The Traveling Vampire Show

With both hands free, she planted a tip of her fiberglass bow against the floor. She pulled down at the top, used her leg for some extra leverage, bent the bow and slipped its string upward until its loop was secure in the nock.

Left hand on the grip, she raised the bow. Then she reached up over her shoulder with her right hand and slipped an arrow out of the quiver. She brought it down silently in front of her and fit its plastic nock onto the string.

At the end of the long, pale shaft was a steel head that looked as if it were made of razor blades.

“Watch my back,” she whispered.

I drew the hunting knife out of its sheath. Rusty opened the blade of the pocket knife. We followed Slim out of the room.

Much of her back was hidden behind the quiver of arrows. The quiver was brown leather and nicely tooled. She’d won it by taking first place in a YWCA Fourth of July archery contest a couple of summers earlier. Most people hadn’t expected a fourteen-year-old girl to win it, but I’d known she would.

Chapter Twenty-five

Just a week before the archery contest, we had hiked out to Janks Field for a secret practice session. It was the end of June, a hot and sunny afternoon. The desolate expanse of Janks Field, scattered with a million bits of broken glass, sparkled and glittered in the sunlight as if someone had sprinkled gems over its bare gray earth. Even with our sunglasses on, we had to squint as we walked onto the field. There wasn’t so much as a hint of a breeze. The air felt heavy and dead. It smelled dead, too. Or something did.

“What’s that smell?” I asked.

“Your butt,” Rusty said.

“Something’s dead,” said Slim.

“Dwight’s butt,” Rusty explained.

“Huh-uh.” Slim shook her head. She was thirteen that summer and calling herself Phoebe. “It’s bodies.”

“Dwight’s…”

“I bet they never found ’em all,” she said. “You know, the stiffs. The corpses. And you know what? It always smells like this.”

“Does not,” Rusty said. He would argue with a rock.

“Yeah, it does,” Phoebe said. “I smell it every time we’re here. It’s just worse sometimes, like on really hot days.”

“Bunk,” Rusty said.

“I think she’s right,” I said.

“Oh, yeah, she’s always right.”

“Pretty much,” I said.

Grinning, Phoebe said, “Right as rain.” “Where do you want to shoot?” I asked her.

“Here’s fine.”

I’d carried the target all the way from home. We’d constructed it that morning in my garage: a cardboard box stuffed with tightly wadded newspapers, an old Life magazine photo of Adolf Eichmann taped to one side.

I set the box down on a mound of dirt so that Eichmann’s face was on the front and tilted upward at a slight angle.

Phoebe paced off fifty feet.

Rusty and I stood slightly behind her.

With her first arrow, she put out one of Eichmann’s eyes and knocked the box askew.

That’s when I knew she would win next week’s archery contest.

She held fire while I straightened the box and came back.

Her second arrow poked through Eichmann’s other eye. He looked as if his big, black-rimmed spectacles had come equipped with feathered shafts.

Though the impact had twisted the box, she managed to put her next arrow into Eichmann’s nose.

Then someone called out, “Well, if it ain’t Robin Hood and his merry fags.”

Even before turning around, we recognized the voice.

Scotty Douglas.

When we did turn around, we saw that he wasn’t alone. Scotty had his sidekicks with him: Tim Hancock and Andy “Smack” Malone.

Smack got the nickname because it was what he enjoyed doing to kids like us. But he was no worse than Scotty and Jim.

Sneering and smirking, the three guys swaggered toward us like desperados on their way to a gunfight.

Nobody had any guns, thank God.

Their empty hands dangled in front of them, thumbs hooked under their belts.

Slim had the bow.

Rusty and I appeared to be unarmed, but we both had knives in our pockets. So did Scotty’s gang, probably. Except their knives were sure to be bigger than ours, and switchblades.

In big greasy hair, sideburns down to their jaws, black leather jackets, white T-shirts, blue jeans, wide leather belts and black motorcycle boots with buckles on the sides, they were a trio of Marlon Brandos from The Wild One, half-baked but scary.

Scotty and Tim were older than us by a couple of years, and Smack was at least a year older than them. Bigger, too. In spite of his hood costume, Smack looked like an eight year old balloon boy somebody’d pumped up till he was ready to burst. Hairy, though. His belly, bulging out between the bottom of his T-shirt and the belt of his low-hanging jeans, was extremely white and overgrown with curly black hair that got thicker near his belt.

Smack was in the same grade as his buddies because he’d gotten held back once or twice. He wasn’t exactly a sharp tool. Neither were Scotty or Tim, for that matter.

Scotty raised his hands. “Don’t shoot,” he told Phoebe.

Though she lowered her bow, she kept an arrow nocked and her hand on it. “We were here first,” she said.

“So what?” Scotty asked.