Page 31

31

As the Amigos Get in the Genesis, They Endure a Recovered Memory

The first October after Rebecca became one of the amigos, Maple Grove was elaborately decorated for the entire month leading up to the holiday. The streets within the six square blocks that might charitably be called a “downtown” were strung with more than half a million orange and red lights. Every store window displayed a spooky diorama or featured fearsome scenes applied to the glass with water-soluble paint. The eyes and grins and snarls of two thousand jack-o’-lanterns pulsed with demonic candlelight. Inflatable spiders as big as cars quivered menacingly on some rooftops. A bus parked in the town circle was occupied by grisly mannequins made up as the riding dead, their rotting faces leering out of the windows, as if the driver had made a wrong turn and gotten lost and stubbornly refused to admit it until everyone aboard had grown old and died. Scores of others with axes buried in their skulls or with viscera spilling from slashed abdomens or with snake heads protruding from empty eye sockets stood in strategically chosen places so that those strolling through the spectacle would encounter them unexpectedly. Hanged mannequins dangled from the trees in the cemetery, a tip of the hat to Maple Grove’s history. Tableaus featuring ghosts, vampires, and space aliens—many motorized—occupied front yards. The grange hall had been transformed into a vast haunted house where paying visitors screamed their way through a long series of horrors too graphic for children ten or under, though infants-in-arm were welcome because it was thought their senses were still so undeveloped that they couldn’t be traumatized by what they saw.

Although Maple Grove’s Month of Christmas attracted thousands of tourists, the Month of Halloween had become the greater draw. Such was the state of the nation.

On the evening of October 31, when the crowds were at their largest, the four amigos roamed the scene, drinking blood, which was really cherry soda, eating gore cream, which was in fact vanilla ice cream blended with a lot of red food dye, and hot dogs. The hot dog vendor had resisted the urge to trick up his wares to be repulsive. However, he wore a necklace of severed fingers, and the sign at his stand referred to his product as dead dogs. The air was redolent of carnival foods—french fries, nachos, cotton candy, churros.

Because they had a reputation as nerds to uphold, the amigos eschewed baroque costumes. Bobby wore a stage arrow through his head. Spencer, who had yet to acquire his trademark porkpie hat, crowned himself with a propeller beanie. Ernie wore horn-rimmed glasses with trick lenses that made his eyes look googly. Outfitted in her usual shambles of thrift-shop clothes, Rebecca painted her face toad-green instead of white and carried a whisk broom, as if she were a witch with the broomstick equivalent of a compact car.

Eventually they arrived at Liberty Park, at the intersection of Cunningham and Winkler. Across the street at the courthouse, a six-member dance troupe wore black bodysuits and masks on which were printed white, radiant images of skeletons; they performed for a standing audience that laughed and applauded, confirming that it is a deplorable trait of human beings to find death hilarious when it isn’t their own.

Pathway lamps dwindled through the trees and toward the center of the park, leading to a large, open pavilion with a latticework skirt; fluted columns supported its scalloped roof. The structure included a bandstand and a dance floor that, on other occasions, glowed with romantic rose-colored light reflecting off motorized, mirrored globes that cast slowly turning diamonds of light and encircling patterns of waltzing shadows. On this night, the light was an eerie yellow-green, and the shadows appeared to caper like entities with malevolent intentions.

The grounds offered event planners numerous locations at which to place startlements along the softly lighted paths. On previous nights, this had been a popular attraction. As the amigos gathered at the Cunningham Avenue entrance, however, the park appeared to be deserted except perhaps for some activity at the pavilion.

“Where is everybody?” Ernie wondered as he stepped through the open gate.

“Something’s weird here,” Bobby warned as he followed Ernie.

“I don’t like this,” said Spencer, and Rebecca said, “We should call it a night and go home,” as they followed Ernie and Bobby into Liberty Park.

To the left and right, ghouls, ghosts, men with goat skulls for heads, and fiends of many kinds popped up as though spring-loaded or shimmered into existence as holograms or were sitting on benches, holding snow cones full of fake shaved ice.

“That hot dog is totally coming back on me,” said Bobby as he kept moving.

