Flyers (9781481414449) Page 8

  We climbed down through the nearest chute and headed for the milk house. Jeremy reached for the hose used to wash the milk tank and turned on the faucet. After drinking from the end of the hose, he started rinsing off his arms, which is a good way to begin cooling down after a tough session in a haymow. I started doing the same thing at the faucet to one of the large stainless-steel sinks. When I turned around again, Jeremy was bent over (like the fat lady on his lawn) spraying water over his face and through his hair.

  “You’re getting good at that, Jeremy,” I told him. “One of these days I bet your parents’ll start letting you use the shower in the house.”

  “Shut up, ribsy,” he said, and shot some cold water my way.

  The ribsy thing was an exaggeration. Jeremy was every bit as lean as I was, although he was probably a little more muscular—I’ll give him that. He had what I always thought of as one of the basic farm boy builds. There’s pudgy farm boy and there’s wiry farm boy, and Jeremy was definitely the latter.

  “Well?” I said, taking a deep breath. “Are we gonna do it?”

  “What’s the big deal? You just do it.” He grabbed the phone book, found the number he wanted, snatched up the receiver to the wall phone near the doorway, and started dialing. I have to admit—I was impressed.

  “Hello, Amy?” he said, after what must’ve been only about two rings. “This is Jeremy Wulfson. You wanna go to that drug thing with me this afternoon?” As he paused for the answer, the look on his face changed, first to a look of puzzlement and then back to its usual deadpan. “Oh,” he said after a while. “Okay. Yeah. Bye”

  “Well?” I said when he hung up. “What’d she say?”

  “Nuthin’,” he told me.

  “Whaddaya mean nothing? You asked her out, and then you stood there listening. She musta said something.”

  “It was her mother.”

  “Her mother?” I started laughing. “Didn’t you make sure you had Amy before you started asking her out?”

  He shrugged. “I thought I did, but her mother’s name must be Amy too.”

  This whole thing was cracking me up more by the minute. And the thing I found the funniest about it was that Jeremy really didn’t see any humor in the situation at all. Nada. And not because he was embarrassed or disappointed or anything like that. He just plain didn’t think it was funny. To him it just didn’t stack up to the plywood fat lady bending over in his yard or the bare-butted kid peeing in his bushes. The more I thought about it, the more I cracked up, until I was practically lying across the milk tank and howling.

  “How was I supposed to know?” he said. “I’ve never heard of a girl being named after her mother.”

  I hadn’t either, but that didn’t make it any less funny to me. “So what’d she say?” I asked when I could speak again. “What’d Amy senior say?”

  “She told me the other Amy was at church camp for the weekend, and she didn’t figure I’d want to take her, which she was right about because I’ve seen her, and I said ‘okay’ and hung up.”

  “Oh, God,” I said, straightening up and wiping my eyes. “Why couldn’t I have had Bo’s video camera? The rest of humanity shouldn’t be deprived of this.”

  “Shut up and make your call, Gabe-boy,” he said, and stuck the phone in my face.

  Seeing the phone close-up like that had a sobering effect on me. Jeremy noticed the difference and pressed his advantage. “Take it in your hand,” he said in a Mr. Rogers voice. “Now put it up to your ear. And then you dial.”

  “If you were really Mr. Rogers, you wouldn’t tell me what to do,” I said. “You’d ask me how I feel about it.”

  “Shut up,” Jeremy said, reverting to his regular personality “Just dial the stupid phone.”

  “You’re so touchy,” I told him, and started dialing. You’ll notice I didn’t need any phone book. Katie’s number had already been imprinted on my brain after one glance at it, the same as her eyes had been earlier in the week.

  I was pretty nervous when I was dialing, but the full force of what I was doing didn’t actually hit me until I heard the first ring. Then my heart started racing like mad. For a few seconds I wasn’t sure if I’d even be able to speak.

  Somebody picked up the phone and said hello. It was a female voice but I knew it wasn’t Katie. I’d heard little snippets of her conversations during some of my girl-scouting trips down the freshman hallway, and there was no way I’d mistake her voice. I even heard it in my dreams.

  “May I speak to Katie?” I was finally able to blurt out.

  “I’m sorry,” the voice said. “She’s with her father right now. Could I take a message?”

