DOODY SHOW we like to watch. “Say kids what time is it?” and “Let’s hear from the Penut Galery” and “Kowabunga, Buffalo Bob!!!” Me and Ellen love that show. She love the Princess and I love Buffalo Bob and we both love Howdy! We wanted my brother Tugga (his name was Arthur but everyone called him Tugga, I dont remember why) to go as “Mayor Fineus T. Bluster” but he wouldnt, he said Howdy Doody was a baby show, he was going as “Frankinstine” even though Ellen she said that mask was to scary. Also, Tugga, he gave me some s--t about taking my Daisy air rifle because he said Buffalo Bob didnt have any guns on the TV show, and my mother she said,

“You take it if you want to Harry its not a real gun or even shoot preten bullets so Buffalo Bob wouldnt mind.” That was the last thing she ever said to me and I’m glad it was a nice thing because she could be strick.

So we was getting ready to go and I said wait a sec I have to go to the bathroom because I was so excited. They all laugh at me, even Mom and Troy on the couch but going to pee then save my life because that was when my dad come in with that hammer. My dad he was mean when he drank and beat up my mom “time and again.” One time when Troy try to stop him by argueing him out of it, he broke Troys arm. That time he almost went to jail (my dad I mean). Anyway my mom and dad were “separated” at this time I’m writing about, and she was thinking about divorcing him, but that wasn’t so easy back in 1958 like it is now.

Anyway, he came in the door and I was in the bathroom peeing and I heard my mother say

“Get out of here with that thing, youre not suppose to be here.” The next thing was she start to scream. Then after that they was all screaming.

There was more—three terrible pages—but it wasn’t me who had to read them.

5

It was still a few minutes shy of six-thirty, but I found Al in the phone book and punched in his number without hesitation. I didn’t wake him up, either. He answered on the first ring, his voice more like a dog’s bark than human speech.

“Hey, buddy, ain’t you the early bird?”

“I’ve got something to show you. A student theme. You even know who wrote it. You ought to; you’ve got his picture on your Celebrity Wall.”

He coughed, then said: “I’ve got a lot of pictures on the Celebrity Wall, buddy. I think there might even be one of Frank Anicetti, back around the time of the first Moxie Festival. Help me out a little here.”

“I’d rather show you. Can I come over?”

“If you can take me in my bathrobe, you can come over. But I got to ask you straight up, now that you’ve had a night to sleep on it. Have you decided?”

“I think I have to make another trip back first.”

I hung up before he could ask any more questions.

6

He looked worse than ever in the early light flooding in through his living room window. His white terrycloth robe hung around him like a deflated parachute. Passing up the chemo had allowed him to keep his hair, but it was thinning and baby-fine. His eyes appeared to have retreated even farther into their sockets. He read Harry Dunning’s theme twice, started to put it down, then read it again. At last he looked up at me and said, “Jesus H. Christ on a chariot-driven crutch.”

“The first time I read it, I cried.”

“I don’t blame you. The part about the Daisy air rifle is what really gets me. Back in the fifties, there was an ad for Daisy air rifles on the back of just about every goddam comic book that hit the stands. Every kid on my block—every boy, anyway—wanted just two things: a Daisy air rifle and a Davy Crockett coonskin cap. He’s right, there were no bullets, even pretend ones, but we used to tip a little Johnson’s Baby Oil down the barrel. Then when you pumped air into it and pulled the trigger, you got a puff of blue smoke.” He looked down at the photocopied pages again. “Son of a bitch killed his wife and three of his kids with a hammer? Jee- zus. ” He just start laying on with it, Harry had written. I run back into the living room and there was blood all over the walls and white stuff on the couch. That was my mother’s brains. Ellen, she was laying on the floor with the rocker-chair on top of her legs and blood coming out of her ears and hair. The TV was still on, it was this show my mom liked about Elerie Queen, who solve crimes.

The crime that night had been nothing like the bloodlessly elegant problems Ellery Queen unraveled; it had been a slaughter. The ten-year-old boy who stopped to pee before going out trick-or-treating came back from the bathroom in time to see his drunken, roaring father split the head of Arthur “Tugga” Dunning as Tugga tried to crawl into the kitchen. Then he turned and saw Harry, who raised the Daisy air rifle and said, “Leave me alone, Daddy, or I’ll shoot you.” Dunning rushed at the boy, swinging the bloody hammer. Harry fired the air rifle at him (I could hear the ka-chow sound it must have made, even if I had never fired one myself), then dropped it and ran for the bedroom he shared with the now-deceased Tugga. His father had neglected to shut the front door when he came in, and somewhere—“it sounded 1000 miles away,” the janitor had written—neighbors were shouting and trick-or-treating kids were screaming.

Dunning would almost certainly have killed the remaining son as well, if he hadn’t tripped on the overturned “rocker-chair.” He went sprawling, got up, and ran down to his younger sons’

room. Harry was trying to crawl under the bed. His father hauled him out and fetched him a lick on the side of the head that surely would have killed the boy if the father’s hand hadn’t slipped on the bloody handle; instead of splitting Harry’s skull, the hammerhead had only caved in part of it above the right ear.

I didnt pass out but almost. I kept crawling for under the bed and I hardly felt him hit my leg at all but he did and broke it in 4 diferent places.

A man from down the block who had been out canvassing the neighborhood for candy with his daughter came running in at that point. In spite of the slaughter in the living room, the neighbor had the presence of mind to grab the ash shovel out of the tool bucket beside the kitchen woodstove.

He slugged Dunning in the back of the head with it while the man was trying to turn the bed over and get at his bleeding, semiconscious son.

Afterwards I went uncontchus like Ellen only I was lucky I woke up. The doctors said they might have to ampantate my leg but in the end they didnt.

No, he had kept the leg and eventually become a janitor at Lisbon High School, known to generations of students as Hoptoad Harry. Would the kids have been kinder if they’d known the origin of the limp? Probably not. Although emotionally delicate and eminently bruisable, teenagers are short on empathy. That comes later in life, if it comes at all.

“October of 1958,” Al said in his harsh dog-bark voice. “Am I supposed to believe that’s a coincidence?”

I remembered what I’d said to the teenage version of Frank Anicetti about the Shirley Jackson story and smiled. “Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a coincidence is just a coincidence. All I know is that we’re talking about another watershed moment.”