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  They planned it every night, hanging out in the woods down below Nakoma: how they would each siphon the gas out of the family car, maybe a soda bottle a day for a couple days beforehand, and hide them until Halloween; how they couldn’t do it too early, because it wouldn’t be dark enough, and anyway, the Bradberrys they wanted to scare wouldn’t be home until midnight or later because Jackie and his brothers were all let run wild. How were they, at eleven years old, going to stay out until two or three in the morning to put the fear of God into those fuckers and their family?

  Dave Ricks had the original idea, and Dave had the older sister who made the idea possible. Dave’s parents were going to be away for some convention his father was attending, auto parts, that was his line, and Dave’s sister, who was seventeen, wanted her boyfriend to stay over, and Dave said he wouldn’t tell if the guys could stay over too, so the sister faked a note from Dave’s mom for all the other moms, and since they were all eleven-year-old guys, not girls, no one was too bent about the peril they might get into to the extent of actually checking with Dave’s mom, on top of which, it was 1976 and parents were totally more laid back about stranger-danger and shit and they all got their overnight passes.

  They found a sheltered area among the trees round the back of the Catholic church and adjacent to the Bradberrys’ backyard and established themselves there. What had Danny felt that night? Anger, or fear?

  Anger, yes; fear, yes; but something more: the hatred that comes from persistent, belittling humiliation. He had noticed that Jackie Bradberry would occasionally forget about bullying him, sometimes for days on end, Jackie happy enough with Jason and Chad, tormenting younger kids for their milk money. Their eyes would meet, and Jackie would half-acknowledge him, as if they were friends, no, not friends, but contemporaries of equal worth who had just followed different paths in life but respected each other nonetheless. And then Jackie would arrive into school even more disheveled than usual, clothes stained and stinking, hair tousled and lank, homework undone, maybe even (at least twice, if not more often) sporting a black eye, or a raw red ear. And whatever had happened to Jackie, he would promptly pass it on to Danny in the form of notes and menaces and verbal abuse, and then of boots and fists. He understood that it wasn’t entirely Jackie’s fault, that if Jackie hadn’t had his brothers, or hadn’t been part of that family, things probably would, or at least, could have been different. But they weren’t different, and there was no one else to blame, and Danny hated Jackie Bradberry, so the only solution, because middle school, or junior high as they called it back then, would last until they were fourteen, another three long years of all this, it felt as if there would never be an end to it, Jesus, so the only solution was for Jackie Bradberry to die. But Danny Brogan had not gone out on that Halloween night of 1976 with the intention of making that happen.

  There they lay all evening, the four of them, like hunters in a hide, a couple venturing out to trick or treat and bring the haul back to base, even though they considered themselves too old for that kind of kids’ stuff: what the hell, they were gonna be hungry there. They dressed in Halloween costumes, ghosts and skeletons, but they’d customized them, with the help of Dave’s sister, whose boyfriend played bass in a metal band, so they could be the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Fire, Famine, Pestilence and Plague. All it meant was, they took basic costumes, three ghosts and a skeleton, and then they daubed the initial letters of the horsemen on the front, two Fs and two Ps. Danny was Fire, Dave was Famine, Ralph was Pestilence and Gene was Plague.

  When it was Danny and Ralph’s turn to venture out for Trick-or-Treat supplies, they had an encounter that would haunt them both for years after. They had collected two full bags of fruit and nuts mostly, the candy quotient not nearly as high as it would become. They were crossing the road by the Bradberry house when Jackie came out and turned right in front of the church and stopped and stared at them. Danny and Ralph were in their costumes; there was no way Jackie could have recognized them. Anyway, Jackie spotted them, and it was as if he could see through their masks, see into their hearts, his gaze was so intense. Jason and Chad had moved on, but Jackie just stood there, staring. There was a whoosh of fireworks in the air above, rockets or something, a trail of stars, and traffic oncoming, so they just had to keep walking. And when they were nearly on top of him, Jackie shook his head and started to grin. Maybe he was out of it on drugs or booze or something, and he started to grin, and he pointed at them, his hand in the shape of a gun. ‘You’re dead!’ he said, and he laughed, and then ran on to catch Jason and Chad up. What he used to say to Danny on every scrawled note. ‘You’re dead!’ And then he laughed. And that was the last time they ever saw Jackie Bradberry.