  I kind of froze for a second—not sure if I should leave my name or not.

  “Ah, no . . . I’ll . . . I’ll call again sometime. Thanks.”

  I took the phone down from my ear and stood there with it. I was still wrestling with the notion of whether I should have left my name or a message. If I’d done that at least I wouldn’t have to start from scratch the next time I called. Which would be when? I hadn’t even asked if she was gone for the morning, for the day, or for the whole weekend.

  Jeremy yanked the receiver out of my hand and hung it up. “We put the phone back when we’re through,” he said in his Mr. Rogers voice. “So much to learn and such a dumb student.”

  I leaned back against the wall and took a couple of deep breaths. I could feel Jeremy’s eyes on me, so I took another one—an extra long one—just to make him wait.

  “Well Scrubby?” he said before I’d even finished inhaling.

  “No luck,” I said. “She wasn’t home.”

  Jeremy scowled about that for a minute. “Maybe she knew it was you calling,” he offered finally.

  I walked over and leaned on the tank alongside him. “Look,” I said, “Just because I struck out, that’s no reason you should have to go to the drug day alone.”

  “Whaddaya mean?”

  I looked him in the eye. “Here’s what I’m thinking: Why don’t you get over there, pick up that phone, and call Amy’s mom back before somebody else asks her.”

  I was quick enough to avoid the headlock, but he caught me with a wicked thump to my back as he chased me out the door.

  Nine

  I have one of those minds that kicks into overdrive at the drop of a hat, and whenever it does the world around me tends to fade into kind of a background noise. This can sometimes cause difficulties for those in my general vicinity—in this case Jeremy, who was back to stacking hay a little below me. A few different times I landed bales on top of him, which didn’t do anything to improve his disposition. After he got whaled the third time, he decided that he should be the one working up by the conveyor.

  The thing was, I couldn’t get my mind off Katie Lyons and the call I’d just made. Part of me was still giving myself grief for not leaving a message, and part of me was still glad I didn’t. Part of me was disappointed that Katie wouldn’t be going to the drug rally with me, and part of me was actually relieved about the whole thing, if you can figure that out. After my mind had slalomed through those issues for a while, it slid into the whole notion of Katie herself. Ever since I’d discovered her I’d had this image of her as coming from one of those Leave it to Beaver kinds of families—you know with two parents waiting at home whose lives pretty much revolved around her. (For some reason I’d assumed she was an only child although I didn’t know that for a fact.) Now I was coming up with a whole different picture. Her mother (the lady I think was her mother) had said she was with her father, which at the time I’d taken to mean that she’d gone someplace with him. But as I pored over those few words again and again in that sweltering haymow I started thinking that what her mother had meant was that she was with her father—like for the whole weekend. Which meant (I was becoming more sure of it by the minute) that her parents must be divorced or separated.

  This sudden realization gave me a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach. All I could think
about was how she must spend her time being yanked back and forth between her two parents, loving them both and feeling guilty and miserable about one whenever she was with the other. Meanwhile they were both trying desperately to come up with ways to win her over to their side (even in this new version I still had her down as the center of their existence). The more I played this over in my mind, the more dramatic and tragic it seemed, and the bigger and hollower the feeling in the pit of my stomach grew until I found myself pleading with her to believe it wasn’t her fault, that she was an innocent victim in all of this. I was so caught up in the whole thing that it didn’t dawn on me at the time that this was pretty much the same kind of spiel Mrs. Quinby fired off with mind-numbing regularity at her WAFA meetings. All I knew was that I wanted to be the one to save Katie from the excruciating torment she must be experiencing as a result of this parental tug-of-war. Over and over in my mind’s eye I set her parents straight once and for all. After dealing with that, I saw myself taking Katie to the movies and on long walks (or on drives when I got my license) and giving her the kind of pressure-free existence to which she was entitled. Her parents would resent me at first, maybe, seeing only how I was stealing their precious daughter’s heart, but then they’d come around and see that I was right, that their behavior had been out of line, and that I was giving her a new life, a life of happiness and fulfillment she’d never known before.

