Flyers (9781481414449) (4 page)

“I still hate camping,” I told them, but had to admit to myself this was pretty decent. The top third of the sun was showing now, and you could almost see it climbing. Ethan stayed quiet, which was pretty much how he stayed most of the time, but mornings, forget it—I hardly ever heard Ethan's voice before ten o'clock. His eyes were wide, though, and his jaw was dropped down, so I knew he was enjoying the whole thing too. We kept watching until the sun was above the horizon and moving up through some tree branches.

“Impressive or what?” Bo asked, cocking an eyebrow.

“Not bad,” I said. “What do you do for an encore?”

“Be here tonight and I'll set her back down for you,” he told me, smiling. “Right over there.” He waved his arm west over our campsite, where Jeremy and
Rosasharn were still sacked out—Jeremy tucked way down inside his sleeping bag and probably scowling, and Rosasharn on his back, eyes closed but his mouth already smiling up at the new day.

“Try not to land it near Jeremy if you want it to come again,” I told him.

The sleeping bag containing Jeremy moved a little, so I figured he was awake and listening to us.

“Hey, Ethan,” I said. “Is that a snake over there by Jeremy?”

Ethan gave a little smile and nodded. He knew the routine. For years I'd driven Jeremy crazy by pointing at the ground under his feet and saying, “Snake!” because it was so much fun to watch him dance. A few times there really
had
been a snake there, so Jeremy could never be sure if I was putting him on or not.

“Shuddup,” the sleeping bag told me.

“I think it's one of those timber rattlers, Ethe. Remember how they caught a couple of those around Lake George last summer?”

Ethan nodded again. The sleeping bag said to shut up again.

Rosasharn's eyes were open now and his smile was bigger than ever. He slipped the rest of the way out of his sleeping bag and started tiptoeing toward Jeremy. When he was almost there, Jeremy's sleeping bag sat up and Jeremy's scowly head popped out the top.

“Don't even start, ya tub,” the head told him.

•   •   •

Pop was up and all set to cook a big breakfast for us when Ethan and I walked in.

“Aaah,” Pop said, breaking into a smile when he saw us, “our modern-day Daniel Boones have returned
from the wilderness.” First he pulled us both into him and gave a squeeze, and then he leaned back to get a good look at us.

“I'm no Daniel Boone, Pop,” I told him. “If he'd been like me, we'd still be waiting for somebody to discover Kentucky.”

Pop laughed. “Notwithstanding the native population's claim to that distinction.”

“They're another reason I'd've passed on Kentucky,” I said, grabbing my hair and miming a scalp removal.

“Raaah,” Pop laughed, rocking back on his heels. “Billy admits they used to trim a little close,” he said. “But they didn't charge anything for the service, so how could you make a case against them?” He let loose another laugh at that one. Billy was William Whitecloud. He and Pop had become friends years earlier when Pop represented his tribe in a land-claim action in the Adirondacks. I remember the first time Mr. Whitecloud and his wife came to dinner at our house. Pop, never being one to walk on eggshells, had opened the door for them and yelled back to us, “Indians, boys! Quick, circle the automobiles!” Without batting an eye, Mr. Whitecloud responded in an old Hollywood Indian accent, “Come for Irish seven-course dinner—six-pack and heap-big potato.” Pop loved it. He bear-hugged both of them and must have kept laughing for five minutes.

Humor and affection went hand in hand with Pop, and I think he believed that to leave somebody out of a joke was another way of saying you didn't feel entirely comfortable with him. Some of Pop's best stories were about the Irish, and his favorite one fell out of our own family tree. It concerned his
grandfather, whom he never knew due to a job-related mishap that took place when Pop's mother was still a little girl. The way the story goes, our dear departed great granddad somehow managed to fall headfirst into an open vat of beer at the South Troy brewery where he worked, and died a few days later of complications resulting from breathing in the toxic gases. This part is family history and no one disputes it. Many of the relatives do dispute Pop's version, though, which holds that upon being pulled from the vat, the guy punched and wrestled himself free and then hopped back in. They also deny another of Pop's claims—that he was buried with a gigantic smile on his face.

