Satanic Summer Read online

  Doug shrugged him off. “That’s all just a rite of passage. You’ll look back on it—if you live through it—and wonder what the point of it was. You’ll develop an addiction, if you haven’t already, and probably get some sort of sex disease—”

  “I already got crabs from this girl who went to Pendleton County.”

  “See, maybe you learned a lesson.”

  “Yeah. I shave my pubes now.”

  Doug put a hand over his face and shook his head.

  “Dude, all you’re doing is wasting your time on the computer and jerking off.”

  “I don’t masturbate. You know that.”

  “Why not?! What’s wrong with masturbation?!”

  “It encourages sinful and lusty thoughts.”

  “But you’ve done it?”

  “A couple times. I was guilty and regretful afterward. I confessed. I said my prayers.”

  “Confessed,” Crank chuffed. “You’re not even a fucking Catholic.”

  “They still take confessions at my church.”

  “Right. That church is fucked.”

  “Crank.”

  “All right. Sorry, man. I just get worked up sometimes. You need to have fun. That’s all.”

  “And I do. In my own way. I know it’s not sanctioned by MTV, but I like it.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “But if you ever change your mind, you know I can hook you up, right?”

  “You’re my auxiliary plan.”

  “So you gonna drink the beer you have left?”

  “I don’t know. It didn’t taste bad. I would have probably liked it more if it was cold.”

  “So, you gonna be okay if I go in back and smoke a j before I take off?”

  “Yep.”

  “Patel’s supposed to be here around six.” Harry Patel was the owner/manager.

  “I hope so. I have my first driving lesson. They’re picking me up here. So what are you doing?”

  “After I smoke the j? Completely alone? By myself? When it would be a much more rewarding experience if my best friend in the world would join me?”

  “Yeah yeah. After all that.”

  “I’ll probably go to Chloe’s and then to Amber’s.”

  “I thought you were gonna cut one of them out.”

  “I don’t want to hurt either one of them like that. Amber shaves her pussy, which is a real turn on, but Chloe lets me fuck her in the ass. And she has some acid.”

  Doug felt a red blush crawling up out of his shirt. He couldn’t imagine seeing a girl naked, let alone having sex with two of them in the same day. “See, this is why I have to play Redemption. So I can feel like I’m actually saving people like you.”

  “Jesus. A video game where you try to convert people. How fucking lame can you get?”

  “At least it hasn’t given me crabs.”

  “Fuck you, Backus.” Crank turned to leave and then spun around. “Oh, hey, check out the paper. Some dumb ass ran his car into the side of a mountain last night and got killed.”

  “Anyone we know?”

  “Some guy named Perry Winthrop. I don’t know him.”

  “Where?”

  “Mountain Bottom.”

  The guy’s name didn’t sound familiar. The road he knew fairly well. It ran out of town and back into the hollow, where most of the people lived in tiny shacks and trailers. He watched Crank wander down the aisle toward the stock room. He turned around and yelled across the store, “The drawer was five dollars over this morning.”

  “I know. I paid for the beer.”

  “Yeah, well I pocketed it, douche bag.”

  Crank disappeared behind the door.

  Without Crank around, the job was a lot more boring. Doug sat down on the wooden stool behind the register and flicked on the small TV resting on the back counter.

  Four

  Crank spent about fifteen minutes in the back room. Doug could hear him coughing all the way up at the register. When Crank finally came out of the back room, he was followed by a cloud of marijuana smoke. He had his uniform shirt unbuttoned and it flapped out behind him as he strolled over to the cooler to grab a bottle of water.

  “I’m off!” He flapped his hand in a wave and headed outside.

  For the next couple of hours, Doug went back to sitting on the stool and watching talk shows. Only a few customers came in. Teenage jocks and their ditzy girlfriends buying condoms and energy drinks. One of them tried to buy beer and got mad when Doug asked to see an ID. The kid should have known it was easier to just steal it. It wasn’t like Doug paid a whole lot of attention and he certainly wasn’t going to confront anyone.

