The Traveling Vampire Show (6 page)

“Get outa here!” I shouted at it.

It barked and leaped, slammed the wall and tried to scurry up. Then it dropped. As it landed on its side in the dust in front of the shack, I jumped.

My plan was to land on the dog with both feet.

Cave it in.

On my way down, I heard it make a quick, alarmed whine as if it knew what was coming.

I braced myself for the feel of my sneakers smashing through its ribcage—and maybe for the sound of a wet splot! as its guts erupted.

But it had just enough time to scoot out of my way.

Almost.

Instead of busting through the dog, one of my feet pounded nothing but ground and the other stomped the end of its tail.

The dog howled.

I stumbled forward and almost fell, but managed to stay on my feet. As I regained my balance, I glanced back. The dog was racing off, howling and yelping, butt low, tail curled between its hind legs as if to hide from more harm.

Rusty, at the edge of the roof, called down, “Got a piece of him!”

The dog sat down, curled around and studied its tail.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can!” I yelled.

My voice must’ve gotten the dog’s attention. It forgot its tail and turned its head and stared at me with its only eye.

I muttered, “Uh-oh.”

It came at me like a sprinter out of the blocks.

“Shit!” Rusty yelled. “Run! Go, man!”

I ran like hell.

Somewhere in the distance behind me, Rusty yelled, “Hey, you fuckin’ mangy piece of shit! Over here!”

I looked back.

The dog, gaining on me, turned its head for a glance toward the voice.

Rusty let fly with a sneaker.

The dog barked at him ... or at the airborn shoe.

The sneaker hit the ground a couple of yards behind it and tumbled, throwing up dust. Not even a near miss. But the dog wheeled around and barked.

Rusty threw a second sneaker.

The dog glanced over its shoulder at me, snarled, then dodged the second sneaker (which would’ve missed it anyway by about five feet) and raced forward to renew its seige of the snack stand.

Afraid the dog might change its mind and come after me again, I ran for all I was worth until I reached the edge of the woods. Then I stopped and turned around.

The dog was sitting in front of the shack, barking and wagging its tail as if it had treed a pair of squirrels.

Up on the roof, Rusty waved at me, swinging his arm overhead like a big, dopey kid.

I waved back at him the same way.

Then Slim, apparently on her knees, raised herself up behind the sign. Holding onto it with one hand, she waved at me with the other.

My throat went thick and tight.

I waved back furiously and yelled, “See ya later!”

And a voice in my head whispered, Oh, yeah?

But who pays attention to those voices? We get them all the time. I do, don’t you? When someone you love is leaving the house, doesn’t it occur to you, now and then, that you may never see him or her again? Flying places, don’t you sometimes think What if this one goes down? Driving, don’t you sometimes imagine an oncoming truck zipping across center lines and wiping out everyone in your car? Such thoughts give you a nasty sick feeling inside, but only for a few seconds. Then you tell yourself nothing’s going to happen. And, turns out, nothing does happen.

Usually.

I lowered my arm, stared at my friends for a couple of seconds longer, then turned and hurried down the dirt road.

I ran, but not all-out. Not the way you run with a dog on your tail, but the way you do it when you’ve got a long distance to cover. A pretty good clip, but not a sprint.

Every so often, I had an urge to turn back.

But I told myself they’d be fine. Up on the roof, they were safe from the dog. And if strangers should come along-like some punks or a wino or The Traveling Vampire Show—Rusty and Slim could lie down flat and nobody would even know they were there.

Besides, if I returned, we’d all be on the roof again a couple of miles from home and no way to get there without Slim bleeding all over the place.

Going for a car was the only sensible thing to do.

That’s what I told myself.

But the farther away from Janks Field I ran, the more I wished I’d stayed. A couple of times, I actually stopped, turned around and gazed up the dirt road to where it vanished in the woods.

And thought about running back.

Maybe I would’ve done it, too, except for the dog. I hated the idea of facing it again.

First, I felt sort of guilty about trying to kill it. Which made no sense. The damn thing had attacked Slim—it had hurt her and tried to rip her apart. For that, it deserved to die. Clearly. Without a doubt. But all that aside, I felt rotten about jumping off the roof to murder it. Part of me was glad it had scooted out of the way.

