Flyers (9781481414449) (17 page)

The thing that caught my attention, though, was the kid himself, Andy, squinting into the sun and grinning in that kid kind of way where you couldn't be sure if he was smiling or smirking, but you couldn't help but smile back at him. With a few scattered freckles and the sandy-colored hair hanging down over his eyes—eyes that seemed to be smiling along with the rest of him—he could have been cast as Tom Sawyer. I looked back to the school picture and saw that it was just an older version of the same face. He was one of those kids who'd made the transition from kid to young man without any major facial traumas, having almost the same delicate features at eighteen that he'd had at twelve. This was undoubtedly thanks to his mother, who had the same kind of features herself.

Jeremy had opened the closet door, and I could hear him scrounging around in there. When he came out he was holding a shotgun.

“Anybody you wanna shoot?” he said.

“You have to ask?” I told him.

Jeremy went back inside and scrounged around some more. I set the snapshot in my hand next to the other picture of Andy on the desk and started checking the lights in the room. All off. Then I walked over to the window. The shade was up. I stood there and looked down the driveway to where I had been standing the night before.

“This is so strange,” I said.

“What?” Jeremy said from the closet.

“The whole thing's bizarre. I
know
I saw a light in one of these rooms, and I
know
the shade was down.” Suddenly another thought hit me—something I'd seen, but it just hadn't registered. “Jeremy, come 'ere.”

He took his sweet time about it, but he came out holding an old car magazine. “What now, scrub?”

“You notice anything different about this room from the last one we checked?”

“Better posters,” he said.

“No,” I said.
“Cobwebs.
There's no cobwebs. And look. . . . “I swiped a finger across a dresser in the corner.

“No dust. It's like it's just been cleaned. Even the downstairs has dust, and we just did that last week.”

“Oooouuu,” Jeremy said, tossing the magazine on the bed, “a ghost that cleans.” But even he seemed to be wondering a little bit. Myself, I was beginning to have a strange feeling about that room—as if . . . I don't know . . . as if it contained some kind of a
presence,
for lack of a better word. And I couldn't help remembering what Mr. Lindstrom had said about seeing Andy.

I went back to the desk and looked at the two pictures of Andy again. Both of them smiled up at me.

Later that afternoon
we all met to do another shoot at Blood Red Pond. Even though Green Guy and his family were pretty much creatures of the night, my script called for the whole clan to go into family counseling, and since their counselor was human, they had to adjust their schedules accordingly. I took some razzing from everybody for managing to drag a Mrs. Quinby type into even a swamp monster flick, of course. Jeremy shook his head and said again, “The kid's obsessed,” and Bo followed with, “Yeah, but at least with Gabe there's no guessing. You always know a psychologist stands for a psychologist.”

Bo had gotten off work at four, and we were all set up to begin when he arrived. I'd gone home after snooping around Mr. Lindstrom's place with Jeremy, figuring I'd check in on Ethan and maybe help him with Cappy for a while if he wanted. Ethan's bike was home but he was nowhere to be found. I knew he hadn't ridden into town with Pop because Pop had left for Albany on business in the morning, so I figured maybe he'd gone for a walk or something on his own. It seemed like Ethan was doing a lot more on his own lately, and I felt a little bad about that. Part of it may have been just that he was getting older, but I was afraid at least some of it might have been that I was always so busy with my thoughts and activities that I left him hanging too much on his own and maybe he'd decided he wasn't waiting for me anymore. A few times in the last few days when I'd come across him,
he'd looked up at me kind of surprised, as if he had a secret he wasn't sharing. Part of me figured it was good that he was becoming more independent, but a bigger part of me missed having him waiting around for me so we could do things together.

