Flyers (9781481414449) Page 9

  If anybody there had kept his head, it wouldn’t have been hard to see that these particular creatures of the night were pretty low-budget, not to mention exactly the same size and shape as Rosasharn and Jeremy and Ethan. But it all happened so fast and the little kids were going crazy knocking chairs over and crawling over each other to get as far away from the monsters as possible that nobody had time to think. One of the reasons the kids believed these creatures were the real thing was that Mr. Woodman’s exaggerated fear-face scaled itself back to a look of genuine shock and for once in his life he gave the kind of understated performance that real people give in real situations. I looked over and saw Pop staring slack-jawed at the three creatures charging past the bonfire. Kids were already streaming around us, heading like an old-fashioned cattle stampede down the hill toward where most of their parents were still sitting around at the tables on the football field.

  “It’s Ethan,” I managed to say to Pop as he was giving the label on his current beer a second take. “It’s Ethan, Rosasharn, and Jeremy.” I pointed them out as best I could, considering the confusion.

  Pop isn’t slow to catch on to things. No sooner had the words sunk into his head than his puzzled expression transformed itself into the most undiluted smile I’d ever seen on him, without even a hint of sadness lurking anywhere. At just that moment I spotted Katie over Pop’s shoulder on the other side of the crowd of stampeding kids, her hand up to her mouth, her dark eyes taking in first the swamp creatures, then Heather, and then going back for another stare at the swamp creatures. I’d never seen her look more beautiful.

  What followed ranks right up there with the greatest moments of my life so far. There was Katie off in the distance, looking more lovely and mysterious than ever in the flickering firelight, and yet so vulnerable it made my heart ache. And there was Pop, as happy as I’d ever seen him, practically dancing with joy and howling like some raspy-voiced kid. “Ethan,” he was saying whenever he could catch his breath enough to say anything. “God bless him! Our little Ethan!” And there was Ethan. I couldn’t see his face, but the way he ran and the little trademark aloha wave he gave as he passed by us said it all. He was having the time of his life.

  I’ll never forget how I felt at that moment. It was the closest I’ve ever come to experiencing pure happiness with nothing else mixed in. I had no way of knowing that events were already starting to happen that would soon put a damper on things, but even if I’d known, I don’t think it would have clouded the way I felt then. It was that pure.

  Ten

  I heard about Mr. Lindstrom the next morning. I’d stayed overnight at Bo’s house and Pop called around eight to break the news to me. He didn’t know many details—just that Walter Owens had been driving by on his way to Stewart’s for his morning coffee and had seen Mr. Lindstrom’s pickup truck parked in front of his old barn with the barn door wide open. Nothing so strange in that, except Walter had seen the truck parked in exactly the same spot with the barn door open exactly the same way the night before. Walter thought at the time it was a little odd that Mr. Lindstrom would be out working around his property after dark, but didn’t give it another thought until he saw a carbon copy of the scene the next morning, and decided to swing back to check on things. That’s when he found Mr. Lindstrom, lying face up a couple hundred feet down the lane. He was alive—but just barely—and the rescue squad had come and rushed him off to Mary McClellan Hospital in Cambridge. That was all Pop knew.

  I didn’t show any big reaction to the news; I just stood listening quietly as Pop explained the situation. But I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. I couldn’t believe it. Right up until Pop called I’d been having one of the best mornings I’d had in a long time. I woke up around six with a pretty decent afterglow from the previous evening. While Bo meditated, I did a five-mile run in the cool morning air, smiling every time I thought about Ethan and the attack of the swamp creatures and what a charge Pop had gotten out of the whole thing. I smiled some more, but in a different way, when I thought about how mysterious and beautiful Katie had looked standing there in the glow of the bonfire. As I was heading back up to Bo’s room I could hear Mr. and Mrs. Michaelson bouncing around in their basement, and that made me smile too. Every bounce they took seemed like a bubble of hope, a promise of good things to come, and the feathery lightness of that promise seemed to pervade the entire house. Anyway, things that morning were looking bright, and by the time I climbed out of Bo’s shower, feeling all clean and good, the last thing I expected was bad news. Then Pop called and told me about Mr. Lindstrom.

  It’s not that Mr. Lindstrom and I had ever been that close. Mr. Lindstrom wasn’t the kind of person anybody got close to, even if you were one of the few people he liked. He’d always been somewhat of a mystery to me and I sometimes wondered if he might even be a little crazy, although crazy is one of those words that’s almost impossible to define, and I tend to wonder more about regular people—the ones who do and say pretty much everything that’s expected of them, and you have to ask yourself what’s really going on upstairs there. Still, Mr. Lindstrom had been known to do some unusual things. At night sometimes, if we were outside and the sound was carrying just right, we used to hear him over at his place yelling at the top of his lungs and blasting his car horn for all he was worth. The first few times we heard it, we went over to check on him—Pop and I the first time, and Bo and I the second—and both times he’d looked a little relieved when he saw it was us and insisted we come in and stay for a while. Neither time did he let on that anything out of the ordinary had been going on. Pop figured he was lonely—that and a little paranoid, two things he said went together more than most people realized—and that shouting and blowing his car horn may simply have been his way of whistling in the dark.

