Flyers (9781481414449) Page 10

  “Yeah, maybe.” I walked into the barn and looked around. Everything seemed pretty much the way it should have been, with not so much as a gas can out of place. I was starting to feel a little foolish about playing the TV detective when something caught my eye. I don’t know how I could have noticed it from halfway across the barn, but I did. I walked over to the tractor for a closer look. “That’s strange,” I yelled over to Bo. “The key is on.”

  Bo walked over to where I was. “You think it wouldn’t start for him when he tried it?”

  “Could be.” I climbed up and tried the key. The starter clicked a few times, but that was it. “The battery’s dead—at least it is now. . . .” I flicked off the key and thought. Then I leaned out over the hood, pulled off the gas cap, and looked down inside. “It started all right,” I said. “And it sat here running until it ran out of gas.”

  “Or it wouldn’t start because it was out of gas,” Bo offered.

  I shook my head. “You’re thinking about people like us. Mr. Lindstrom never let his tank get anywhere near empty. He checked every fluid level every day before he started working. He must’ve started the tractor up, left it sitting there running, and then went down the lane for some reason.”

  I wondered about that for a while but didn’t come up with anything. Then I forgot about it—at least until a few more strange things started happening that made me think about it some more.

  Eleven

  The next school week blew by at a decent clip—starting with two days of last-minute review in classes with exams that meant something and wasting time in those that didn’t. Local exams began on Wednesday and state Regents exams the following Monday. I wasn’t a last-minute study-er (some teachers might say I was no kind of study-er), but I paid attention in class and read most of the assigned readings, which was more than a lot of the kids did, so I wasn’t worried. There would always be a few kids like Bo who’d score higher, but that didn’t bother me. I knew I’d end up with a halfway-decent average.

  There was quite a bit of talk about the infamous raid of the drug field day by the mystery creatures, but as far as I could tell nobody took it all that seriously. There was a small mention of it in the Post Star, but it was largely treated as a prank, not as some kind of supernatural visitation. After school on Monday Ethan told me that Mrs. Quinby had been around to all the elementary and middle school classrooms to talk about the raid and to tell the kids that it was all right to be afraid. I could just picture her swooping around, hoping to find even a flicker of an emotional response, so she could fan that flicker into a flame. Ethan said that by the end of the day she’d rounded up a whole flock of kids, many of whom hadn’t even been at the field day. They ended up taking over the elementary library to begin the healing process. Even Ethan thought that was funny. He was wearing a big smile all while he was telling me about it.

  Of course we all stayed mum about who was responsible for the attack, even Pop, who claimed it would be a shame to destroy the “delicious mystery of the thing.” I was glad because I didn’t want Ray McPherson putting two and two together and coming after us. What I didn’t know was that Ray was already putting two and two together, but being the kind of mathematician he was, he wasn’t coming up with four. I learned that later. At the time my mind was on other things. I’d been kept pretty busy running back and forth to the hospital with Pop, and whenever I had a free moment, I only wanted to kick back, dream of Katie, and savor the winding down of the school year.

  Jeremy was one of the kids who couldn’t afford to do any kicking back, dreaming, or savoring. In addition to being reasonably unprepared for all of his exams, he was in real danger of failing social studies, with or without the exam, because of a research paper he’d turned in about the Nazis—without going to the trouble of doing any research on the Nazis. Knowing Jeremy, he probably got most of his information from watching old episodes of Hogan’s Heroes.

  Tuesday evening Jeremy was bringing his lame paper over to Bo’s for help in overhauling it. I didn’t want to miss out on that so I had Pop drop me off at the Michaelsons’ on the way back from the hospital.

  When Jeremy arrived I resisted the temptation to run up and snatch the paper out of his hands. He knew what a kick I got out of his papers, and that was one of the reasons he’d asked Bo for help and not me. It’s not that I thought Jeremy was stupid. When it came to certain things, he was smarter than I’d ever be. He could tear down an engine, fix it, and put it back together quicker and better than most professional mechanics, and he’s intelligent to talk to—when he wants to be. But academically, forget it. The things he writes on paper, and even his handwriting itself, are so innocent and childlike, they never fail to crack me up.

