Hoodoo
I grew up in a small town about fifty miles north of New York City called Briarwood. It was a pictaresque community of stone walls and hand-painted mailboxes, the kind of place that people would go out of their way to drive through on a Sunday afternoon. When I was nineteen, I went away to college in Boston. I made a lot of new friends up there, including Richie, my future husband, and pretty much never looked back. But every so often I’d see somebody I knew from town. It was strange how plentiful they were, almost as if the entire population had bailed out when I had.
Not Jeff Hawkins, though. I know for a fact that he’s still there.
On Tuesday, I ran into Cyndi Sherman at the mall. She was in my high school class in Briarwood, my best friend back then. We both sort of stopped and stared at each other like those reunited twins you see on TV. Then she threw her arms around me and hugged me so tight I thought I’d faint. We went into the sit-down restaurant, and I bought us a couple of beers. It turns out she has two daughters and two grandchildren, and lives with her husband in Saddle Ridge, not ten miles from here. Small world. We started shooting the bull about old times, and out of the blue she mentions Jeff Hawkins. I hadn’t thought about Jeff in a long time. Nor had I wanted to. After that came the rest of it, of course, about Halloween night, the Hag, the whole nine yards.
And all of my careful forgetting was undone.
* * *
We were juniors that year, forever ago in 1970. Cyndi was in love with Ed Cook, star running back of the football team, and I was ga-ga for Jeff Hawkins. Both of them were seniors, which meant that we faced some major competition from the older girls. Or at least Cyndi did. Jeff was a moody loner with a bad reputation, but that didn’t matter to me one iota. All I knew was that he looked like Robert Redford with his hair messed up.
“More like his brain’s messed up, from what I’ve heard,” said Cyndi as we walked along the sidewalk.
I shot her an angry glance. “You don’t like him ‘cause he isn’t a jock.”
She was big into sports herself (the goalie on the field hockey team), and most of her friends were jocks, except me. In our school, the kids fit pretty much into one of several groups. You were either a jock, or you were a freak—that is, you smoked pot and took drugs—or you were a greaser, into cars and bikes and whatnot. If you did what you were supposed to do and concentrated on your studies, you were a plain old nerd. Some of the kids overlapped a bit, and a few seemed to fit in anywhere. I was one of those I guess. Then there were some who didn’t fit at all. That was Jeff.
Cyndi stopped walking and turned to face me. She was a long haired, blue eyed Swede, a little heavier than she’d have wished, but otherwise truly stunning. I wasn’t nearly so pretty, but my figure made the boys walk into things. “I wasn’t going to tell you this, Sarah, because Marcy told me in confidence, but I think you should know. Jeff was arrested once. Where he used to live, in New Jersey. For assaulting a woman.”
“Oh, that’s bull,” I said. “How would Marcy know a thing like that?”
“Because he told her, that’s how. After a six-pack at the Rec Center. Then she gave him the slip, before he got any ideas about her.”
I shrugged like it meant nothing, and started walking again. But it meant plenty, and instead of following Main Street into the village, I veered down Bleakley Avenue toward the lake. At my side, Cyndi didn’t notice. “Hey, I’m sorry, Sarah. I didn’t mean to hurt you or anything. I’m your friend. I’m trying to protect you.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, walking faster. She practically had to jog to keep up.
“What’s the hurry?” she asked, when a cold gust of wind stopped us both in our tracks. “Darn,” she said, tugging at her collar. “I hate the winter.”
“It’s only fall,” I snapped, glad to contradict her. Then I saw she was gazing at something over my shoulder, and it wasn’t until that moment that it clicked what road we were on. I turned to see for myself. And sure enough, there she was. The Hag. Staring down at us from her porch across the street. Wrapped in a shawl and sitting in that rocking chair, working it back and forth, back and forth. The runners on the chair were crooked, so that every few cycles she’d have to pause in her rhythm to jerk it around straight again.
