Flyers (9781481414449) Read online

  “Another triumphant denouement?” Mrs. Michaelson said, being possibly the only human on the planet who would refer to the ending of a Flipper episode as a denouement.

  Mr. and Mrs. Michaelson almost single-handedly proved the theory that opposites attract. Mr. M. wrote books for kids—kids Ethan’s age and younger—sometimes novels, sometimes picture books, anything from mysteries to humor and fantasy, and he was even talking about trying his hand at science fiction. Go into any bookstore or library in the country and you’re bound to see some titles by Lawrence Michaelson. I always considered him a genius in his own way, but there was no denying he was a kid at heart, and he loved those old TV shows as much as Bo did. Mrs. M., on the other hand, didn’t even watch TV. A lot of people make a big deal out of slipping it into conversations how they don’t watch TV, but Mrs. M. really didn’t watch it—ever, except for documentaries or an occasional film (usually with subtitles). For her, the theme to The Lone Ranger was, and would always be, the “William Tell Overture.” That wasn’t their only difference. She was formal; he was casual. She was meticulous; he was absentminded. I could go on and on.

  About the only thing the Michaelsons were in perfect sync on was their meditation program, which they did together twice a day. I say meditation program because they didn’t just meditate. They were also flyers. The actual Transcendental Meditation term for what they were was “sidhas,” but “flyers” captured the flavor of the whole thing, and even TMers use the word. It meant they’d been trained in the yoga sutras of an ancient and revered mystic named Patanjali. I’m no expert on Patanjali himself, but I do know that the yoga sutras are what you might call a set of mental formulas for achieving supernormal functioning—one of the most dramatic of those functions being levitation. Bo had heard that there were at least a few people in India who were actually levitating, but pretty much everybody else (the other sidhas) spent their levitating time hopping around on foam rubber in the lotus position, working on developing their minds to the point where they’d eventually lift up and stay up. I’m not sure if I really believe that will ever happen, but I have to admit I kind of like the idea of it.

  Because I grew up with it, I never found the notion of people flying all that bizarre. I’d always listened to Bo telling stories about Indian holy men doing this or that extraordinary thing, and I’d read Autobiography of a Yogi when I was twelve. That book is filled with stories of people doing miraculous things, including St. Joseph of Cupertino, who couldn’t even take his turn serving the other monks at their meals because of his tendency to float to the ceiling, dishes and all, whenever he had a particularly happy thought. Then there was St. Teresa of Avila, who supposedly used to lift off regularly, whether she planned on it or not. I remember reading the whole section on levitation to Ethan a few years ago, and of course he thought it was the greatest thing in the world, feeling the way he did about flying. He’s always been crazy about anything that had to do with flying. When he was seven or eight, for his birthday Bo made him a painting he called The Second Flight of Icarus, which was based on the Brueghel painting The Fall of Icarus.

  In case you don’t remember, Icarus and his father, Daedalus, tried to escape the island they’d been imprisoned on by making wings out of feathers and wax. The wings worked like a charm, and it looked as if they might pull it off until Icarus got a little carried away and flew too close to the sun, which unfortunately melted the wax on his wings and sent him into a major nosedive. In the Brueghel painting, all you see of Icarus are his legs sticking out of the water after taking the Nestea plunge. In the forefront of the painting is a plowman who’s plodding along behind his horse and plow. His head is down, and you get the feeling he’s never in his life lifted his eyes to the sky—the sky where Icarus has just been.

  Bo’s painting uses pretty much the same setting, but in his, Icarus is still high in the air, stretched full out and soaring for all he’s worth, a look of joyful serenity on his face. And he doesn’t have to worry about his wings melting, because he’s not wearing any. In some way that I can’t quite describe he has this quality of lightness about him, and you never for a minute think he’s going to fall. Below him is the plowman, so solid and dense-looking I always had the sense that he was actually sinking into the ground. Even when you look at it close-up, it’s hard to tell where the guy’s boots leave off and the dirt begins. I always felt a little sad when I looked at that plowman. Something about the way he was trudging along behind the horse reminded me of Mr. Lindstrom and the way he plodded around on his land. Ethan loved the painting, though, and since the day he got the thing, he’s had it hanging on the wall at the foot of his bed where he can see it first thing in the morning and last thing at night.

