He coos, “You know who.”
I climb onto the bus and quick head down the aisle. But Richie’s voice is following me like a fire on the back of my neck: “Debbie… Debbie…”
I think the parents were behind the whole thing, because the school was having it on Mischief Night, the night before Halloween. Keep us off the streets, I guess. Afraid their windows might get a little soapy. Or their house might get egged.
We talked about moving Mischief Night up one. But nobody did anything about it.
Anyway, it turned out we had three wagonsful for the hayride. Besides Richie, Peter Kim and Calvin came too. And Dugan showed up, of course. Even though he goes to Catholic school.
So, I’m kind of hanging away from the wagons at first, because I’m waiting to see which one Debbie Breen is getting into. She’s got this lemon-yellow quilt jacket on and her face was so—I never saw her at night before—she was so perfect. She was the most beautiful girl in the universe.
Well, she finally hops into the front wagon. I pretend I don’t notice, wait a minute, then I say, “Well, might as well get in, huh?”
So we pile in. By now all the wagons are loading up. Us guys are at the back of the wagon on one side. She’s at the front on the other side. I pretend I don’t know she’s there, but my heart’s going nuts.
Then the motors start up—each wagon has a tractor to pull it—and as soon as that happens there’s this wild scream from the wagon behind us: “Debbie-e-e!”
And from the front of our wagon: “Jude-e-e!”
And next think I know Debbie Breen and another cheerleader are crawling over my feet, jumping down from the wagon and running back to the next one. Hands reach down to help them climb on.
“Shit,” I said into the straw.
It was a junko hayride. I couldn’t wait till it was over. The ride was bumpy and the tractors were so slow I wanted to get out and walk. They kept going puh-puh-puh-puh. You felt like you were being dragged off to a war or something.
First we went along these old skinny roads where cars hardly ever went. And when a car did go by, everybody got so excited you would have thought the school burned down. I just sat there. All I did was keep offering Dugan $1000 to moon one of the cars, but he wouldn’t.
Then the wagons went off the road and up through the orchards. Next thing you know everybody’s reaching out and picking apples and throwing them at everything: the wagon behind, the tractors, the trees, the moon. Never occurred to any of the idiots to eat them.
So the drivers start keeping the wagons farther away from the trees. So the big hay fight starts. Which I wasn’t about to get into, except Richie jammed a fistful of hay in my face.
Once when I reached down for a handful, who’s underneath but George Dermody and Betsy Heidenbach. (She finally got him.) We call them The Lovers. They think they’re hot shit because they’re all over each other’s bodies all the time. They can’t even stand to go to classes apart from each other. You’re always bumping into them in stairwells and corners and bushes. When I pulled the hay up off them, I sort of got the same feeling you get when you turn over a big rock and you see all these white wormy things kind of shrinking away. Like, “What’s that doing here?”
A couple times I think I heard Debbie Breen screaming.
Finally the wagons stopped and we all got off and there was this big campfire waiting. Some of the parents were there throwing wood on it, and others were waving for us to come and make a circle around it and handing out these long sticks with points on and hotdogs. I don’t know how it happened—I didn’t pray for it, I never have good luck, and I don’t believe in miracles for teenagers—but there I am along with everybody else, sticking my hotdog into the fire, and all of a sudden there’s this voice right next to me: “Oh, it’s too hot! My face is burning!”
One guess who the voice belonged to.
Not only that, but I just happened to be scrunched right up next to her. Shoulder to shoulder. Next thing I know—it’s like I’m dreaming it—I’m grabbing her stick and saying, “Here, I’ll take it. I’ll bring it to ya.”
I was amazed at how easy she gave up her stick. She just sort of dropped back then, complaining about her face.
I called, “How do you want it done?”
“Medium,” she called.
Medium… the first word Debbie Breen ever spoke to me.
