The Traveling Vampire Show (28 page)

You don’t see leopard skin steering wheel covers too much anymore. In fact, the last one I remember seeing was on Slim’s grandmother’s Pontiac. Back in those days, steering wheel covers weren’t at all uncommon. Old people seemed especially fond of them. When you saw a leopard skin cover on a steering wheel, you could pretty much bet that the car was owned by an old woman.

Anyway, Slim lightly stroked the leopard skin along the top curve of the wheel while she concentrated on her thoughts. After a while, she said, “I don’t know much about cars.”

Rusty let out a laugh.

She leaned forward, looked past me and frowned at him.

“Thought you knew everything,” he said.

“I know more than you, numbnuts.”

“Hah!”

“But not about this.”

“Whatcha mean, J. D. Salinger don’t teach you how to fix a car?”

Ignoring Rusty’s crack, she gave the key another twist. Silence.

“How about Ayn Rand!” Rusty called out. “Why don’t you look up ‘dead batteries’ in Alice Shrugged.”

I gave him a shot with my elbow.

“Ow!” He grabbed his arm. “Damn it!”

“It’s Atlas,” Slim said. “Not Alice. Anyway, are you guys interested in helping me fix the car? My mom wants nothing to do with it. She’ll just let it sit here forever. But if we can get it running, it’s as good as mine. I can get my driver’s license and then we can drive all over the place.”

“I’ll teach you how to drive,” I said, really eager.

“Great.”

I pictured the two of us roaming the back roads together, just as Lee and I had done the previous summer when I was learning to drive in her pickup truck.

“What about me?” Rusty asked.

“You don’t have a license.” I pointed out.

“Who cares? I’m a great driver. We can both teach her.”

I’d seen samples of Rusty’s driving prowess a few times after he had “borrowed” his family car in the middle of the night. We’d been lucky to live. For various reasons, we’d never told Slim about the excursions, so she had no idea what a lousy, dangerous driver Rusty was.

Shaking my head, I muttered, “I don’t know.”

Slim patted my thigh and said, “If we get this baby going, you can both be my teachers. We’ll drive all over the place! It’ll be great!”

So we didn’t go to the river that day. We worked on the Pontiac, instead.

Apparently, Slim’s grandmother had kept it in fine shape while she was alive. Its troubles were mostly the result of the car not being used for almost a year.

Rusty really came through. He figured out all the problems as we went along. Slim and I provided money to buy whatever he suggested: some new belts and hoses, mostly, but also a new battery. He installed them. He also patched the flat tires.

Within a week, we had the Pontiac running.

On back roads outside the town limits, Slim drove. Rusty and I took turns sitting beside her, giving instructions, once in a while grabbing the wheel to keep us on course. We had a few close shaves, but no accidents.

After about two weeks, Slim was driving as well as anyone I’d ever known ... and a zillion times better than Rusty. Her mom took her over to the DMV in Clarksburg. A couple of hours later, she came back with her temporary driver’s license.

There was no stopping us, then. Slim behind the wheel (and sometimes me or Rusty), hardly a day went by when we didn’t go for a drive someplace. We had already explored most of the nearby back roads, so we hit every town within fifty miles of Grandville. We followed the roads that ran alongside the river, stopping whenever we felt like wandering around on foot or taking a swim. At night, sometimes we cruised downtown Grandville. Once a week, we took the Pontiac to the drive-in movie show. We were having ourselves a fine time until about the middle of July.

That’s when the Moonlight Drive-in had its very first “ALL-NIGHT SHOCKFEST.” From sunset till dawn, the drive-in out on Mason Road would be showing one horror movie after another.

We wanted to go and stay for the entire event.

Not a chance.

Even though Slim would be driving and everyone trusted her, we were ordered to be home by midnight. By “we,” I mean me and Slim. Both my parents were pretty strict about that sort of thing, and so was Slim’s mother. Rusty’s parents thought of themselves as strict, too, but they were easy to fool. Rusty could’ve tricked them and stayed out all night, no problem. He had no reason to do it, though, since Slim and I both had to be back by twelve.

Our parents thought they were being generous, giving us till midnight.