“What’s happening?”

“This isn’t right.”

“This is so wrong.”

Although they openly expressed their misgiving, they progressed as if they were one organism, pacing one another without hesitancy. In their lives leading to this moment, they had suffered a similar sense of abandonment by the families that should have loved them and held them close. Each had reacted by keeping a certain distance from the social circles of which others their age were a part. After all, if you couldn’t trust your parents, if they were so high on their lives that they couldn’t find their way down to yours, how could you put your faith in people who weren’t even part of your family? So you told yourself that your eccentricities were the things about you that made you unlovable, the very things about yourself over which you had little or no control—your appearance, your intelligence, your natural enthusiasms—and you emphasized those qualities until they were no longer your weakness and became your strength, your armor against the world. If then you discovered others like you—nerds in a world of cool kids—there could be an end to loneliness at last and the birth of a group purpose that was a civilizing force. All of that, however, did not explain why the four amigos continued toward the pavilion like one creature with eight legs. They were individuals, defiant enough to take satisfaction in being outcasts in a world of sheep. Yet they proceeded as if they were lemmings, sleepwalking toward a cliff rather than racing toward it.

They reached a flight of four steps. They climbed them. They were aware that some force compelled them, and they didn’t like it. They suspected they could resist whatever magnetism drew them, but they surrendered to it because in this case capitulation was more interesting. The primary way high intelligence complicates life is that it inspires endless questions and the determination to answer them.

They stepped inside. The raised bandstand was at the far end of the building. In the center of the dance floor stood a tall man with a thick neck and broad shoulders, his back to them. Something lay on the floor in front of him, but his form and the carousel of revolving lights and shadows made it difficult to deduce what he was standing over.

Like all of his kind, he possessed an uncanny sense of how long to wait in order to have the greatest dramatic effect before turning toward his audience. The fact that he was holding a severed head by its hair and that the head appeared to be real also contributed to the impact he had on those who’d been drawn here to him.

Although only Bobby had gone into the parsonage weeks earlier and seen Wayne Louis Hornfly in the library armchair, the other three amigos knew who this must be, which was a tribute to Bobby’s talent to describe a character and which in part explained his great success as a novelist.

Even in these kaleidoscopic fragments of swarming light and shadow, they could clearly see the severed head had chubby cheeks, kind features, and a look of heartbreaking innocence. The murdered person who once possessed it had surely been a nice and harmless individual. The amigos most likely all knew—and certainly Rebecca did—that they would never be able to forget this face. One day years from now, perhaps at the altar on their wedding day or at Adorno’s after a nice lunch, this image would flash into mind with sickening impact and sort of ruin the moment.

“This is a warning,” Hornfly said, shaking the severed head so it dripped more copiously on the dance floor. “You have periodically continued your surveillance of Pastor Larry and been researching his past as best you can. You have asked questions of people who knew nothing, and you should be glad they knew nothing, because if they’d known something, we would cut off all your heads after gouging out your eyes. You saw something you were never meant to see, Pastor Larry running through the cemetery at night. You went somewhere you had no right to go, down into the church basement where those poorly constructed men were lying naked, a mistaken creation about which we are much embarrassed. You must stop now or you will be stopped in an exhibition of the most gleeful violence of which we’re capable, and we are capable of gleeful violence greater than you can imagine with your limited human brainpower.”

Everyone was silent for a moment. The mirrored globes revolved overhead, and beams of light directed at them fractured into lacy patterns that swept around the dark pavilion. Music often enlivened this place, but there was no music now. Ernie Hernishen lamented the lack of music, for a nice tune would help settle everyone’s nerves. It is a mystery what inspires us to take the path in life we choose, but it might have been here that Ernie decided to be a songwriter.

Rebecca was the first to speak to Hornfly. “Don’t you think this warning of yours is more extreme than it needs to be?”

The monster did not take this criticism well, which monsters seldom do. “You are obstinate mules. Like all mules you will die like dogs if you don’t stay in your stable where you belong.”

“May I make an observation that might be helpful?” she asked.

“You have nothing of value to give us.”

