Flyers (9781481414449) Page 2

  “Greetings from the swamp world,” Rosasharn said.

  “Nobody’d stop for that,” Jeremy said again, and shoved the car in gear. Then, tromping down on the gas, he feathered the clutch and tried to coax the car forward. From the sound, you’d’ve thought it was the space shuttle lifting off. A few seconds later the car started moving. You might have had the feeling you were watching the whole scene in slow motion except the car was shaking like crazy and Jeremy seemed to be scowling at his. usual speed.

  I stepped back out of the smoke cloud and watched the car limp up the hill. When it made the top, I started in on Rosasharn. “Remember,” I told him, “stay outta camera range until the car gets close and then come charging into its field of vision. You can stay behind that bush over by the barn until it’s time.”

  “Zay will not drive zee car past my swamp,” Rosasharn told me. “Zay must be stopped.”

  “Yeah, well make sure zay don’t run over you,” I cautioned him.

  Rosasharn shuffled off toward his bush and I headed over to where Bo and Ethan were. The way we had it planned was that on Jeremy’s first run Bo would shoot a long shot of the attack from the entrance lane. Ethan had already turned on the yard light that was attached to the peak of the old barn. Bo figured the yard light, along with the headlights on Rosasharn’s car, should give the scene a kind of glary, shadowy effect, where you’d see Green Guy, but not too clearly, which was important considering how ratty he looked, especially in the ankle department. Then we’d have Jeremy do a couple more runs for shots from different angles, and finally Bo’d get some footage from inside the car looking out the windshield.

  I ran over and stood behind Ethan, trying to picture how it all might come out. I’d written it, but I wasn’t too sure how it would translate onto film. As usual I had to trust Bo to make it look right.

  Bo knew what I was thinking and laughed. “We’ll get what we get,” he said. That pretty much summed up Bo’s whole approach to life, and it was one of the things I really admired about him. Most people our age fell into two categories: They either didn’t care about things at all, or if they did, they were completely neurotic about them. Bo really poured himself into pretty much everything he did; he just didn’t worry very much about how things panned out. Even so, I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that no filmmaker in the country his age was doing better work than Bo Michaelson.

  Right after I finished thinking this, I noticed a set of headlights shooting up over the hill Jeremy had just disappeared behind.

  “That can’t be him already,” I said. “Can it?”

  We stood there watching as a car cleared the hill.

  “It’s not him,” Bo said. “Listen.”

  He was right. What we were hearing was a regular car, the kind of car Rosasharn’s would never sound like again.

  It was bearing down on us.

  “Let’s get outta sight,” I said, “so whoever it is doesn’t stop and ruin the shot when Jeremy shows up.”

  Ethan was already picking up the camera bag, and Bo grabbed the camera and tripod. We all hurried toward the barn.

  “Sit tight, Rosasharn,” I said as we ducked into the barn.

  “Zay will not drive zee car past my swamp!” we heard Rosasharn say.

  “It’s not Jeremy, Rosasharn!” I hissed out the door. “Stay put!”

  “Zay must be stopped!”

  I looked at Bo. He looked back at me and shrugged. Ethan crept up to the only window on the road side of the barn and peeked out. Bo was next. Soon all three of our faces were pressed up against the glass.

  At first we couldn’t see the actual car, only the light it cast on the trees and bushes alongside the road. We could see Rosasharn, though, crouched behind his bush right off to the side from our window, and two seconds later we heard what might have been a cross between a Tarzan yell and a moose in heat, and our man Rosasharn was on the move. He charged onto the road, planted his feet, and held up his hands like some kind of underworld traffic cop. The car, which I recognized right away as Ray McPherson’s—an old wreck of a Buick stitched together with Bondo and a colorful mixture of preowned fenders—screeched to a halt in front of him. Before the front end had quit bobbing, Rosasharn was on the hood and heading for the windshield. He was making some kind of barking noise and clapping his hands together.

  “He’s doing that seal thing he does,” I heard from Bo, whose head was just the other side of Ethan’s. For someone who takes things pretty much in stride, he sounded fairly amazed.