  At this point a bale slammed into my back and I came close to ripping my scalp open on a few of the roofing nails poking down a few inches from my head. I pulled the bale off me and gave Jeremy dirty look.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said in a mincing voice. “I must have been daydreaming. I’m just awful like that.” Then he fired another bale at me which I managed to snag in time and shove up under the eaves. This didn’t put a complete stop to my Katie speculations or my different savior scenarios, but it did pull the here-and-now world of the haymow into at least a partial focus, and it was harder for Jeremy to catch me off guard during the rest of the load.

  When I got home and hit the shower, my mind, knowing it was out of physical danger there, was off and running again, tearing into Katie’s parents with a vengeance. In one version I even had to block a swing from her father and hold him down while I set him straight. Later, as I helped Ethan tow Cappy around the yard, I was still rewriting and editing the whole scene. Ethan must have known something was up, but he’s pretty used to me drifting off like that and he didn’t say anything.

  Rosasharn and Jeremy came by at about two. Sudie was at the school already, being one of the volunteers who’d be organizing the kids’ games and then helping serve the barbecue in the evening. Ditto for Bo, who’d also be on stage afterward to introduce speakers and what not.

  We dropped Ethan off at Pop’s office, and he gave me his little wave as we pulled away. Then we drove over and helped Rosasharn sweep out the laundromat and collect the change and fix a washing machine that had been acting up. Finally we headed for the school.

  Half the town was already there, it seemed, and we spent some time wandering around the athletic field watching different kids’ games and races, which were just getting under way. I kind of wished I’d talked Ethan into signing up for a few of the races at least, but then again he always looked forward to helping Pop on Saturdays, so maybe it was just as well I hadn’t. I kept my eyes peeled for Katie but didn’t see her. Before too long Sudie spotted us and put us to work helping set up tables on the football field. The chickens were already barbecuing and volunteers were going up and down the rows of makeshift steel barbecue pits basting and turning them. Emmett was there, striding importantly from the games to the barbecue to the tables, delivering instructions (and an occasional manly hug) and holding small summit meetings with Bob Chirillo and Ray Phineas over issues unknown to the rest of us, but crucial to the future of the world, if their facial expressions were any indication. Antidrug and alcohol posters were everywhere. A kid couldn’t run even the shortest sprint race without sailing past at least a couple of SAY NO messages. Emmett must have been in seventh heaven; probably never in the history of the town had the people of Wakefield had their attention so solidly focused on so many convenient ways to mess up their lives.

  I had just set down my end of a table and turned back to the truck containing the rest of the tables when I felt myself wrapped in a bear hug. “It’s coming off, man,” Emmett said, flushed with the kind of exhausted warmth and goodwill you expect in the closing moments of a thirty-six hour telethon. “It’s really coming off!”

  He was gone before I had a chance to say anything, which was probably just as well. Why not let the guy have his big moment.

  • • •

  Pop didn’t make it until almost six. He’d sent Ethan over earlier, saying he could manage in the office alone this one time. When Pop finally arrived, Ethan and I showed him around before we sat down to eat. Actually, Ethan did most of the showing, pointing out all the different booths and all the different games we’d played and whether or not we’d won anything at them. I was still keeping a pretty sharp lookout for Katie. I almost had the feeling that if I saw her (and she saw me), she’d recognize me as the guy who’d worked so tirelessly on her behalf against her parents that whole afternoon, and her face would light up with a shy smile. But I didn’t see her, and I figured more than ever she must be away, spending the weekend with her father.

  We were just finishing up eating when Rosasharn and Jeremy came up to our table. Rosasharn, after bowing dramatically and saying, “O kind and distinguished father of the great and not-too-shabby Riley clan” and on like that, asked Pop if he and Jeremy could borrow Ethan for a little while. Pop roared through the whole routine like he always does during a Rosasharn performance, and then said that if Ethan was agreeable to the idea, they were certainly most welcome to his good company. I didn’t have a clue as to what Rosasharn was up to or why he needed Ethan, and I didn’t give it much thought. I’d long ago decided that trying to speculate about the day-to-day workings of a brain that vibrated at his particular frequency just wasn’t worth the effort.