“At any rate,” Pop said, running a hand through my unscalped scalp, “you look good to me just the way you are.” Then he ran a hand through Ethan's hair. “And we wouldn't want to change anything on you now either, would we, Ethan?”

“Gabe told Jeremy there was a rattlesnake near his sleeping bag,” Ethan said proudly.

“I'm sure Jeremy was delighted to receive
that
piece of information,” Pop said, smiling and rubbing Ethan's head some more.

Ethan laughed. “He was mad,” he said.

“Raaah, raah!” Pop roared. “Yes, I'll bet he was at that.”

Pop then led us into the kitchen and made us his Saturday morning specialty, what he called his world-famous, Tex-Mex-style western omelet. Between Jennie's cooking during the week, and the things Pop made or brought home on the weekends, it's a wonder Ethan and I weren't real tub scouts, but we were anything but. Pop was lean as a post too, but then he
didn't eat the way we did, or at least not the way I did. Not even close.

•   •   •

Back in my room, after a long, leisurely shower where I tried to wash the lingering dampness of the great outdoors away, I went to grab my favorite pair of jeans. The only thing was they weren't there. I knew for a fact they'd been in a pile of clean clothes Jennie had folded and left on the stairs a few days earlier, along with my gray Key West henley and some socks and underwear and things. I almost remembered carrying the pile up to my room, but that didn't mean much. I almost remembered doing a lot of things I never did. I padded out to the hall and checked the stairs. No luck. Next I checked Ethan's room, and then Pop's, in case my things had somehow gotten mixed in with theirs. No luck there either. None of this surprised me. I sometimes think I spend half my life looking for things I've been busy losing during the other half. It was no big deal. My missing stuff generally turned up on its own when it was good and ready, so I never got too bent out of shape unless it was something I absolutely needed that minute, which I didn't this time. I threw on another pair of jeans and then dug out an old green-and-white rugby shirt.

I was eager to get back to the Emerson book Pop had bought me. I'd managed to read a little of it around the campfire the night before. Jeremy, after studying me like a hawk, had announced I'd better not be going off on another of my kicks and driving everybody crazy. I responded by throwing a marshmallow at him, even though I'm the first to admit I do go off the deep end from time to time. A few years earlier I went through a phase where I tried to convince everybody
that Brian Wilson was an underrated musical genius. It didn't stop me that no one else my age even knew who Brian Wilson was—or cared. I'd learned about him from a documentary on the Disney Channel and decided everyone else should know about him too.

After that played itself out, I spent two solid months studying old racing forms that Art saved me from the newsroom, trying to design a system I could use to beat the races that summer at Saratoga. What I ended up with worked great on paper, netting me a hypothetical fortune on horses I picked from already-run races at Belmont. Unfortunately the first two times I actually went to the track I ended up losing almost a hundred dollars. (Jeremy lost fifty, which had the effect of further dampening his enthusiasm for my hobbies.)

Then I went through my magic phase, where I pored over about twenty different books on famous magicians and escape artists, trying to learn everything I could about how they were able to do all the things they did. I learned a few tricks, but before I got anywhere near good my mind had already graduated to something else.

What happened was, the whole idea of creating illusions got me thinking more about reality itself. Because if things can
seem
so real and not be, you have to start wondering what
is
real, and when you start getting into that, you find out that most of the things around you are a lot less real than you thought.