  It was a sight to behold. Rosasharn was sitting up on the hood as if he were waiting for a fish to be dropped in his mouth. At that point Ray must’ve all of a sudden snapped out of it because he hit reverse and gunned it, sending Rosasharn out of his seal pose and into a backward roll. He landed on the pavement, and the car screeched out of our range of vision and made what sounded like a power U-turn. A few seconds later it was history.

  We ran out to check on Rosasharn. He was up on all fours when we got to him.

  “Woof,” he said, being a dog now and looking to where the car had disappeared over the hill.

  “You all right, killer?” Bo asked, patting his head.

  “Woof,” he said, and gave us a nod.

  We helped him to his feet and brushed him off a little.

  “I can’t believe you, Rosasharn,” I said, laughing. “You’re crazy.”

  “Yes,” he said, tilting his head and pointing his finger philosophically, “but still I must protect zee swamp.”

  We were still laughing about that when I noticed Ethan staring out into the trees across the road with that look he gets every once in a while. Whatever he thought he saw, I couldn’t see. But that was when it all began. At least for me it was.

  Two

  It was pushing ten o’clock by the time we finished filming out by the road. Jeremy had pulled up about three minutes after Rosasharn had rolled off Ray’s hood and was a little put out when Rosasharn wasn’t immediately available to jump in front of him. We were busy doing what on-the-spot repairs we could on his battered-up Green Guy outfit and didn’t pay much attention when Jeremy actually rolled up.

  “Aren’t we forgetting something?” we heard him ask. You could almost feel him glaring out the window at us.

  Bo and I put on puzzled looks.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “We forgetting something, Bo?”

  Bo shrugged. “I can’t think of anything.”

  “Idiots,” Jeremy said. Then he made us pay for our fun by refusing to drive the car anymore until I practically had to beg.

  That wasn’t my only problem. All while we were shooting the car attack scene from different angles I kept expecting Ray to show up again—with some kind of homemade posse, maybe, or maybe alone but carrying a shotgun or some such thing, and then we’d have some serious explaining to do. Ray was that chain-smoking, emaciated type, a nice enough guy for the most part, but temperamental (I’d heard some use the word crazy), and emaciated-looking or not, had been known to do serious damage to people when he was in one of his moods. I’d always gotten along well with Ray, but he was one boat I didn’t want to rock.

  Luckily that was the last we saw of him—that night at least.

  When we finally wrapped up, I was surprised at how much time had passed and figured I should see about Pop—whether he’d made it home or not and how he was doing. I wasn’t sure exactly what the story was but for the last few weeks it seemed that Pop had needed a little extra looking after. He’d always been what you might call the life of the party, and as far back as I could remember we’d sometimes had to go out in the middle of the night Pop hunting. Margaret, who was our housekeeper back then, would drive me into town and she’d stop in front of the different “establishments,” as she called them, while I ran in to see if Pop was there. But that was an occasional thing and I always just saw it as part of my job as older son.

  Things took a short turn for the worse right after my mother left, which is a
story in itself. Pop had managed to seem pretty much like his old self at the time, but for the next month or two he’d really kept Margaret and me on our toes. I was in the fourth grade then and Ethan was in kindergarten. Mom’s leaving didn’t come as any big surprise to anybody. She was a good twenty years younger than Pop, and you might say she never really took to family life. She’d packed up and left a couple of different times over the years, but this time somehow Pop and I both knew it was for keeps.

  Pop had pulled into the driveway just as Mom and a guy who was supposed to be his friend were coming off the front steps and heading for the cab that was waiting to take them to the airport. I figure Margaret must have called Pop at his office to tell him what was happening because it was rare for him to come home midmorning like that. Not only that but he seemed to have arrived ready for business. As easygoing as Pop generally is, he’s always had a hop-up-and-down kind of temper when the situation calls for it, and this time he seemed to feel it did. This was understandable since just a few weeks earlier he’d not only gotten this guy off on a felony embezzlement charge but then had offered him an out-of-town place to stay until the publicity died down. When you think about it, the whole deal was pretty raw.