  Around two, a skinny, twitchy girl came in. She wandered absent-mindedly around the store. Doug stood up from the stool and leaned against the counter, ready for the girl to ask him where to find something. Usually batteries. Nobody could seem to find batteries.

  The girl wore an old navy blue sundress that ended above her knobby, bruised knees. Ratty brown Converse with no socks. A dingy cardigan with holes all over it, despite the intense heat outside. Her greasy black hair was pulled back into a ponytail and she wore clunky black-framed glasses. Her complexion wasn’t that great. Doug thought she was kind of cute. And he thought he might know her.

  She finally made her way up to the counter empty-handed. Her eyes searched behind Doug, roaming over the disposable cameras, tobacco products, condoms, and winning lottery tickets.

  “Can I help you?” Doug asked.

  “Yeah...” She drew the word out. Doug wondered if she was on drugs.

  He waited for her to say something else.

  “Can I get...?”

  She drummed her chipped and badly painted fingernails on the counter.

  If Doug were Crank, he would have thrown something by now.

  “A pack of Marlboro reds in the box and... some condoms.”

  This was not necessarily an odd coupling of items, but it sounded unusual coming from the girl.

  Doug turned around and grabbed the cigarettes, letting his hand hover over the condoms. It loitered over the Trojan lubricated, the most often asked for brand. “Any particular kind?”

  “Those are fine.”

  “These?” Doug tapped the Trojans.

  “Yeah...”

  Jesus, it sounded like she was licking her lips.

  Doug put the condoms and the cigarettes on the counter.

  “I’ll need some ID for the cigarettes.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  Disgusted, she reached into the stretched out pocket of her cardigan and slapped her license down on the counter.

  “Ha,” Doug said, not really so surprised. “Whitney Smith. I thought it was you. I knew you looked familiar.”

  She yanked her license back and pocketed it, plopping down some crumpled and moist bills in its place.

  “I haven’t seen you in, like, four years?” He smiled, trying to be polite, even though he now knew she was crazy. And probably also on drugs.

  She smirked, making eye contact with him for the first time. “Yep. Four years.”

  “Where’ve you been? Did you go live with your dad? I know your mom still lives down the street. When did you get back?”

  “I had to go away. That’s all. Now I’m back. I just got back yesterday.”

  Now Doug realized he’d pretty much exhausted their topics of conversation. Whitney grabbed a paper and put it on the counter. “I’ll take this, too. I like to read about people dying.”

  Doug blushed. Like he’d just figured out that Whitney was buying condoms for herself. Probably to have sex with Crank. Everyone was having sex. Doug scanned the cigarettes and condoms with shaky hands, manually punching in the price of the paper and the age verification.

  Doug asked if she needed a bag.

  “No.” Now she wouldn’t stop looking at him. He got more and more nervous.

  Not knowing what else to say, he said, “Yo
u could, uh, come over some time.”

  “Why? We’re not friends.”

  Doug backed away from the counter and began wringing his hands. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. Forget I said anything. That was a stupid thing to say.”

  “And just because I’m buying condoms doesn’t mean I’m easy.”

  “No. Of course... I didn’t...” He turned away from her and sat on the stool before he fell down.

  She leaned over the counter and kept staring at him with those nervous gray eyes. Doug fought the desire to look down the loosely drooping neck of her dress. It hadn’t looked like there would be much to see there anyway.

  “Maybe we’ll run into each other sometime again this summer, Doug Backus.”

  Doug now found that prospect absolutely terrifying.

  “Yeah. Maybe.” He stared hard at the television, refusing to make eye contact with her.

  She grabbed up her things and wandered to the front door and out into the heat. Doug hopped off the stool and watched her from the windowed wall at the front of the store. Surely they wouldn’t give someone like that a license. He watched her wander out into the road toward town, thankful she wasn’t driving.

