Flyers (9781481414449) (22 page)

I felt sorry for him, but I was still pretty much occupied being worried about Ethan and me. All while I waited for Andy to continue I was staring at the gun in his lap.

He took a couple of big snuffs and then went on. “I had to go someplace. I couldn't stay home anymore, and this was the only place I could think of.” He ran his hand through his hair and shook his head slowly. “My mother . . . she's lost it. All she talks about these days is
him
—about how everything that goes wrong is
his
fault.”

My mind was working overtime trying to connect the dots. “Him” had to be her father, Mr. Lindstrom.

“Not that
that's
anything new,” he continued. “A couple of years ago, we moved from Maryland back to Saratoga, and I swear she did it just to be near him. So she could bother him. She used to get her loser boyfriend—the loser boyfriend she had at the time—to call his house. As soon as the old guy picked up the phone, the loser would say things like, ‘We're watching you' and ‘You can run but you can't hide,' that kind of crap. Just to do a number on his head. One time she even made a tape of her loser boyfriend's voice saying that stuff so that she could call him and play it, and meanwhile the loser's over in his yard shooting little pebbles at his windows. When the old guy came charging out, there was a note taped to his porch that said WE
TOLD
YOU WE WERE WATCHING. They pulled that one twice before that loser took off on her. Then we moved to Syracuse with her new loser, and she had him make a few calls from there.”

I thought about Mr. Lindstrom sitting alone in that big old house, getting those calls and figuring every time that there was somebody outside spying on him. No wonder he took to ranting and raving around his yard.

“Her latest boyfriend was the worst of the bunch-one of those wheeler-dealer types who's always got something going only he always screws it up. He said he was gonna start some kind of business—cleaning pools or something like that—and he just needed some money to get it off the ground. So my mother gave him all the money we had—about seven hundred dollars. That same night he got busted for cocaine possession-seven hundred dollars' worth. The first guy he tried to sell to turned out to be an undercover cop. So much for his
pool-cleaning
business. The loser.” He shook his head some more. “That was the last straw for my mother. No money. No boyfriend. A job she hated. She cried all that night and kept asking over and over what we were gonna do. I tried to talk to her but it was as if she didn't even know I was there.”

He paused and almost seemed to drift off for a while. An uncomfortable silence filled the room, but for the life of me I couldn't think of a thing to say.

“When I was little,” Andy continued in a voice that sounded weaker and more distant, “I always liked stories about kids living on farms. I always kind of envied those kids. It seemed like such a good life—staying in one place and having animals and lots of land and all that. That night, while my mother was crying nonstop in the next room, I kept thinking about being on a farm. Finally I made up my mind, and I went and told her that we should come here—that however bad she thought her father was, he couldn't be any worse than most of
the loser boyfriends we'd lived with.”

“What'd she say?” I finally asked after he'd sat slumped there a while without saying anything.

His head came up slowly. He was all-out crying now and didn't even try to hold it back. “She went
crazy—
screaming and throwing stuff and hitting me. . . . She said she'd done the best she could and if that's the way I felt to get the hell out. I guess that night was the last straw for me too because that's just what I did. I didn't even pack anything. I just walked out the door.” He took a deep breath. “I slept in a park that night and then started for here. It took me almost the whole next day to hitchhike this far, and then a few more hours to find the place.”

“I still don't get why didn't you knock on the door and introduce yourself,” I said, but a little nicer than I'd said it before.

Andy shrugged. “All my life I'd heard nothing but bad things about that guy. One other time, when I was little, I'd asked my mother about him, and she slapped me across the face for even mentioning him.” He shook his head. “That's a laugh. She's spent her whole
life
talking about him, and I get slapped for just bringing him
up.
Anyway, I couldn't even imagine what he must be like. So when I finally got here, I wasn't all that eager to go running up to the house. I walked around in the woods, thinking about what to do, and that's when I heard you guys. And after the goofy kid jumped on that car, I doubled back around and found stuff to eat at your campsite. The next day, I started getting things I needed from your house.”