I didn’t care too much about mine, but I babied that hotdog of hers in that fire. I rolled it up and down the flames like I was painting it. That fire, it tried to snatch the hotdog, but I wouldn’t let it. I just gave the fire a little sniff. I teased it. And when I was done I had the mediumest hotdog there ever was.
No trouble finding her again; that lemon-yellow jacket was brighter than the fire. “This okay?” I asked her.
She looked at it, turned it over. “Yeah. Good. Thanks.”
“Well, here”—I handed the stick to her—“I’ll get some rolls.”
They had the rolls over in a big cardboard box. Sodas too. I got two sodas, two rolls.
She was in a different place when I came back. “Okay,” I said. “Gotcha a soda, okay?”
“Uh-huh,” she said. She flicked her head. She was always doing that to get the hair out of her eyes. I could watch her flick her head like that for ten years.
So I got to sit next to her and pass her stuff that was going around the circle. Like mustard and relish and pretzels and potato chips. When the mustard came around, instead of handing her the jar, I said, “Here. Hold out your hotdog. You want a lot?”
She held her hotdog back. “Is it yellow or brown spicy?”
“Yellow.”
She held it out. “A lot.”
I couldn’t believe how nice she was being. I used to think it would be hard to get to know her. But it wasn’t. It was easy.
I wound up getting her another hotdog. Then another. And each time, I went around the circle looking for the yellow mustard. She spent most of the time talking to her girlfriends on the other side of her. But I didn’t care. I just wished time didn’t pass and fires didn’t die out and stomachs didn’t get full, so I could serve her forever. Debbie Breen. The cheerleader. Beautiful. Flick-flick. The Debbie Breen!
And me.
I guess it was around the end of the second hotdog when the boss parent, Mister Burger, started telling scary stories. A lot of the guys laughed at first and kept making funny noises, but by the end of the first story all you could hear was Mister Burger’s voice and the fire crackling.
The story was about this late room in some junior high school, and how every time a kid got sent to it he never came out again. Just disappeared. Well, this one kid saw what was happening. He was never late a day in his life, but he started to get nervouser and nervouser because no matter how early he came to school, he was always almost late. He came earlier and earlier, and the late bell kept ringing sooner and sooner.
Then one day it rang just as he was opening his homeroom door. He knew what was coming the next day. He better do something. So what he did was, he never left school that day. He snuck into a janitor’s closet after his last class and stayed there till everybody left: the kids, the teachers, and finally even the janitors. The last light went out.
All night, all night he crouches and shivers in a corner of the closet. And all he can hear are the clocks, ticking away all over the school, in the dark… up on the second floor… down in the basement… in the gym… the library… the teacher’s lounge… everywhere. There seemed to be hundreds of them. They got louder and louder. They seemed to be moving. And then… and then… they stop! All of a sudden, all at once, the clocks stop ticking. And the kid has the strangest feeling he knows why: they’re listening. He stuffs a rag in his mouth to keep his teeth from chattering.
Then the clocks start up again. Same as before… tick-tock tick-tock… louder… louder.… The kid can’t stand it anymore. He takes the rag and rips it in half and stuffs it in his ears so he can’t hear the clocks.
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Sometime during the night the kid dozes off, and next thing he knows there’s this faint ringing somewhere. He quick wakes up and yanks the rag from his ears. It’s the late bell! He crashes out of the closet, tears down the empty hallways, up the empty stairs, praying the bell will keep ringing. But it stops just before he pushes in his homeroom door.
All the kids turn toward him. They’re all the ones that had disappeared. Their faces seem strange. And something else is strange too. It’s a sound. He listens—ticking. Lots of little faint tickings. It’s the students. They’re not breathing; they’re ticking! And the homeroom teacher is giving him this eerie grin, and he points out the door and says, “Late room.”
Well, that was just the first story. You could sort of feel the circle inching up closer to the fire, and you started to notice how cool the back of your neck was. You kind of wanted to look behind you, just to check. We were in a clearing, and almost all around us was this gigantic pumpkin patch. You could make out a few pumpkins in front, looking like basketballs somebody left. Then it was all dark.