  “Remember when we were kids, hon?” Mr. M. said from the hall closet, where he was dumping the tennis rackets. “And all the Westerns we used to watch?”

  “I remember when we were kids,” she said, reaching in and straightening up the rackets, “but I don’t remember the Westerns.”

  “My favorite was Fury,” Mr. M. continued wistfully. “My brothers and I watched that show every Saturday morning, no matter what. Remember Fury, hon?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t, dear.”

  “Hon,” he said, miming disbelief. “Don’t toy with me here. You couldn’t have gone all the way through your childhood without watching Fury.” He followed her over toward the stairs. “You remember—he was a horse, a shiny black horse, and he saved Joey every week.”

  “Sorry, dear. You know that’s not my forte.” She pronounced it “fort,” not “fortay,” which is how most people say it, and a little smugly too because it sounds foreign, not having a clue they’re using the wrong word. I’d learned all those pronunciation subtleties from Mrs. M. over the years. You could say correct pronunciation was her forte.

  “But how could you have missed Fury?” Mr. M. said, scratching his head in disbelief as she headed up the stairs. He shot a mischievous smile our way and then looked back up at her. “Do you suppose maybe they didn’t get that show on your planet?” he asked her.

  “That may explain it, dear,” we heard from the top of the stairs.

  • • •

  Bo had to work the pro shop starting at three, so he dropped me and my bicycle off at my house on the way. I figured since Ethan and Pop would most likely be done with their chess tournament by then, Ethan might want to go out for a hike. We were both big on hiking, or exploring anyway, and it seemed like a perfect afternoon for that kind of thing. Plus, Pop liked to get in a Sunday afternoon nap whenever he could, and I wanted to make sure that this week he could. I wondered if part of his problem in the last few weeks hadn’t been just a matter of his not having enough time to call his own. I was well aware of the fact that for years Pop had worked hard at being father, mother, and breadwinner for us. After a while that kind of pressure has to take its toll.

  As we headed out, Ethan said he hoped we could find the family of beavers that used to live on the swamp side of Blood Red Pond up until a couple of years ago. One day we’d gone over there to watch them, and they were gone. Mr. Lindstrom told us that was the way beavers were, that they’d stay in one spot for a while and chomp down all kinds of saplings for their lodge, and when they used up the ones they wanted, they moved on.

  Ethan and I had spent a lot of time hiking along the many no-name streams that eventually feed into the Hudson River a few miles west of our place. We’d never found so much as a single beaver, but Ethan didn’t seem to mind. He got a kick out of just being out there looking. Ethan was a lot like Bo in that regard, having that ability to just enjoy things without having to have them come out exactly how he planned them. If I live long enough, I may get that way myself.

  In keeping with tradition, we didn’t find any beavers that day either, but we did find an old house foundation way out in the middle of the woods, and we explored around in there for a while. We wondered about the people who’d lived there—what they’d been like, what
happened to them, and if we knew their grandchildren or great-grandchildren, that kind of thing. What got me was, I knew that the people who’d lived in this old place had been every bit as real as we were, and I tried to imagine our house like that, disintegrated down to the foundation, overrun by trees and vines and totally forgotten. It kind of gave me the creeps to think about it. I don’t adjust that well to change—even if it hasn’t happened yet.

  As we were walking home that evening, I saw Ethan give a little wave—what Bo and I always called his aloha wave because it was the same whether he was coming or going. I looked way across the field we were in front of to see Mr. Lindstrom wave back at us. He had good eyes for an old guy, and didn’t miss much when it came to anything going on around his land. You wouldn’t even know he was looking at you, but if you waved at him—even Ethan’s shy little wave—he’d wave back. At least he would to us. If he didn’t know you, or knew you and didn’t like you, you could end up with a different kind of gesture entirely.

