The witch lives at the end of the alley.  Blair is the one who discovered her. He says some kids who used to live in my building went Trick or Treating there and never came back. No one else ever talked about the missing kids or the witch, but we agree they are all trapped under her spell.

            I, myself, have witnessed her trickery. She has a pile of rotting garbage that she spreads in her garden. I assume it helps her wort and root and what-not grow. There’s no doubt she harvests newt and salamander from under it. She has a bonfire once a week, but only late at night. You can see the glow of it and catch flickering glimpses between the slats of her fence. 

            She has maybe three teeth and it makes her chin roll up to her long nose. 

            One of the strangest things is the girl that lives with her. She’s our age, but she doesn’t go to school. We see her on the back porch using an old-timey wringer for the laundry. 

            “Hang up that warsh!” hollers the witch.

            Blair thinks the girl is one of the missing kids. Some kind of zombified slave to the witch. She always wears that same dress, no shoes, never speaks, just does the witch’s bidding out in that garden of decay. 

            A couple months ago, we made our first move. Blair had a comic about witches and we saw this hex that you can use to keep them away. We scooped out a bunch of wheel grease from this old tractor and snuck up and smeared the hex onto her door. 

            We figured it would at least trap her inside, but being in league with the devil like she is, she knew it was us, and told our parents we did it. Later we looked back on our failure and realized we never said the words from the comic and so the hex wasn’t properly fired up. 

            “No harm, so long as they warsh it off.”

###

            It’s already sticky. 

            St. Petersburg dangles off the Gulf side of Florida like a skin tag. The humidity closes in from both sides of the peninsula. We moved here from New York when I was three, but the local kids are positive I have an accent. 

            “New Yawk! Say it!”
            “Um… New York?”
            “You hear it? New Yawk! New Yawwwk.”
            “We’re not from that part of New York.”      

            I’m allowed to go two blocks in any direction around the apartments while mom sleeps, and have to check in every hour.  I plan to take my usual route up the alley.  Two rows of identical stucco ranches, that all have small garages. The alley zips them together in the back, and that’s where all the action is on a Saturday morning.

            I cross the courtyard, past orange and lemon trees so overgrown with fruit, it just plops to the ground. The sweet smell sticks in my nose like the shirt sticking to my back. I pick up a grapefruit and hurl it at the statue of Ponce de Leon. On a fountain, of course. The fruit splits against his armored back and slops into the slimy green water of the fountain, which never ran. Nothing youthful about it. 

            I grab a handful of mulberries from the big tree and cut down the alley. 

            The first garage is my favorite stop. Sam and his brother are there, as always, weaving fishing nets. There are pictures of them on the wall, standing knee deep in water, throwing the net out in front of them. It spreads like a mis-tossed pizza crust.

            “Hey, buddy, check this out.”

            Old Sam reaches into a box and pulls out a puppy. It looks like a little wolf, with one green eye and one icy blue eye. His fur is soft and dry, even in the heat.

            “That eye can see ghosts.” 

            I leave Sam and walk past the trailer park. They have a shuffle board court and it’s already teeming with residents. The man in the button down linen and high waisted pants is winning.

            Mimi waves to me. Mimi wears MuuMuus. She owns my building. Supposedly she has a lot of money and never spends it anywhere but the salon. I don’t believe it, I’m pretty sure that’s a wig. Hot days like this, sweat will drag some of her real hair out from under it. 

            Past the trailer park, it turns into woods and a big pond, the custodian is changing signs on the tall fence around the pond. The old one said “Beware of Alligators” the new one says “Beware of Quicksand.“

            “Why are you changing the signs?”

            “Because kids don’t get drunk and climb the fence to mess with quicksand.”

            I know from multiple episodes of “The Six Million Dollar Man” that he’s right. Quicksand is nothing to be messing with but there’s a place near here where this guy will wrestle a gator for money. One handed. Now, anyway. 

            Even before I get to Blair’s garage, I can hear him winding up his Evel Knievel Stunt Bike and I get to the door in time to see it the jump and crash into a long line of die-cast cars, somersault, and keep rolling into the wall. Blair was wearing his usual get up, a zip-up jumpsuit and a neckerchief. Like some kind of pit crew at the Ft. Myers flat track. 

            “Too bad his real bike can’t do that,” he says.

            Blair was always disappointed when the real Evel landed a jump, luckily that didn’t seem to happen often. They say Evel has broken every bone in his body. Twice. Blair has all the crashes and can play them back on TV with this box that’s bigger than the projector at school.

            “You wanna go watch the Vegas crash?”
            “No,” I say. “Let’s go fight the witch.”

            So here, in Blair’s stunt garage, we formulate a plan. We know the only way to defeat her is to get inside and destroy her. Probably with fire or at least dumping out her cauldron and melting her with it. I tell him that Sam has a dog that can see ghosts and we should borrow it because he can probably see demons and evil spirits, too. A dog like that is bound to come in handy. 

            Blair tells me that the big drain pipe over at the gator pond leads under those older houses and he heard the witch uses it to dump bodies over there. Between the gators and the quicksand, this is pretty crafty. 

            He says we should use that to get inside, and we should do it late at night. On bonfire night. Tonight.

            It’s high time for me to check in at home, so we decide I should tell my mother I’m staying the night to watch motorcycle crashes and stop by Sam’s on the way back and grab the dog. Blair is going to change into his denim jumper, grab a flashlight, and meet me there. 

            I don’t know it yet, but this is to be our last run at the witch.

###

            My mom is barely awake, so I eat dinner and leave a note to tell her that I’ll be at Blair’s. I change into some dark clothes and head over to Sam’s.

            I find him asleep in the garage, in front of his little TV. The Rowdies are playing the Cosmos and even the locals cheer when Pelé takes the field for New York. Sam doesn’t even flinch at their roar. 

            Ghost dog is already sitting by the door, waiting for me. He has a lot of power for a puppy. I make little kissing noises and he follows me out into the alley and toward the fenced in pond.

            We get to Blair’s and he isn’t there. His father is in the garage, instead, the puppy runs right up to him.

            “Nice dog.”
            “That blue eye,” I sound more like I’m asking, than telling. “It can see into the spirit world.”
            “Is that right?” He takes the puppy’s snout in his hand and looks at him hard. “I wonder which one sees me.” The corners of his mouth curl into a smile that never makes it to the rest of his face. “I sent Blair to bed early, so no sleepover tonight, okay buddy?”

###

            In the middle of the night, Blair’s father would hang himself in that garage. The sirens and lights wouldn’t make me up, so I would come by the garage the next morning and it would be shut and taped off. I’d find Blair down by the gator pond. 

            “What happened?” I’d eventually ask. 

            He’d shrug and we’d sit in silence until the sun went down. I wouldn’t know for another week, when he and his mother moved, that would be the last time I saw Blair. And it would be years more before I figured out people could be trapped by their own spells.