Second, the dog was sure to attack me if I returned to Janks Field on foot. It would try to maul me and I’d try to kill it again.

But I hope the dog wasn’t the reason I decided to keep going. I hope it wasn’t for anything selfish like that.

But you never know about these things.

The real whys.

And even if you could somehow sort out the whys and find the truth, maybe it’s better if you don’t.

Better to believe what you want to believe.

If you can.

Anyway, I didn’t go back. I kept on running up the gloomy dirt road, huffing, sweating so hard that my jeans were sticking to my legs.

I met no one else. The road, all the way from Janks Field to Route 3, was empty except for me.

When I came to the highway, I stopped running. I needed to catch my breath and rest a little, but I also didn’t want anyone driving by to get the wrong idea.

Or the right idea.

With Grandville only a couple of miles away, some of the people in cars going by were sure to recognize me. They might not pay much attention if I’m simply strolling along the roadside. But if they see me running, they’ll figure something is wrong. They’ll either stop to offer help or tell everyone what they saw.

Golly, Mavis, I was out on Route 3 this morning ’n who should I see but Frank and Lacy’s boy, Dwight, all by himself over near the Janks Field turnoff, running like he had the Devil itself chasing after him. Seemed real strange.

Spose he was up to some sorta mischief?

Can’t say, Mavis. He ain’t never been in much trouble. Always a first time, though.

I wonder if you oughta tell his folks how you saw him out there.

I better. If he was my boy, I’d wanta know.

And so it would go. In Grandville, not only does everyone know everyone, but they figure your business is their business. Nowdays, you hear talk that “It takes a village to raise a child.” You ask me, it takes a village to wreck a child for life.

In Grandville, you felt like you were living in a nest of spies. One wrong move and everyone would know about it. Including your parents.

After giving the matter some thought, I decided I didn’t want to be seen on Route 3 by anyone. So every time I heard a car coming, I hurried off and hid in the trees until it was out of sight.

I hid, but I kept my eyes on the road. If something that looked like a Traveling Vampire Show should go by, I wanted to know about it. I planned to call off my mission to town and run back to Janks Field.

When I wasn’t busy dodging off to hide from cars, I wondered how best to get my hands on one.

My first thought had been to borrow Mom’s car. But on second thought, she never let me take it without asking where I wanted to go. Janks Field was supposed to be off limits. She would be very angry (and disappointed in me) if I told her my true destination. Lying to her, however, would be even worse. “Once people lie to you,” she’d told me, “you can never really believe them again about anything.”

Very true. I knew it then and I know it now.

So I couldn’t lie to her.

Which meant I couldn’t borrow her car.

And forget about Dad’s.

Both my brothers owned cars, but they loved to rat me out. No way could I go to either of them....

And then I thought of Lee, my brother Danny’s wife. Perfect!

She would let me use her old red Chevy pickup truck, and she wouldn’t yap.

I’d learned how to drive in Lee’s pickup with her as my teacher. If she hadn’t taught me, I might’ve never learned how to drive. Mom had been useless as an instructor, squealing “Watch out!” every two seconds. Dad had snapped orders at me like a drill instructor. My brother Stu was a tail-gating speed-demon; being taught how to drive by Stu would’ve been like taking gun safety lessons from Charlie Starkweather. Danny might’ve been all right, but Lee was in the kitchen when we started talking about it, and she volunteered.

That was the previous summer, when I’d been fifteen.

I spent plenty of time that summer hanging out with friends my own age: Rusty and Slim (calling herself Dagny) and a kid named Earl Grodin who had an outboard motorboat and wanted to take us fishing on the river every day. We did go fishing almost every day. Earl loved to fish. The strange thing was, he insisted on using worms for bait but he hated to touch them. So Rusty and Dagny and I took turns baiting his hook for him. And teasing him. You’ve never seen such a sissy about worms. Eventually, Dagny tossed a live one into her mouth. As she chewed it up, Earl gaped at her in horror. Then he gagged. Then he slapped her across the face as if to knock the worm out of her mouth so I slugged him in the nose and knocked him overboard. After that, he didn’t take us out fishing any more. But the summer was almost over by then, anyhow, so we didn’t mind very much.