  The next couple of times we heard him start to carry on like that Ethan and I sneaked onto the hill across the road from his house and crouched down there to watch. Twice Mr. Lindstrom came charging out of his house and ran to his car yelling things like “Leave me be, ya bastards!” then blowing his horn some and charging back into the house. He had his yard light on that night, and from where we were watching, the yard looked like a lighted stage showcasing a one-man show. That’s the reason I didn’t feel worse for him than I did, I think, because he seemed so much like an actor playing out some kind of bizarre role.

  I felt plenty bad about it after Pop called, though, and as Bo drove me to my house I couldn’t help thinking about how, except for us, Mr. Lindstrom was virtually alone in the world, and for the last few years at least, he must have been afraid a lot of the time and had to resort to carrying on and shouting threats at whatever it was he imagined might be lurking out there in the darkness. It made me sad, and I wished I had taken more time to visit him.

  When we got to my house, Pop was on the phone trying to reach Mr. Lindstrom’s daughter. The last I’d heard anything about her she was living someplace in Maryland. I’d never laid eyes on her myself; she’d been estranged from her father for years over some falling-out they’d had that I’d never gotten the particulars on. Mr. Lindstrom’s only other child, a son, had been killed in a car accident returning home from Saratoga late one night on a long straight stretch of road we called the Schuylerville Flats. He’d been celebrating his eighteenth birthday. People claimed Mr. Lindstrom never quite got over that and started to keep more to himself and get more peculiar from then on, and that it only got worse after his wife died and his daughter left. I knew he missed his daughter because Pop once told me that after she left, he’d buy presents every Christmas and on her birthday and wrap them and send them to her. And every time they were returned unopened. One year he even had Pop get him a private investigator to find her new address. He finally located her, but it didn’t do any good. The presents were returned the same as before. After that, I guess he gave up.

  I couldn’t tell who Pop got through to, but it wasn’t her because he explained the whole story (or as much of it
as he knew) and asked if the person would be kind enough to see that she was notified. Then he gave our number and arranged to have his calls forwarded to the hospital, where he and Ethan were heading to check on Mr. Lindstrom. Meanwhile, he wondered if Bo and I would mind going over to Mr. Lindstrom’s place to check on things and make sure the doors were locked and the windows were closed and all that. We always left our own doors unlocked, but someone was always coming and going from our place, and that was different from leaving a house completely abandoned, especially when the whole town would soon know the place was vacant. I couldn’t help but wonder as we headed over there, if Mr. Lindstrom didn’t make it (and Pop had warned me that it didn’t look good), who we were protecting the property for. From what I’d heard about the daughter, she wouldn’t want to have anything to do with her father or his property. The whole idea of it made me feel worse than I already did.

  Mr. Lindstrom’s house was on the south side of Blood Red Pond and sat quite a ways back from the road in the middle of what was now a hayfield. His place always struck me as looking like it belonged in Kansas or Nebraska or someplace like that, where you often see old abandoned houses sitting smack-dab in the middle of huge wheat fields. It was a good-sized house, yellow with a flat roof and a bunch of curlicue buttresses that were used to support the overhang and embellish things. That effect may have worked in its day, but ever since I can remember the house has looked pretty sad, sitting there marooned in the field like that, needing paint and other basic repairs, with no yard to speak of, only a small unkempt area out in front with a few scraggly bushes and an old box elder, which is what you might call the tree version of a weed and didn’t add any kind of homey quality to the place. Just looking around the yard made me sadder still.

  The long driveway curved around in front of the house and became the other end of the lane that went to the pond and then back out to the road by the old barn we’d hid in the night Rosasharn jumped on Ray’s car. You could see the woods where the pond sat at the upper end of the hayfield about a quarter mile away. The pond itself sat quite a ways back in the woods and was probably as close to our house as it was to Mr. Lindstrom’s.

  We went to the back door, and I fished the key Pop had given me out of my pocket. I stood there with my hand on the knob for a few seconds before opening it. I was almost wishing Jeremy was there. He probably would have grumbled something sarcastic and pushed me through, and I would have fired a suitable insult back and maybe punched him, and it might have helped bring my mood back to normal.

  What hit me first, even before I had the door open all the way, was the smell. I could never quite identify what made Mr. Lindstrom’s house smell the way it did—probably because there was no one cause for it. He was no housekeeper, and there were always empty tuna fish cans and things lying around and dirty dishes on his kitchen table and in his sink, but somehow they didn’t totally explain the smell because no matter what day you went there, and no matter what kinds of cans were lying around or what was on the dirty dishes or in the garbage, the smell was always the same. It was thick and acrid, permeating the whole house and by no means pleasant. Eventually the place would probably have to be fumigated.

