The Traveling Vampire Show (11 page)

Actually, this wasn’t unusual. Back in those days, most men preferred for their wives to stay home and take care of the family instead of run off to work every day. A lot of women seemed to like it that way, too.

In this case, though, Louise wanted to work. She hated living in her parents’ house. Not because she had problems with them, but because of Jimmy’s behavior. He drank too much. He had a violent nature and a horny nature and he enjoyed having people watch.

Slim never told me all the stuff that went on, but she said enough to give me the general picture.

To make it fairly brief, when she was three years old (so she’d been told), her grandfather fell down the stairs (or was shoved by Jimmy) in the middle of the night, broke his neck and died. That left Jimmy with the three gals.

God only knows what he did to them.

I know some of it. I know he tormented and beat all of them. I know he had sex with all of them. Though Slim never exactly came out and said it, she hinted that he’d forced them into all sorts of acts—including multi-generational orgies.

At the time it came to an end, Slim was thirteen and calling herself Zock.

She seemed strangely cheerful one morning. Walking to school with her, I asked, “What’s going on?”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“You’re so happy.”

“Happy? I’m ecstatic!”

“How come?”

“Jimmy (she never called him Dad or Pop or Father) went away last night.”

“Hey, great!” I was ecstatic, myself. I knew Slim hated him, but not exactly why. Not until later. “Where’d he go?” I asked.

“He took a trip down south,” she said.

“Like to Florida or something?”

“Further south,” she said. “Deep south. I don’t exactly know the name of the place, but he’s never coming back.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, hoping she was right.

“Pretty sure. Nobody ever comes back from there.”

“From where?”

“Where he went.”

“Where’d he go?”

“The Deep South,” she said, and laughed.

“If you say so,” I told her.

“And I do,” said she.

By then, we were almpst within earshot of the crossing guard, so we stopped talking.

Though the subject of Jimmy’s trip came up quite a lot after that, I never learned any more about where he’d gone. “Deep South,” was about it.

I had my suspicions, but I kept them to myself.

Anyway, the grandmother died last year. She passed suddenly. Very suddenly, while in a checkout line at the Super M grocery market. As the story goes, she was bending over the push-bar of her shopping cart and reaching down to take out a can of tomato sauce when all of a sudden she sort of twitched and tooted and dived headfirst into her cart—and the cart took off with her draped over it, butt in the air. In front of her were a couple of little tykes waiting while their mother wrote a check. The runaway cart crashed through both kids, took down the mother, knocked their empty shopping cart out of the way, kept going and nailed an old lady who happened to be heading for the exit behind her own shopping cart. Finally, Slim’s grandma crashed into a display of Kingsford charcoal briquettes and did a somersault into her cart.

Nobody else perished in the incident, though one of the kids got a concussion and the old lady broke her hip.

That’s the true story of how the grandmother died (with the help of a brain aneurism) and that’s how Slim and her mother ended up living by themselves in such a nice house.

Side by side, Rusty and I climbed the porch stairs. I jabbed the doorbell button with my forefinger. From inside the house came the quiet ding-dong of the chimes.

But nothing else. No footsteps, no voice.

I rang the doorbell again. We waited a while longer.

“Guess she’s not here,” I said.

“Let’s find out.” Rusty pulled open the screen door.

“Hey, we can’t go in,” I told him.

Stepping in front of me, he tried the handle of the main door. “What do you know? Isn’t locked.”

“Of course not,” I said. In Grandville, back in those days, almost nobody locked their house doors.

Rusty swung it open. Leaning in, he called, “Hello! Anybody home?”

No answer.

“Come on,” he said, and entered.

“I don’t know. If nobody’s home ...”

“How’re we gonna know nobody’s home if we don’t look around? Like you said, maybe Slim passed out or something.”

He was right.

So I followed him inside and gently shut the door. The house was silent. I heard a ticking clock, a couple of creaking sounds, but not much else. No voices, no music, no footsteps, no running water.

But it was a large house. Slim might be somewhere in it, beyond our hearing range, maybe even unable to move or call out.

“You check around down here,” Rusty whispered. “I’ll look upstairs.”