Next Mister Burger told a story about this bloody hand that kept crawling around strangling people. Then one about the ghost of a snake. But we never got to hear the end of that one, because halfway through it some girl sitting on the other side of the circle lets out this ear-splitting scream. Everybody started to laugh at first, figuring she was just scared of the story. But then she sort of half sat up and screamed again and went, “Something’s there!” Her eyes were glowing and she was staring over our heads to behind us.
I turned around. We all turned around. Nobody could see anything. Nothing we could be sure of, anyway. The fire light kind of flickered into the pumpkin patch, and sometimes it did almost look like things were moving.
“Oh God,” Debbie goes. “Something is there.” She was grabbing the arm of one of her girlfriends. “Annie. Annieeee…”
Mister Burger was standing. His face was calm and smiling. “Well,” he goes, “looks like I really did it now. Now you’re all seeing things.” He starts across the circle. “If I’m ever going to finish the story I guess I’ll have to go have a look, huh?”
Some of the girls start squealing. “Oh, Mister Burger! No!”
But he keeps on walking. He cuts through the circle next to where we are, and he’s saying if any brave souls want to go along with him, they can. And Debbie Breen is biting her lip and staring out into the unknown darkness and she’s scared, she is scared.
I stood up. “I’ll go,” I said.
Peter Kim got up too, and some other kid I didn’t know.
Into the pumpkin patch. It was weird. The ground got darker and darker with each step. Pretty soon we were bumping into pumpkins.
“Okay, fellas,” Mister Burger said, sort of whispery. “Let’s fan out a little bit. When I call your name out, just yell ‘Okay.’ Okay?”
“Okay,” we said.
“Okay, now, let’s see: you’re Peter Kim, right? And you’re the Gruber boy. Howie? And you’re… you’re…”
“Jason Herkimer.”
“That’s right. Jason. Hard to see. Okay, let’s go.”
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. But it’s the honest-to-God’s truth that I wasn’t real scared. That’s because when I did start to get almost real scared I thought about Debbie back there, all trembling and biting her lip, and the scared kind of got pushed out of the way by mad.
I started thinking about all the things it could be—if it really was something. Like, it could be an animal. Or some kind of kids messing around. Or some guy. Some weirdo. Maybe one of those perverts or rapists just hanging around waiting for one of the girls to sort of drift away from the group. I pictured Debbie drifting away. I pictured this big dark form hulking behind her. “Come on,” I said under my breath, “come on, come on…”
Mister Burger called our names out. Everybody said okay.
My eyes were getting a little used to the dark. I could see about two pumpkins in front of me. I was freezing, but the palms of my hands were mushy. My mouth was like wood. My swallow wouldn’t work.
I thought I saw something right ahead of me. I stopped. Nothing moved. Nothing made a noise. But something was different.
I took a step forward. It was on the ground. Something about the ground a couple yards away was different. Another step. I couldn’t make out any pumpkins at the spot, and the darkness there seemed a little different shade, and there was a kind of wavy, floppy shape to it. I knelt down slow. I knelt down very slow. I was feeling for a stick and still keeping my eyes on it when all of a sudden there’s this sharp fsssss-thp of air, like a tire inflating, and the damn thing is moving!
And hissing!
I turn, take off, and trip over a pumpkin, fall on my face, look back—it’s growing!—get up and haul ass outta there.
I’m almost back into the firelight when two things happen: (1) I hear Mister Burger calling my name, (2) I remember Debbie Breen. I stop, pick up the only thing around, which is a pumpkin, and start heading back.
“Jason!” Mister Burger is calling.
I call back, “I got it!”
“Jason, got what? You okay?”
“I got it!”
“Jason!”
“I got it!”
I got it all right. By the time I got back, the thing was as high as a football goalpost. It was hissing and kind of swaying back and forth. A hundred hearts were thumping inside of me and every one of them was ready to explode, and I figured that throwing that pumpkin might be the last thing I ever did, but I was going to do it if it killed me.
