The Traveling Vampire Show

twelve times before hanging up.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“Where to?”

“Slim’s house.”

“Want to catch her in the tub?”

“I want to make sure she’s all right.”

“She’s fine.”

“She should’ve been here by now. She’s not taking any bath, not with all those cuts on her back. Maybe a quick shower, but she would’ve been done with that a long time ago and it only takes five minutes to walk here. So where is she?”

“What about our sandwiches?”

“I’m not hungry,” I said. “And you ate a Ding-Dong in the woods.”

“That was hours ago.”

“We’ll get something later. Come on.”

“Shit,” Rusty muttered. He polished off his Pepsi, then scooted back his chair and stood up.

On our way to the front door, I said, “Slim did make it home, didn’t she? You stuck with her the whole way?”

“Almost. We split up at the comer.”

“At the corner?”

“The comer of her block.”

“Great,” I muttered, throwing open the screen door.

Rusty followed me onto the porch and down the stairs.

“So you don’t really know she made it home?”

“Her house was right there.”

“You should’ve walked her to the door.”

“Oh, sure.”

“And even if she made it into her house,” I said, “nobody was there to take care of her. Maybe she got inside and passed out, or something.”

“What was I supposed to do, go in with her? Then you’d be riding my ass for being alone in the house with her.”

I guess he was right about that.

“You could’ve at least made sure she was all right,” I muttered. “That’s all.”

Speaking slowly, in a clipped voice that sounded as if he might be running short of patience, Rusty said, “She told me she’d be fine. She said she didn’t want any help. She told me to go over to your place and she’d be along as soon as she got done bandaging herself up.”

“How was she supposed to put bandages on?” I asked. “The cuts are on her back.”

“Don’t ask me. I’m just telling you what she said.”

I said, “Damn it.” My throat felt tight and achy.

“Don’t worry, Dwight.” He sounded a little concerned, himself. “I’m sure she’s fine.”

Chapter Fourteen

Even though Slim didn’t have a father and her mother worked as a waitress at Steerman’s Steak House, she lived in a better neighborhood than mine and in a better house.

That’s because they inherited the house and some money from Slim’s grandparents.

Slim’s mother, Louise, had grown up in the house and continued to live there even after she got married. This was because she and her husband, a low-life shit named Jimmy Drake, couldn’t afford to move out. At the time of the wedding, she was already pregnant with Frances (Slim), and Jimmy had a lousy job working as a clerk in a shoe store. After Slim was born, Jimmy wouldn’t allow Louise to have a job.

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.