It was seven fifteen and very dark now; already the children were fluttering along the sidewalks in white ghost sheets and zinc-oxide masks, ringing bells, screaming, lumpy paper sacks banging their knees as they ran.
Leonard, she thought.
They didn’t call him Leonard, they called him Heavy-Set and Sammy, which was short for Samson. They called him Butch and they called him Atlas and Hercules. At the beach you always saw the high-school boys around him feeling his biceps as if he was a new sports car, testing him, admiring him.
He walked golden among them. Each year it was that way. And then the eighteen-year-old ones got to be nineteen and didn’t come around so often, and then twenty and very rarely, and then twenty-one and never again, just gone, and suddenly there were new eighteen year olds to replace them, yes, always the new ones to stand where the others had stood in the sun, while the older ones went on somewhere to something and somebody.
Leonard, my good boy, she thought. We go to shows on Saturday nights. He works on the high power lines all day, up in the sky, alone, and sleeps alone in his room at night, and never reads a book or a paper or listens to a radio or plays a record, and this year he’ll be thirty-one. And just where, in all the years, did the thing happen that put him up on that pole alone and working out alone every night?
Certainly there had been enough women, here and there, now and then, through his life. Little scrubby ones, of course, fools, yes, by the look of them, but women, or girls, rather, and none worth glancing at a second time. Still, when a boy gets past thirty . . .?
She sighed. Why even as recent as last night the phone had rung. Heavy-Set had answered it, and she could fill in the unheard half of the conversation because she had heard thousands like it in a dozen years:
“Sammy, this is Christine.” A woman’s voice. “What you doing?”
His little golden eyelashes flickered and his brow furrowed, alert and wary. “Why?”
“Tom, Lu, and I are going to a show, want to come along?”
“It better be good!” he cried, indignantly.
She named it.
“That!” He snorted.
“It’s a good film,” she said.
“Not that one,” he said. “Besides, I haven’t shaved yet today.”
“You can shave in five minutes.”
“I need a bath, and it’d take a long time.”
A long time, thought his mother, he was in the bathroom two hours today. He combs his hair two dozen times, musses it, combs it again, talking to himself.
“Okay for you.” The woman’s voice on the phone. “You going to the beach this week?”
“Saturday,” he said, before he thought.
“See you there, then,” she said.
“I meant Sunday,” he said, quickly.
“I could change it to Sunday,” she replied.
“If I can make it,” he said, even more quickly. “Things go wrong with my car.”
“Sure,” she said. “Samson. So long.”
And he had stood there for a long time, turning the silent phone in his hand.
Well, his mother thought, he’s having a good time now. A good Hallowe’en party, with all the apples he took along, tied on strings, and the apples, untied, to bob for in a tub of water, and the boxes of candy, the sweet corn kernels that really taste like autumn. He’s running around looking like the bad little boy, she thought, licking his lollipop, everyone shouting, blowing horns, laughing, dancing.
At eight, and again at eight thirty and nine she went to the screen door and looked out and could almost hear the party a long way off at the dark beach, the sounds of it blowing on the wind crisp and furious and wild, and wished she could be there at the little shack out over the waves on the pier, everyone whirling about in costumes, and all the pumpkins cut each a different way and a contest for the best homemade mask or makeup job, and too much popcorn to eat and—
She held to the screen door knob, her face pink and excited and suddenly realized the children had stopped coming to beg at the door. Hallowe’en, for the neighborhood kids anyway, was over.
She went to look out into the backyard.
The house and yard were too quiet. It was strange not hearing the basketball volley on the gravel or the steady bumble of the punching bag taking a beating. Or the little tweezing sound of the hand-squeezers.
What if, she thought, he found someone tonight, found someone down there, and just never came back, never came home. No telephone call. No letter, that was the way it could be. No word. Just go off away and never come back again. What if? What if?
No! she thought, there’s no one, no one there, no one anywhere. There’s just this place. This is the only place.