“So you just walked in and helped yourself?” I was surprised how much that bothered me. My whole life our house had been the kind of place people could feel
free to drop in to, and lots of times we'd get home and find Rosasharn or Jeremy or somebody in the living room watching TV. But that was different from having a stranger sneaking in and scrounging around for whatever he felt like helping himself to.

“What'd you
want
me to do? If you don't like it, why don't you try locking your doors once in a while? What are you worried about anyway? It's not like you can't afford to lose a little stuff.”

“I don't think that's the point,” I said.

“You try being someplace with no money and no place to stay sometime and then come and tell me about the
point.”
He let that sink in before continuing. “I moved into here after the old guy got sent to the hospital. Your brother heard me in your kitchen a few nights ago picking up some things. The last few days he's been getting me what I needed.”

I realized that he'd probably been in our house practically every day up until when Ethan found him. He'd even been picking up fresh clothes and leaving the dirty clothes in the laundry pile, for crying out loud.

“He saw you, didn't he?” I said. “Your grandfather. He saw you the night he had the stroke.”

Andy nodded. “That night . . . I'd finally decided to speak to him. . . . After he'd backed the tractor into that old barn, I walked up to the door . . .” He was back to crying again, almost as hard as before. “He saw me in the doorway. . . . At first he just stared at me, and then he started coming at me. I've never seen that kind of look on anybody's face. . . . I knew then my mother was right about him. The next thing I know he's chasing me. The crazy old man is chasing me, waving his arms and yelling for me to come back. I ran all the way to the pond and hid out. There was no way I was gonna let
that head case get his hands on me. Then the next morning the ambulance was there. I didn't know something had happened to him, but it didn't matter. He was crazy anyway.” He pulled my rugby shirt up to wipe his eyes.

“He wasn't crazy,” I said. “He thought you were the
other
Andy His son.” I pointed to the picture on the desk.

He gave a sneering laugh. “And that's not crazy? He thought I was some kind of a zombie? Yeah, he sounds like he's all there.” He wiped his eyes on my shirt again and looked over at me looking at him. “What? You want your precious shirt back? You can have it.”

He reached down and grabbed the bottom of the shirt. For a second I thought he was going to pull the shirt up over his head and throw it at me, and when he did I was going to charge him—hit him in the midsection and tackle him when his head was covered and his arms were tangled in the sleeves. Ethan might not like it, I knew, but once I had the gun I'd feel better about things. He didn't do it though. He wiped his eyes again and let the bottom of the shirt fall back down. “You can get it tomorrow,” he said bitterly. “I won't be needing it.”

That seemed to remind him of what he intended to do. He took the gun off his lap and kind of waved it our way. “Look, I don't want to hurt you, but you gotta get going. That jerk with the bat is probably crying to the police right now about me shooting at him, and I'm not waiting around for them to come and get me.” There was a hitch in his voice as he said this, then his eyes went down to the gun. A tear ran down his cheek, and he wiped it away angrily. “Just go, will ya?”

“Why don't you come with us?” I said, kind of
surprised to hear myself saying it. “You don't have anyplace to go, and—”

“That's right!” he said angrily. “I don't have anyplace to go! This was the last chance I had. I don't even care anymore. I'm not going back home, and
he's
history. Even if he wasn't crazy, which he
is,
he's not getting out of that hospital. I've heard you talking about him. He's gonna die.”

I shrugged. “Maybe. But he's not crazy. It was just the shock of seeing you. That and . . . Did you know your mother was suing him?”