  The last time he’d seen Whitney was the summer between their eighth grade and freshman years. She was in the same grade as him. The Clover police were pulled up in front of her house. An ambulance was in the driveway and two officers had dragged Whitney out, one of them holding her wrists while the other held her ankles and she thrashed wildly in between. Her mother had stood in the doorway, crying and shaking.

  Doug had seen it all but had been unable to figure out what exactly had happened. He had enjoyed speculating about it with Crank and his mother all through the summer. When high school resumed in the fall, it was all their class could talk about for the first week. Some said she had overdosed. Some said she had tried to slash her wrists. Others said she was pregnant or she was really, deeply disturbed. But, like Doug, Whitney didn’t exactly have a lot of friends so he doubted the validity of most of these claims. And, since Whitney’s mother had become a shut-in, to the extent that Meals-on-Wheels had to bring food to her, no one was getting any truth there. Doug thought the myth was probably more exciting than the truth anyway. And once the football team won their third game in a row, in a season that would ultimately take them all the way to a loss in the state finals, Whitney Smith was all but forgotten.

  It took Doug a little while longer but, eventually, he had forgotten too.

  Maybe she just needed a little guidance.

  Maybe she just needed a little religion.

  Maybe Doug had found himself a project.

  Maybe Crank was right. Maybe he had been playing too much Redemption.

  Five

  Harry Patel showed up at a quarter to six, double parking his black Mercedes in front of the building. Doug knew he hated coming in to work the register but he was too cheap to hire anyone else. From the secret stash located under the counter, Doug figured he liked to watch porn and keep one eye on the door for customers. It was no wonder he hated coming in. Even though he was Indian, most of the town’s residents assumed he was using the money he made on the store to fund a terrorist cell. Doug could have told them that what little money the convenience store made was spent on things like the Mercedes, his wife’s Jaguar, private schools for his kids, and the homeowners’ association fees for the gated community where he lived.

  Harry disappeared back into the office and then came up to the front register, wiping the back of his hand across his thick black mustache. “You can go now.”

  “I don’t see him yet.” Doug scanned the parking lot for a Chariot Driving Academy car. They advertised themselves as a religious institution. All of their cars had that metal Jesus fish magnet on them. This was good enough for Doug’s mom. Doug didn’t really see what religion had to do with driving instruction, but he went along with it. It was the only driving school in Clover, aside from the one ran by the high school. Doug was happy to be done with high school and didn’t see any reason to go back to the classrooms, even if it was for something that held the promise of freedom.

  “You can go now.”

  “I was going to stay in here in the air conditioning. If you have things to do in the office, I can come and get you when I need to go.”

  “I’m here. Now I’m just paying you to stand around.”

  “Ah.” Doug nodded his head.

  Patel pulled at his crotch and sat down on the stool. Did he already have an erection? His eyes flitted to the drawer containing his secret stash. Doug could tell he wanted to be alone.

  “Guess I’ll just clock out then.”

  Doug wasn’t even out the door when the sounds of moaning and slapping flesh started up. He felt himself blush.

  He waited outside for a couple of minutes before a small, unsafe-looking red car pulled into the lot. This was his first driving lesson and he didn’t know what to expect. The passenger side window slid down and a girl who looked younger than him asked, “Are you Doug?”

  The girl was extremely attractive and Doug felt immediately panicked. How was he going to be able to concentrate on driving if this was his driving instructor? He nodded.

  “Hop in!” she said.

  He pulled the door open and sat in the passenger seat. Guiltily, his eyes rolled over the driving instructor. Blonde hair, straight and shoulder length. Blue eyes. Skin tight blue t-shirt stretched over ample but not sloppy or fake breasts. Khaki shorts ending just below the buttocks. Tennis shoes with no socks.

