Flyers (9781481414449) (2 page)

Bo finished panning and gave me a little over-the-shoulder wave, which took me by surprise since I hadn't made a sound as far as I could tell. That was more like what I expected from Ethan, who seemed to have a sixth sense about that kind of thing. It was almost impossible to sneak up on Ethan, who was always doing things like answering our door before anybody
even rang the bell—just the opposite of Pop and me, who might not know the difference if somebody was out there taking our front porch apart.

Bo must have noticed my surprised expression. “You're not half as quiet as you think you are, Gabe.” He reached down and grabbed his camera bag.

“You may want to stay here for a while,” I told him. “Rosasharn and Jeremy are going at it again.”

Bo laughed. “Or maybe we'd better get started while they're both still in one piece.” He slid the camera bag over my shoulder and picked up his camera and tripod.

“You want to check on your dad first?” Bo asked as we started up the hill. “We can hold off on the shooting.”

“Nah,” I said. “It's early. I'll do it after.”

Bo nodded and we trudged on. A few seconds later we heard some yelling and looked up the hill to see Rosasharn rolling on the ground in front of the campfire. I thought at first he was doing that Curly thing where he gets on the ground and runs his feet around in circles, until I saw Jeremy tear over and start swatting at him. Then Ethan jumped up and got into the act. Bo and I ran up to see what the deal was.

“The stupid tub was on fire,” Jeremy told us, still a little out of breath.

Little wisps of smoke rose up from the ankles of Rosasharn's Green Guy costume.

“He was moonwalking,” Ethan explained, wide-eyed. “And he went through the fire.”

“It was the fire's fault,” Rosasharn announced from the ground. “It should have seen me coming.”

“Stupid tub,” Jeremy said, all indignant. “How's a fire s'posed to see you coming?” That was the beauty
of Jeremy: No matter how ridiculous a situation got, he always insisted on being rational. That alone probably went a long way toward explaining his scowl.

I bent down to study Rosasharn's smoldering outfit, a sickly olive-green thing that had been designed and manufactured by Rosasharn's girlfriend, Sudie Robinson. The costume consisted of a pair of gray long johns covered with pea-green construction paper scales, along with matching green gloves, and a Halloween headpiece we'd picked up at a costume shop in Schenectady. Some of the scales below the knees were pretty well charred, and we didn't have any paper on hand to fix them up. I reported all this to Bo.

“Hmm . . . ,” Bo said, thinking. “Why don't we go out to the road for the car scene. It'll be dark enough by the time we're set up there, and it's almost all long shots and facials so you won't be able to see his ankles much anyway.”

He reached down to help Rosasharn to his feet. “You still up for this, tiger?”

“Me health has niver been better,” Rosasharn said in a lousy Irish accent. “And me mither thanks ya fur inquirin'.”

“Stupid tub,” Jeremy said. And in a strange way his grumpiness was kind of touching. I think he'd been genuinely worried for the big guy.

•   •   •

Jeremy sat there for a minute rotating the steering wheel back and forth and scowling at it. “Is this thing attached to anything?” he wanted to know.

Bo and I laughed. The play in Rosasharn's steering wheel was legendary. We used to joke that you had to turn it three complete revolutions to switch lanes. The rest of the car was no great shakes either. The
transmission, an archaic on-the-column three-speed, was exactly fifty percent shot, having a second and third gear but no first or reverse. Not only that, but the floor of the car had, over the years, gradually rusted away from the sides, which left it strung there like a hammock, and when you hit bumps it sagged down and gave you a good view of the pavement flying by underneath.

“Okay, start it up,” I told Jeremy as Bo went over to help Ethan, who was setting up the video camera. “Pump the gas a few times first.”

“Shuddup,” Jeremy said. “I know how to drive.” He did. Being a farm kid, he'd probably done more driving than all of us put together, but since he was now driving for our film I felt justified in giving him advice.

Jeremy pushed the brake, which you could tell from the way he scrunched down sank almost to the floor. “Ya call this a car?” he said.

The engine turned over slowly as Jeremy hit the key, and with a belch of smoke started up. It sat there wheezing and shaking like something sick that needed to have a blanket thrown over itself.

“Okay,” I said, sticking my head in the window. “Remember, no reverse, so you'll just hang a U-ey in my driveway. And be careful on the hill. The road has some major dips there and with this steering, you could lose it. And the most important thing—are you listening, Jeremy?—the most important thing is you gotta be able to stop when Rosasharn jumps in front of you. You already know about the brakes, so give yourself room. Ya hear me?” I reached in and rapped on his head a few times.

He slapped my hand away. “Nobody'd stop for that,” he said, pointing at Rosasharn, who was coming toward us in his Green Guy getup.

“Just follow the script, Jeremy. When he jumps in front of you, stop. Humor me on this one.”

“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.

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.