1976

What happened was it was Halloween, or the run up to Halloween, and most kids were on a longer leash than usual, running around at night, even on school nights. Danny was running with his buddies, Dave and Gene and Ralph. The Bradberrys lived over on Schofield, east of Lake Monona. They shouldn’t have been at Jefferson in the first place, only for their father had gone there or something. The bullying didn’t happen except when they were at school. Danny had a reprieve that summer, and then it all kicked in again in September. But at least he had the nights, and the guys were all saying they had to do something, they just couldn’t let it continue the way it had been, and it was decided to stage some kind of Halloween prank over at the Bradberry place.

It was Dave Ricks, Danny thinks, who had the idea. Because the house was beside, or backed onto by, the Catholic church there, and so they could get over the wall or swarm in through the trees and they wouldn’t have to go squat in someone else’s yard, they could wait there and bide their time and watch for the right moment.

So they decided they would burn big skulls and spiders into the lawn with gasoline and set them ablaze, make a Halloween spectacular. The only thing was, they wanted to be around to see the fun. They wanted to see how absolutely shit-scared they could make, not just Jackie, and Eric and Brian, but all twelve Bradberrys, the whole family, or at least, apart from the two who’d left home. Fourteen, if you count the mom and pop.

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