Lost Souls

1 It was past midnight when I got home Halloween night. The car lights swept across the yard. The house had been toilet papered. I got out and saw where the kids had burned the word ?PIG? into my lawn with bleach. The air smelt chemical clean. I was used to all of it. As the law in this small dead-end Midwest town, I was a target of pranks, of kids? initiation ceremonies, of first acts of rebellion. It went with the territory, especially since my divorce. The kids knew that when my car was gone, the house was empty, except for my dog Max.I could hear Max barking from his solitary confinement in the basement. I went down and let him up into the house. It was a night when they say the dead walk among the living, and the evening had passed in a motley assortment of trick-or-treaters going door to door. I'd followed the ghoulish neighbor spectacle from my cop car, kids dressed as ghosts with shackles and chains, witches with warts, devils with forked tails, skeletons with scythes, sorcerers and wizards, monster brides, along with the usual superheroes: Super-man, Spider-Man, Batman, The Incredible Hulk. I'd turned on my siren and lights from time to time, just to add to the phantasmagoria of the evening. The crime of the night had been some kids tying a string of firecrackers to a cat's tail, that and a bogus incident with some loser kid reporting he'd found a razor blade in an apple. Max was groggy, though he came and licked my hand. I'd given him a sedative, since he was a barker. I'd not wanted the kids harassing him while I was on duty. He growled a bit, like he was mad at me. I told him about the cat. The word ?cat? made his ears point. Just hearing my voice made him pant. He looked to the window like there was a cat in the vicinity. It was good to get that kind of loyalty, even if it had to come from a dog. You hang on to whatever is thrown to you. I opened the refrigerator. The kitchen filled with the smell of meatloaf. I put ketchup on it, the way he liked it, and fed him. I drank a glass of milk just to kill the time. I wasn't sleeping well. My reflection stared back at me in the window'like looking into an old memory. I was two years on from a divorce that had blindsided me. My wife, Janine, had left with my son. I'd not learned to inhabit the silence of the house. I missed my kid is what it was. Holidays could do that. For some, they represented happiness; for others, regret. Earlier that night, I'd seen my kid at the mall where the town held its official trick-or-treating. It was two years after the Tylenol murders in Chicago in ?82, the case still unsolved. I'd set up a metal detector at the mall, to scan all the kids? candy. I was dressed as Obi-Wan Kenobi, and this kid dressed as ET came forward and emptied his stash of candy. I scanned his candy with my metal detector made up to look like a light-saber. The disguise was complete'that is, until I saw my kid's eyes staring through the eyeholes of his mask, and then I knew, but Eddy said nothing. He turned and looked back. He didn't know what to do, like he was going to get into trouble just speaking to me. It wasn't my day to be with him. He was more lost than that alien he was pretending to be, but I didn't blow his cover. He wasn't the problem. As he walked away I simply said, ?ET, phone home.' In the background, I saw my ex-wife with her new husband, Seth Hansen. They were dressed as ghouls, chained together, each carrying a ball and chain, pretty much how I saw them in real life. The line for receiving Scare Packages snaked all the way back to the Food Court, our mayor, master of ceremonies, dressed as Gomez Addams, trying to bolster his personal profile in the community. His face shone with perspiration. I could smell his aftershave from fifty feet away? his signature smell, optimism overlaid with desperation, a tangy ripeness of someone having just finished running. He radiaCollins, Michael is the author of 'Lost Souls', published 2004 under ISBN 9780670033287 and ISBN 0670033286.