We didn’t see it that way. They always let us stay out till midnight when we went to the drive-in. But this wasn’t just the usual double-feature—this was the first ALL-NIGHT SHOCKFEST. Six different horror movies would be shown and we wanted to see them all.

Thanks to our midnight deadline, we would only have time to watch two of them.

Didn’t seem fair.

We pushed for one o’clock, figuring we might get in three of the movies. That would at least be half of them. Getting to see half sounded pretty good.

But my parents wouldn’t go along with it. Therefore, neither would Slim’s mother.

Midnight. Take it or leave it.

Midnight, it seems, is the magic hour for parents. Somewhere along the line, maybe someone was too impressed by Cinderella. Or maybe midnight was when the gates of the city got locked, back in the old days when cities had gates. More than likely, the fixation on being home by midnight had primitive, superstitious origins. Midnight, the witching hour, “when churchyards yawn” and all that. Who knows?

I do know this. The need to be home by midnight was what got us into trouble ... the fact that we left the drive-in exactly when we did.

We arrived at the Moonlight Drive-in early enough to find a parking place fairly close to the screen. Though the sun had already gone down, it wasn’t quite dark enough yet for the movies to start. “Big Girls Don’t Cry” was coming from the speaker box on the post beside our car. Kids were still playing on the swings and slide and teeter-totters below the giant screen.

We had plenty of time for a trip to the snack bar, where we bought Cokes and hot dogs and buttered popcorn. Back at the car, I took the driver’s seat. Slim sat beside me, and Rusty sat by her other side. “Walk Like A Man” was playing on the speaker. I leaned out the window, grabbed the metal box off its post and brought it inside. I cranked the window up a few inches and hung the speaker over its edge. And we were all set.

About ten minutes later, the Shockfest began.

The first movie turned out to be Bucket of Blood. It’s about this goony beatnik who wants to be an artist, but he’s no good at it. Then he accidentally kills a cat, which was pretty funny in an awful way. To conceal the cat’s body, he covers it with clay. Presto! He has himself a perfectly good sculpture. Everybody’s amazed by how detailed and lifelike it is. Knowing a good thing when he sees it, he starts murdering gals and covering their bodies with clay.

We loved it. We kept laughing and going, “Oh, no!” But it scared us, too. A couple of times, Slim grabbed my leg and squeezed it.

After Bucket of Blood was over, we went to the restrooms. We also paid another visit to the snack bar, where we picked up boxes of Juicy Fruits, Good ’n Plenty and Milk Duds.

The second show was The Killer Shrews and even scarier than Bucket of Blood. Shrews are supposedly the fiercest creatures in the world, but they’re so small they don’t go after people. These shrews, though, were the size of dogs. (Looking back on it, I’m pretty sure they were dogs.) They kept trying to get at a group of people stranded on this island. Wanted to rip them up and eat them. The people took refuge inside a house and boarded up the place to keep the shrews out. But the damn things kept getting in, anyway. It was pretty horrible. Several of the people got themselves eaten.

When I saw The Night of the Living Dead a few years later, it reminded me of The Killer Shrews... and of what happened after we left the drive-in. I found myself reminded of that night about a zillion times because the main actor in The Killer Shrews turned out to be Festus in Gunsmoke. After Chester got replaced by Festus, I could hardly ever watch Gunsmoke without thinking about The Killer Shrews and what happened on the way home.

At about eleven-thirty, the movie ended. An intermission started, and the area around the snack stand lit up. Here and there, headlights came on and engines started. Apparently, we weren’t the only people who needed to get home.

Since I was already behind the wheel, I asked Slim, “Want me to take us back?”

She was supposed to do all the driving that night. In fact, she always drove us to and from the drive-in movies. But I figured it would be easier if we just stayed in our seats and I took the wheel.

Slim didn’t answer for a few seconds. Then she said, “We told everyone I’d be driving.”

“Yeah, true. Maybe you’d better.”

“I suppose so.”

Leaning out the window, I reached over and hooked the speaker box onto its pole. Then I brought myself back into the car and opened the door.

And realized my mistake. If I went around to the other side of the car so Slim could scoot over behind the wheel, I would end up sitting next to Rusty on the way home.