  They waited and waited, until the fireworks dimmed, and the firecrackers died down, and they watched the house. First the lights went out about twelve, twelve-thirty. They couldn’t see the front, couldn’t see who was coming in, but they saw the lights go on and off about one, and again about two thirty. By which time they had already laid the ground work: they had emptied the bottles of gasoline in the patterns of skulls and snakes and giant spiders on the Bradberry’s hardscrabble lawn. All they needed to do was light the match.

  The truth of it was, they never meant for it to happen like it did. They made sure to keep the gas away from the house, ten or twelve feet away. But there were a copule of factors that played against them. First of all, Mrs Bradberry was paranoid, not alone about burglars, but also about drafts, about night air, the potentially damaging health consequences of it on the young children she otherwise merrily neglected. And to protect against this, she had vinyl windows with very tight seals and locks installed, locks to which she kept all the keys (they were found in the ashes of her nightstand). The vinyl frames of the windows were petroleum based, and highly inflammable.

  The second crucial element in accelerating the fire’s progress and preventing anyone in the house from getting out safely was, Brian and Eric, the eldest of the Bradberry children, were distilling applejack in their bedroom, and not alone had they containers of the stuff under their beds, they had a propane-fueled stove among their equipment, a canister of propane ready to blow. So the only two Bradberrys who could have helped the others to escape (because the parents, as usual, were in a drunken coma), or who could have escaped themselves, played their part in making sure the blaze was lightning-fast and unstoppable.

  But the boys didn’t know about the locks, or the vinyl, or the applejack, or the propane. All they knew was, it was coming up to three in the morning. Not a soul stirring. And it was all down to Danny. The guys agreed, he was dealt the shit, he got to be in charge of hurling it back. He took a firecracker and lit it and tossed it into the yard and it set off one skull, one snake, one spider, and whoosh, the whole yard was aflame, and Danny standing in back of it, like the demon who conjured it up. And then the other guys joined him, they couldn’t resist, the four of them dancing around like maleficent sprites, the lawn blazing before them.

  They were the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse! They thought it would be the greatest Halloween prank ever. They thought it would go down in history. Two of the kids looked out their window. Not Jackie or his brothers, the younger kids. They could see their little faces. They looked frightened. The Four Horsemen waved at them. They laughed at their fears. It was all in fun. They thought it was all in fun.

  And then the house caught fire. There was no wind that night, but the house caught fire. Sometimes Danny liked to think it was the propane stove, that the propane stove had, separately, coincidentally, exploded, ignited by a lit cigarette, perhaps, or in a case of spontaneous combustion, he had awoken from dreams in which this had been proved to be the case and believed it for precious minutes afterwards. But that was not what the police and fire service investigations of the time found. What they found was that the Bradberry house fire was caused, not by the blaze on the lawn that had spread into the house, or by a propane canister, but, according to the burn patterns
and scorch marks, by a missile flung above the kitchen door, a fire bottle, a Molotov cocktail.

  And Danny, it was agreed by them all, was the one who threw it.

  The only thing was he couldn’t remember. Oh, he felt as if he could, because it had been decided that this was what had happened, had gone over and over it in his head so that it seemed as real to him as a memory. But Danny had run into a tree and knocked himself out, immediately after he had flung the bottle, coming to moments later, apparently. So what Danny actually remembers is the blaze, and then nothing, and then his head pounding as they swarmed over the wall of the Catholic church and along the streets to where they’d left their bikes and shot across to the West Side, to Dave’s house, to safety, still daring to hope and to pray that it wasn’t as bad as it turned out to be. And no one really talking very much about what had happened, just wondering why he had thrown the bottle, and Danny wondering too, and there being no actual reproach or recrimination, but the sense that what happened shouldn’t have happened remained clear. And the next day, once the scale of the fire was made clear, the intensity, the horror of the fire, and then amid the aftermath, the funerals, the small white caskets, the outpouring of grief, genuine and feigned, the speeches from governors and congressmen and the senator from Wisconsin, the rituals and ceremonies and obsequies, amid it all, the boys never said a word, Danny and Dave and Gene and Ralph, they never spoke of it again. All Danny knew was he was responsible. He had done it. He never tried to wriggle out of it, to deny his guilt, except in dreams.