“I’ll come with you,” I whispered.

We were whispering like a couple of thieves. Supposedly, we’d entered the house to find Slim and make sure she was okay. So why the whispers? Maybe it’s only natural when you’re inside someone else’s house without permission.

But it wasn’t only that. I think we both had more on our minds than checking up on Slim.

I was a nervous wreck, breathing hard, my heart pounding, dribbles of sweat running down my bare sides, my hands trembling, my legs weak and shaky as I climbed the stairs behind Rusty.

Over the years, we had spent lots of time in Slim’s house but we’d never been allowed inside it when her mother wasn’t home.

And we’d never been upstairs at all. Upstairs was off limits; that’s where the bedrooms were.

Not that Slim’s mother was unusually strict or weird. In those days, at least in Grandville, hardly any decent parents allowed their kids to have friends inside the house unless an adult was home. Also, whether or not a parent was in the house, friends of the opposite sex were never allowed into a bedroom. These were standard rules in almost every household.

Rusty and I, sneaking upstairs, were venturing into taboo territory.

Not only that, but this was the stairway where Slim’s grandfather had met his death. And at the top would be the bedrooms where Jimmy had done many horrible things to Slim, her mother and her grandmother.

There was also a slight chance that we might find Slim taking a bath.

And neither of us was wearing a shirt. That’s fine if you’re roaming around outside, but it makes you feel funny when you’re sneaking through someone else’s house.

No wonder I was a wreck.

At the top of the stairs, I said, “Maybe we oughta call out again.”

Rusty shook his head. He was flushed and sweaty like me, and had a frantic look in his eyes as if he couldn’t make up his mind whether to cry out with glee or run like hell.

In silence, we walked to the nearest doorway. The door was open and we found ourselves in a very spacious bathroom.

Nobody there.

The tub was empty.

Good thing, I thought. But I felt disappointed.

What was nice about the bathroom, it had a fresh, flowery aroma that reminded me of Slim. I saw a pink oval of soap on the sink. Was that the source of the wonderful scent? I wanted to give it a sniff, but not with Rusty watching.

We went on down the hall, walking silently, Rusty in the lead. A couple of times, he opened doors and found closets. Near the end of the hall, we came to the doorway of a very large, corner bedroom.

Slim’s bedroom. It had to be, because of the book shelves. There were lots of bookshelves, and nearly all of them were loaded: rows of hardbounds, some neatly lined up, while others were tipped at angles as if bravely trying to hold up neighboring volumes; books of various sizes resting on top of the upright books; neat rows of paperbacks; crooked stacks of paperbacks and hardbounds; neat stacks of magazines; and scattered non-book items such as Barbie dolls, fifteen or twenty stuffed animals, an archery trophy she’d won at the YWCA tournament, a couple of little snow globes, a piggy bank wearing Slim’s brand new Chicago Cubs baseball cap and her special major league baseball—autographed by Ernie Banks.

In one corner of the room stood a nice wooden desk with a Royal portable typewriter ready for action. Papers were piled all around the typewriter. On the wall, at Slim’s eye level if she were sitting at the desk, was a framed photo of Ayn Rand that looked is if it had been torn from a LIFE or LOOK magazine.

Slim’s bed was neatly made. Its wooden headboard had a shelf for holding a radio, books, and so on. She had a radio on it, along with about a dozen paperbacks. I stepped over for a closer look at the books. There were beat-up copies of The Temple of Gold, The Catcher in the Rye, Dracula, To Kill a Mockingbird, Gone With the Wind, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Jane Eyre, The Sign of the Four, The October Country, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. I hadn’t actually read any of these books myself (except The Catcher in the Rye, which was so funny I split a gut laughing and so sad that I cried a few times), but Slim had told me about most of them. Of all the books in her room, these were probably her favorites, which is why she kept them on her headboard.

When I finished looking at them, I turned around. Rusty was gone.

I felt a surge of alarm.

Instead of calling out for him, I went looking.

I found him in the bedroom across the hall. The mother’s bedroom. Standing over an open drawer of the dresser, his back toward me, his head down. He must’ve heard me come in, because he turned around and grinned. In his hands, he held a flimsy black bra by its shoulder straps. “Check out the merchandise,” he whispered.