We sure had fun on his boat while it lasted, but I had even better fun on the roads with Lee.

Being a school teacher, she had the summers off. She told me to drop by the house whenever I wanted driving lessons, so that’s what I did.

The first time out, she told me to get behind the wheel of her big old pickup truck. She sat in the passenger seat, gave me a few instructions, and off we went. Their house was near the edge of town, so we didn’t need to worry much about traffic. Good thing, too. Even though the driving part of the operation turned out to be easy, I did have trouble keeping my eyes on the road.

That’s because Lee was a knockout.

You take a lot of beautiful women, they’re shits. But not Lee. She was down-to-earth, friendly and funny. I’d say that she was just a normal person, but she wasn’t. She was better than normal people. Way better. She didn’t seem to know it, though.

When we went driving, she usually wore shorts. Not cut-off jeans, but real shorts. They might be red or white or blue or yellow or pink, but they were always very short and tight. She had great legs. They were tanned and smooth and very hard to keep my eyes away from.

On top, she might wear a T-shirt or a knit pullover or a short-sleeved blouse. Sometimes, when she wore a regular blouse or shirt, I could look between the buttons and catch glimpses of her bra. I tried not to do it often, though.

Mostly, I just stole glances at her legs.

I would’ve tried to sneak looks at her face, too—it was a terrific face—but I could look at that without being sneaky about it.

The first afternoon out with Lee, I learned how to drive. I didn’t really need any more lessons after that. She knew it and I knew it, but we kept it to ourselves. Two or three times a week, for the rest of the summer, I went over to her house and we took off in the truck.

While I drove us through towns and over back roads, we talked about all sorts of stuff. We shared secrets, complained about my parents, discussed our worries and our favorite movies, laughed. We laughed a lot.

It was almost like being on a fabulous date with the most beautiful girl in town. Almost. What made it different from a date was that I held no hope of ever having any sexual contact with her. I mean, you can’t exactly fool around with your brother’s wife. Also, she was ten years older than me. Also, she was out of my league entirely.

All I could do was look.

Lee knew I was sneaking glances at her while I drove, but it didn’t seem to bother her. Usually, if she noticed, she didn’t mention it. Sometimes, though, she said stuff like, “Watch out, we’re coming up on a curve,” or “Don’t forget about the road entirely.” She was always cheerful when she said such things, but I always blushed like crazy. I’d mutter, “I’m sorry” and she would say, “Don’t worry about it. Just don’t crash.”

Then one day I crashed.

For some reason, Lee wasn’t wearing a bra that day. Maybe they were all in the wash. Maybe she was too hot. Who knows? Whatever the reason, I noticed it the moment she walked out of her house. Nothing showed through her bright red blouse, but her breasts seemed to be moving about more than usual. They were loose underneath the blouse, no doubt about it.

After noticing that, I tried to keep my eyes away from her chest as much as possible.

Maybe ten minutes later, I was driving along a narrow road through the woods, Lee in the passenger seat, when I finally just had to look.

I glanced over at her.

Between two buttons of her blouse, the fabric was pursed like vertical, parted lips. Looking in, I could see the side of her right breast. Her bare breast, smooth and pale in the shadows. Not very much of it actually showed—a crescent maybe half an inch wide, at most.

But much too much.

All of a sudden, I couldn’t hear a word Lee was saying. I kept steering us along the road, smiling and nodding and turning my head to look at her—first at her face to make sure she wasn’t watching me, then at the curve of her exposed breast.

I felt breathless and hard and guilty.

But I couldn’t stop myself.

Suddenly, she yelled, “Watch out!” and flung her hands out to grab the dashboard.

My eyes jerked forward in time to see a deer straight ahead of us. I swerved and the deer bounded out of the way and I missed it just fine. But then I couldn’t come out of the turn fast enough. I took out a speed limit sign.

We weren’t hurt, though.

Next thing I knew, Lee and I were standing side by side in front of the truck, looking at its smashed headlight.