Which I did. The pumpkin hit the thing, sort of towards the bottom. There was a clank and a louder-than-ever hiss and the thing just took off. It shot up into the air and curlicued and darted all over the place and all the time sounded like a dinosaur farting. Finally it plopped back down to earth, and that’s when I heard laughing. A couple of people—parent-type people—were standing just behind where the thing used to be, and they were howling their heads off.
I asked them what it was. A dragon balloon, they said. And it still had some more growing to do when I hit the compressed air can. We went over to where it was, this big deflated flopdop of rubber. You had to look at it pretty long before you could tell it was a dragon.
By this time Mister Burger and the two other guys were with us. The parents told them what happened, and they were all having a good laugh. Everybody but me, that is.
We picked up the balloon and started carrying it, just like it was a real dead dragon carcass. There was a lot of commotion by now back at the fire. They were all standing at the edge of the firelight, staring. As we got closer and I could smell hotdog and mustard in the air and I could make out a patch of lemon-yellow jacket, I wanted to drop my end of the dragon and go hide in the pumpkins.
When everybody got back in a circle and quieted down, Mister Burger opened his big mouth and started telling them all what happened. But he didn’t tell it the way I thought he would. Or even the way I would have told it.
He started off saying what the plan was. How the parents got this dragon balloon and hid with it out in the pumpkin patch. And how they let in this one girl on the secret, and told her to scream that she saw something out there. And how Mister Burger knew he could get at least a couple kids to go along with him.
“And everything was going along perfectly,” said Mister Burger, “until Jason Herkimer messed it all up.”
Everybody laughed. My face was hot from more than the fire.
“That’s right, that’s right,” Mister Burger told on, “Jason Herkimer did not cooperate. What the plan called for was that whoever came across the dragon would be scared silly—and Jason was scared silly—”
Laughter.
“—and that the kid would take off and run like mad back to the fire.”
Double laughter.
Mister Burger waited. “The rest of the plan called for everybody getting excited and scared around the fire, an
d then watching as the dragon comes looooming out of the darkness.”
A little laughter, some ghost hoots.
“But we never got to that part of the plan. Why? Because Jason Herkimer turned around and went back. Why, I don’t know. But apparently there was something in him that was bigger than being scared silly. And that something made him charge back into that dragon and kill it—with a pumpkin!”
Thundering laughs. Even I had to.
When Mister Burger started again, his voice was low. “The point is, my friends, that we knew it was all a joke. He did not.” He took a step forward and looked right at me. “Jason Herkimer—Saint Jason”—he held up the drooping dragon—“well done, lad. You slew the dragon.”
Then there was this dead silence for about a year. Everybody staring at me. Me staring at the dirt.
Then Dugan slapped me on the back. “Hey! Saint Jason!”
And then everybody started laughing and clapping and slapping palms. “Saint Jason! Saint Jason!” I kept hearing. Then they broke out the marshmallows, and somebody gave me a stick with one on it and said, “Here ya go, Saint. Here’s your sword.”
So all this stuff was going on and I was toasting my marshmallow—burning it actually, I like them black—when I hear, “Do you do marshmallows as good as you do hotdogs?”
Heaven. That’s where I spent the rest of the night.
She talked to me:
“Aren’t you the one that was wearing the patch on your eye?”
“How did you get hurt?”
“Oh neat! What position did you play?”
“Oh neat! Do you have any hobbies?”
“Oh neat! Can I see it sometime?”
And I talked to her:
“Yeah, that was me.”
“Playin’ football.”
“Linebacker. But I’m going out for halfback next year.”
“I’m making my own space station.”
“Sure!”
I don’t know how many marshmallows we had that night. I only know we were still doing them while they were putting out the fire and loading up the wagons for the ride back. (The Lovers were still in the hay. They never left.)