  There was a time when he saw the frightened faces of those Bradberry kids at their locked bedroom window every night when he closed his eyes and when he woke before dawn, a time when he’d see them in the faces of his own daughters, waving out the car window as their mother drove them to school. When those night fears, those waking dreams, gradually fell away, he thought they had gone for good. But nothing that you do goes away; it’s always out there, in the woods, in the trees, waiting to come back, to sit at your table, to tell the truth and shame the Devil and leave you without a moment’s peace the rest of your life.

  Extract from

  Trick or Treat

  Unpublished manuscript by Ralph Cowley

  PART TWO

  The Day After

  I’m Gonna Live Till I Die

  Charlie T has never been in an old-style gentleman’s club, but he imagines it would look a lot like Mr Wilson’s apartment on West Randolph Street: the wood panelling, the leather chairs and sofas, the dark wood tables and bookshelves filled with military history and biography, the paintings of army commanders and scenes of battle through the ages, the green lampshades. Of course, it would be a gentleman’s club with a view: twelve floors up, the Chicago River running beneath, the Sun-Times offices to one side, the ornate Civic Opera House to the other, the buildings lending the scene dimension and scale, like a cityscape in a comic book. Chicago was the first place Charlie T came to in the States, and he’s found everywhere else to be a disappointment: Manhattan was all right if you were outside it, approaching, on the ferry or in Brooklyn, but when you were right there in the city, the buildings may as well have been half the size: you couldn’t see the skyline. Whereas here, or down at the Michigan Avenue Bridge, you could take it in all at once. It looked like America, so it did.

  Charlie T arrived from Belfast in 1994, not long after the first IRA ceasefire. (His name is Charles Toland, but he decided to call himself Charlie T when he got here because he thought that sounded more American, although imagine what kind of clown he felt like when, a few days later, somebody called him Mr T?) He was twenty years old and had shot seven men in nine months without too many qualms, either in the run-up, or in the moment, or in the aftermath, very little in the way of second thoughts, and a few senior IRA volunteers in Belfast told him he should stick around, that the peace would never last and his services would be needed again. But he knew it was over: there was a disdainful thing coming from the IRA leaders, not just the ones who got on TV but the likes of his own OC, a kind of looking-down-the-nose vibe at the likes of him and Gerry Daly, who had shot four and was raging the ceasefire had come before he could catch Charlie up (not that Charlie would have let him). The day of the gun has been and gone, that type of thing. Plus, the loyalists were raising their game, assisted by British intelligence, and a lot of IRA volunteers were getting dropped in the streets; Charlie wasn’t three months in Chicago when he got word Gerry Daly had been ambushed by the LVF. He’d never catch him up now.

  No, Charlie had called it right. America, where you could be, well, maybe not anyone you wanted to be, that was pie in the sky, but where you could be somebody else. Charlie prefers it at night, with the city lights glittering their promises and lies, but he likes it well enough at any time, for instance, now, at breakfast: coffee and bacon rolls, served by Mr Wilson himself, who is immaculate as ever in navy chalk stripe three-piece suit, white on pink contrast-collar dress shirt, tassel loafers. Admittedly, Charlie would like it a lot better without the opera music playing quietly on Mr Wilson’s Bose Wave CD player. Charlie doesn’t know what it is, German, it sounds like. Maybe he looks in its direction once too often because Mr Wilson looks up and says, ‘Wagner – Parsifal’ and smiles a like-it-or-lump-it smile and continues with his breakfast, which is a mere cup of coffee, Charlie couldn’t figure it, the guy was forty-five pounds overweight, minimum, and yet he’d never seen a morsel of food pass his lips. Wagner. Parsifal. Well, it could be worse. They could be listening to it at night. Charlie T is not really an opera sort of guy, and even if he were, he wouldn’t be a Wagner type of guy, like something you’d hear in a church except weirder, maybe at a black mass, giving him the creeps so it is, especially in light of what he had to do last night, and by the curl of a smile playing around his mean little mouth he can see Mr Wilson knows it right well.