  I don’t remember if I waved to him that day or not. I may just have let Ethan’s wave do the job for both of us. Not that it made much difference at the time. I had no idea then that it would be the last time I’d ever see Mr. Lindstrom out and around like that.

  Six

  On Monday morning Pop dropped Ethan off at the middle school and then pulled around to let me off at the high school. “Give ’em hell, Gabe,” he told me, and roared out a laugh. He’d said the same thing to Ethan, and it was pretty much the same thing he said to both of us every day. He didn’t mean anything by it; neither of us gave much hell to anybody as a rule. It was just Pop’s way of saying good-bye.

  “You give ’em hell too, Pop,” I said as I got out of the car.

  “I fully intend to, Gabriel. I fully intend to.”

  In Pop’s case he probably would—or at least I hoped he would. He was on his way to the courthouse in Hudson Falls, where he was defending a guy accused of poisoning his ex-girlfriend’s cat—an unpopular side to be on since nobody likes cat poisoners. To make things worse, all the TV stations and newspapers were jockeying for the easy moral high ground, which Pop says is often a simple matter of supplying the public with somebody convenient to hate. They kept showing videos of the cat during its happier moments, then of the girlfriend crying and holding its little cat corpse. Pop figured he’d have to fight tooth and nail to keep the focus on the real issue of the trial: whether the guy was actually guilty, which in Pop’s mind was somewhat doubtful since at least one person who knew them insisted it was the guy who’d broken it off with the girl and she’d been pretty angry about the whole thing. And this supposedly happened right before the poisoning took place. But that didn’t stop the animal lovers. Every night on the evening news you’d see them out in front of the courthouse, their faces twisted in anger, demanding justice. Watching that always made my stomach feel funny.

  I watched as Pop drove off—his smile slowly fading to reveal the look of wistful melancholy that lurked behind even his biggest and warmest smiles. That look had been there for as long as I could remember—long before my mother had headed for the hills, so it wasn’t just the result of that. Her leaving didn’t help matters, though, and since then I’ve often had the uneasy feeling I was watching him grow older right before my eyes. Pop wasn’t young. He’d been in his mid-forties when he got married, and he turned sixty the year I turned thirteen. As I stood there I could see the way he hunched over the wheel as he rounded the corner and putted toward the elementary school on his way back to Main Street, and I wished there was something I could do to make his life a little easier. And I wished, too, that if he still felt he had to work, he’d at least take on some easier cases—cases where John and Jessie Q. Public didn’t take such an active and angry interest. But I knew he wouldn’t. Whenever I said anything about it, he’d laugh and tell me, “I’ve always been a little skittish about being in the majority, Gabriel. The comfort level there is too high for somebody as cantankerous as I am.”

  Right. The world should be as cantankerous as Pop.

  • • •

  As if worrying about Pop weren’t enough, before I even made it to homeroom I’d come to the awful conclusion that I was in love again. With Katie Lyons this time. A freshman. I’d noticed her sweetly shy smile when I passed her in the hall the week before. Then on Friday I happened to fall in behind her on the stairs and noticed that from that angle she was pretty impressive too. Later that day I saw her at her locker and came to the conclusion that her hair was nothing short of spectacular. That’s the way it works with me. I start by getting hooked on one part of a girl, and then, often as not, I can feel myself being reeled in by the rest of her. Next thing I know I’m like a fish out of water.

  Since seventh grade I’ve been in and out of love exactly eight times. I try not to let it throw me as much anymore. Long ago I decided that (in addition to the fish-out-of-water thing) falling in love was a little like getting a bad cold—sometimes the symptoms persist longer than others, but it’s only a matter of time before you feel like yourself again. Pop told me this was to be expected for somebody my age, an age he referred to as “the white-water section of life’s journey.” He said that for his first twelve or thirteen years he’d been what you might call the model of Irish-Catholic boyhood, following the commandments, serving on the altar, and praying regularly to the Blessed Virgin Mary. But then he’d hit puberty running, as he put it, and that all changed; overnight he turned into a kind of hormonal Mr. Hyde. Naturally, he explained, this knocked a commandment or two for a loop and made it hard for him to look at the Blessed Virgin in quite the same light. He assured me that he eventually adjusted to this new world view and that, knowing me, he had every confidence I’d do the same, and probably in a lot less time than it took him.

