Everyone around Boston's White City called them the Three Amigos, as if a single entity. I knew them as Bobby, Stevie and Brian.

The Pumpkin Wars began the Halloween of '57; not long after the Milwaukee Braves beat the hated Yankees in the World Series. The boys were only ten when they started it, but old Mrs. Pease had surely gone begging. Every year she would put out one of her intricately carved pumpkins — candle lit, on a sheet-covered porch chair fronted by a section of low picket fence. Fastened to the top of the fencing was a white sign inscribed with bold black letters, lit by a spotlight the old crone had staked into the lawn.

Their initial raid was a spur of the moment thing. For the first time, the boys were old enough to be out on their own on Halloween night, and passed by Mrs. Pease' house on the way back from gathering booty at the larger homes surrounding the Goodway mansion. Stevie started it. "You guys hate freakin' Mrs. Pease' pumpkins as much as I do?" he screamed, as if the old bag could hear him. "My Mom used to drag me all the way over here just to stare at her stupid-ass pumpkins."

"They have nothing to do with Halloween," Brian agreed, not nearly as loud. "I mean, what does a flying fairy or a jumping deer have to do with Halloween?"

"And you'd think she'd at least put out a basket of candy or something," Bobby chimed in. Stevie looked around and nodded toward a tall hedgerow between Mrs. Pease' bungalow and the duplex next door. The three ducked behind the bushes, dropped their candy-stuffed pillowcases to the ground and took up surveillance positions facing the house.

No doubt, Stevie would make the run to the porch to grab the giant gourd. By far the best athlete of the three, Stevie could run down most dogs. "You guys watch my back and I'll go grab the pumpkin," he whispered.

Brian spread open the branches of the hedge to peek through. "I can see her through the side window," he said, a whispered sort of shout. "She's sitting in the parlor, watching TV."

Poised in a crouch at the street end of the hedge, Stevie took off as soon as Brian waved the all clear. He dashed across a short expanse of scruffy lawn to the front corner of the house and waited for Brian's high sign with his back up against the wall. Once Brian's upturned thumb poked though the hedge, Stevie slid behind two tall junipers along the side of the house, hunkered down to pass under the parlor window, and tiptoed onto the porch. He grabbed the glowing orange sphere with a two-handed basketball grip, leapt from the porch over the short picket fence and sprinted up the narrow pathway toward the street.

By the time he made the sidewalk, he had hit full stride, the pumpkin held high above his head. Without losing a step, imitating a Bill Russell dunk shot, Stevie slammed the pumpkin onto the corner of the curb, where it shattered with an echoing splat. He never looked back, racing from the street to join Bob and Brian, now jumping up and down behind the cover of the hedge. Hardly out of breath, Stevie was laughing. "It was a freakin' church," he whispered. "She carved a picture of a freakin' church on a pumpkin."

Brian thought he'd better check and poked through the hedge. "I guess she didn't hear anything," he said.

"I knew I should have rung the goddamn bell," Stevie sighed. "I'm going back." Using similar stealth tactics, he snuck back to the porch and jabbed the doorbell a half-dozen times. He turned, leapt over the steps into the yard and began to pry the hated sign off the fence. It wouldn't budge.

Through the window, Brian saw Mrs. Pease rise from her chair headed toward the front door. "Holy shit, Bobby. She's just about out the door," he said. "Has he got it off yet?"

The sign finally broke loose, save a broken corner held fast by a screw through a fence slat. Brian and Bobby moved out from behind the hedge, to get a better look and to be on the mark to hightail it. Mrs. Pease waddled out the door, taking one-at-a-time clumsy old lady steps down the three stairs to the yard. "What are you doing, young man?" she screamed. Stevie was in the street, kneeling on the asphalt facing Mrs. Pease and poised over the pumpkin. He masked his face with shadow by pulling the hood of his sweatshirt down low, and began to mash the scattered wedges of slimy squash edge-on with the Quiet-Please sign, hammering away like a rapid-fire pile-driver.

