The Traveling Vampire Show(10)

 

Janks Field was just that way.

 

So we expected trouble. We wanted to see it coming, but we didn’t know where to look.

 

We tried to look everywhere: at the grandstands ahead of us, at the mouth of the dirt road behind us, at the gloomy borders of the forest that surrounded the whole field, and at the gray, dusty ground.

 

We especially kept watch on the ground. Not because so many people had been found buried in it over the years, but because of its physical dangers. Though fairly flat and level, it was scattered with rocks and broken glass and holes.

 

The rocks were treacherous like icebergs. Just a small, sharp comer might be sticking up, but if your foot hits it, you find out that most of it is buried. The rock stays put and you go down.

 

You don’t want to go down in Janks Field. (Forget the double-meaning.) If you go down, you’ll come up in much worse shape.

 

Even if you’re lucky enough to escape bites from spiders or snakes, you’ll probably land on jutting rocks and broken glass.

 

The field was carpeted with the smashed remains of bottles from countless solo drinking bouts, trysts, wild parties, orgies, satanic festivities and what have you. The pieces were hard to see on gray days like this, but whenever the sun was out, the sparkle and glare of the broken bottles was almost blinding.

 

Of course, you never walked barefoot on Janks Field. And you dreaded a fall.

 

But falls were almost impossible to avoid. If you didn’t trip on a jutting rock, you would probably stumble in a hole. There were snake holes, gopher holes, spider holes, shallow depressions from old graves, and even shovel holes. Though all the corpses had supposedly been removed back in 1954, fresh, open holes kept turning up. God knows why. But every time we explored Janks Field, we discovered a couple of new ones.

 

Those are some of the reasons we watched the ground ahead of our feet.

 

We also watched the more distant ground to make sure we weren’t about to get jumped. That sort of thing had happened to us a few times before in Janks Field. If it was going to happen again, we wanted to see it coming and haul ass.

 

Our heads swung from side to side as we made our way toward the stadium. Each of us, every so often, walked sideways and backward.

 

It was rough on the nerves.

 

And it suddenly got rougher when Slim, nodding her head to the left, said, “Here comes a dog.”

 

Rusty and I looked.

 

Rusty said, “Oh, shit.”

 

This was no Lassie, no Rin Tin Tin, no Lady or the Tramp. This was a knee-high bony yellow cur skulking toward us with an awkward sideways gait, its head low and its tail drooping.

 

“I don’t like the looks of this one,” I said.

 

Rusty said, “Shit” again.

 

“No collar,” I pointed out.

 

“Gosh,” Rusty said, full of sarcasm. “You think it might be a stray?”

 

“Up yours,” I told him.

 

“At least it isn’t foaming at the mouth,” said Slim, who always looked on the bright side.

 

“What’ll we do?” I asked.

 

“Ignore it and keep walking,” Slim said. “Maybe it’s just out here to enjoy a lovely stroll.”

 

“My ass,” Rusty said.

 

“That’s what it’s here to enjoy,” I pointed out.

 

“Shit.”

 

“That, too.”

 

“Ha ha,” Rusty said, unamused.

 

We picked up our pace slightly, knowing better than to run. Though we tried not to watch the dog, each of us glanced at it fairly often. It kept lurching closer.

 

“Oh, God, this ain’t good,” Rusty said.

 

We weren’t far from the stadium. In a race, we might beat the dog to it. But there was no fence, nothing to keep the dog out if we did get there first.

 

The bleachers wouldn’t be much help; the dog could probably climb them as well as we could.

 

We might escape by shinnying up one of the light poles, but the nearest of those was at least fifty feet away.

 

A lot closer than that was the snack stand. It used to sell “BEER—SNACKS—SOUVENIRS” as announced by the long wooden sign above the front edge of its roof. But it hadn’t been open, far as I knew, since the night of the parking disaster.

 

We couldn’t get into it, that was for sure (we’d tried on other occasions), but its roof must’ve been about eight feet off the ground. Up there, we’d be safe from the dog.

 

“Feel like climbing?” Slim asked. She must’ve been thinking the same as me.

 

“The snack stand?” I asked.

 

“Yeah.”

 

“How?” asked Rusty.