  I appreciated the thought, but didn’t have nearly as much confidence in myself as Pop did in me. While Pop had charged into puberty, I had the sense that I’d limped into it and, at the rate I was going, would be lucky to make it out at a crawl. Of the eight girls I’d practically lost my mind over, Yd only spoken to three, and of those three I’d only actually asked one out. And by the time I’d worked up the courage to go for it, the major symptoms I’d been experiencing had pretty much run their course and the date had turned out to be kind of anticlimactic. I could only hope this time things would be different.

  I saw Katie soon after I’d completed a prehome-room girl-scouting trip down the freshman hallway. (Girl scouting was a term Pop used to describe the time when, in a beautifully mixed metaphor, his eyes started taking an interest in girls and asked his feet to lend a hand.) At first I thought Katie might be absent. She wasn’t at her locker, but her next-door-locker neighbor, Heather Lutz (grandniece of Clutz, I’d heard), was and spotted me on my first pass by. I could feel her watching as I continued down the hall. To make sure this wasn’t all in my head, I decided to test it out, acting as if I’d all of a sudden remembered something important and doing a quick U-turn. She was still watching me. And on my way by, I caught her giving the girl next to her what I took to be a there-he-is jab. I groaned inside. This was a complication I didn’t need. If she liked me, and if she was a friend of Katie’s (which she might not be since locker assignments were given out alphabetically), Katie might feel like she had to say no if I ever got around to asking her out. And that was a big if in itself.

  I was well into this new line of worrying when I almost hit her head-on—Katie, that is. I saw her the last half second before we would have actually collided. She was looking down adjusting her pile of books, and I don’t even think she saw me swerve past her. From my particular angle at the time, the thing that struck me was her deep blue eyes. With just that split-second encounter before I veered left, those eyes were already imprinted on my brain. I knew in every fiber of my being that they were the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen, quiet and enigmatic, as if they contained important secrets of the universe. I hurt—actually felt a wrenching emptines
s inside—from just the thought of those eyes.

  I stopped and stood for a second to let my head clear. And in that moment I knew without a doubt that Katie Lyons had become my number nine.

  • • •

  I saw Emmett when I was coming out of the gym at the end of fourth period. Instinctively I slammed on my brakes, forcing Bo and a few other guys behind me into a chain-reaction collision. My mind was still kind of reeling from the whole Katie Lyons thing, and I definitely wasn’t up for dealing with a human suction cup like Emmett St. Andrews.

  Emmett had appeared a month or so earlier, fresh from Salvation House in Albany, and for the last few weeks the whole school had been under a kind of drug siege. Not with real drugs, which had never been a big problem in Wakefield, but with drug awareness. Emmett, ex-druggie but still-practicing pain in the butt, was relentless. In addition to haranguing us in all our classes and at a Friday evening antidrug rally, he annoyed us more informally throughout the day as a peer pal and some kind of self-proclaimed role model. He’d left for a few weeks and was now back in town preparing for the final phase of his assault—the upcoming field day that was to be the culmination of Wakefield’s “Say No to Drugs” campaign.

  The way I heard it, Wakefield had applied for and received a fifty-some-thousand-dollar grant to make us aware of drugs. The money was used for: 1. Bringing us Emmett, 2. Buying multiple copies of every antidrug poster ever made, and 3. Sticking up a few DRUG-FREE ZONE signs around school property. As far as I could tell, the only result of this expenditure, except for my being personally offended by having a boob like Emmett brought into my sphere, was a purely unintentional one. Owing to some confusion caused by the proliferation of posters showing fried eggs as “your brain on drugs,” one kid in the elementary school supposedly turned his mother in to the police after she cooked his breakfast one morning.