  I watched as the three of them disappeared into the crowd and then asked Pop if he felt like heading up toward the bonfire behind the school It was when we were strolling up the hill that I spotted Katie. At first it didn’t register with me that it was really her. I’d seen so much of her lately in my mind’s eye that it took my brain a few seconds to grasp that she actually was there. When it did, my brain went into overload, leaving me light-headed and slack-jawed. She was with Heather Lutz, and they were just hanging there halfway up the slope as if they were waiting for somebody. As we ambled by them, I could feel Heather giving me the once-over, and then she gave a not-so-subtle jab to Katie. I think Katie looked over, but I can’t be sure. As soon as I thought her eyes might be heading my way, my eyes went for the ground. I could’ve kicked myself for that, but it was an involuntary thing, like flinching when you first spot a snake.

  “Ladies,” I heard Pop say and I could picture just the kind of little bow he’d give them, “you’re looking lovely as usual. I hope you’re enjoying the evening.”

  “Oh, hi, Mr. Riley. Yes, we are. Thanks.” Both of them kind of answered at once, so it was hard to tell who said what, especially since my eyes were still busy studying the grass. The fact that Katie seemed to know Pop shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did since practically everybody in the whole town does. I think in some sense I hadn’t come to the full realization yet that she truly did exist outside my mental realm, and the fact that her physical existence somehow intersected with mine caught me a little off guard.

  I waited until we’d moseyed a little further up the hill and Pop had already greeted two or three other groups of people before I said anything.

  “How well do you know Katie Lyons’s family, Pop?”

  “We go back a ways,” he told me. “I’ve known Mike and Allison for a good long while—since before they were married as a matter of f
act.”

  “But they’re divorced now, huh?”

  “Heavens, .no,” Pop said, sounding a little surprised. “They’ve remained one of the closest families it’s ever been my privilege to know. And that Katie . . .” He paused and nodded his head thoughtfully. “As far as her parents are concerned, the sun absolutely rises and shines for that girl.”

  Well, I thought, seeing my afternoon’s rescue work going up in smoke, at least I was right about one thing.

  • • •

  It had just turned dark when it happened. We’d finally made it to the bonfire where, since just before sunset, the little kids had been gathering and staking out seats down in front where the ghost stories would be told. Of course they had to pay for that privilege by first sitting through a series of peer leadership activities which, among other things, included the obligatory mock beer party skit—you know, the one where a kid who doesn’t want to drink is being harassed by other kids whose only purpose in life seems to be to get him to do it. The peer leaders playing the drinkers hammed it up for a good ten minutes, riding the non-drinking kid without mercy until finally, accompanied by cheers from some junior high kids at the back, he popped open a tall one. The cheers from the back were not part of the official program. Neither was the “pfft” sound Pop made as he opened a beer of his own, leaning over and explaining to me that all that talk about drinking made a person thirsty. I had the feeling there was some wisdom in that statement that had eluded the planning committee.

  Next came the postskit discussion, designed to get the little kids to tell how they’d never fall for that kind of peer pressure. The whole thing was pretty bizarre—especially considering that Bo was the only peer leader up there who didn’t drink himself, and everybody knew it.

  After all the peer pressure skits and assorted malarky, the kids got what they were really there for: Mr. Woodman’s ghost stories. Mr. Woodman was a teacher in the middle school and a professional storyteller on the side. For my money, he was a little overly dramatic, with his bulging eyes and his alternately booming and then hushed voice, but younger kids really eat that stuff up. He told all the usual yarns like the one about the escaped mental patient with a hook for a hand who had hidden out in a rain forest just outside of town (it didn’t matter that the nearest rain forest was probably in Costa Rica), and how a guy and a girl who were parking there one night got spooked by a noise outside their car, and peeled out of there, only to discover a bloody hook hanging from the door handle when they got to the girl’s house. He followed with a couple of generic ghost stories before moving on to his grand finale—stories about our own Blood Red Pond swamp creature. His stories about this swamp monster had grown over the years, and he knew just when to lower his voice for effect and when to pause and say “Hark” and to look bulgy-eyed out into the dark woods. He was doing a decent job on this night, even for my tastes, and it’s ironic that I had just been feeling a little sorry that Ethan was missing the performance when it happened. Mr. Woodman was in the middle of his best swamp monster story and had done the “hark” business and was staring into the woods when all hell broke loose. First we heard a god-awful cry come from right where he was staring, and then out of the woods charged not one, but three creatures of the night.