We started walking, each of us glancing back repeatedly. And every check confirmed it: her eyes were still fixed on us, tracking our progress unerringly as an owl with a pair of field mice. Which wouldn’t have been so remarkable—a lonely widow, following the events outside her home—except that she couldn’t have heard our footsteps from that distance in the wind, and cataracts had done their work long ago: the old woman was blind as a gargoyle.
* * *
So many images of that year remain. The cherry-red Toyota that Cyndi got for her seventeenth birthday, and the funny hum the engine made, her peace sign dangling from the rearview mirror. The homecoming game, with Ed Cook scoring two touch-downs—one to tie it up at at halftime, and another in the closing seconds—the roaring crowd shaking the bleachers beneath us like an earthquake. Sneaking into Macy’s with my babysitting money for a pair of black-lace panties and matching bra. And then, of course, there was Halloween.
* * *
We were cruising around in Jeff’s ’59, moss-green Chevy wagon, passing a bottle of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine, and trying to decide between a party at Barbara MacIntyre’s house, or this movie over in Ossining. The movie was some gross-out job about torture duing the Salem witch trials where they handed out vomit bags in the lobby. Cyndi and I voted for Barbara’s house. Jeff wanted to see the movie, and Ed did too, but after some strategic nuzzling he came over to our side, so the party won out.
Along the way, Jeff pulled over for a pit stop on Hardscrabble Road, where he and Ed got out and vanished into the woods. It was a cold and blustery night with high, thin clouds moving fast across the moon. There were no street lamps, and no houses nearby, and Jeff had left the motor running but cut the lights, so the only illumination was a little green bulb on the eight-track tape player. The tape he had going was Mountain: Climbing, which was awesome, but we’d heard it all the way through at least twice already, so I clipped it as soon as the boys were gone. Then Cyndi and I chatted catty-corner across the seat-back while I smoked one of Jeff’s Marlboro’s. The wind blew harder now, and the big car wobbled like a dinghy in an ocean swell.
“Where the heck are they?” asked Cyndi. “We’ve been sitting here forever.”
“Hold on,” I told her. Cranking down the glass, I gave a shout. “Hey, you guys! Hurry it up, will ya?” My voice sounded puny against the wind. I peered into the roiling bushes beside the car, but saw nothing.
“Gee, Sarah, close that thing. I’m freezing back here.”
I threw out my cigarette and cranked it shut. When I turned back to her, something was looming in the window behind her head: a giant, goggle-eyed face. She saw the same behind me and we screamed in unison. Then the doors flew open and they were coming at us as we scrambled away across the vinyl, kicking and yowling and hardly aware of the sudden burst of laughter—
“Ed!” cried Cyndi, and then she was swatting at him and it was his turn to retreat, hindered by the mask skewed sideways around his head. Jeff had me pinned behind the steering wheel and was pawing too hard. I got my leg around somehow and kneed him in the groin. He let out an ‘oomph,’ then crawled backwards like a cat pulling out of a grocery bag. He managed to shut the passenger door without a slam. I appreciated that. After taking some time to recover, he strolled calmly around the front of the car and climbed back in, still wearing the mask. Cyndi and Ed were already getting hot and heavy by then.
“Aren’t you going to take that off?”
“Nah,” he said. “We gotta go trick-or-treating, first.” But then he did take it off—just long enough for a swig of wine.
* * *
We drove by clumps of kids, the younger ones decked out as ghosts and devils, the older ones less adorable in pea coats and stocking caps, their bags more likely to contain eggs and shaving cream than candy. No one questioned where Jeff was headed. He was driving north, away from the theater and in the general direction of Barbara’s house. When he turned onto Bleakley Avenue my brow furrowed, but it wasn’t until he’d pulled in at the curb that my jaw went slack to boot.
“Here we are,” he said jovially, his grin hidden behind the mouth-hole in the mask. “Let’s try this place.”
I stared past him at the Victorian relic across the street. It had been beautiful once, a storybook confection of fanciful turrets and gingerbread trim, as gaily painted as a doll house. That was once. Now the porch roof sagged in the middle, one chimney was collapsing in on itself, the colors were a mottle of sick-looking grays, and shingles jutted at sharp angles, like teeth in a disinterred skull. There was light in the windows, but it wasn’t the clean, inviting light that shone from the other houses; this was a weak ochre smear that suggested candles made of tallow. And that wasn’t the worst of it: the worst was inside.
