Richard Laymon: The Traveling Vampire Show

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 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.