  Pop took his time getting out of his car and strolled up to where Mom and the embezzler were coming down the flagstone sidewalk with their suitcases. When he got to them, he took a little more time studying the guy up and down, and then he unloaded a quick right and a quick left into the guy’s head. The poor schmo had obviously underestimated Pop, which people who don’t know him well enough tend to do, seeing only his modest stature, his gray hair, and his normally sweet disposition, and not knowing it isn’t good to get his Irish up. The next thing I knew the schmo was laid out across the front lawn. My mother opened up her compact and took a few seconds to check her makeup one more time, and then said to Pop as if she were asking about the weather, “You don’t really think this changes anything, do you?”

  “I believe it does!” Pop bellowed, all warmed up now and rocking back on his heels and slurring his words slightly in that way of his which didn’t seem to have much to do with whether or not he’d been drinking. “If nothing else, it makes it easier for me to reclaim my shoes!” He then proceeded to pull his Italian cap-toe Oxfords off the make-yourself-at-home and help-yourself-to-it ingrate, who was still flat on his back and staring up at him glassy-eyed.

  “I think that’s your suit too, Pop,” I told him, because it did look like one of his and I always hated to see Pop get the short end of things.

  “Good eye, Gabriel, my boy!” Pop rasped out enthusiastically. “I think it might be one of mine at that!” He started yanking the suit off the guy right there on the lawn, handing me the jacket and the vest and then shaking the guy out of the pants—all without bothering to undo any buttons or zippers, so the suit suffered some in the transaction.

  A few minutes later as we walked into the house together, Pop, holding his Oxfords in one hand and rubbing my head with his other, told me matter-of-factly, “You know, Gabriel, I’m beginning to think that sonavabitch was guilty after all.”

  That’s the last any of us saw of my mother, or for that matter, the embezzler who got ripped out of the suit, which incidentally, turned out not to be Pop’s at all. That was par for the course. Pop always did give me more credit for my abilities than I deserved.

  I don’t think Pop ever completely got over that day, but it wasn’t too long before he’d pulled himself together and things went more or less back to normal. Things took another short turn for the worse a few years later when Margaret died, but Pop managed to pull himself out of that one quicker yet, I think because he realized Margaret’s dying had been harder on Ethan and me than our mother’s leaving, since Margaret was the one who’d practically raised us.

  We never got another full-time housekeeper, but Pop did hire a cook, Jennie, a former student of Bo’s mom who came highly recommended by her, and she prepared our evening meals five days a week, Sunday through Thursday, as well as seeing that we had lunches waiting for us on the days following. Fridays and Saturdays we’d eat out, generally at Willie’s, which was pretty much the only good restaurant in town. Jennie’s job description had gradually grown over the years to take up what she felt was the slack—things like doing dishes, washing clothes, and watering plants—and at the rate we were going, I figured she’d probably be full-time before too long. So all things considered we made out all right. The only thing was, in the past few weeks I’d seen some disturbing signs that Pop might be drifting off again, and that was why I was making a special effort to keep track of him.

  The other guys stayed at our camp and Rosasharn and I set out to find Pop. Even though Jeremy had told me that every time he’d turned around in our driveway, the place looked pretty deserted—no lights on, and no Pop’s car—I was still hoping to find him home. But he wasn’t there, so we headed for town.

  I figured if I could catch Pop before he left Willie’s, I’d have a pretty good shot at getting him home without too much hassle. Ethan and I had had dinner with him there earlier and he’d seemed in halfway decent spirits at the time. When we’d left to head out to our campsite, he’d stayed on to talk to some friends from Saratoga. I hoped they weren’t drinkers. Once Pop got started on the wrong foot, he could be a rip.

  Rosasharn and I pulled up in front of Willie’s a few minutes later. Rosasharn loved Pop and wanted to go in to say hello, which I wouldn’t have minded except he was still in his Green Guy costume. I’d grabbed the headpiece off him as we were pulling into town and I caught a glimpse of him under the first streetlight. I figured his car could attract enough attention on its own. Plus I didn’t want to run the risk of having Ray see him looking like that and putting two and two together.

  “Thanks, big guy,” I said as I got out. “I’ll tell Pop you were asking for him.”