* * *
Henrietta Clay. That was her real name. I knew that and a bunch of other things about her, too. It was tribal knowledge, acquired from the school bus, or the girls’ locker room, or older brothers and sisters. The kind of stuff that everybody knew, like the name of the Jets’ quarterback (Namath) or Denise Santini’s cup size (38D). It was said that she was a French Creole from Mississippi, and also that she was part Negro. I only saw her up close the once, when she was around seventy or so, I guess, and any of that could have been true or not.
And, of course, we all knew that she was a witch. Now, these were the old days, remember, before power crystals and people listing Wicca as a religion on job applications. Witchcraft wasn’t cute and fuzzy then. It was still considered to be dark and scary and evil. Not that anyone believed in it—the supernatural hokum part, I mean—but I’m getting ahead of my story.
Henrietta’s husband, Sam, was a Woody. That is, a local from Briarwood. An insurance salesman who made enough money to buy a nice house for himself and the girl he’d met down south during basic training. He was also a war hero who’d been wounded in the Battle of the Bulge. The memories caught up with him, they said. Started drinking, piled up the Studebaker, gave Henrietta the back of his hand. What finally got to her, though, were the floozies. At first he’d been circumspect, limiting his dalliance to business trips. But once he and the bottle got to be best buds, he started hitting on the talent right here town, and none too discreetly, either. When he got home, there’d be trouble. The fights at the house got nasty enough that police were frequent visitors. Sometimes they’d find Henrietta banged up pretty bad, but she’d never let them take her Sammy down to the hoosegow.
Then one Friday evening, Sam Clay is sitting in a booth over at Pharaoh’s Tap Room on Rte. 9 with a couple salesman friends of his and a trio of affable bimbos. They’re having themselves a grand old time when all of a sudden Sammy cuts out in mid-anecdote and gets this funny look on his face, clueless and staring, like a newborn baby. He stands up without a word to anyone, goes over to the coat rack, slips on his leather bomber jacket, and walks on out the door. Folks who were there that night said that Sam headed straight across the parking lot to perch himself on a split rail fence that paralleled the highway, just as peaceful as could be, like he were waiting for a bus. Only there weren’t any buses that time of night, nor much traffic of any kind, though eventually an eighteen wheeler did roll through on its midnight run up to Albany, and Sam Clay got down off his fence and strode in front of that monster like it was the most natural thing in the world. The big rig dragged him two hundred feet with its air brakes keening to wake the dead before it finally came to a stop.
But the kicker was that one of the neighbors—neighbors of the Clays, that is—told the cops that Henrietta had awakened her with this horrendous carrying-on about one A.M. that morning—which happened to coincide exactly with the time that her hubby had chosen to check into the afterlife. Well, that got around, of course. In a town the size of Briarwood, everything gets around. And after it had been hashed over and bandied about at the laundromat and the beauty parlor and the 7-Eleven, that raven-haired she-wolf had whipped up a Mississippi hoodoo on poor Sammy, and killed him off plain as day.
There hadn’t been enough left of him for anyone to notice the eyes.
As for me, I didn’t worry about it much myself. I was in diapers then, and my mother did my worrying for me. I didn’t see the roses in Henrietta’s yard that were said to bloom black, or the tree with the poison apples, and I was too young to remark the Hag—as she was coming to be known—who would sit in the park for hours on end, while the crows arrived to drop trinkets and jewelry in her lap.
And nobody told me, as a third or fourth grader, about the Lees’ German shepherds—two of them, brother and sister—who’d gotten the woman’s cat. It was a stray, really, a scruffy-looking thing with half an ear gone that sort of belonged to the neighborhood. But the Hag had taken a liking to it, and fed it cans of tunafish on her big front porch. Then one day a pair of dogs came bounding up the walk, cornered that tabby and tore it to pieces, right there in the yard. The Hag came out after them, spitting and cussing and waving a broom, but they high-tailed it over the picket fence to safety. One of them, though, left something behind—a tuft of grayish hair, caught on a nail—and when the Hag found that, they say, she tilted her head back and laughed and laughed.