“Just the same, I suggest that before you use similes to make your point, you think them through. Mules die like mules, not like dogs. And generally speaking, neither mules nor dogs are kept in stables.”

“I see you shaking,” Hornfly retorted. “Don’t think I don’t see you shaking.”

“It’s a little chilly tonight,” Rebecca said. “Anyway, take the time to think through your similes. We’ll wait.”

Bobby said, “How do we know that’s a real head?”

Although Hornfly had a face that distorted any expression into one that was hard to read, there was astonishment in the killer’s voice. “We are not a genotype that makes empty threats.”

“Genotype?” Spencer asked. “What’s a genotype?”

“He just gave us a clue,” Ernie said.

“How do you spell that?” Rebecca asked. “With an a or an o ?”

“What is wrong with you?” Hornfly demanded. He stepped aside, revealing a headless body on the floor. “This will be you if you poke your nose in where noses don’t belong. Are you all insane?”

“No, no,” Spencer assured him. “We are just some kids who’ve been kicked around and dumped on pretty much since we came into the world, and we’ve had enough of it.”

Bobby said, “We’re not going to take it anymore. We’re not going to be called names and laughed at and just keep our heads down. We’re not going to find monsters in a church basement and scurry away and do nothing about it.”

Rebecca said, “We’re not going to be intimidated by some lumpy orange-eyed monster with a wriggling beard and three names like a serial killer, some stupid genotype who rips the heads off innocent people just to make a point.” She spoke with passion, although in truth it was not just her stirring speech that caused her three amigos to tremble and to feel that their bladders were full. “We have been the objects of endless mockery and vitriol and plain old meanness, targeted by barbarians who express their feelings for us with their fists, with hair pulling and shin kicking, abandoned by the people whose highest responsibility was to take care of us when we were little and vulnerable. But at last, we have someone. We have each other. We’re amigos. We’ve been through the wringer, nothing more can be wrung out of us. And you ”—she imbued the pronoun with cold scorn and contempt—“ you stand there with a severed head, trying to look sooo scary, thinking you can bend us to your will, terrify us so much we’ll turn tail and run. Well, that shows how clueless you are, because we don’t even have tails , you despicable turd.”

Ernie shook one fist. “Totally.”

Spencer said, “Damn straight.”

“I second that emotion,” Bobby said.

Ernie stood tall. “Back off, buttercup.”

Spencer said, “All for one—”

“—and one for all,” Bobby said.

Hornfly turned his fiery stare on Ernie, on Spencer, on Bobby, on Rebecca. After making eye contact with each, during which none of them looked away, he cleared his throat. In spite of his game-show voice, he sounded sincere and profoundly impressed when he said, “Holy crap, what a bunch of losers.” He took one step forward, and they took one step backward in unison. “Time for you to come back from Neverland and face reality. This tourist who came to Maple Grove and got himself beheaded,” said Hornfly, “can’t just be left here to be found. He must disappear. Do you know how we’re going to make him disappear?”

The amigos shook their heads. They had suspicions regarding how Hornfly would make the dead man disappear, but they were reluctant to entertain those suspicions at any length.

The monster said, “We are going to eat him. By ‘we’ I am not referring to you. We do not need your assistance to eat him. Do you want to know how we are going to eat him?”

“Not really,” said Ernie, and his amigos shook their heads again.

“We are going to eat him right here. It won’t take more than two minutes, maybe three. You really should watch, because if you dweebs don’t back off and mind your own business, we will eat you just the same way.”

“Whoa,” Spencer said, consulting his wristwatch, “I didn’t realize how late it is. They expected me home before this.”

“Me too,” said Bobby. “I’m out way past curfew.”

Ernie and Rebecca made noises of agreement, although no one in any of their lives cared how late they stayed out or whether they ever came home.

Wayne Louis Hornfly said, “We like to start eating from the crown of the head and finish with the toes. Because this man is in two pieces, we would much enjoy having an intermezzo of some kind, something soft and rotten, but as the Rolling Stones have told us, ‘You can’t always get what you want.’ So there will only be a short pause between courses.” He bit into the skull as if it were no harder than a peach and began to gobble through the brain.

The amigos bolted from the pavilion.