I know that sounds far-fetched when you first hear it, but the more you think about it, the more sense it makes. Take, say, something like a hunk of wood. On the surface level the wood is real enough, and if somebody were to hit you over the head with it, it wouldn't do you a whole lot of good. But if you trace the
makeup of that hunk of wood beyond its molecules and get to the atomic level, you find that what's actually there is just a bunch of electrons whirling around submicroscopic nuclei—kind of like miniature solar systems consisting mostly of empty space. And here's where it really starts to hit you. The electrons aren't
things
at all—not solid physical things anyway. They're just energy. So you're left with nothing solid but the nuclei. And if you study
them,
the little neutrons and protons, it turns out these little guys are nothing but waves of energy too. So you start with a solid, hurt-your-head-with-it hunk of wood, and in the end you find out it's nothing but an expression of some kind of energy soup. And this is true of everything you see around you, from a banana peel to somebody's mother-in-law.

That's one of the things that struck me as I'd plunged into the Emerson book that morning. He seemed to know this stuff back when scientists hadn't even discovered
bacteria,
let alone the atom. He learned it from studying the ancient Indian holy books. I kept rereading the second stanza of his poem “Brahma,” which is what the Hindus call the soul of the universe:

Far or forget to me is near;

Shadow and sunlight are the same;

The vanished gods to me appear;

And one to me are shame and fame.

What he seemed to be saying was, everything is actually
one
thing—even things that appear to be opposites. And when you see that underlying unity, I guess he was saying you see God. Bo and I'd had plenty of late-night and all-night discussions about this kind of thing—Bo being kind of Eastern in his approach
to life, as you might guess—so this wasn't completely new to me. I thought about it some more and then read the poem through to the end. The next stanza was trickier, and I was wishing Bo was there so I could run it by him.

They reckon ill who leave me out;

When me they fly, I am the wings;

I am the doubter and the doubt,

And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

I checked my dictionary and found that the Brahmins were the priestly class in India, but I still couldn't get the whole thing to come together for me. I read it over two or three more times, still not quite getting all of it, but liking it anyway. Whenever I hit that stanza, I'd smile, thinking about how Ethan would love the part about flying.

And for the time being at least, I'd pretty much forgotten about the missing clothes.

Bo called from
the country club around noon. He'd turned sixteen in the spring and gotten a job in the pro shop, where he handed out people's clubs when they went out to play and then cleaned them and put them away when they were done. In between, he worked the cash register when the pro was out giving a lesson or having lunch. The hours weren't bad and neither were the tips. Anyway, he'd be getting out at three and wondered if I wanted to do anything. I told him to swing by and we'd come up with something.

Pop was at his office, which is pretty usual for him on a Saturday, always having more of a workload than he can take care of in a five-day week. Ethan had taken his Holstein calf out of our little barn and was in the front yard trying to halter-train it. Pop had given him the calf for Christmas, and Ethan was planning to show it at the county fair at the end of the summer. I'd been showing cattle at the fair each year since I was Ethan's age and had gone on to state fair twice. All the calves I'd raised were over at Jeremy's farm now, having grown into cows and needing to be milked twice a day, which didn't always fit into my schedule, especially after the novelty wore off. I wasn't sure if I was going to show them this year or not. Not only is it a lot of work, but when you're almost sixteen, you're supposed to be too cool for that kind of thing. I knew I'd probably end up doing it, though, partly for Ethan's
sake, and partly because I actually still got a kick out of it.

I felt bad when I looked out and saw Ethan gently tugging on his calf all by himself. When I was training my three calves to lead, Ethan was with me every minute, getting behind them and pushing when they got stubborn, even though at the time they were a lot bigger than he was. Ethan probably wanted me to help him, but if he knows I'm in my room reading or doing homework or even taking a nap, he'll never disturb me. I never told him not to bother me or yelled at him for it or anything like that. It's just the way Ethan's always been. When he was younger, sometimes I'd find him outside my room, just sitting there in the hall, waiting for me to come out. As he got older, he wouldn't sit and wait for me anymore. He'd start doing whatever it was he wanted to do by himself, but always close by so I could join him when I was ready. I try to remember him, but he's so quiet and it's easy for me to get all wrapped up in what I'm doing and forget he's even there. I've told him a million times to let me know when he wants me for something, but he never will.