Everybody dance and we will judge. Get up on the neighbor’s high porch on a dark night. Turn on the light and get somebody’s portable record player or their transistor and we will listen to the beat. There will be three dancing positions. You have to dance your best and the judges will mark you, scratching your grade in the gravel, for the best performance of the night.
You are really doing the Cool Jerk well, and imagine if you were at a cool club doing this dance in the night. Whaaaaaaaaaaaa! XERB1090. Moths flitted around the porch light and Mexican free-tailed bats swooshed in the summer sky.
For the talent show that Meredith hoped to win, she and Charlaine Gomez, the oldest girl of four children who lived next door, practiced “Speedy Gonzalez,” the Pat Boone version. Performed in the night with the 45 on the record player over and over again. The lady with her silly la la la’s. The request that he please come home. The silly moves of their feet. Peasant white tops and trousers. Straw hats. Slap a trowel or two of mud on the adobe, Speedy. The serapes and the dance moves, goofy running and silly hat flips, wearing huaraches and drinking. Stumbling home.
Then after the judgment of the act by those of us gathered around in the dark, watching the moths around the porch lights, the stars and moon in the desert sky, the cool concrete feeling of the high porch, someone putting the 45 on one more time, needle scratching and dropping, and watching the red lights blink, halfway up the mountain.
“What are those?” a nervous little kid asks, pointing to the flashing red lights. He must have been one of those Donaldson kids whose faces all resembled each other.
“Those lights?” Charlaine asked. “Those ones are the runway lights for the airplane that Dracula uses to get from place to place. From his castle up there in the mountains. He flies all over the flipping world biting people and turning them into flipping vampires. You see the lights at night because that’s when he’s out doing his business. Slurp, slurp and all that right at the juggler vein in your neck.”
This kid squirmed and clutched his neck.
“Dracula is a bat. He can change into a bat. Haven’t you seen the movies on Chiller? What does he need with an airplane?” said Meredith, sensibly. “Those lights are blood red because they are marking the lost ruby mine of the conquistadores. Only people with special vision can see them, by the way. We oughtta go up there some day and find all the rubies and crap up there.”
“Like sand rubies?” I asked.
“No, like real rubies, silly,” Meredith said.
“Riches,” said Jack, “pouring through my fingers!”