  Rosasharn gave me his Curly wave-off and finessed the clutch for his ferocious-sounding second-gear takeoff.

  Pop was on his corner stool at the bar when I walked in. He seemed to be in halfway decent shape, although with Pop it was hard to tell anything was wrong until he was pretty much three sheets to the wind. But just finding him still at Willie’s where Charlie could look out for him was a good sign. Charlie was the regular bartender at Willie’s, and he had a fine line to walk when it came to keeping Pop on the straight and narrow. If he tried to cut Pop off, or even delivered the drinks too slowly, there was the risk Pop would wander off and go someplace else where he’d be unchaperoned and could get into some real trouble. So whenever Pop seemed up for some serious drinking, Charlie did his level best to keep him there until I came for him, while at the same time trying to keep him as sober as possible for as long as possible. Charlie wasn’t much in the personality department, but I really appreciated him for doing that.

  “How’re ya doing, Pop?” I said, coming up behind him.

  Pop turned toward me, his face wrinkling into a melancholy smile. “You know who this guy is?” Pop said, squinting at me, but talking to Charlie.

  “I’ve seen him around,” Charlie said, nodding into the big bar mirror at me as he stacked a row of clean glasses.

  “Come ’ere and let me have a look at you,” Pop said, even though I couldn’t have gotten much closer without climbing onto his lap. That’s the way Pop was. He always had to have a look at me. It didn’t matter if I’d only been away from him a few hours, or even a few minutes. He was the same way with Ethan.

  “I ask you, Charlie,” Pop said, wrapping his hand around the back of my neck and studying me with a sad and sleepy kind of awe, “what’d I ever do to deserve a kid like this?” He pulled me in even closer.

  Charlie gave me a half smile. He knew the routine.

  Pop ruffled my hair and continued. “How’s a no-account old codger like myself end up with the kind of boys I have? That’s what I’d like to know.”

  “Somebody made a mistake upstairs,” Charlie said.

&n
bsp; “You’re darn tootin’,” Pop told him. “It was a great and wonnerful mistake of cosmic proportions. A magnificent cosmic mistake.”

  “Rosasharn says hello, Pop.”

  “Rosasharn? He said to say hello, did he?” Pop’s wistful smile broke into a wide grin. “Raaahaaa,” he rasped out. “Now there’s a man after my own heart. That’s another wonnerful thing about you, Gabriel. You’ve got the very best friends in the whole world. The whole world.”

  “You haven’t done so bad there yourself, Pop.” It was true. Despite whatever else anybody might say about Pop, you’d be hard pressed to find somebody who didn’t like him. Even without all the legal favors he’d done for people over the years, lots of times leaving state senators, and at least one time the Governor of New York himself, waiting while he gave free advice to a neighbor who had a contract problem or a widow worried about protecting her estate from a gambling son-in-law, the fact remained it was hard to know Pop without liking him.

  As always, it took a few minutes to get Pop out the door. Pop’s the kind of guy who on the way out of a place has to go and shake everybody’s hand and say good-bye and find out how everybody’s wife and kids are and send them his best. He’d’ve made a pretty good politician except that he was so sincere. He genuinely liked all those people.

  We picked up Pop’s car at his office just up Main Street, and I dropped Pop and the car off at the house. I was a few months short of sixteen and couldn’t drive legally yet even though I was good with a car. Pop taught both Bo and me to drive on the lane that went around Blood Red Pond back when we had to use pillows to see over the dashboard, and when we got a little bigger he let us practice on our road, which was paved but pretty much off the beaten path. Lately Pop seemed content to have me drive him home whenever I was around—even when he was fit to drive himself. We’d met Chief Finnegan a few times, and though he must have known I didn’t have a license, he never stopped us. Pop would give him a big friendly wave and say without any intended irony, “Keep up the good work, Michael,” in that way Pop had of talking to people who couldn’t possibly hear him, being on the other side of two sets of windows. I think the Chief was just as happy to see me driving, license or no license, rather than Pop, who after hours could be a little unpredictable. I never took advantage of his indulgence, driving only when I was picking up Pop and never using the car for my own reasons even if it meant walking or hitching.