“Probably you’re thinking what I was hearing was sex—that I was too young to know how much noise ladies make when they’re having fun. Well, maybe I was only eleven, but I grew up in Darktown, not Miller’s Hill, and our walls were none too thick. What was going on with this lady didn’t have anything to do with fun. The strange thing is, Dee didn’t know that—he thought just what you were thinking. He wanted to see this lady getting humped. Maybe he even thought he could sneak in and get some for himself, I don’t know. The main thing is, he thought he was listening to some wild sex, and he wanted to get close enough to see it. Well, I thought, his daddy was a preacher, and maybe preachers didn’t do it once they got kids. And Dee didn’t have an older brother like mine, who sneaked girls into the house whenever he thought he wouldn’t get caught.
“He started sliding sideways through the woods, and I had to follow him. I’d seen enough of The Backs to last me the rest of my life, but I couldn’t run off and leave Dee behind. And at least he was going at it the right way, circling around the shacks sideways, instead of trying to sneak straight through them. I started off after him. At least I could see a little better ever since I ripped at my eyehole, but I still had to hold my blasted costume bunched up under my chin, and if I moved my head or my hand the wrong way, the hole moved away from my eye and I couldn’t see anything at all.
“So naturally, the first thing that happened was that I lost sight of Dee Sparks. My foot came down in a hole and I stumbled ahead for a few steps, completely blind, and then I hit a tree. I just came to a halt, sure that Eddie Grimes and a few other murderers were about to jump on me. For a couple of seconds I stood as still as a wooden Indian, too scared to move. When I didn’t hear anything, I hauled at my costume until I could see out of it. No murderers were coming toward me from the shack beside the still. Eddie Grimes was saying You don’t understand over and over, like he was so drunk that one phrase got stuck in his head, and he couldn’t say or hear anything else. That woman yipped, like an animal noise, not a human one—like a fox barking. I sidled up next to the tree I’d run into and looked around for Dee. All I could see was dark trees and that one yellow window I’d seen before. To hell with Dee Sparks, I said to myself, and pulled the costume off over my head. I could see better, but there wasn’t any glimmer of white over that way. He’d gone so far ahead of me I couldn’t even see him.
“So I had to catch up with him, didn’t I? I knew where he was going—the woman’s noises were coming from the shack way up there in the woods—and I knew he was going to sneak around the outside of the shacks. In a couple of seconds, after he noticed I wasn’t there, he was going to stop and wait for me. Makes sense, doesn’t it? All I had to do was keep going toward that shack off to the side until I ran into him. I shoved my costume inside my shirt, and then I did something else—set my bag of candy down next to the tree. I’d clean forgotten about it ever since I saw Eddie Grimes’ face, and if I had to run, I’d go faster without holding onto a lot of apples and chunks of taffy.
“About a minute later, I came out into the open between two big old chinaberry trees. There was a patch of grass between me and the next stand of trees. The woman made a gargling sound that ended in one of those fox-yips, and I looked up in that direction and saw that the clearing extended in a straight line up and down, like a path. Stars shone out of the patch of darkness between the two parts of the woods. And when I started to walk across it, I felt a grassy hump between two beaten tracks. The path into The Backs off Meridian Road curved around somewhere up ahead and wound back down through the shacks before it came to a dead end. It had to come to a dead end, because it sure didn’t join back up with Meridian Road.
“And this was how I’d managed to lose sight of Dee Sparks. Instead of avoiding the path and working his way north through the woods, he’d just taken the easiest way toward the woman’s shack. Hell, I’d had to pull him off the path in the first place! By the time I got out of my sheet, he was probably way up there, out in the open for anyone to see and too excited to notice that he was all by himself. What I had to do was what I’d been trying to do all along, save his ass from anybody who might see him.
“As soon as I started going as soft as I could up the path, I saw that saving Dee Sparks’ ass might be a tougher job than I thought—maybe I couldn’t even save my own. When I first took off my costume, I’d seen lights from three or four shacks. I thought that’s what The Backs was— three or four shacks. But after I started up the path, I saw a low square shape standing between two trees at the edge of the woods and realized that it was another shack. Whoever was inside had extinguished his kerosene lamp, or maybe wasn’t home. About twenty-thirty feet on, there was another shack, all dark, and the only reason I noticed that one was, I heard voices coming from it, a man and a woman, both of them sounding drunk and slowed-down. Deeper in the woods past that one, another grease-paper window gleamed through the trees like a firefly. There were shacks all over the woods. As soon as I realized that Dee and I might not be the only people walking through The Backs on Halloween night, I bent down low to the ground and damn near slowed to a standstill. The only thing Dee had going for him, I thought, was good night vision—at least he might spot someone before they spotted him.
“A noise came from one of those shacks, and I stopped cold, with my heart pounding away like a bass drum. Then a big voice yelled out, Who’s that?, and I just lay down in the track and tried to disappear. Who’s there? Here I was calling Dee a fool, and I was making more noise than he did. I heard that man walk outside his door, and my heart pretty near exploded. Then the woman moaned up ahead, and the man who’d heard me swore to himself and went back inside. I just lay there in the dirt for a while. The woman moaned again, and this time it sounded scarier than ever, because it had a kind of a chuckle in it. She was crazy. Or she was a witch, and if she was having sex, it was with the Devil. That was enough to make me start crawling along, and I kept on crawling until I was long past the shack where the man had heard me. Finally I got up on my feet again, thinking that if I didn’t see Dee Sparks real soon, I was going to sneak back to Meridian Road by myself. If Dee Sparks wanted to see a witch in bed with the Devil, he could do it without me.