But her heart was beating fast and she had to sit down.
The wind blew softly from the shore.
She turned on the radio but could not hear it.
Now, she thought, they’re not doing anything except playing blind man’s buff, yes, that’s it, blind tag, and after that they’ll just be—
She gasped and jumped.
The windows had exploded with raw light.
The gravel spurted in a machine-gun spray as the car jolted in, braked, and stopped, motor gunning. The lights went off in the yard. But the motor still gunned up, idled, gunned up, idled.
She could see the dark figure in the front seat of the car, not moving, staring straight ahead.
“You—” she started to say, and opened the back screen door. She found a smile on her mouth. She stopped it. Her heart was slowing now. She made herself frown.
He shut off the motor. She waited. He climbed out of the car and threw the pumpkins in the garbage can and slammed the lid.
“What happened?” she asked. “Why are you home so early—?”
“Nothing.” He brushed by her with the two gallons of cider intact. He set them on the kitchen sink.
“But it’s not ten yet—”
“That’s right.” He went into the bedroom and sat down in the dark.
She waited five minutes. She always waited five minutes. He wanted her to come ask, he’d be mad if she didn’t, so finally she went and looked into the dark bedroom.
“Tell me,” she said.
“Oh, they all stood around,” he said. “They just stood around like a bunch of fools and didn’t do anything.”
“What a shame.”
“They just stood around like dumb fools.”
“Oh, that’s a shame.”
“I tried to get them to do something, but they just stood around. Only eight of them showed up, eight out of twenty, eight, and me the only one in costume. I tell you. The only one. What a bunch of fools.”
“After all your trouble, too.”
“They had their girls and they just stood around with them and wouldn’t do anything, no games, nothing. Some of them went off with the girls,” he said, in the dark, seated, not looking at her. “They went off up the beach and didn’t come back.
Honest to gosh.” He stood now, huge, and leaned against the wall, looking all disproportioned in the short trousers. He had forgotten the child’s hat was on his head. He suddenly remembered it and took it off and threw it on the floor. “I tried to kid them. I played with a toy dog and did some other stuff but nobody did anything.
I felt like a fool the only one there dressed like this, and them all different, and only eight out of twenty there, and most of them gone in half an hour. Vi was there. She tried to get me to walk up the beach, too. I was mad by then. I was really mad. I said no thanks. And here I am. You can have the lollipop. Where did I put it? Pour the cider down the sink, drink it, I don’t care.”
She had not moved so much as an inch in all the time he talked. She opened her mouth.
The telephone rang.
“If that’s them, I’m not home.”
“You’d better answer it,” she said.
He grabbed the phone and whipped off the receiver.
“Sammy?” said a loud high clear voice. He was holding the receiver out on the air, glaring at it in the dark. “That you?” He grunted. “This is Bob.” The eighteen-year-old voice rushed on. “Glad you’re home. In a big rush, but—what about that game tomorrow?”
“What game?”
“What game? For cri-yi, you’re kidding. Notre Dame and S.C.!”
“Oh, football.”
“Don’t say oh football like that, you talked it, you played it up, you said—”
“That’s no game,” he said, not looking at the telephone, the receiver, the woman, the wall, nothing.
“You mean you’re not going? Heavy-Set, it won’t be a game without you!”
“I got to water the lawn, polish the car—”
“You can do that Sunday!”
“Besides, I think my uncle’s coming over to see me. So long.”
He hung up and walked out past his mother into the yard. She heard the sounds of him out there as she got ready for bed.
He must have drubbed the punching bag until three in the morning. Three, she thought, wide awake, listening to the concussions. He’s always stopped at twelve, before.
At three thirty he came into the house.
She heard him just standing outside her door.
He did nothing else except stand there in the dark, breathing.
She had a feeling he still had the little boy suit on. But she didn’t want to know if this were true.
After a long while the door