  Anyway, when Jeremy walked into Bo’s room, I just sat there and continued looking at the book I had in my hands. Bo was down in the den finishing his evening meditation so I had some time to play with.

  “Hi, scrub,” Jeremy said finally when I didn’t even look up.

  “Oh, hi,” I said, acting kind of surprised to see him.

  I kept my face in the book while Jeremy scrounged around the room for a while. He was the worst when it came to scrounging through other people’s things, picking stuff up and examining it, snooping through drawers and like that. It drove me crazy when he did it in my room, but Bo was used to it and didn’t mind. Jeremy’s scrounge rounds in Bo’s room were fairly short-lived anyway, since he was already so familiar with everything there, and pretty soon he settled down in a chair and started looking through his research paper, which he’d been holding on to all while he was scrounging. I still held back. Jeremy’s the impatient type, and I knew if I waited him out, it was only a matter of time before I’d have the paper in my hands.

  “I can’t believe DeFabio’s making me do this over,” he said finally.

  “He’s tough on papers,” I lied.

  “It’s the last week of school and all he’s worried about is this stupid paper.”

  “What’d he say was wrong with it?” I said it casually and didn’t even look up from my book.

  Jeremy grunted. “What didn’t he say was wrong with it?”

  I shook my head in mild commiseration and went back to my book. It took about half a minute, but then Jeremy got up and headed my way.

  “Look at it,” he said. “It’s not that bad.” Being as impatient as he was, he kind of batted me in the face with it and then held it out for me.

  I looked up at the paper. It was right in front of my eyes, but I played it cool and didn’t reach for it or anything.

  “Look at it,” Jeremy said, batting me in the face one more time. He plopped the paper down on my lap.

  I gave the kind of sigh tired parents give to nagging kids and then picked up the paper. The trick now would be to keep a straight face while reading it. One smile and I knew he’d snatch it back. I screwed on a serious look and started in:

  The Germans hated the Jews. They hated the Jews because they thought they were cheep.

  That was as far as I got. The whole idea was ridiculous enough, but it was the word “cheep” sitting there at the end of the second sentence that did me in. All I could think of was this old I Love Lucy episode where Ethel told Fred these baby chicks were talking about him because they kept saying, “Cheep, cheep, cheep.” No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t keep the smile off my face.

  Jeremy, who’d been watching me like an attack dog, snatched the paper out of my hand so fast I was lucky I didn’t get some kind of life-threatening paper cut. “Shut up,” he said, even though I hadn’t said anything yet.

  When Bo walked in a few minutes later, I had Jeremy on the floor trying to wrestle the paper out of his hands. “I must see more,” I said, pretending to be a crazed zombie. “You mustn’t keep me from that paper!”

  “Get off me, you jerk!” Jeremy said, swatting at me.

  “I see you’ve already started working on the paper,” Bo said.

  “‘The Germans hated t
he Jews’” I quoted. “‘They hated the Jews because they thought they were cheep’— C-H-E-E-P.”

  “They did,” Jeremy said, giving me one last cuff to the head. “I remember learning it.” He looked to Bo, who was wearing a big smile, more than likely at the entire scene and not just about Jews being “cheep.” “Tell ’im,” Jeremy demanded.

  “I know what you meant,” Bo said judiciously. “Hitler did accuse the Jews of controlling too much money and of ruining the German economy.”

  “Face,” Jeremy said, leering my way. “In your face!”

  I laughed. “You’re telling me that what you said is the same as what he just said?” A better person might have felt a little ashamed that Bo, who was half Jewish himself, was being so much nicer than I was, but I didn’t. Not too much anyway. For one thing, Bo was always nicer than I was and I was pretty much used to it, and for another, the shoe had been on the other foot enough times that picking on Jeremy didn’t exactly feel like picking on some innocent babe in the woods.

