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Clyde was told to look for a man in a costume complimenting his own. A vague clue, in his mind. For the third consecutive year, Clyde was attending the countywide American Legion-sponsored Halloween bash as a pirate. That left a number of partner possibilities.
"It does not," his sister Mellie said as they argued the entire drive to Manila Farms. "You're Captain Hook. We just have to look for a ginger-haired Peter Pan."
"I was Captain Hook two years ago," Clyde said. Last year he went as Jack Sparrow. Big difference. "This time I'm Blackbeard."
Mellie, in her gangster moll getup, gave Clyde's costume a perfunctory glance. She didn't let up on the gas pedal. "It's the same clothes as last time."
"Well, pirate fashion hardly varies." Clyde tugged at his fake beard. In case Mellie intended to crack about Blackbeard having two hands, he waved his realistic prosthetic.
Mellie shrugged. "Works better with the hook. Just saying."
"Knowing Stens, he might have gotten his pirates mixed up." Peter Pan, Smee, Tinkerbell… no telling what to expect in his date’s companion costume.
On top of that, the annual Halloween event brought in hundreds of people, and everybody dressed for it. Clyde arranged to meet Stensland, a relatively new West Virginian, for their first holiday together. The furniture store where Stens worked was sponsoring a booth; Clyde just had to find it.
Mellie parked in the grass lot reserved for cars participating in the Trunk or Treat. The kids would line up shortly to collect candy from each decorated trunk or hatch. Thanks to the Logans' recent financial windfall, Mellie sprung for full bars. "Whatever it takes to win car of the year," she said, pointing gangster moll finger guns.
Luck appeared on Clyde's side for once this Halloween, too. As he helped Mellie set up, a figure with familiar red hair ran up to him. Stens got the costume match correct; he was decked out as the pirate Stede.
"Clyde!" Stens crashed into Clyde's side with the full arm, gasping for air. Mellie shooed them off, clearly figuring to finish by herself.
Clyde walked a nearly sobbing Stens from the lot. "Hey, take deep breaths, okay?" He fingered the open plackets of Stens's satin blue coat. "I love your outfit."
"And it will look marvelous crumpled in a pile on your bedroom carpet later tonight. Yes." Stens hardly sounded enthused about it, though. He yanked off Clyde's beard. "We have an emergency."
Terrific. Clyde remained calm, however, since Stens tended to lean toward the dramatic. He watched Stens inhale and blinked in confusion when the story spooled from the man's mouth.
"IwasdecoratingtheluckywheelboothwhenIsawyournieceSadieshelookedsocuteinherBlackWidowcostumeandIofferedhersomeextracandythatSoftSolutionsboughtforthebooth…"
Clyde cut him off with a long kiss. Stens looked at him, eyes glazed.
"Go slower," Clyde said.
Stens nodded, taking another breath. "Sadie was looking in the bucket for something she liked."
"Uh huh."
"Then she saw my reusable Grocery Castle bag. I packed some snacks for later."
"Yeah?"
Stens swallowed. "Before I realized it, she snatched the brownie from it and ran off." Tears rimmed his eyes. "I don't know where she went."
Was that all? "Stens," Clyde held him tighter, "it's Halloween. Kids think they can get away with this stuff. I'll make sure Jimmy–"
"Clyde, you don't understand. I made that brownie for us, for later."
"That's sweet of you, but we can find other treats here to take back."
Stens grasped Clyde's whiskered chin, squeezing hard. "Clyde, love," he said, "that brownie is meant only for adult consumption."
The world around Clyde slowed and Stens’s words echoed in his head. "You brought a weed brownie to Halloween, didn't you?" To an event full of sugar-hungry kids.
Stens bit his lip and nodded.
"Dang it, Stens."
~*~
Only one place Sadie would go before the Trunk and Treat started, and that was the corn maze. It cost one ticket to visit and you signed up with your start time beforehand. Whoever completed the maze in the shortest time won a hundred bucks.
Clyde bummed a few tickets from the Bang brothers. They checked the signup sheet for Sadie's block-letter scrawl and found they missed her coming out by five minutes. His friend Earl, also his mechanic, sat guard at the entrance monitoring the entrances and exits. Clyde noticed he was chowing down on a brownie.