"No trick or treat, no pumpkin, you clueless old hag," he shouted, pounding and scraping at the orange mess until the shrieking maniac was almost on him. He sprang to his feet and backed away with three quick hops. "Remember, no trick or treat, no pumpkin," he repeated, then wheeled and skip-jumped three steps to a full run. Bobby and Brian knew the drill and darted off in the same direction, toward Wachusett hill. Stevie would catch up with them. A block away, the three slowed down to look back. Mrs. Pease was squeezing pieces of pumpkin up against her flabby tits, blubbering like a moron.

A single battle doesn't make a war. It was Mrs. Pease' counterattack the next year that really raised things to an ugly head. As soon as Mrs. Pease' pumpkin appeared on the stoop during the week prior to H-Day, Stevie got little Richy Hagen to scope out the scene in return for Richy's customary house snooping fee: a quarter's worth of penny-candy at Maury's Corner Variety.

"The carving looks like a skinny-ass bear in a tuxedo, tap-dancing or something. It says, 'Bear Astaire'," Richy told them later, on their way to the store. "And there's a new sign there. Says the same old stuff, but has all these metal clamps holding it to the fence."

Nothing had changed. Mrs. Pease hadn't learned her Halloween lesson.

This time, now sixth-graders, the trio waited until later in the evening, hoping to put the old biddy off guard, maybe catch her thinking they'd forgotten. The raid would be a blitzkrieg pumpkin grab and smash. No doorbell and no noise, they'd decided æ just an enforcement action according to the no-treat, no-pumpkin rules of engagement. They approached the tidy home from the rear by way of Bourne Street, slinking through the backyards in ranger mode. They assumed the same staging position as the year prior, hidden behind the shedding hedgerow. Mrs. Pease was watching TV in the parlor.

When Stevie made the porch and took a grab at the glowing orange bear, he let out a muffled shriek — a cry of pained surprise. He rubbed and then shook his hands as he side-kicked a sneakered foot twice through the weak, carved front of the pumpkin, collapsing the gourd and smothering the candle inside. He kept his hands waist-high as he loped off, shaking his fingers as if he'd pissed on them. When Brian and Bobby finally caught up, Stevie's face was glowing atomic red. "The freakin' old bat put needles through the sides. She was trying to freakin' kill me." It was getting late. With a 10:00 curfew and Stevie already all but grounded, they wouldn't have much time to mount a counterattack.

"I told you guys we should have grabbed some eggs and toilet paper," Brian said.

Stevie glared. He was still flapping his hands, alternately pinching at the soft skin of his right palm. "Never mind that now, Brainiac. We ain't got time." While staring at the ground trying to come up with a plan, Stevie spotted something and bent to poke at it and pick it up. "Look what just blew by," he said, holding up a dusty brown paper by a pinched corner. "A freakin' lunchbag! Hey ... I think I got it. You guys see any dog shit around?"

Bobby remembered seeing a beauty, on the sidewalk three houses down from the Goodway place — said he almost stepped in it. Stevie took off that way, the after-burners switched on. Bobby and Brian heard the rustling of flying leaves far up the street after Stevie disappeared into the darkness, zipping along as if his ass was on fire. Soon the rustling returned, headed their way. Stevie raced out of the dark in the middle of the street, sagging lunch bag held high over his head with one hand, nose clamped shut with the other.

Though Mrs. Pease threw open the door just seconds after Stevie put a lit kitchen match to the bag and palm-slapped the doorbell a signature six times, Stevie was off out of sight by the time she got there. She spotted the smoking bag, scanned the street with a face washed in panic and almost toppled over trying to jab at a tongue of flame using the back of her heel. She edged closer, positioned a furry-slippered foot directly over the smolder and began to stomp, hugging the front doorframe for support while trying to snuff out the fire flatfooted and blind. The smell finally clued her. She began to stab her nose up in the air and flare her big-mo hairy nostrils like a spooked rabbit. She stopped her dance over the smoking bag, looked down at the remains and backed away. Shaking, she tried to kick off the worst of her two caked slippers, screaming bloody murder into a now-silent, moonless night. "I'll get even with you, you little bastards! So help me, God, I'll get even!"