  “It’s the same thing,” Jeremy said. “He just explained it more.”

  “All right,” I said, getting to my feet. “Okay, I admit it. It’s the same thing.” I reached a hand down to help Jeremy up. “So are you gonna let me see the rest of it?”

  Now it was Jeremy who was smiling—in his Jeremy sort of way. “Uh-uh,” he said, shaking his head, “If I let you read it, you’ll probably end up thinking Hitler is supposed to stand for that what’s-her-face lady.”

  “Mrs. Quinby,” Bo told him helpfully.

  “Yeah,” Jeremy sneered.

  • • •

  Wednesday evening after dinner, Ethan and I headed out on our bikes. Ethan had actually found a beaver dam while he was wandering around the afternoon before and he was eager to show it to me. To be honest, after all the searching we’d done for beavers in the last couple of years, it was kind of anticlimactic to know I was about to see some, which I all of a sudden seemed to remember were actually members of the rodent family. Ethan was pretty excited, though, so I acted that way too. That afternoon I’d taken my first final—English, which I was pretty sure I’d aced—and since all my other exams were Regents, which were given the following week, I had the rest of the week off. I figured I’d probably end up doing some studying, especially for biology, but I didn’t see any need to rush into things.

  It was almost twilight when we got as close to where we were going as we could on our bikes, and we ditched them and set off through the woods.

  “There’s a whole family of them,” Ethan said right before we got to the stream. These were his first words since we’d left the house, but I knew he’d been thinking about those beavers all the way there. A few seconds later as we cleared the crest of the last knoll, he touched my elbow and pointed. There was the dam, strung out across the stream and holding back enough water so it was building up behind it and flooding out over the banks. In the center of the pool of water that had collected behind the dam was the lodge, sitting there like a collapsed wigwam. Ethan showed me the pointed stumps of some saplings the beavers had chewed down, and then we sat on the side hill and watched to see if any beavers were out and around. There didn’t seem to be much doing down there, which didn’t surprise me since it was so late. I was about to tell Ethan I was afraid we were out of luck when I felt him touch my elbow again. A dark shape moved across the water and did a surface dive to enter the lodge. You could tell it was a beaver by the way it moved. We waited to see if any other beavers were going to make an appearance.

  “I think they’re all tucked in for the night, Ethe,” I said after a while.

  We still sat there. It was so peaceful that neither of us was in any hurry to leave.

  “I used to think that all the animals in the forest were really friends,” Ethan said a few minutes later. That’s the way Ethan was—coming up with things like that right out of the blue—but the funny thing was, when he did it, I’d almost always know exactly what he was talking about.

  “Remember Mr. Bear Builds His House?” he asked me.

  I smiled. I knew that’s what he’d been thinking of. Pop used to read that book to me when I was little, and we both used to read it to Ethan. In the story all the animals in the forest showed up to help Mr. Bear build a log cabin, and the beavers did more than anybody. “Remember how the beavers cut down all the trees for the bear?” I said.

  Ethan nodded. “And then when the walls were up, they used their tails to smear mud between the cracks to keep the wind out.”

  We sat there for a while without saying anything. I don’t know how, but I could tell Ethan was really thinking hard about something.

  “Do you think we ever really believed it?” he said finally. “You know, that all those animals really got along and helped each other?”

  I thought about it. “I did, I think. Maybe not that they got along every minute, but that they were friends. I think I believed that.”

  Ethan’s face was serious, even for him, as he tried to get what he was thinking to come out right. “The thing with me is, even when I felt like I believed it, I still knew it wasn’t true. I mean, we’d always watch those nature shows on TV where animals were fighting and eating each other all the time. And, remember, Mr. Lindstrom had that dog Sheila who’d go around killing woodchucks every day. She didn’t even eat them or anything. She’d just catch them and kill them, one after the other.” He stopped and looked at me. “It’s just funny—you know-how you can believe something and still know it’s not true.”

  Sometimes I thought Ethan must be quite a bit smarter than I ever was. He was always coming up with those kinds of things that I’d never thought of.