  When I stepped into the kitchen, I saw the same living-alone-old-guy kind of mess I’d come to expect from that house, and then some. There wasn’t a clean anything anywhere, and that made me sad too. I noticed that his Mr. Coffee was still on. It must have been one of the older models without the automatic shutoff. All the water had evaporated away, leaving the coffee baked to the bottom of the pot. I pulled it off the heating pad, put some water in it, and set it by the sink next to the other dirty dishes to let it soak. The next thing I knew I’d dug out some Dawn and was washing the dishes in the sink. Don’t ask me why. It’s not something I’d normally even think to do, let alone do without thinking. Bo started clearing off the table and counters and washing them down with a cloth. Then he grabbed a broom and swept the floor. Somewhere along the line he must have opened the window in front of the sink because all of a sudden I was aware of a fresh breeze coming in from the outside world. Neither of us had said anything the whole time.

  Twenty minutes later the kitchen was pretty well taken care of, looking better than I’d ever seen it, although the smell still lingered, even with the window open. We had just moved on to the living room when Jeremy and Rosasharn and Sudie arrived. They walked in awkwardly, not knowing quite how to act or what to say in the living room of a person who might at that very moment be dying. Rosasharn wasn’t being the clown and Jeremy wasn’t being the crank, and that left a little bit of a vacuum there, at least for me.

  Sudie pitched in first, finding a cloth and dusting the coffee table and the TV and the old fireplace mantel, with its knickknacks and photos dating back to when the Lindstroms were a family. Jeremy and Rosasharn found some Windex and started in on the windows, which from the looks of them hadn’t had any major contact with that Windex for a good long while.

  Before noon we had the whole downstairs taken care of, including the bathroom, and the less said about that, the better. I’d thought about tackling the upstairs too, but there’s something about the upstairs of a house that seems more private, and even though I was curious because I’d never seen it, I didn’t feel as if we should intrude. Maybe if it’d been only Bo and me instead of all five of us, I’d have felt different. I don’t know.

  Before we left, I walked over to the big wooden mantel and looked at the old family pictures. The first was a wedding picture, and it seemed to have been taken out in front of the house. I recognized Mr. Lindstrom right away, standing stiffly and looking so out of place in his tuxedo. Back then he was a big bear of a guy, and I thought again how he reminded me a little of the plowman in the Icarus painting Bo had made for Ethan. His wife wore a frilly white wedding gown and was smiling shyly into the camera. She was kind of pretty, and looked so thin and delicate next to her husband. The next picture was of two little kids, a girl of about six who was scowling into the camera and a boy of three or four who was peeking out from under a Yankees hat. Next to those were what looked like their senior pictures. The thing that struck me right away was how different the son and the daughter were, which, I realized after a while, was the exact same difference as between Mr. Lindstrom and his wife. There was no question that the son took after his mother, and the daughter was the spitting image of her father, which, for a girl, was definitely not a good thing. She and her father both had big heads and coarse features and both looked like if they smiled their faces would crack. The boy had a more sensitive face, like the mother, and even from the senior picture you could tell he had her slight build too. I studied his picture some more. I knew he’d been killed during his senior year, so it couldn’t have happened too long after that picture was taken. I couldn’t help wondering what he was like. I didn’t wonder about the daughter. For some reason I felt as if I already had a pretty good idea what she was like.

  Pop called just as I was locking up. When he hadn’t been able to reach me at home, he figured I might still be at Mr. Lindstrom’s. The news wasn’t all bad, but it wasn’t very good either. Mr. Lindstrom had suffered a fairly serious stroke, and his entire left side was paralyzed. He was conscious—at least somewhat—but he still couldn’t speak, and the doctors had no way of knowing if he’d ever make it up and around again. As you might guess, he wasn’t a very good patient, and with the little capacity to move that he had, he was flailing around and giving the nurses an awful time. Nobody could tell what it was he was trying to tell them, but my guess was that at least part of it contained the phrase “sons-o’-bitches.” The doctors had given him something to calm him down and now he was resting comfortably. Pop was taking Ethan to lunch at the Cambridge Hotel, and then they were going to check at the hospital again to see how Mr. Lindstrom was doing.

  On the way back to my house Bo and I stopped to lock up Mr. Lindstrom’s barn. I didn’t want his boat or tools or anything to end up stolen. You could
still see the tracks from where the ambulance had strayed off the lane as it backed in to pick him up. Pop had heard right: Mr. Lindstrom had collapsed a couple hundred feet down the lane. That’s where the tracks stopped.

  “I wonder why he opened the barn door and then walked over to there,” I said to Bo. “He always opened the door to get the tractor or bulldozer out, and then he’d close it and lock it right behind him. Always.”

  Bo shrugged. “Maybe he walked out to clear a branch off the lane or something. There’s always dead wood falling off those old maple trees.”