The Traveling Vampire Show(91)

 

“I’ll teach you how to drive,” I said, really eager.

 

“Great.”

 

I pictured the two of us roaming the back roads together, just as Lee and I had done the previous summer when I was learning to drive in her pickup truck.

 

“What about me?” Rusty asked.

 

“You don’t have a license.” I pointed out.

 

“Who cares? I’m a great driver. We can both teach her.”

 

I’d seen samples of Rusty’s driving prowess a few times after he had “borrowed” his family car in the middle of the night. We’d been lucky to live. For various reasons, we’d never told Slim about the excursions, so she had no idea what a lousy, dangerous driver Rusty was.

 

Shaking my head, I muttered, “I don’t know.”

 

Slim patted my thigh and said, “If we get this baby going, you can both be my teachers. We’ll drive all over the place! It’ll be great!”

 

So we didn’t go to the river that day. We worked on the Pontiac, instead.

 

Apparently, Slim’s grandmother had kept it in fine shape while she was alive. Its troubles were mostly the result of the car not being used for almost a year.

 

Rusty really came through. He figured out all the problems as we went along. Slim and I provided money to buy whatever he suggested: some new belts and hoses, mostly, but also a new battery. He installed them. He also patched the flat tires.

 

Within a week, we had the Pontiac running.

 

On back roads outside the town limits, Slim drove. Rusty and I took turns sitting beside her, giving instructions, once in a while grabbing the wheel to keep us on course. We had a few close shaves, but no accidents.

 

After about two weeks, Slim was driving as well as anyone I’d ever known ... and a zillion times better than Rusty. Her mom took her over to the DMV in Clarksburg. A couple of hours later, she came back with her temporary driver’s license.

 

There was no stopping us, then. Slim behind the wheel (and sometimes me or Rusty), hardly a day went by when we didn’t go for a drive someplace. We had already explored most of the nearby back roads, so we hit every town within fifty miles of Grandville. We followed the roads that ran alongside the river, stopping whenever we felt like wandering around on foot or taking a swim. At night, sometimes we cruised downtown Grandville. Once a week, we took the Pontiac to the drive-in movie show. We were having ourselves a fine time until about the middle of July.

 

That’s when the Moonlight Drive-in had its very first “ALL-NIGHT SHOCKFEST.” From sunset till dawn, the drive-in out on Mason Road would be showing one horror movie after another.

 

We wanted to go and stay for the entire event.

 

Not a chance.

 

Even though Slim would be driving and everyone trusted her, we were ordered to be home by midnight. By “we,” I mean me and Slim. Both my parents were pretty strict about that sort of thing, and so was Slim’s mother. Rusty’s parents thought of themselves as strict, too, but they were easy to fool. Rusty could’ve tricked them and stayed out all night, no problem. He had no reason to do it, though, since Slim and I both had to be back by twelve.

 

Our parents thought they were being generous, giving us till midnight.

 

We didn’t see it that way. They always let us stay out till midnight when we went to the drive-in. But this wasn’t just the usual double-feature—this was the first ALL-NIGHT SHOCKFEST. Six different horror movies would be shown and we wanted to see them all.

 

Thanks to our midnight deadline, we would only have time to watch two of them.

 

Didn’t seem fair.

 

We pushed for one o’clock, figuring we might get in three of the movies. That would at least be half of them. Getting to see half sounded pretty good.

 

But my parents wouldn’t go along with it. Therefore, neither would Slim’s mother.

 

Midnight. Take it or leave it.

 

Midnight, it seems, is the magic hour for parents. Somewhere along the line, maybe someone was too impressed by Cinderella. Or maybe midnight was when the gates of the city got locked, back in the old days when cities had gates. More than likely, the fixation on being home by midnight had primitive, superstitious origins. Midnight, the witching hour, “when churchyards yawn” and all that. Who knows?

 

I do know this. The need to be home by midnight was what got us into trouble ... the fact that we left the drive-in exactly when we did.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Thirty-eight

 

 

We arrived at the Moonlight Drive-in early enough to find a parking place fairly close to the screen. Though the sun had already gone down, it wasn’t quite dark enough yet for the movies to start. “Big Girls Don’t Cry” was coming from the speaker box on the post beside our car. Kids were still playing on the swings and slide and teeter-totters below the giant screen.