Well, the female shepherd went missing. Three days later it dragged itself into town, looking like it had gone through a meat grinder, climbed up the steps of the gazebo and died right there before a handful of gawkers. But the weirdest part, the part that everybody talked about afterward, was that the eyes had changed. Their striking, sky-blue color remained only at the edge of the irises, while the middle parts had turned a sickening, milky-white. When he’d examined the animal, Doc Porter, the vet, shook his head. Never seen anything quite like it, he said. Not in a dog that wasn’t old as the hills, anyway, and this one was barely full-grown. Folks were still abuzz about that when word arrived that the other shepherd—the brother—had met with a more conventional end, cut down by a hit-and-run driver on North Division Street. The problem was that a witness swore up and down that it was Sam Clay’s long-gone red jalopy that had done the deed.
With Sammy himself behind the wheel.
Now, I can’t vouch for any of this; like I’ve said, it was way before my time. Just a bunch of silly stories from what I could tell. I asked my mother once, when I was maybe thirteen or so, about all the stuff I’d heard, and she dismissed the matter with one of her favorite words. “Hogwash,” she said. And that would’ve made me feel better, probably, if she hadn’t looked up just then to the kitchen window with a certain expression on her face. An expression that told me different.
By all appearances, though, the Hag was just a harmless, run-of-the-mill old biddy who sat in a rocking chair on the porch of her house, letting the days go by.
Except for those eyes.
* * *
They were what I was thinking of as I stared Jeff down behind his stupid rubber mask. I didn’t want to go anywhere near that house, especially at night, and most especially on this night. But he was daring me—this was a teenage test of will—and there was no way I was going to back down, not in front of the others. So I plucked the bottle out of his hands and drank some off myself. “O.K.,” I blustered finally. “Let’s do it.”
* * *
It seemed like the universe died when we passed through that gate. There wasn’t a sound except for our own footsteps; no traffic, no kids nearby, no comforting T.V. or radio jabber from inside the house, not even the rustle of leaves in a night breeze that had gone abruptly calm, as if we’d entered the eye of a storm. I glanced up at the pale, spidery outline of an oak tree against the purple-black sky to my right, and it looked awfully creepy—but then this was late October, and they were all like that.
As we ascended the bowed wooden steps, I was sure that they’d creak like they do in a horror movie, and maybe they did, but the blood pounding in my ears made it impossible to know. Jeff marched boldly across the porch with me right beside him and Cyndi and Ed bringing up the rear. We huddled together beneath a dim, bug-spattered light fixture as Jeff studied the antique doorbell. It wasn’t a button or a knocker, but a T-shaped brass handle that protruded about an inch from the colorless paint. After he’d wasted a few seconds glaring at it, Ed reached over his shoulder and gave the thing a twist. A little bell jingled just beyond the door. Suddenly I felt faint, and I think that if I’d stood there waiting a single moment longer, I’d have chickened out and gone back to the car. But the door opened right then, as if she’d been standing behind it waiting for us all along.
“Trick or treat,” said Jeff, trying to sound macho, but it was clearly all he could do to produce those three syllables. Then he was spellbound, as we all were, by the vision.
She stood in the gloom of a darkened foyer, far enough back so the porch light missed her, revealed only in silhouette. As we watched, transfixed, she came slowly forward, the illumination inching up the full-length brown dress to reveal a narrow belted waist, an old woman’s formless chest, a splay of long black hair streaked with gray on both sides, and then—
That face. We drew a collective breath as it came into view. I was at once repulsed and fascinated, and part of me wanted to turn away, and yet, the longer I looked the more interesting it became, and once I got over the strangeness of it, I realized that it was actually kind of attractive in an odd, exotic way. Her skin was smooth and dark and showed barely a wrinkle in spite of her age, and the lips were young looking and surprisingly sensual. But the eyes— Twin amber rings surrounded opalescent corneas that seemed to glitter and seethe in the porch-light. There was no question that those orbs were dead as glass, but when she pointed them at you, it was like peering into the sun. She came nearer to us now and Jeff took a step back, bumped into me and stopped. And then—she smiled. And it was a warm, disarming smile that none of us had expected, and the faintest, unconscious giggle escaped Jeff. When she spoke, the tone was so honeyed and friendly that I had to grin as well.