“What booth is selling those?” Clyde asked.
“Hell if I know.” Earl flashed a smile flecked with fudgey crumbs. “Sadie gave it to me jes’ before she ran into the maze. I think it’s s’posed to be a bribe,” he said with a wink.
Clyde put his good arm around Stens and rubbed the man’s hip. All’s well and all that. Hopefully Sadie hasn’t sampled the treat before giving it to Earl. Earl didn’t exactly recognize the five-second rule when it came to food, so one missing bite wouldn’t deter him. Nonetheless, the man needed to know what he was eating.
“Earl,” Clyde flicked his gaze at a worried Stens, “Stens made that brownie. It’s loaded.”
Stens tensed hard against him, as though expecting a fearsome backlash. Earl, however, inspected the half-eaten brownie and chuckled. “Well then,” Earl said, “if you think I’m sharing…” and he crammed the rest of it in his mouth.
“Hey, Stens,” Earl added, still chewing, “you grow your own, right?”
“Of course.” Stens took on an affronted expression. Like he’d continue to buy through a dealer when he had nice space behind his trailer for a greenhouse. Clyde knew all this and smiled at his date’s reaction. “It will hit quickly, too, so be ready for it.”
Earl shoved the clipboard at Clyde. “You two gonna run the maze or not?” he barked. “Time to beat’s ten minutes.”
Clyde whistled. The American Legion planned out their corn mazes with the express purpose of confusing the hell out of townsfolk. More than once somebody on the committee had to go in with a map to retrieve a lost child. Clyde checked the signup sheet to find Joe Bang was the current record holder.
Stens sniffed when he saw the sheet. “He probably blasted his way out.”
“Let’s see if we can get it in nine.” Clyde scrawled their names on the same line and Earl wrote in their start time. Earl then yelled “Go!” and Clyde dragged a protesting Stens through the first turn.
“Clyde!” Stens acted as a dead weight of sorts but at least he wasn’t digging in his heels. “Clyde, seriously, now that we’re sure Sadie didn’t eat the brownie we don’t have to prove anything by running the maze.”
Clyde had Stens by his good hand as they sped-walk in between the tall, yellowed stalks. The lanes were narrow and luckily they hadn’t run into anybody else on their trek. Clyde paused at one open turn and calculated the odds of hitting a dead end before continuing forward. “We might as well try to win it, Stens,” he said. “It’s a hundred bucks and I’ll split it with you.”
One of Stens’s white lace cuffs had tucked into his jacket sleeve. He let go of Clyde’s hand to straighten it, then quick-stepped to stay in pace alongside Clyde. “It’s not about the money for me,” he said, “it’s just…”
Clyde stopped abruptly at the end of their current path and Stens crashed into his back. They stood at a cross-path. Left or right?
“I don’t like mazes,” Stens told him. Clyde heard the discomfort in his voice and turned to find his would-be boyfriend paler than ever in the face.
“What’s this about, Stens?” he asked. He’d seen that look on other people before. Not in Boone County, but in Iraq. Pure terror and trauma. Clyde braced himself for the guilt. It never occurred to him that Stens might experience a bad reaction to a Halloween tradition, as much as he seemed to love the holiday.
“It’s silly.” Stens shook his head, looking away. “When I was a child on a school trip we visited a botanical garden with a huge hedge maze, like in The Shining ,” he said. “Bullheaded wanker that I was, I ran in thinking I could easily solve it.”
Clyde’s heart went out to him. “You got lost?” He pictured a small ginger-haired child, curled up in a hedge-framed artery of a giant garden puzzle, alone and frightened.
“Oh, no. It wasn’t that difficult a maze. It’s just that I was almost to the exit when I hear a rustling in one of the hedges.” Stens widened his eyes. “This squirrel comes dashing out, right up my pants leg. I about pissed myself.”
Meanwhile, time ticked away. Clyde panned his gaze up and down Stens’s gentleman pirate costume. “Stens, you got on white stockings and knee-length breeches. Ain’t no squirrel gettin’ in there, even if there was one diggin’ through the stalks.” He pointed at Stens’s crotch. “But if you want to turn around I’m okay with that.”