He nodded. “Something she picked up from one of her afternoon talk shows. Watching those is another of her specialties—in addition to hooking up with worthless guys.” He wasn't crying now. He just looked tired. “I'm so sick of it,” he said. “I'm sick of everything. It doesn't even matter anymore. That old guy—he's a goner. And my mother might as well be, with the way she lives.” He was quiet for a few seconds, and then he started crying again. “Coming here was my last hope. And look how it turned out.” He slammed his free hand into the wall angrily. “So get out of here!” he yelled with a sudden violent intensity. “Get out! Do you want to see this? Do you want your little brother to see this? Go on! Get!”

The gun barrel was up to his mouth again. His finger was on the trigger, and his hand was shaking like mad. He'd gone hysterical.

“Don't!” I yelled, and Ethan did too. It all of a sudden dawned on me that that's what Ethan had been yelling at him when I arrived, and that my arrival had just delayed things a few minutes. “Your grandfather . . . ,” I stammered. “We don't know for sure he won't pull through. You can at least wait and see.”

He pulled the gun back a few inches. “Last
chance,” he said in a deadly quiet voice. “You'd better leave.” The gun went back to his mouth.

I'd like to think I would have kept talking—that I would have said all the right things and saved the day. But I'm not sure I could have said anything more. I'll never know. Because just then we heard Pop's voice calling us from downstairs. Andy lowered the gun and leaned his head back against the wall and just stayed like that for the longest time with his eyes closed. I think I felt sorrier for him at that moment than at any other. I knew he had to be thinking that even his suicide wasn't coming out right. It would have been the perfect time to rush him, but I just stood there with Ethan, feeling terrible, but relieved too that Pop was here to take control of things. I could hear Pop making his way up the stairs, asking if we were cleaning the upstairs now or what. I finally managed to yell, “In here, Pop,” although he would have found us anyway since Andy's room was the only one with a light on.

Ethan and I stayed where we were as Pop headed down the upstairs hallway toward us. “Sudie and the boys said I might find you here,” he was saying. “I got a call from the hospital and I'm afraid things aren't looking so good with John.”

I looked at Andy. He was still leaning against the wall, the gun back in his lap, as he waited, resigned to the whole thing, for Pop to enter the room.

“We'd better step lively—” Pop stopped in midstep and midsentence when he saw Andy on the other side of the room. He seemed to study him for a few seconds, his jaw hanging down. “Well, I'll be dipped and fried,” he finally said. He took a few steps closer and studied Andy some more. “For a second I could have sworn I was seeing a ghost, but that's not the case, now is it?”

“Don't bother coming any closer,” Andy said wearily. “God, you people might as well move into this house.”

Pop looked from Andy to us and then back to Andy. “The resemblance is simply
remarkable,”
Pop said. “Simply remarkable.”

Andy didn't say anything more, so I started filling Pop in on some of the details, tentatively at first and then picking up some steam when Andy didn't try to stop me. Ethan looked up at me a few times and nodded, in silent appreciation, I think, of the way I was summing things up.

Pop listened to the whole spiel, making the usual Pop sounds and facial expressions, studying Andy and shaking his head in wonder. “Well, I'll be dipped and fried,” he said again when I'd pretty much wrapped up the story.

“So
now
you'll get out?” Andy said, waving the gun feebly toward the door.

“Yes,” Pop told him. “And you will too. You're coming to the hospital with us.”

As soon as he took a step in Andy's direction, the gun went back up to Andy's head. “I'll do it right in front of you,” he said. “Right in front of all of you, so don't fool with me. Just get going!” His finger was shaking on the trigger.

“You'll do no such thing,” Pop said. “Look, son, if you're determined to kill yourself, there's nobody can stop you. There'll be plenty of time for that later—there's always later for that sorry kind of business. But right now there's a man in the hospital, somebody who means a lot to us and I think would mean a lot to you if you knew him. He lost his son to an accident, and his daughter to”—he waved his hand—“to God knows
what, and if I can show him his grandson before he leaves this earth, then dammit, I'm gonna do it. Now, for the love of Peter, do the decent thing and put that gun down and come with us.”

“I don't owe
him
anything,” Andy said. “What's he ever done for me?”