“Isn’t this a nice surprise,” she said. “Young folks at my door for Halloween. I don’t get many visitors these days, you know.” She brought her chin up and swiveled her head from side to side, and I could hear tiny snuffling sounds, almost as if she were—smelling us.
“Oh, my, but you’re not children, are you,” she said. Ed let out a snicker that drew her attention, and then he fell silent as falling snow. We all did.
She seemed to zero in on Jeff. “Well now,” she said to him, still beaming. “Trick or treat, is it? Have you got your bag there with you?”
Jeff hesitated a moment, then produced the paper bag from the wine bottle, shaking it a little to make some noise. “Yeah. Here’s the bag, lady,” he answered curtly, trying to rekindle his nerve. “I got the bag right here.” He held it out, and crinkled the paper between his fingers.
“So you do,” said the Hag approvingly. She put a hand over it, and let something plop to the bottom. Then she reached up deliberately to touch the loose rubber edging of his mask. I felt him tense beside me, but he held his ground, and I was impressed. I don’t think that I could have done that.
“You disguise yourself tonight, my son,” the old woman cooed. “But Henrietta can still
see them, you know. Every naughty burr and thistle, just as plain as day.”
For an awkward moment, all remained still. Then the wind came up without warning in a
rush that threw my hair back, and I had the weirdest impression that it had come from inside the house—and the Hag’s face transformed in a blink of an eye from a friendly old lady to something harsh and feral, and the hand that was at Jeff’s mask made a sudden twitch and I heard him yelp and then she was holding a lock of his ash-blonde hair in her fingertips and laughing, laughing in a screech-owl titter that made my skin crawl.
“Hey!” cried Jeff, slapping a hand to his temple. “You crazy old bat! What do you think
you’re doing?” But his anger changed to something else as she continued to laugh, waving the pinch of hair at him, and he began to back away, urging the rest of us with outstretched arms until we were stumbling down the steps, and then in full flight to the car.
Jeff slammed his door and hammered the lock button with a fist. Then he tore the mask from his head and flung it aside, fumbled keys from his pocket and stabbed at the ignition till he drove one home. The engine roared to life, sputtered, roared again as he pumped the gas. But before he put it in gear, I touched his arm.
“The bag,” I reminded him. “See what’s in the bag.”
He looked down to where he’d dropped the thing between us, then flipped on the interior light. “You’re so darned curious, Sarah, why don’t you see what's in it?”
Cyndi and Ed leaned forward to watch over the seat-back. I glanced at them, then took hold of the rolled-over top of the bag. Slowly, I unfurled the heavy brown paper and forced myself to look inside.
It was empty.
* * *
I don’t have a second beer as a rule, but I ordered one for each of us that afternoon at Cheery-O’s, and Cyndi didn’t object. Gazing into her azure eyes—still as pretty as ever—I could see the reflection of my own unease. And more: a sadness, maybe even some resentment toward a place that could still bother us after so much time. But we couldn’t leave it alone. It was like our version of a therapist’s couch, I guess: face your fears and they'll go away. I'm not so sure about that theory anymore. The beers arrived then, frosty-cold and topped with foam, and I sipped at mine a little too eagerly.
