to his could be heard. “ It’s a wolf boy Lulu. Nothin to be stopping for. Its Halloween is all.”

And then a laugh, growing in its power, high and spider web thin, “ Oh my Yon…--A wolf boy? Gret!!!!  Oh Gret!!! Come see….we haven’t seen one wolf boy in years! Come Gret….Hold him there Yon….Gret…get one of em one cookie ut fer our visitor…I hears wolf boys like other…but oranges is what we have….and a blueberry tart, from Grets apron Yon….”

Joshua was staring at me, waiting.

The movement inside the house was stirring the currents, making his candles flame undulate and struggle to hold its wick. I could hear the witches rising from their thrones, moving scaly skin like rustling sheets as their joints unhinged in the virgin hours of winter.

And then his light winked out, without the fan fare of any mysteries climax. One second it was gyrating and skipping across its top, and the next it wasn’t. The door frame that held the pale white skin of Joshua’s open eyed expression went black, taking Joshua and everything else to its inset rectangular shadow. I didn’t wait another second; didn’t wait for any ancient spell spewer to slither her parched carcass to her stoop and splash me with hypnotic dust, nor bend a skin starved finger my way and beckon me inside to the eternity of witchcraft and large oven-boy roasters. When my heart started beating again, and the blood refilled my shoes, I spun around and leaped to the sidewalk, running faster than I thought was possible until I could dive headlong behind the car and join the plastic mannequin-like frames of my friends. I peeked over the car’s trunk just in time to watch the door close soft and quiet.

It didn’t take long after that.  A week after swearing my platoon to absolute secrecy the towns army of children came to know that Joshua was living and studying the black arts with the ancient ones, was feasting on stray pets and pine needle tea, and never closed his eyes due to the fact the ancient ones had placed fireflies behind his eyelids, just another spell cast to make sure their guard was always on the ready. His reputation solidified and set as concrete, making him the mystic and magical king among us and most importantly, was to be avoided at all cost. We all breathed a sigh of relief when school ended knowing that the following September Joshua would be starting High School, leaving us to the peaceful last year of our elementary grades, made so, by the absence of our shared warlock.

Years pass slowly when you think you’re waiting for your life to begin. In the halls of our high school we all seemed to drift away, to different schedules, to different interests and different lives. For the most part Joshua’s reputation was left behind to the carriage of youth, and its origins abandoned to the receding kaleidoscope of childhood imagination. As the years passed, he simply became known as a loner, keeping always to himself and his home. I don’t think in all the four years we watched him walk among us, any of us took the time to talk with him. For me though, it will always be the discovery of Joshua, in the summer of 1972, that shook me from his fable and made me live alone in mine.

In 1972, before any of the wonderment was taken, I learned and lived the difference between temporary legends and the timelessness of the human art in the truth of things. The one thing that did set children apart from each other was our bicycles. Those children that came into our midst, peddling shiny new steeds with ribbons hanging from their handle bars, unscratched paint and spinning glistening chromed spokes were aliens to us. In that second we would all go quiet, sure as we existed that the transgressor would fall and mar the one thing that was unachievable for any of us. A new bike was the one thing that separated a child from every other, at least until the chain loosened and began to loop heavily across its sprockets, or the paint peeled and the tires went flat and had to be repaired by a gathering of twelve year old mechanics. It was always understood that a child with a new bike was untested, lacking in the shared investments of skinned knees, long walks and chain tangled pants; forever lying in wait for the life-path of his bicycle to bruise him in. Keenan was the most experienced among us, holding as his testament, a bike that his father had built for him after scavenging parts from the local dump and the long sweeping grass lots of the neighborhoods’, now sun burnt and mummified, abandoned sheds. It was truly beautiful. Cody and Karen both sported single speed bicycles that looked much too large for either of them, made even more so when Cody decided to add extensions on to his front forks making him appear like he was forever peddling up a non-existent hill.

I was situated somewhere in the middle.  When I was that boy, around nine or ten, I owned a bicycle. It was of no matter that it had come into my life by way of a kind neighbor, another childhood friend’s father who, after purchasing a new bike for his newly exiled son had passed the old one on to me. It was a rusted inheritance, with tired red paint, a ripped seat, flat style handle bars and one speed on its single horse-powered sprocket. But to me it was freedom, a sprint in my life, my rocket and the first taste of quickened air passing across my face. It was my first companion.

I would lay awake at night anticipating the morning, knowing the day was yet undiscovered and that all its mysterious distance could be covered in a flash. Together we would stop and go; visit and leave, knowing that nothing could catch nor stop us. In the spring I would sit atop its large frame and survey the landscape, riding cautiously across shallow frozen islands of puddles, lifting my body off the seat in some futile effort to change my body weight and keep the thin crackling layers of ice intact. Those earliest spring morning hours were always the best, rising and dressing, removing my bike from its winter hibernation and feeling the individual me in a day empty of any fellow souls. I think it was then, somehow in the by-product of those chilled dawns that the seeds of introspection began to take root and I began to separate myself from the daily trappings of children.