“Put that away. Are you nuts?”

“It’s her mom’s.”

“My God, Rusty.”

“Look.” He raised it in front of his face. “You can see through it.”

“Put it away.”

“Dig it, man. It’s had her tits in it.” He put one of the cups against his face like a surgical mask, and breathed in. The soft pouch collapsed against his nose and mouth. As he sighed, it puffed outward. “I can smell her.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I swear to God. She hasn’t washed this thing since the last time she wore it.”

“Gimme a break.”

“C’mon and smell it.”

“No way.”

“Chicken.”

“Put it back, Rusty. We’ve gotta get out of here before somebody catches us.”

“Nobody’s gonna catch us.”

He breathed in slowly and deeply, once again sucking the fabric against his nose and mouth.

“For God’s sake.”

“Okay, okay.” He lowered it, folded it in half and stuffed it into the drawer.

“Is that the way you found it?” I asked.

“What do you think, I’m a moron?” He slid the drawer shut.

“Let’s go.”

“Hang on.” He pulled open another drawer. “Undies!”

He started to reach in, so I rushed over and shoved the drawer shut. He jerked his hands clear in the nick of time.

But I’d shut the drawer too hard.

The dresser shook.

On top of the dresser was a tall, slim vase of clear green glass with three or four yellow roses in it.

The vase toppled forward.

Gasping, I tried to catch it.

I wasn’t quick enough.

It crashed down onto a perfume bottle and they both shattered. Glass, water and perfume exploded, filling the air. Roses flew off the front of the dresser. As they bumped their bright heads against the front of Rusty’s jeans, a cascade of scented water spilled over the edge of the dresser, ran down and poured onto the carpet.

We gazed at the mess, stunned and silent.

The air of the bedroom carried an odor of perfume so sweet and heavy that it almost made me gag.

After a while, Rusty muttered, “Shit. You really did it this time.”

“Me?”

“Huh? You think I slammed the drawer?”

“Oh, you had nothing to do with it. All you did was open it in the first place so you could paw through her stuff. If you weren’t such a degenerate ...”

“If you weren’t such a prude...”

Then we both fell silent and resumed gazing at our catastrophe: the puddle on the dresser top bristling with chunks and slivers and specks of glass; the wet patch on the carpet that looked as if a dog had taken a leak there; the bits of colored glass sprinkled on and around the wet patch; the yellow roses at Rusty’s feet, some of their petals fallen off.

“What’re we gonna do?” Rusty asked.

I shook my head. I couldn’t believe we’d found ourselves in such a predicament.

“Clean it up?” Rusty asked.

“I don’t think we can. That perfume ... we’ll never get the smell out of the carpet. The minute someone comes upstairs, they’re gonna know something’s wrong.”

“Not to mention,” said Rusty, “we can’t exactly unbreak the glass.”

“Whatever we do, we’d better do it fast and get out of here.”

“Wanta just leave?” Rusty asked.

“I want to make it all go away!”

“Rotsa ruck.”

“Okay,” I muttered, sort of thinking out loud. “We can’t make it go away. And it’d probably take us fifteen minutes just to clean up all the glass. Then the place’ll still smell like a perfume factory. And in the meantime, we might get caught up here.”

Rusty nodded, then said, “If we just go away—leave everything exactly the way it is right now—they might not even realize anyone was here. I mean, if shutting a drawer too hard’ll knock that vase over, anything will. They’ll think it was just an accident.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“C’mon, man. A lot of stuff could’ve knocked the thing over. Like even the front door slamming.”

“Maybe so.”

“So let’s haul ass.”

We walked backward away from our mess, watching it as if to make sure it wouldn’t pursue us. On the other side of the doorway, we whirled around and ran for the stairs. When we were a block away from Slim’s house, we looked at each other, shook our heads and sighed.

“I feel like such a rat,” I said.

“Accidents happen,” Rusty said. “Thing is, we got away with it. Long as nobody blabs....”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Lying to Slim...”

“You’d rather have her find out we went sneaking through her house? That’d go over big.”