* * *
We went on to Barbara’s house that night, just as I’d wanted, and I could’ve used a vomit bag there too, as it turned out. Everybody except me got loaded, and everybody except me got stoned. By the end of the evening people were all over the house making out and swaying to the music, but I was holed up in the kitchen with Barbara’s mother, sipping Ovaltine and talking about horses. Jeff had disappeared soon after our arrival. I found him eventually, wishing I hadn’t. I opened the door to the washroom, not knowing where I was, and discovered a couple sharing a joint. It was only on the second take that I recognized Jeff, and it took a third in the acrid blue haze to identify Miss Sidon, our new art teacher at school, and Jeff’s senior by at least a dozen years. I’d heard that she showed up at the kids’ parties sometimes—a definite no-no for anyone on the faculty. I waited for him out in the car, where he materialized an hour later complaining that he’d had to search for me.
Not long after we broke up, but it wasn’t over that. Or not just over that, I should say. I’d begun to see another side of Jeff, the side hidden by the golden fluff and that gorgeous, Greek-god face of his. The dark side. He’d always had a hair-trigger temper, but it got worse then. It got physical. He started shoving me around, punching me in the arm so it left a bruise. One day he took me out parking to Sparkle Lake. There was a small space between some pine trees that was big enough to conceal a car if you could back into it from the main dirt lot, which was tricky because you had to clear some low boulders on either side. I will say this for Jeff: he was a darned good driver. Anyway, he started groping when I wasn’t in the mood, and when I finally slapped him he slapped me back. Then, on the ride home, a fat, pregnant possum was waddling across the road and Jeff swerved to hit it. When I yelled at him he gave me a look that made me scrunch up against the passenger’s side door as tightly as I could. That was our last date together, that afternoon.
A month later he took Miss Sidon out to that very same spot by the lake on a Saturday night. At some point there was an incident not unlike the one I described, except this time Jeff had more in mind than a feel, and when he was rebuffed he went berserk. He used his fists on the woman—all hundred-and-ten pounds of her—and when he got tired of that, he wrapped the sleeve of her sweater around her neck and pulled it tighter and tighter until she was crimson and couldn’t breathe. She fought back in vain with all of her strength, but was coming to grips with the fact that her life was over as the world became a flashing sea of stars.
Then, as she told the police later, Jeff simply let go. He sat up straight on the seat beside her and stared off into space like he’d been cold-cocked with a bat. Next she noticed that the muscles on his face and neck and forearms were churning beneath the skin, like there were little animals in there alive and moving, and he seemed to come back to himself for a moment, and he turned to her with such an expression of—of pleading, that she’d actually reached over to try and help him if she could. But he bucked away from her wildly and clawed the door open, and then he was marching off stiff-legged like a marionette amongst the pine trees in the direction of the lake. That was on her side of the car, and she pressed up against the window, watching through the glass as he’d splashed right into the coal-black water, wading awkwardly in the silt in his motorcycle boots and dungarees, pushing out further and further into the deep, his arms jerking uselessly at his sides and making no effort whatsoever to swim. At the end, when only his head and neck remained visible like a cork bobbing in a giant tub, he found his voice again and cried out, in a single manic shriek that was quickly stifled by the inrush of liquid. And then he was under and the surface swirling about where he’d disappeared, but soon it grew quieter, then quieter still until at last it was smooth and lustrous in the rays of the moonlight.
The State Police divers took about an hour the next morning to find the body. When the coroner hosed the mud from its eyes, they say he found something unusual.
As for the Hag, she’d whooped up a storm that night. I got the scoop from Lydia Smythe, who had just moved into a little pink cottage on the corner of Bleakley and Pine. She said she heard it herself about eleven o’clock. A sort of eerie sing-song on the breeze that stiffened the hairs on the back of her neck, and had every hound in the neighborhood harmonizing.
* * *
So, like I told you, not everybody left Briarwood. Jeff Hawkins is still there, under the maple tree at Hillside Cemetery. And I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Henrietta Clay—over a hundred now, or conceivably even older—still sits on the porch of her rickety house in that same old bent chair, rocking, rocking, and every so often, making one of her small, but necessary corrections.
Cyndi and I tore a napkin in half and wrote down our phone numbers, vowing to get together again real soon. I left hers on the tablecloth.
This story appeared first in the Bryant Literary Review. Comments or questions may be posted below, or on Facebook.
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