  “Is that the way it is with Superman, do you think?” I’d often wondered just how seriously Ethan took that whole Superman business, but I’d never come right out and asked him before.

  He nodded. “Kind of. I know there’s nobody who flies around in a cape saving people and all that. But it’s still kind of true. There are people who save people. Like Pop does in court. And the flying part—Mr. and Mrs. Michaelson kind of do that. One of these days, I bet they’ll take right off. Don’t ya think?”

  I sort of shrugged and nodded at the same time. It’s not that I believed they wouldn’t; it’s just that I didn’t believe they would. But I hated to tell Ethan that. He’d always been fascinated by the idea of the Michaelsons going into their basement and doing their flying practice twice a day—a lot more fascinated than I’d ever been. I liked it, but I took it pretty much for granted, the way you do TV or radio or fax machines—the kind of things that really are kind of amazing, but when you’ve grown up with them you don’t give them much thought. With Ethan it was different; if something was amazing, it was amazing, and that was that.

  “I think they will,” Ethan said. “I’d bet anything they will.” He was looking at me to see what my reaction would be. “And when I get older,” he continued, “I’m gonna do it too. I’m gonna sign up for the same course Mr. and Mrs. Michaelson took, and I’m gonna keep practicing every day till I fly.” He had his jaw set and he was studying me, probably to see if I’d smile or anything. It reminded me of the way Jeremy had watched me when he gave me his Nazi paper to read, and I felt a little bad.

  “Learning to fly would be pretty cool,” I said after a while. “Maybe I’ll sign up for that course with you.”

  Ethan didn’t say anything more. But he put his hand on my shoulder as we looked down over the beaver dam.

  • • •

  It was almost dark by the time we came into view of Mr. Lindstrom’s place. We were moving right along, trying to make it home while we could still see the road, when Ethan all of a sudden stopped in front of me. I almost rear-ended him. I looked up and saw him staring out across the field. It took me a few seconds to figure out what he was staring at. I mean it wasn’t hard to see that he was looking at Mr. Lindstrom’s house, but what for? Then it dawned on me. It was such a common everyday sight I didn’t
even notice it at first, but when I did, I felt a little chill go up my spine. Upstairs, in one of the rooms that faced the road, a light was on.

  Twelve

  I didn’t make it back to check on Mr. Lindstrom’s house until late Friday night. Ethan and I didn’t have a key with us the night we first saw the light, so we’d continued on home. And then after I’d had time to think about it, that light being on didn’t seem so strange. We’d never gone upstairs on the day we cleaned the place. And even though I’d been up and down the road a bunch of times since then, it had always been daylight and I wouldn’t have noticed it anyway. I figured Mr. Lindstrom had probably left the light on himself, before the stroke. Not only that, but I started thinking that having a light on might actually be a good thing, giving the impression that someone was staying there and cutting down on the chances of a break-in.

  Even with the exams coming up the following week, I had a pretty strong feeling that for me the summer had started. I love summer. Except for a couple of too hot days each year, I love everything about it: the sunshine, the thunderstorms, the long evenings, you name it. But the best thing, as far as I’m concerned, is waking up in the morning and getting to decide what you want to do that day, not simply marching through the day doing all the things you have to do. I knew this might be my last real “kid” summer because, next time around, I’d be sixteen and I’d have to try to land at least some kind of regular job—something more steady than just helping out on the Wulfsons’ farm when they needed me or fiddling around at Rosa’s with Sudie and Rosasharn. I’ve never minded working, but I wasn’t crazy about the idea of tying up big chunks of time. Even without a regular job, I can never find enough time to do all the things I want to do.

  On Thursday Bo and I took The Tank to Rensselaer and caught the train to New York. At least two or three times a year we’d make a point to go to the Museum of Television and Radio on Fifty-second Street, where we’d get to watch old TV shows we couldn’t see anyplace else. After hanging out there for a while we wandered around checking out different stores and then taking in a movie we’d read about that wasn’t showing upstate.