The Traveling Vampire Show

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 tailgating 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