I wanted to sit next to Slim, not Rusty.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

I couldn’t tell her. We were pals, buddies, best friends. If she found out I needed to sit next to her, she might realize how I really felt. It might scare her.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“Are you sure? If you really want to drive ...”

“Nah, that’s okay.” I climbed out and shut the door. Starting to feel lousy, I walked around to the other side. By the time I reached the passenger door, Slim and Rusty had both scooted over.

I sat beside Rusty and swung the door shut.

Leaving the headlights off, Slim drove slowly forward down the slope of the hump from which we’d viewed the movies. At the bottom, she made a sharp turn onto the cross-lane.

She put on the parking lights. A couple of times, she stopped to let people walk by. At the end of the lane, she waited for a car to pass us before she pulled out.

She didn’t cut anyone off. She didn’t do anything wrong or even rude. Neither did Rusty or I.

In fact, we’re pretty sure that what happened a few minutes later had nothing to do with any of the cars from the drive-in. Those exiting ahead of us had all turned the other way at Mason Road. And none came out after us. None that we noticed, anyway.

For a while, Slim’s Pontiac seemed to be the only car on the road. We were about ten miles north of town, midway between Grandville and Clarksburg.

We had forest on the right.

On the left was the old graveyard. If it had a name, we didn’t know it. Nobody’d been buried there since about 1920. We’d explored it a few times, though never at night. It had a lot of very cool tombstones and statues and stuff.

Driving by, the three of us snuck glances at it the way we usually did. I think we wanted to make sure nobody was digging up bodies ... or crawling out of any graves.

No one was.

But a car sat between the old stone posts of its entry gate. A car without any lights on.

“Uh-oh,” Slim said. I felt our speed decrease slightly. “Was that a cop car?”

“Didn’t look like one,” Rusty said.

“It wasn’t,” I confirmed. Being the son of Grandville’s police chief, I knew what every cop car looked like: not just ours, but those of all the nearby towns, plus the county cars and state cars.

“Thought it might be a speed trap,” Slim said.

“Nope,” I told her.

“Cool place to make out,” Rusty said.

Slim and I both laughed.

“Don’t you think?”

“No,” Slim said. “For one thing, it’s right by the road where everyone can see you. Not to mention the bone orchard. You wouldn’t catch me making out there.”

“Wouldn’t catch you making any ...” Rusty tipped his head back and stared at the rearview mirror.

“What?” Slim asked.

“I think it’s coming,” he said.

“Huh?” Slim glanced at the rearview mirror. “I don’t ... oh.”

I was already looking over my shoulder and knew why she’d said, “Oh.” A car was coming, all right, but without headlights on. It looked like a clump of shadow hurling toward us from the rear.

“That the car from the graveyard?” Slim asked.

“Think so,” Rusty said.

Slim groaned.

Rusty and I both looked over our shoulders.

Rusty muttered, “Shit.”

By the velocity of the car’s approach, I expected it to swerve and zip around us. But it didn’t. It stayed behind us. Just when I expected it to slam into our tail, Slim hit the gas. We shot forward, the sudden acceleration pushing me into the seat.

The other car shrank into the distance, then started to grow. It looked like a big old black Cadillac.

“Here it comes,” I said.

“What’s the matter with that bastard!” Slim blurted.

“You’d better get moving,” Rusty told her.

“I am moving.”

“Faster.”

We picked up more speed. The Cadillac quit growing. It didn’t shrink away, either. It matched our speed and stayed about twenty feet behind us.

Moonlight glinted on its hood and windshield. I couldn’t see inside it.

Slim said, “I don’t like this.”

She rounded a bend in the road too fast. The tires sighed. As the forces pulled at me, I grabbed the door handle to keep myself from leaning into Rusty. He let himself tilt against Slim. She muttered, “Get off me,” and shoved at him with her elbow.

I looked back. The Cadillac was still on our tail.

“I’m slowing down,” Slim said and took her foot off the gas.

“Here it comes,” I warned.

I braced for the impact. There wasn’t one. When I looked back again, the car was no more than two feet from our rear. But the space seemed to be growing.

“Looks like they don’t want to hit us,” I said.

“What do they want?” Slim asked.

I shook my head.

Rusty said, “Maybe they’re just trying to scare us.”

“If that’s all,” Slim said, “they’ve succeeded. They can go home now.”