Good Buddy (4)

He was awake at nine on the Saturday, which had not happened since the spring.

The house had a light in it he was not used to at that hour, and he lay there a while and listened to somebody two yards over running a blower, and then he got up and made coffee and drank it sitting down.

He drove out to the store at eleven for the candy. They were down to what was left, the mixed bag with the ones nobody wants in it, and he bought two.

At the truck he set them on the passenger seat and they slid when he braked at the light on Sixty-Two.

---

By four the street was working.

Two doors up the Bunches had their garage open and a folding table out with a cooler under it. Somebody's grandmother was in a chair at the end of the Radfords' driveway with a blanket over her knees. The inflatable at Wayne's came up at half past four with the fan going and stood there swaying in the last of the sun before it was anywhere near dark enough for it.

It was sixty-two degrees.

Roger put the bowl out at half past five on the second chair, and he put the porch light on, and he stood in his own doorway with the storm door propped against his hip.

They came in ones and twos for the first half hour and then all at once.

Three of them said thank you without being told to. One of the little ones would not come up the walk at all and had to be carried, and her father stood at the bottom holding her under the arms like a cat while she took one piece with great care and then another. A boy of about nine in a full-body dinosaur suit stood on the step and said, "Is that new?"

"Is what new?"

"That step. It's a different color."

"It is new."

"Okay," the boy said, and took two, and went.

A woman he had seen a hundred times and never spoken to came up the walk behind a pair of twins in matching bedsheets and said, "You're doing it this year," and he said, "I'm doing it this year," and she said, "Good," and went on.

He had to go in and open the second bag at ten past six.

By seven he had had forty-one of them and there was maybe a third of the second bag left, and his hand had got cold from the doorway, and he was standing there with the bowl against his hip when Wayne pulled up at the curb with his flashers on.

He set the bowl on the second chair with the rest of it in it and left the porch light burning and went down the walk.

---

The truck was a Silverado with a bench seat and it smelled like a truck that somebody eats in.

There was a stack of the half-sheets on the seat with a rubber band around them and Wayne picked it up to make room and put it on the dash.

"Watch that. I never did get through those."

It sat up there against the windshield for the whole ride, face up, forty of them or better under the band, and the white space at the bottom of the top one was empty.

He got them turned around in the road.

"Deb'll have thirty of them through there by the time we're back. She counts. She's been counting since we moved in."

They went up out of the neighborhood past the pole with the notices on it.

Willow Road is on the other side of the school, which meant going the length of Fairview, and Fairview on Halloween at ten of seven is a thing to see. There were cars on both shoulders. There were parents standing in the road in groups of four and five with the drinks they had brought from their own houses, and kids going up walks and down walks in both directions, and every porch on both sides of that road had something on it, and half of them had somebody in a chair by the door with the bowl in their lap.

Two little girls in the same costume ran across in front of them and Wayne stopped and let them and put his hand up to whoever was behind them.

"Look at that," he said. "That's what it's supposed to look like."

"It's a good night for it."

"It's warm is what it is. Some years you got them out here in coats over the whole outfit and they cry about it." He turned at the light. "You get many?"

"Forty-one."

"There you go." He was pleased about it. "There you go."

They passed the Baptist church on Fairview and its lot was full, cars nose to nose with their trunks open and the whole thing strung with lights, and there were people standing between the cars in the cold with paper cups, and a man in an inflatable dinosaur suit larger than the boy's was directing traffic in the entrance with two orange wands.

"They do a big one," Wayne said. "That's a big one."

Past the school the houses thin out and it goes dark between them, and then there is the turn.

---

Willow Road has nine houses on it before the church and every one of them was lit.

The last one before the lot had a wooden cutout of a witch on a post and a speaker somewhere in the shrubs playing organ music on a loop, and a family was coming down the driveway with a wagon, and the light off their porch went out across the grass and stopped at the property line.

Then the church.

There was no sign lit. There is a sign, a low one on a brick base at the road with white plastic letters in it, and it was there in the dark saying whatever it said, and he could not read it going past.

Nothing on the outside was lit.

The lot had, Roger thought, thirty-some cars in it. They were parked the way people park when there are no lines painted, which is to say in rows that were mostly rows, and there were three or four more coming in behind them off the road with their headlights sweeping across the brick.

There was nothing out front. No pumpkins. No orange bulb in the socket by the door, and there was a socket by the door. No bowl. No table. No card.

Across the road a boy in a hockey mask ran along the shoulder with a pillowcase and his father calling him back off the pavement, and the noise of them carried across the lot.

Wayne put it in park at the end of the second row.

"They fill it up," he said. "It doesn't look like much from the road."

He turned the engine off and the heater died and the truck ticked, and the two of them sat there a second.

Then Wayne got out.

---

The building was brick, one story, with a peaked roof over the entrance and a set of double doors under it with glass in the top halves.

There was light inside. Not much of it out here, but enough that you could see through the glass into a space with a floor of that tile they put in schools, and a coat rack against the far wall with coats on it, and past that another set of doors standing open with warmer light coming through.

The cold came up off the asphalt through his boots.

A couple got out of a car in the row behind them and came across, an older man and a woman in a raincoat over something, and they went up the two steps and the man took the handle and pulled the door and held it for his wife and went in behind her, and it swung to on its closer and shut with a sound like a book.

There was nobody standing on the other side of it. He could see the whole of that entry through the glass and there was not one person in it, only the tile and the coat rack and the doors beyond, and every so often somebody would come across from the lot and take the handle themselves and go in.

Wayne came around the front of the truck putting his keys in his pocket.

"Cold now," he said.

"It's dropped."

"It'll be forty by the time we come out." He blew into his hands and looked up at the front of the building. "It's an hour."

They went across.

Two women passed them going the other way, in from a car parked out at the road, and neither of them said anything to Wayne and Wayne did not say anything to them. He touched the middle of Roger's back once as they came up on the steps and took his hand away again.

At the steps he stopped to let a man come down past them, and the man nodded at both of them the way you nod at anybody, and went on out to the lot.

Roger went up the two steps.

Behind him the road was going. He could hear it — a car door, somebody's kid at the far end of Willow Road shrieking about something, the organ music from the speaker in the shrubs coming around on its loop, and under all of it that low sound a whole street makes on a night when everybody is outside at once.

In front of him the glass had a little of the road in it, the porch lights back down that way, laid over the tile and the coat rack.

His phone went off in his shirt pocket. One buzz, the short one.

He put his hand on the door.

"Are you sure?"

Roger looked over.

Wayne was on the bottom step with his hands in his jacket pockets, not coming up. He had the same face he had had all night, which was his face.

Behind him the lot was full of cold cars and past the cars the road was lit all the way down.

Roger's hand was on the handle. The door was heavy and it had not moved.

 

~End~