The boys, hidden behind a parked car in the driveway across the street, rolled back and forth over the gravel with their hands over their mouths, Stevie pounding his fist on the ground.

In the third year, there were victories and defeats for both sides, by the boys' way of reckoning Mrs. Pease getting the dinky short end. Stevie christened their plan The Dog-Doo Megabomb Bait and Switch and obsessed on every detail, including feeding the Hagen's Labrador, Buster, a family-sized can of baked beans mixed with a half-pound of stale baloney — things Brian filched from home while his Mom was hanging out the wash. Stevie chased the beast around half the morning, all in the name of decent weapons-grade material.

The device itself was simple: the explosive — a cherry-bomb Brian fit with an extra-long fuse; a triggering device — the tried-and-true lit cigarette wedged inside a closed matchbook cover; and finally, the payload — painfully provided by Buster.

They used a softball-sized wad of mud to stand in for Buster's mess and fired off a test shot in the vacant lot behind Brown Brothers' Roofing, producing a fairly uniform, fifty-foot-diameter circular scatter. "Not so bad," noted Brian, pacing the perimeter around ground zero. "But tonight, I recommend we pack the Buster Bomb a little tighter. We may get less distance, but much better material concentration at the target height."

Mrs. Pease had made changes to the yard during the past year. Their observation hedge had been replaced by an unbroken stretch of six-foot-high chain-link fence stretching from her rear property line to just shy of the front sidewalk, where a stripling oak was newly-planted beside it. Stevie, claw-hammer slung through his belt, munitions in hand, and a lit cigarette dangling from his mouth, circled around the block and approached the porch from the opposite side of the house.

Moments after Stevie dropped the smoking bag in front of the welcome mat and had torn up the pumpkin using the claw-hammer, the smoldering butt set off the matchbook, causing the top half of the bag to burst into flame. Stevie pumped the doorbell six times as soon as he saw the telltale fuse sparks fly, and then bolted. Their plan relied on Mrs. Pease getting to the door nearly as fast as the year before. "Yes!" Brian whisper-shouted to Bobbie, as soon as he saw the door fly open.

The old woman stood in the doorway. "You little bastards think I'm going to fall for that stupid trick a second time?" she yelled into the night, following up with a throaty, sarcastic laugh.

A cherry bomb is damned loud, even buried in a huge dog-crap meatball. Bobby later swore Mrs. Pease left her feet with the explosion. The old woman staggered back from the doorway and banged her lard-ass into a closet door before sliding onto the floor. The pale-lemon clapboard on the front of the house sported a new color-coordinated, ten-foot-wide yellowish-brown polka dot, almost perfectly centered on the front door.

A car engine cranked to life, high beams and blue flashers in a driveway down the street. Stevie, on the run, made a sudden change in direction and veered past the young oak and along the fence toward the backyard, headed straight for Mrs. Pease' minefield with Bobby and Brian behind him. He hit the tripwire, an ankle-high strand of baking twine hung with Christmas bells and tin cans full of beads. Stevie spun into the air ass over teakettle, landing with an oomph on a bed of mud, broken glass, and thumbtacks. Two flashlights moved down the narrow grassy alleyway, behind one the dark silhouette of Slim Jim Casey, a Forest Hills' beat cop already too familiar with the Three Amigos. Brian grabbed Stevie by the arm and pulled him to his feet. The three scaled the fence. Bobby, the last to go over, caught the cuff of his jeans and needed help to tear loose.

When they finally stopped running, a full three blocks away, Stevie began to dig slivers of glass out of his left hand using the small blade of his pocket knife. "I told you we should have given Richy Hagen the two packs of firecrackers to watch the house," Brian said, his chest heaving. Stevie tore him a new blowhole. "In case you weren't watching, Smartass, we just got our butt kicked! If Slim Jim recognized any of us, we're screwed glued and tattooed."

They sweated out the rest of the night and most of the following week, waiting for Boston's Finest to arrive and announce themselves with a hard knock on the door. They never did.