I took a shower, and when I went to get dressed I had another surprise. Now my backup pair of jeans was missing. And while I was pawing around for them, I discovered my green pocket tee was gone too. Then, when I went down to the laundry room to drop off my sweaty working-on-the-farm clothes and to see if there was any folded clean stuff available, what do I spot but my missing Key West henley on top of the dirty-laundry pile. And right under them were my original missing jeans. This was very strange. Jennie must've done four wash loads since they'd disappeared, not to mention that I could've sworn they'd been in a
clean
-clothes pile the last I'd seen them. This kind of thing had always been pretty much the story of my life, but now it was getting out of hand. I trudged back up to my room and dug out some backup things to my backup things.

Ethan showed up about twenty minutes before we were supposed to meet at the pond. I was loading up the cooler, because we planned on staying there right through dinner. I wasn't having much more luck with the food than I'd had with the clothes.

“Hey, Ethan,” I said as he pulled some Wheat Thins out of the cupboard and set them by the cooler, “didn't Pop just bring home a bunch of Cajun shrimp yesterday? And some seafood salad?”

Ethan kind of shrugged and went back to the cupboard. I waited for him to say something, but he didn't.

“Where'd all that stuff go?” I said.

Ethan plunked some nachos down next to the Wheat Thins. “I ate it,” he said, looking up at me apologetically.

“You ate it
all?”
Ethan can hold his own when it comes to eating, but he's still fairly pint-sized and he doesn't even like Cajun shrimp that much.

“Sorry,” he said, and he looked it too.

“No,” I said, thinking I'd come on too strong. “You can eat whatever you want.” I reached back into the refrigerator and pulled out some deli turkey. “We've still got plenty of stuff.” I grabbed some lettuce and mayonnaise and a loaf of bread. “Come on. We'd better take off or they'll be waiting.”

A half hour later the Green family was all suited up and I was giving them the once-over before Bo arrived.

“Nothing personal,” I told them, “but you guys look like doo-doo in the daylight.” I said it kind of without thinking, or maybe thinking Jeremy would be the only one who'd take offense, and was kind of surprised when I saw Sudie giving me a look. Then it hit me that she was the one who made their costumes. “Of course, I don't mean 'doo-doo' in a bad way,” I explained with a lame smile.

“Yeah, right,” she said, looking over the rims of her glasses at me. Sudie didn't actually wear glasses, but she was going to be playing our counselor, and we were following the time-honored film and TV convention of making someone look intellectual by sticking a pair of glasses on her face. It didn't work any better now than it ever did, but that didn't matter. We were playing the scene for laughs anyway.

I'd ordered some counselor props from a company in New Jersey that specialized in selling every kind
of baloney that ever came down the pike to help people “heal.” I got “The Feelings Game” (which turned out to be the same one we'd used with Mrs. Quinby) for Green Guy and Green Gal to play, and since Ethan was too shy to speak on camera, I decided on a “feelings” wall chart for him. It had all these different clown faces on it in pockets all around a Ferris wheel, and as the catalog put it, “When the child wants to express a certain feeling, he takes the clown face from the pocket and places it in the center of the wheel (it stays on by the magic of Velcro!).” When I called the 1-800 number and tried to place the order, the lady on the other end asked me if I was a licensed therapist. Being caught a little off-guard I said no, and she almost wouldn't send me the stuff. Finally she checked with some higher-up, and after a few minutes' discussion they must have decided it was all right. What did they think—that the sad-faced clown in the wrong hands might cause serious damage to a kid? Those people kill me.

Filming the scene was almost easier than ordering the props. Sudie was really becoming a decent actress, not to mention a complete ham when she wanted to be, but she played it completely straight, guiding this goofy family through their goofy therapy. Each time Ethan put a clown face expressing what he was supposedly feeling in the center of the Ferris wheel, she made a big deal out of it just like Mrs. Quinby would have, explaining in an unscripted aside to the camera how important it is to “affirm children's feelings whenever appropriate.” Ethan was hamming it up too. By the end of the scene, he was flinging those feelings up there one after the other, and Sudie could hardly keep up with all the affirming she owed him. Meanwhile, Green Guy and Green Gal were busy
describing off-the-wall scenarios about when they felt each of the feelings they'd landed on in “The Feelings Game.” In a little over an hour we had more than enough usable footage, as well as pains in our sides from laughing so hard.

