“It’s not too late,” she said. “Not too late to teach him.” She pulled out of my grip and was through the cardboard stone entrance before I could say anything. She went right to the boy in the red shirt. They started talking. Mommy was now distracted by the sudden cries of baby Willie to see any of this.
The red shirt boy held out a candy bar to the girl in the witch hat. She shook her head and then after a moment of hesitation, the kid handed over two bars. The girl took them, turned to the kid in the pumpkin shirt and gave him one. He took it slowly, as if thinking it was a trick, and then smiled real large when the girl said something to him.
The girl opened the other piece of candy and looked over her shoulder at me. I smiled, feeling a warm sensation spread inside me. There was cruelty in the world but there was also goodness. There was always a choice.
The girl held the open bar before her and then brought her other hand to it. Light bounced off the fragment of glass before she buried it in the chocolate. She patted the bar down with her fingers and went back to the kid in the red shirt. She held it out to him and he took it eagerly, all smiles.
He was still smiling as he took the first bite.
“What the hell are you doing?” I jumped in surprise and Freling laughed. He had come up behind me. He was wearing a blue dress shirt with an ugly brown tie. His manager name tag hung crookedly on his sagging breast pocket. “Careful, Chubs,” he said. “You don’t want to fall and put the other leg in a brace, too.” Chubs was his other name for me.
When he wasn’t mocking my leg, he went after my gut.
“Right,” I said.
“Were you going to stand here watching kids like some perv or did you plan on cleaning up that mess back there?”
It wasn’t right what he did to you, the little girl had said. It’s not right what he does still.
Freling had been the one who said the slope was open, the one who said he had just skied it, the one who called me a pussy for hesitating. Of course, I was the one who skied down it and crashed into a snowmaking machine. I was the one lucky to not be paralyzed.
“Sure,” I said.
“You want me to hold your hand?” Freling said.
The little girl was looking at me again. She didn’t smile, she didn’t acknowledge me, but I knew what she was trying to tell me. He knew you’d get hurt. He knew it and he was happy. She was right about that. I had known that ever since freshman year when it happened.
It’s not too late. Not too late to teach him.
“I got it,” I said.
“Good,” Freling said. “Now get hobbling.” He walked away.
The girl held my gaze a moment longer and then she was running out of the Halloween display and through the store. Her long black hair trailed behind her. The witch hat never wavered.
I turned back to the aisle of exploded baby food. It looked like a monster had spewed out the contents of its enormous stomach. I walked slowly toward the mess. My brace clacked along with me. The Snickers weighed heavily in my pocket.
Glass shards gleamed before me like a million stars upon which I might wish. There is cruelty and there is goodness too. There’s always the choice. Sometimes, however, that choice is made for us.
I took the candy bar out of my pocket and was bending toward a particularly nasty-looking chunk of glass with its numerous sharp fangs when the woman at the candy display started screaming.
THE JACK LANTERN
Jack X. McCallum
A founding member of Dark Red Press, Jack McCallum lives in Northern California. His writing ranges from graphic horror to tales for younger readers. He also writes screenplays and makes inexcusably awful short films.
***
Territory Northwest of the River Ohio
October, 1800
“I’m scared, da,” Stephen said from the back of the wagon. “There might be haunts in the woods.”
“Me too,” Molly said.
“You should be asleep, young miss,” Francis said to his daughter. He lifted a flap of canvas and looked back into the covered wagon, trying not to laugh when Molly pulled a blanket over her head. “And you should be on the watch for trouble, young man.” Stephen nodded, but he was still frightened.
Molly was six. She was easily upset. Stephen was nine. He should have been hardier, but it seemed both children had inherited their mother’s belief in ghouls and ghosts and God.
“Be still, children,” Laura said, tucking the canvas flap back in place.
She was sitting on the seat beside her husband as he watched the horses and what passed for a road in this uncivilized country. “You have your father’s skill and your mother’s faith to protect you.”
Francis turned away and said nothing, having been married long enough to know that his Scottish wife’s wrath was greater than that of her God. The children were living the life of leisure. When Francis was nine he was already working, and by the age of sixteen, he was at war. That will change soon enough, Francis thought. There will be plenty of work ahead for all of us.
One hundred acres of land. The thought was enough to make him swoon. One hundred acres, his land, land for his family and his descendants.
Francis’ father had been a cordwainer’s assistant in Roxbury during the start of the Revolutionary War, and not a very proficient one. Francis often wondered if his father shouldn’t have lived up to the Applebaker family name and become a baker instead. His mother and father declared themselves Loyalists and British subjects. They were aghast when their son became entranced with the Patriot’s cause and enlisted in the Continental Army in January of 1776, something Francis could not have done without his parents’ consent if he had been a year younger. His father called him a damned Liberty Boy. His mother and father perished in a fire started by British soldiers while Francis had been digging trenches near the Charlestown Neck. Much older and a little wiser now, Francis realized he had been too young to grasp the greater principals involved at the time, but since he had fought for his country he had been given his reward, his bounty, a deed to one hundred virgin acres in the far western reaches of the Northwest Territory.
This land, this freedom, had cost him six years of service and one eye.
It was a fair trade.
With the new century, the Applebaker family was starting a new life.
Francis gave the reins a gentle flick and urged the horses along the nearly imperceptible ruts that corresponded to the trail on his map.
On the side of the trail behind them was a dry jumble of bones. As the Conestoga wagon had rolled past the bones Lorna had gasped and asked if they were human, the remains of someone mercilessly slaughtered by the heathen Indians. Francis had laughed and told her and the children who were peeping through folds in the wagon’s canvas cover that they were looking at the bones of a deer. That was a lie. He had seen bodies split, gutted and flayed by cannon fire. The bones were human, but he didn’t want to worry his family. He put the shattered bones out of his mind.
The wagon rocked back and forth on the poor excuse for a road, the wooden frame creaking softly. The trees were close and dark, growing right to the edge of the trail.
The sun was disappearing behind a hill. The eastern sky was dark; the western sky was the color of blood and bruises. The evening air was crisp. It was nearly the middle of October. The year was growing late.
Jefferson came out from the back of the wagon. He was a young gray and white tom cat who liked to sleep among the sacks of cornflower and bundled clothing. He spent most of his waking hours peering under a flap of canvas in the rear of the wagon. Strapped to the frame were four cages holding a rooster and three hens. They kept a tether on Jefferson. They didn’t want him wandering until they reached their own plot of land. A log cabin was an open house for mice and other vermin. Jefferson would have to earn his keep.