  ‘More coffee?’ Mr Wilson says. ‘And then we can talk.’

  ‘More coffee, and change the music. Or turn it off,’ Charlie says. ‘And then we can talk.’

  Mr Wilson inclines his big blond head in a mock bow, and smiles a thin smile, and tops up Charlie’s coffee cup, and his own, and picks up a little gray remote control and flicks the music off.

  ‘The decline of Western civilization,’ Mr Wilson says, clicking his tongue and shaking his head.

  ‘Thought your man Wagner was one of those Nazis there,’ Charlie says.

  ‘Given that he died in 1883, and the Nazis only came to power fifty years later, that would have been quite an achievement,’ Mr Wilson says briskly, not wanting to have the conversation. ‘Now, how did we get on last night?’

  ‘Has your little pal in the Madison Police Department not told you yet?’

  ‘How do you know I have a little pal in the Madison PD?’

  ‘You have one everywhere else, why should Madison be any different? Do they ever do anything practical for you, like? Disappear evidence, warn when there’s gonna be a warrant or an arrest, type of thing?’

  Mr Wilson shakes his huge head emphatically, theatrically, as if Charlie is a slow study who can do better.

  ‘Now that really would be dangerous. No, all you want is eyes and ears, someone you pay disproportionately well for information. No more, no less. That way, they don’t really feel they’re doing anything wrong. In fact, they feel a little guilty about getting paid so much for doing so little, so they really will do their best. So yes, I’m up to date with what you no doubt would call “developments”, but I always insist on a report from the field, so to speak.’

  ‘No “so to speak” about it, I was in a field so I was, digging up a dead man, and then burying a dead dog.’

  ‘You buried the hound?’ Mr Wilson says, a leer of derision rippling across his fleshy jowls. ‘Above and beyond, Charlie, above and beyond.’

  Charlie T sets his jaw, catches sight of his cheekbones in the plate-glass window. He read in a magazine belonging to his girlfriend recently about looking over your cheekbon
es as a way of improving your posture and, almost as a reflex response to Mr Wilson’s lardy face, Charlie does so now, his gaze as intense as, in a hair-trigger instant, his feelings are.

  ‘And God forgive the pair of us for leaving the poor creature the way we did,’ Charlie says, and feels the wind in his sails as he sees Mr Wilson’s dirty yellow snail-smear eyebrows rise above his porky wee eyes. ‘It was a, a desecration, so it was, and I was proud to set it right. And that’s what I want to say to you,’ Charlie continues, the coffee refill doing the work a third drink would. ‘The abuse of animals is not something I can condone or tolerate. In fact, my advice is tell the bad bastard behind all this he can go and shite. There’s plenty more want a clean kill and are happy to pay for it; that’s the kind of work you can sleep easy after, not this torture and, and stalking, aye, psychological terror, the only reason the poor wee guy was left out was to set your woman’s wits astray. That’s not right, Mr Wilson. And if that’s how you want to run things, well, you’d better find someone of like mind. And so had I.’

  Truth was, he hadn’t been up to killing the dog at all; that had been Angelique, who persuaded him to bring her along. Angelique is the closest thing he has to a steady girlfriend, in the sense that a) he mostly crashes at her place and that’s where his stuff is; b) she’s not on drugs or a stripper or a sex worker, Charlie T’s usual female companions (she’s a geriatric nurse at Masonic in Lincoln Park); c) she’s not an insane freak, although she is kind of flaky and drinks a lot and knows what he does for a living and doesn’t care, in fact gets off on hearing about it, on top of which she’s got a kink for S&M he doesn’t always see the point of (she bites, and likes to be bitten back: why?); and d) he actually likes her. Mind you, he might have to revise (c) above in the light of what she was capable of doing to the poor wee spaniel. Still, she helped him out of a jam: he can’t afford to turn down any work Mr Wilson brought him, not with the debts he owes. He bows his head now, caught between pride in his spirit and anxiety that he has said too much.