  “So, you’re Doug Backus. I’m Mindy Astan.” She held out a petite hand. Doug took it. His hand was already sweating and he wanted to wipe it off first but thought that would be weird.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said.

  “All right. So we’ll do two hours today and count it as four cause I’ve got some people I’m meeting later. Sound good?”

  “Sounds great.”

  “I thought I’d drive for a bit and you can observe and then we’ll get you out on one of the back roads and I’ll have you home about eight.”

  Doug nodded. Observe? Did she mean observe the road or her? Maybe he was supposed to observe the car. His heart leapt around in his chest. She pulled out of the parking lot and he watched her tan, slightly muscled legs work the brake and accelerator. He didn’t think she could be any older than him but it seemed like driving instructors had to be at least twenty-one, maybe even older.

  “You go to the high school?”

  “Just graduated.”

  “Glad to be out?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Most boys are ready to start driving at sixteen.”

  “My mom made me wait.”

  “That sucks.”

  “I guess she thought it would be safer.”

  “She’s probably right. I know I got mine as soon as I turned sixteen and it would’ve definitely been safer if I’d waited. When you’re sixteen, you can’t do anything at home so you do everything in your car.”

  “True.” He tried to make it sound like he knew what she was talking about but he really didn’t. The only friend he had was Crank and he didn’t have a car either, just a dirt bike. “My mom’s a little overbearing.”

  “Aw, she’s probably just worried about you. I bet you’re an only child, aren’t you?”

  “Yep.”

  “And you said you were only eighteen?”

  “As of March.”

  “You look a lot older.”

  He didn’t know if this was a compliment or not.

  “These roads really twist and turn a lot. I’ll try and find a straight one to get you set up. You can turn the radio on if you want to.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Don’t listen to music?”

  “Not much.”

  She poked the volume knob and the radio came on. He expected something more mainstream to come out of it. He didn’t know who the band was on this particular song. It sounded kind of like meta
l but worse, angrier and darker.

  The shock must have registered on his face. Mindy reached out to change the station, “Are you not into this?”

  “No, it’s fine. Really.”

  She turned the volume down.

  He pretended to be interested. “Who is this?”

  “I’m not sure. Something foreign. A lot of dots and weird lines over their name.”

  “I have a friend who’s in a band. Their music sounds a lot like that.”

  “What’s the name of the band?”

  “Chainsaw Enema.”

  “Cool name. Who’s your friend?”

  “Crank? He works at the Pantry with me.”

  “Oh, I know him. One of my friends used to go out with him.”

  Doug nodded. He was afraid that, possibly, knowing Crank was not a good thing. Then Mindy’s face lit up and she said, “Hey, did you hear about that guy who got killed on Mountain Bottom last night?”

  “Yeah. I read about it in the paper.”

  “My friend Bunt, he’s an EMT and he said the guy’s guts were all over the road.” She scrunched up her face. “He said it didn’t look like just a car crash.”

  “No?”

  “No. He said he thinks something got at the body.”

  “Something?”

  “Yeah. Like a wild animal or something.”

  “Gross.”

  “Isn’t it? You want to go out there? That road’s pretty straight. I don’t know how someone could run their car off the road. He must have been wasted or something.”

  Part of Doug was curious. It would be delayed rubbernecking. And he didn’t really think he would tell Mindy ‘no’ in regards to anything.

  “So, you want to go there?”

  “Sure.”

  Six

  Crank sped along Wickham Road, nothing more than a gravel driveway servicing about five farms. He had the dirt bike opened up, chugging from his forty. Before reaching the driveway to his house, he finished the last of the beer in a single gulp and chucked it off the side of the road. He passed his driveway, en route to Chloe’s house. Chloe’s house was a cool place to hang out because, since turning eighteen, she had emancipated herself and retreated to the unused barn in the back field. Crank figured this probably wouldn’t last much past fall and then she would have to either move back into the house or find an apartment downtown. Of course, she’d need a job if she was going to do that.