Even with all that was going on, I couldn't help but notice that every so often Ethan would look out into the woods as if he'd seen something or was
expecting
to see something. I asked him once what he was looking for, and he just shrugged and right away went back to reading his script. I may be a little dense about a lot of things, but I was slowly getting the idea that he knew more than he was letting on about some of the stuff that had been happening around these parts—my missing clothes, the food shortages, and maybe even the strange sightings by Ray McPherson and Mr. Lindstrom. I took a long look into the area of the woods where I'd caught Ethan sneaking peeks, but of course I didn't see anything. Sighing, I decided all I could do was keep my eyes open and wait until whatever was going on became obvious enough that even I couldn't miss it.

•   •   •

That evening, as we sat around the fire, Rosasharn reached over and grabbed Jeremy, saying he had a feeling he wanted to share. Jeremy proceeded to share what
he
was feeling. He smacked Rosasharn on the side of the head.

“I think I should order Jeremy a self-esteem coloring book,” I said.

“Shut up,” he said.

We laughed at the idea of scowly-faced Jeremy with crayons and then gradually drifted off into our own thoughts. Jeremy got up and started stoking the fire.

“You wanna know what gets me?” he said, and
threw on a couple of big sticks. He actually waited until we all nodded our heads. “Campaign posters,” he then announced.

“Campaign
posters?” I said. The thing was it was June and nobody'd seen any campaign posters in months.

“Yeah,” he said. “They're so stupid. You see this poster sitting on somebody's lawn or someplace, and the thing says maybe three words, like ‘Vote for Hincky' or something like that, and it doesn't even tell you anything
about
the guy. So what's supposed to happen? A week later you're in the voting booth ready to vote for the other guy and all of a sudden you think, ‘Hey, wait. That poster said to vote for Hincky.' It's so stupid. Who's gonna change their vote because of an idiotic poster that doesn't even tell you anything?”

“I don't know about you,” Rosasharn said, “but Hincky's got my vote.”

Jeremy was so wrapped up in what he was saying he didn't even call Rosasharn a tub or tell him to shut up. “You know what else is stupid?” he said. “Those bumper stickers that say S
CHOOL'S OUT
. D
RIVE CAREFULLY.
If they're gonna have those, then how come they don't have some that say S
CHOOL'S BACK IN SESSION. DRIVE CRAZY AGAIN.”

You could see he was getting all wound up and was developing a kind of momentum. His face was all earnest and intense, as if these things were more important than peace in the Middle East. More than once Bo has told me that I look the same way when I get up on my high horse. Still, that didn't stop me from getting a charge out of Jeremy's performance. Everybody else seemed to be enjoying it too.

“And you know those B
ABY ON
B
OARD
stickers?”
Jeremy continued. “Like your car is going out of control and you're about to crash into somebody, but all of a sudden you see that sticker and decide ya better hit somebody else. Gimme a break.”

Jeremy was working the fire harder now, sending up a shower of sparks every time he poked at it. Meanwhile he went on listing everything he could think of that rubbed him the wrong way, till all of us, including Ethan, were just about rolling in the dirt. Finally he noticed the reaction he was getting and offered his standard advice.

“Shut up,” he told us.

•   •   •

Bo stayed at my house that night. He would have just as soon we stayed out at the pond, but I nixed the idea. The one camp-out we'd already had had pretty much cured me of that for the season. Bo and I had stayed at each other's houses so much over the years that we both had our own beds in both places. When we were little kids, we probably could have disappeared from the face of the earth, and for a few days everybody would have just thought we were at the other one's house.

After we'd undressed and climbed into bed, I suddenly remembered something I'd been wanting to talk with him about.

“Did you know Mr. Lindstrom had a daughter?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “I saw some pictures at his house and I guess I figured one of them was his daughter. Why?”

“I found out last night she's suing him.” I knew none of this was
legally
confidential, but it seemed personal enough that I wouldn't have told anybody about it except Bo.