Year four was their last in junior high. Stevie didn't need to remind the Amigos another chapter in their one-night-a-year conflict was about to go down. He raised the subject two weeks before Halloween, while the three were inventing excuses not to watch the televised Kennedy-Nixon presidential debate. "I want to get her good this year." Brian and Bobby nodded, glanced at each other and back at Stevie. "Real good," Stevie crowed, a sign he had ideas for the assault.

In return for a reconnaissance mission, they agreed to give Richy Hagen an assortment of fireworks and a ride on Stevie's bike, though Stevie at first objected and suggested they pummel the little bastard. "The sign and stuff are about the same," Richy reported in. "This year the pumpkin has a picture of a hooded kid hanging from a tree. You know ... lynched. Weird!"

They waited until midnight, snuck out of their homes, and met at the edge of the woods, just past the outfield fence behind the little league diamond. Brian pulled out his Zippo and charred a wine cork he had brought along, using the soot to blacken their faces.

The Pease place was dark, save for the spotlit pumpkin. The first order of business was to make sure it was safe. The police may have had the house staked-out earlier, but there wasn't a soul around this late at night. The coast clear, they ran hunched-down in single file from one safe cover to the next, and stopped behind the shed in Mrs. Pease' next-door neighbor's yard. Stevie put on leather gloves and approached her front porch in a combat-crawl, a shopping bag dragged along behind him. He unplugged the pumpkin spotlight from its extension cord, pulled their modified twenty-five-foot lamp cord from the bag and plugged it in. The bare-wire end was fastened to a large, crisscrossed swatch of duct-tape. Stevie grabbed the tape, dashed to the door and slapped the tape and exposed bare wire onto Mrs. Pease' front doorknob. After smoothing out the creases, he karate-chopped the doorbell six times and took off.

The old woman took longer than usual to get to the door, perhaps already off to bed for the night. If she had grabbed the electrified doorknob first, she might have gotten only a small shock to accompany the surprise. Instead, she pulled open the door using a deadbolt above the hot-wired lock assembly and stood in the open doorway with a bucket in her hand, evidently expecting another flaming bag of dog poop. When she saw no one there, she turned to go back inside and took hold of the hot-wired knob to pull the front door closed behind her. The instant her fingers grabbed hold of the knob, she jerked back at the waist like dodging a foul ball. The bucket dropped from her hand, and her knees began to give way.

If the bucket hadn't dropped onto a nearby heating grate æ hadn't tilted as it fell, hadn't fallen the wrong way when it landed on its edge æ then mission accomplished. Instead, the metal pail fell onto its side, spilling its contents over the woman's slippers and onto the cast-iron grate. With the clang of the bucket and the muffled splash, smoke began to seethe from melting rubber all along the length of electrical cord running from her parlor window through the boys' extension to her door. Mrs. Pease went down on her knees with her hand still welded to the knob, twisting and jerking like kleenex in a clothes dryer. With a sudden, audible flash, the lamp cord melted away at its weak point. She fell to the floor, rolled onto her back and went still, eyes glazed over, blue tongue sticking out high and straight from a toothless gaping mouth.

"Jesus," Stevie said, out of breath, back at the lot behind the baseball diamond. "You think she's dead?"

"I thought you said it wasn't dangerous, Brian," said Bobby, now crying.

"Don't blame me. It was Stevie's idea," snapped Brian. "I said it wouldn't be dangerous so long as she wasn't grounded. You guys stick your fingers in sockets all the time! Hurts like hell, but it won't kill you. She got grounded by the damn water."

"We're not going to freakin' tell anyone," insisted Stevie. "I'm the one they're gonna fry."

Rumors flew around the neighborhood that the same boys who year-after-year smashed Mrs. Pease' pumpkins grew up to become her assassins. However, the hooded-boy-hanging pumpkin was still intact when the police arrived. Stevie would never smash a pumpkin with his picture on it, never part of their plan. The Amigos were home and asleep in their beds as far as anyone knew.

With few clues to guide them, an out-of-town, ex-con nephew of Mrs. Pease — her only living family member and in line to inherit the house and a small insurance policy — became the focal point of the police investigation, though never charged.

