Death's Pale Flag

CHAPTER 3 HALLOWEEN PARADE

CHAPTER 3HALLOWEEN PARADE

The dream clung to Ryan’s consciousness for several days. In the hospital he avoided less populated wards once darkness fell, and looked over his shoulder as he went out into the parking lot each night. At home he was skittish, jumping with every creak of a floorboard or groan of a closing door. And he came down with a major case of the heebie-jeebies every time he ventured into the basement or out to the barn. It all threatened to put a damper on his fifth Halloween in the family’s adopted hometown, New Bethany, Pennsylvania.

Straddling the flood-prone Susquehanna River, New Bethany strained to reach a population of ten thousand but was home to the Carriere Clinic, a sprawling hospital complex designed to bring state-of-the-art medical care to a vast, rural section of Pennsylvania. Very rural indeed, Pittsburg lay four hours to the west; Philadelphia, three hours to the east; and that was about it. Unless you counted Scranton, but most did not. New Bethany was a picturesque little town full of anachronistic mom-and-pop shops, unimposing but well-kept homes, and finely manicured parks. To the kids growing up there, it was just as lame and uninteresting as any other corner of the United States. Lost on them was the unrushed and kindly nature of the town’s shopkeepers, the lack of violent crime, the associated freedom of movement without hovering parental supervision, the superlative public schools, the always-accessible athletic facilities, and the surrounding hillsides of verdant forests and well-tended farms. But it wasn’t lost on Ryan and Kelly, who instantly fell in love with the place.

Both Ryan and Kelly were the products of military families and had thus grown up in an array of locales. After college and professional schools, both ended up working in Washington D.C. There, they fell in love, married, and brought three daughters into the world. When Kelly was pregnant with their third, the couple sought to get away from the crime and bustle of D.C. and settle somewhere “out in the country.” Kelly, an environmental lawyer, could work remotely from anywhere. Ryan was more of a challenge. Hospitals featuring top-of-the-line neurosurgery departments were generally found in the hearts of big cities, not out among a bunch of fields and streams.

After an intensive search, the two found precisely what they were looking for: an archetypical American small town, well distant from the madding crowds of the Eastern Seaboard megalopolis but featuring a major medical center. They therefore pulled up stakes and headed for New Bethany. They settled into a rambling old farmhouse just across the river from the town’s business section. A busy work schedule soon swallowed Ryan whole, but he did find his way to the occasional Sunday afternoon pickup game of soccer. Said games served as a nexus for a growing social life, and the Brenans were quickly absorbed into a fun-loving group of thirty- and forty-something-year-olds.

Over time, Ryan and Kelly came to recognize some shortcomings in their new home. Ignorance, inequity, and bigotry ran deep within its veins. And rather than sharing a small-town joie de vivre, many of the locals seemed to marinate in a pervasive sense of town-grown resentment and aggrieved entitlement. But one thing that could always be said for the place was that “it kept Halloween well.”

To celebrate the holiday, shops and residences would be decked out with elaborate displays ranging from the tacky, to the whimsical, to the macabre. Entranceways would be adorned with cobwebs and jack-o-lanterns. Front lawns would be littered with tombstones and skeletons. And displays of hangings, headless beings, witches, ghosts, ghouls, and goblins could be viewed down every lane and side street.

The highlight of the season, though, was the Halloween parade; and yearly, on the Saturday before Halloween proper, people from across the region would line up three and four deep along its route to partake in the festivities. The parade consisted of every regional civic group, high-school band, preschool class, scouts’ den, sports club, volunteer fire department, cheerleading squad, teenage guitar band, sheriff’s department, church choir, knitting circle, and stamp club, all marching in full Halloween regalia. Elaborate floats were perched, in a most teetering fashion, upon the beds of old pickup trucks. The town’s mayor (and popular hairdresser) waved to the crowd from atop a John Deere tractor. Fellow dignitaries rode behind in a hay wagon. The celebration lasted a good three hours as the procession inchwormed down Main Street, eventually disbanding in the parking lot of the town hardware store, a block away on View Street. Before reaching the parade’s end, though, every float, pickup truck, Chevy convertible, tractor, police car, ambulance, and fire truck disgorged itself of a cornucopia of candy. Said bounty was shed upon every inch of the parade route, only to be eagerly scooped up by throngs of children and not a few adults.

Ryan adored the event and, each year, sold his soul to his partners in order to be off work for it. This year was no different. And so, with someone else facing the slings and arrows of neurosurgery call, he and Kelly headed out to the parade. The girls were already there, in the company of family friends Hugh and Dianne O’Connor, and their five children. Freed of shepherding the kids for the evening, Ryan and Kelly leisurely crossed the New Bethany Bridge on foot. With the Susquehanna churning thirty feet below, the two paused halfway, and took healthy pulls of Irish whiskey from a stainless-steel flask. After disembarking from the bridge, they took a circuitous route into town. They first walked away from the fanfare along a series of fog-draped levies overlooking the river, then doubled back along High Street, voyeuristically peering into the front parlors of the old Victorian mansions there in a state of unbridled antique-envy. They eventually lighted on a spot at about the midpoint of the parade route.

As the bands and floats passed by, and sugar-fortified mana rained down upon the delighted throngs of children, Ryan settled into a state of well-being: loving wife under his arm, and his own happy, healthy children marching by in an all-but-extinct example of small-town Americana.

Honk!

A blaring horn snapped Ryan out of his trance, and he alerted to an immense diesel-powered fire engine as it rolled up the parade route. His throat closed as he spotted a little girl darting out into the street to snatch a fallen Tootsie Roll immediately in front of the truck’s oversized right front tire. To his horror, the driver, busy mugging at a covey of teenage girls, failed to notice the child. Ryan tore himself away from Kelly, scythed through the crowd, and threw himself out into the street. There, he came face to face with a canine hood ornament as the truck came screeching to a halt. He bolted around the side of the vehicle and frantically searched for its victim. With a sigh of confused relief, he noted no human detritus under the wheel or in the adjacent gutter.

The fire engine’s driver jumped out and grabbed Ryan by the shoulders. “Hey, buddy, you all right? I almost ran you over.”

“Yeah, I’m okay,” replied Ryan, heart slamming against his ribcage. “A little kid almost went under your wheel, though.”

The driver froze and his face turned ashen. He looked all around the truck, then back at Ryan. “You saw a kid too close to the truck?”

“She must have just made it to the other side. Scared the hell out of me, though,” replied Ryan, noticing he was trembling.

By now Kelly was out with them. “Ryan, what is it? What’s the matter?”

“Oh, just some little kid trying to meet her maker. Where the hell were her parents?” growled Ryan as he squatted to take one more look under the truck.

The driver stooped down by Ryan again, then stood up with a smug smile on his face and put a hand on Ryan’s shoulder. “Well, buddy, I’m glad you didn’t end up under my wheel. Maybe next time it’d be best to leave the drinkin’ ’til after the parade, eh?”

Ryan looked up at the guy, eyes narrowed.

“It’s on your breath, friend . . .” said the driver with a wink.

Ryan started to protest, his chest tightening, but thought better of it and signaled to Kelly that it was time to head home. Meanwhile, the driver climbed back into the truck and moved along to close the fifty-yard gap that had been created in the parade.