“No, Clyde. I’m sorry.” Stens turned left and Clyde followed. Together they walked the long stretch of maze. Voices and laughter carried over from other parts and Clyde got the impression they were close to the center. “I’m projecting my misery, I suppose. This is our first date and I made a mess of things.”
“You didn’t. It’s not like you gave Sadie that brownie on purpose. She didn’t even eat it.”
“What if she had? She could have gotten sick, ended up in the hospital,” Stens said. “Your brother would kill me, assuming your sister didn’t get to me first. I’m actually more afraid of her than anybody else in your family.”
“That’s two of us.”
All the while, they walked, taking arbitrary turns and idly grabbing at the long fibrous stalk leaves waving in their faces. “I was irresponsible, Clyde,” Stens rambled on, “I should have left that brownie in the car, but I wasn’t certain if you intended to drive me back to your place. I also wanted it near me, in case somebody was breaking into cars tonight, playing Halloween tricks…”
“Mellie drove me up,” Clyde said. “I was hoping you’d drive me to your place.”
Stens rounded on Clyde and walked backward with him. “You see there. I knew that because you told me when I was at Duck Tape last. I was probably fixated on my costume so we’d match.” His face crumpled, taking in Clyde’s pirate getup. “And I fucked that up, too,” he wailed. “Stede Bonnet doesn’t go with Jack Sparrow.”
“Stens, I’m Blackbeard. Remember when you ripped my beard off? Stens, calm down.”
They’d come to a more populated area of the maze now. Clyde saw they’d strode right into the center without really trying to find it. The few kids they met there waved hello and Clyde handed them some wrapped treats he kept in his coat pocket for just in case. When they disappeared he took Stens in his arms and hugged him tight.
“Hey.” Clyde kissed Stens behind his ear and they touched foreheads. “Listen to me. You didn’t ruin Halloween. Our costumes match. You made Earl very happy just now, and…” he pulled out his phone and shot a quick text to Mellie. After a few seconds, he showed Stens the response. “See that? Sadie’s at the Trunk or Treat filling up on candy. Everything’s fine.”
“Everything’s fine.” Stens fluttered his wispy copper lashes and Clyde longed to kiss each of his eyelids. Stens pulled away, eyes still closed and nodded. “Right,” he said, and opened back to look around them. “Oh, we made it to the center. How are we doing on time?”
Clyde checked his phone. “It’s been ten minutes just to get here.” Goodbye, hundred bucks.
“No sense in hurrying then.” Stens eyed the three possible exits from the center. “Which one looks good?”
Clyde wasn’t seeing any of the spaces in the maze for the wall of stalks next to them. The prize money was lost, as was Stens’s Halloween treat, but the corn maze offered them one advantage: camouflage.
Holding Stens by the bicep, Clyde pulled them into the corn until the tall stalks concealed them. It seemed a bit claustrophobic at first, but Clyde focused on Stens standing before him. Stens, meanwhile, looked up and around their surroundings with awe.
“How long can we stay here before we’re caught?”
Clyde touched his lips down on Stens’s. “One way to find out.”
~*~
Earl was having a nice nap, filled with dreams of shapely and hospitable cheerleaders, when somebody flicked him behind the ear.
“The fu–” Earl stopped himself on seeing a pair of children in Marvel costumes, standing with their parents. He sat up in his folding metal chair and handed over the clipboard for the family’s signout time. “Nice to see y’all made it out okay,” he told them.
The father filled out the form for everybody, smiling. “Great maze this year, Earl. Especially with all the special effects.”
“What’s that?”
“You know.” The man crooked his head toward the maze entrance. “All that monster-like heavy breathing and moaning in the center of the maze. It sounds like it’s real haunted in there.”
Earl took back the clipboard and glanced at the form. Every participant was accounted for with an end time except for two people, and it’d been two hours since Clyde and Stens entered the maze.
“Glad y’all had fun,” was all Earl said, and wished the family goodnight. Then he tilted the bill of his trucker’s hat over his eyes and went back to sleep. He ought to check the maze for any unsavory activity, but decided against it.
He might be high, but he sure wasn’t stupid.