The boys rarely spoke of the incident, except for Bobby. Every Halloween throughout high school he'd wish they hadn't done it. No one, not even Bobby, ever mentioned the woman's name. After graduation, Brian went on to UMASS. Stevie and Bobby, both owners of a high draft lottery number, enlisted in the Marines on the buddy-plan.

They returned home together from Camp Lejeune after infantry training, their last leave before staging for Viet Nam. Their plane landed at Logan the same day the Impossible Dream '67 Red Sox lost the seventh game of the World Series to the Cardinals. Slim Jim Casey, now plain-clothes Jim Casey, met them at the gate. "Which one of you is Robert Everett?" he asked, looking straight at Bobby. "I've been waiting years to get you guys. I suspected all along it was kids, not Reggie Pease. Kept the duct-tape all these years and a list of kids to check, if I could ever get a hold of their fingerprints."

Bobby looked at Stevie, shaking his head, no. Bobby began to cry, the same sort of bawling the boys thought he'd left behind years ago.

"When I heard you jerks enlisted, I contacted the Department of Defense and made an official request for a copy of your fingerprints," Casey said. "Guess what, Bobby Everett? Your prints match those found at the scene on the duct-tape. You're under arrest." Casey signaled to two uniformed officers waiting nearby. They snapped handcuffs on Bobby's wrists while a whispering crowd gathered in a circle around them. Casey turned to Stevie. "It's you I want, you little bastard. You and your friend, Brian. Bobby's going to help me." The boys weren't stupid and had watched Dragnet religiously. They had put together their makeshift booby trap with gloves on and had wiped everything clean, except for the duct-tape. Bobby simply forgot he had used the tape last, for a school project. His prints were all over the stuff.

Bobby could be emotional and frightened easily. Brian and Stevie knew that. But he would never rat-out an Amigo, a reason you became an Amigo in the first place. They offered to turn themselves in if it would make things go any easier on him. Bobby refused and pled guilty to a reduced charge, getting two years for Involuntary Manslaughter.

It seemed like it was over and done with, but wars rarely work that way. Only days after Bobby was sentenced, Stevie, out at the point on a jungle patrol, spotted a VC scout up ahead and took off after him just like he used to chase down Buster. After he hit the tripwire and went airborne into the shredding teeth of a fifty-pound exploding Claymore, he had to know he was a goner a snap before he was gone.

Did he think of her the instant before his light went out?

At the funeral, Stevie's Dad said what they shipped home wouldn't have filled a man's shoebox. The only way he knew it was Stevie was from a remnant of the left hand dotted with jagged pink scars Stevie got from a fall on some broken glass while in junior high.

Bobby took it hard. If he hadn't been arrested, he might have been on patrol with Stevie and yelled out a warning when Stevie took off down the trail. Or, Bobby might have died with him. Worse, if Bobby had spilled the beans or allowed the other two to confess, Stevie would have been arrested and discharged, but still alive and kicking up dust somewhere.

While in prison Bobby learned to rub the edge off his multi-bladed razor of guilt with filthy needles full of bad smack, moving on to purer grades after his parole. He shot up his farewell overdose the next Halloween, no coincidence.

I knew them because my name is Brian, last soldier standing in the Pumpkin Wars. It began as a small test of will, in strange ways a war like any other. Some die in combat, some in the aftermath, those that survive are crippled by sorrow.

And regret — sorrow's evil, nasty twin.

They've increased in number over the years, the pumpkins engraved with a hanging figure identical to the one on Mrs. Pease' stoop the night she fried. I've tried to ignore them, not look at them, but now you see them everywhere on Halloween. At the supermarket today, on a rotating display near the checkout counter, I noticed the hanging-boy stencil for sale and picked one up off the rack. "From the Pumpkin-Mania Legacy Collection," it said, in bold black and orange print on the package, "by renowned Stencil-Artist Emma Pease. Since 1961, our most popular design!"

We always assumed the hanging figure was meant to be Stevie. After a closer look, I knew it was me. I paid the $2.99 for the stencil and drove over to the hardware store for the rope. This war ends tonight, on Halloween. The oak next to the rusted-out chain-link fence at the old Pease place grew up to look just like the hanging tree carved into thousands of pumpkins.

Somehow, she knew.