The Traveling Vampire Show

Chapter Thirty-one

The sun normally would’ve been blazing in our eyes at this time of the evening, but it couldn’t get through the heavy clouds. Though the air felt muggy, a breeze came along every so often. A warm breeze. It felt pretty good, anyway.

We sat at the picnic table near the back of the lawn. It was painted green and had benches along both the long sides. Slim and I sat across from each other.

The cheeseburgers tasted great but they were very messy to eat. Juices and Velveeta dripped off their sides, ran down our chins, dribbled down our hands and fell onto the table. After just a few bites, I ran into the house to get napkins.

We’d finished our beers and needed something to drink with our burgers. So I went to the fridge. I half intended to grab a couple more beer bottles, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. I took out a couple of Pepsis instead.

Then I hurried outside.

Watching me, Slim said, “Ah, Pepsi.”

“If you’d rather have more beer…”

She shook her head. “This is just what I wanted.”

I put the cans on the table, gave Slim a couple of napkins, then sat down.

“Anyway,” she said, “we don’t want Rusty’s parents to smell beer on our breath.”

“Why are they gonna smell beer on our breath?”

She gave me a whimsical, tilted smile. “We drank beer.”

“I know that, but…”

“And we’re going over to Rusty’s house when we get done eating.”

“We are?”

“We want to rescue him, don’t we?”

“I guess so.”

“Well, we can’t exactly go in and kick butts, you know? I mean, this is Rusty’s family.”

“Right.”

Her smile spread. “What we’ve got to do is kiss butts.”

When she said that, I suddenly remembered the wager about Valeria. Rusty had suggested that the loser would have to kiss Slim’s butt. And I’d imagined myself doing it. I imagined it now, too, and my face went red.

“That’s a figure of speech,” Slim pointed out.

“I know.”

“Anyway,” she said, “if we were literally going to kiss their butts, we wouldn’t need to worry about beer on our breath.”

“We’d have bigger worries.”

We both had a pretty good laugh, and then we went on eating. When we were done, we carried everything into the house and cleaned up. Slim washed the spatula, knife and platter. I dried them and put them away. Soon, every trace of our supper was gone except for the two empty beer bottles.

“What’ ll we do with those?” I asked.

“Find a sack. We’ll take them over to my place. We’ll put them with my mom’s empties, then grab a couple of fresh ones and bring them back here.”

I grinned. “Good plan.”

“Elementary, my dear Thompson.”

My dear.

She only said it to make a play on Sherlock Holmes, but the words gave me a warm feeling, anyway.

“We’d better take care of that, first,” she said. “Get it out of the way before we try to liberate Rusty.”

I found a grocery sack. The brown paper kind. (This was before anyone came up with the notion of “saving the trees” by providing plastic grocery bags—which now decorate the trees and fences and streets and rivers and never go away.) Mom used the grocery bags to line our wastebaskets and sometimes to wrap packages for mailing. So she had a good collection of them.

I got one and held it open for Slim. With the empty bottles in her hands, she bent down in front of me, the top of her head almost touching my belly. The bottles clinked together as she set them on the bottom of the sack.

Then she straightened up. We looked each other in the eyes. Smiling softly, she said, “Let me smell your breath.”

I set the sack down beside me. Slim moved in close, very close. She put her nose in front of my mouth and sniffed. I expected a smart remark, but didn’t get one. Instead of commenting on my breath, she put her mouth against mine and kissed me. Her arms went around me. She pressed her body against mine.

I thought about hugging her, but was afraid of her cuts. She didn’t have any cuts on her rear end, though. I could put my hands down there. I wanted to. But I didn’t dare. After all, that was below the belt.

While I was still struggling to work up the nerve, Slim took her mouth away and stepped back. “Your breath’s fine,” she whispered.

“Yours, too.”

“Smells like beer and cheeseburgers.”

“I thought you said it’s fine.”

“It is,” she said. “Only thing is, Mr. & Mrs. Simmons are going to know you’ve been drinking.”

“You, too.”

She smiled. “Maybe if we don’t let them kiss us…”

“They’d better not try.”

“Why don’t you go and brush your teeth?”

“I don’t think that’ll take care of it.”

“Can’t hurt. I’ll brush mine when we get to my place.”

“Well…”

“Go ahead, I’ll wait here.”

I ran up the stairs two at a time and hurried into the bathroom. After brushing my teeth, I used the toilet. This was the tough part about wearing swim trunks instead of underwear; they had no fly. Usually, I tried to maneuver myself out through the leghole of the trunks and the zipper of my jeans. But I didn’t feel like struggling, so I just dragged everything down around my ankles. My skin was hot and damp from being trapped inside all those clothes. In front, I was slippery as if I’d been dipped in liquid soap. I could hardly hold on to take aim. But the air felt great on all those hot, wet places.

Before flushing, I used a lot of toilet paper to dry myself. Then I pulled up my trunks and groaned at the way their hot, clammy lining clung to me. Quickly, I tugged them down again. I took off my shoes, jeans and trunks, then put my jeans back on. The dirty clothes hamper was next to the toilet. I dropped my trunks in, put my shoes on, then washed my hands and left the bathroom. Without anything on under my jeans, I felt dry and loose and free.

I could stay like this, I thought. Nobody’ll ever know.

But I knew I didn’t dare.

In my bedroom, I shut the door and turned on the light. I unbuttoned Rusty’s shirt, took it off, turned toward my bed and gave his shirt a toss.

On the pillow of my bed was a yellow rose.

My stomach dropped.

I leaped to my open closet, pulled a clean shirt off a hanger, then snatched Rusty’s shirt off the bed and ran to the door. I jerked it open.

“Slim!” I shouted.

“Yeah?” Her voice sounded far away. “What is it?”

I slapped the light switch. As darkness collapsed all around me, I raced down the hallway to the top of the stairs and then I ran down the stairs.

Slim was standing in the gloom of the kitchen, the grocery sack in her hand. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Somebody’s been here.” Holding the two shirts in my left hand, I grabbed Slim’s arm with my right. I hurried to the back door, pulling her.

I felt a little better the moment we were outside, but I didn’t actually feel safe until we’d reached the sidewalk out front. When we came to the end of the block, we stopped. I tried to put on my shirt, but it wasn’t easy with Rusty’s shirt in one hand.

“I’ll hold it,” Slim said.

I gave Rusty’s shirt to her, and put on my own.

“So what happened?” she asked.

“I went to my bedroom to change shirts,” I explained. “When I looked at my bed, there was a rose on the pillow. A yellow rose.”

The left side of Slim’s upper lip lifted, baring some teeth. “Like one of my mom’s yellow roses?”

“Yeah.”

“Ooo.”

“It was just lying there on my pillow.”

“Everything else was okay?”

“Far as I could tell. But I didn’t exactly hang around to find out.”

Or put on underwear, I thought. But Slim didn’t need to know that.

“I was afraid they might still be in the house. And I thought about you being alone in the kitchen.” I finished buttoning my shirt. Then I took Rusty’s shirt from Slim. “Figured I’d take this back to him.”

She nodded.

We stepped off the curb and crossed the street.

“Are we still going to your place?” I asked.

“We have to,” she said. “Then we’ve got to go to your house again. If we don’t take care of the beer, you’ll get the shaft from your parents.”

“Guess we never should’ve drunk it in the first place.”

She smiled at me. “Can’t say I regret it.”

“This is a lot of trouble to go through.”

“The cover-up’s the price you pay for doing the crime.”

I laughed. “Did you just think that up?”

“I think so.”

“Good one.”

She slipped her hand into mine. We walked side by side through the quiet evening.