I sat there. As much as I wanted to, it just wasn’t the right moment to say “Thanks for the ride” and get out. I looked over and noticed Pop’s car wasn’t back in the yard yet. No cavalry to the rescue.
“You wanna know what I’m thinking?” Ray said, and looked for all the world as if he were staring right through me.
I nodded—reluctantly.
“I’m thinking them sonavabitchin’ things are the same sons-o’-bitches that come charging out of the woods last Saturday at that stupid-assed drug day they was having at that tax drain they call a school.”
“Yeah?” I said—not so brilliant, maybe, but then I hadn’t had time to plan for this conversation.
Ray wasn’t through making connections. “That ain’t all,” he said. “You know what else I’m thinking?”
I held my breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Ray continued solemnly. “I think John Lindstrom seen ’em too, and that’s what give him his stroke. I come prit’ near having one myself seeing that numb-nut-looking thing staring down at me . . . nothing between us but a friggin’ windshield. I’m telling ya, Gabey, you never seen nothin’ like it!” He wore a vague but undeniable look of pride as he studied me—the look of a survivor.
“He told Pop he saw his son,” I said, hoping to steer the conversation a little.
“And what’s that tell you?” Ray said. “You’re supposed to be a smart guy. What’s that mean in your book?”
I shrugged, not having the slightest idea what he wanted me to say.
“College,” he said, kind of disgusted. Not meaning that I’d gone, but that I was the type who would go, and already I’d lost my common sense. I didn’t get all this out of that one word, but from a whole lifetime of living in Wakefield.
“It means,” Ray continued in what I took to be his remedial voice, “that he’s crazier than a outhouse rat.” He studied me to see if I was getting his drift. It must be he didn’t think I was because he rolled his eyes and continued in that same remedial voice. “I’ve known John Lindstrom my whole life, and he may have been missing a few cards, I’ll give you that, but you know as well as I do, most of his friggin’ deck was still there. Until that night.” He leaned in toward me. “So you tell me. What did that sonavabitch see that night that knocked him over the edge? He seen one of them sorry-assed . . . whatever the hell the friggin’ things are. You can’t tell me he didn’t.”
He waited to see if I had any intention of telling him he didn’t.
“And that ain’t all,” he continued. “There’s other donkey dookie going on around here.”
It suddenly came back to me why I’d been trekking down the road at such a good clip. “Like what?” I asked, this time genuinely interested.
“Like at that friggin’ house you just left,” he said.
He definitely had my interest now, and I figured he knew it and was playing it for all the drama he could.
“You see anything in there?” he wanted to know.
I shrugged. “Like what?” I said again, dying to know what he was getting at.
He looked at me and nodded knowingly. “Let’s just say that God forsaken dump of a place ain’t as empty as it’s supposed to be.”
I sat up straighter and looked at him. “Yeah?” I said.
“I’ve seen things,” he said importantly. “More than once.”
“You’ve seen things in the house?” My heart started picking up the pace again just from remembering the feeling I’d had when I left there.
He nodded, playing it for all it was worth. “Damn right.”
“Pop’s been in there,” I said, thinking that might be what he saw. “And I’ve been over a few times with my friends. We cleaned the place one day.”
He shook his head. “I ain’t talking about your old man, or you and your squirrel-bait friends. Things friggin’ happen when you ain’t even close to that place.”
“Yeah?” I said. Guys like Ray always seemed to have a pretty good handle on where everybody is at any given time, which always amazed me since I wasn’t even sure where I was half the time.
Ray nodded. “At first I thought maybe that pill-faced daughter of his had come back and was staying there. You ever see her? She’s scarier than the sonavabitchin’ thing that was on my friggin’ hood. But I didn’t see no car around. And then I find out from Clutzy today that she ain’t been here and you couldn’t get her here if you wanted to, even though I don’t know why anybody’d friggin’ want to. So if she ain’t been here, how do you explain some of the hocus pocus I been seeing? Lights on, then off, shades down, then up, you name it. Then one friggin’ afternoon I seen something moving around the living room. And it wasn’t you and your brother ’cause you were out in the yard draggin’ around that fur ball calf, and your old man was at his office, and young Rosa was cleaning motel rooms and young Wulfson mowing hay and young Michaelson out at the damn country club. So I pull up and look through the friggin’ windows, but whatever it was I seen has already made itself good and scarce. I shoulda kicked the sonavabitchin’ door down, but at the time I was still thinking it mighta been Rachel and I didn’t feel like ending up face-to-face with that. But come to find out it wasn’t Rachel, and it wasn’t Rachel any of them other times either. So I seen you over there again today and I wanted to find out if you knew what in God’s green friggin’ earth was going on at that place.”
I shook my head and probably looked just wide-eyed enough to be believable. “I wish I did.”
“I’ll tell you something, Gabey—just between you me and the sonavabitchin’ man in the moon. I’m about done wishing I knew what was goin’ on there. Tonight I’m gonna find out for myself.”
I looked at him. “Whaddaya gonna do?”
“You ain’t gotta worry,” he said. “I ain’t gonna break into your pal’s precious friggin’ place. Not unless I have to anyway. But I’ll be there watching, you can bet your hindquarters on that, and I’ll stay all sonavabitchin’ night if I have to.”
“And if you see something?”
Ray snorted and reached into his backseat. “Depends. But I might just play me some baseball.” He pulled out a beat-up old baseball bat that looked like it might have belonged to Babe Ruth’s grandfather and waved it in my face. “This here’s Betsy,” he told me, “and I wouldn’t wanna be some sorry-assed, numbnutted, green sonavabitch when old Betsy’s open for business.” He nodded solemnly and looked down at Betsy like a proud father and then back to me. “No sirree, Gabey. I would not.”
Eighteen
I hurried in to the phone, hoping I could get hold of everybody before it was too late. We’d planned to meet at the pond to do some more filming that evening, but that no longer seemed like such a bright idea. With Ray and his pal Betsy lurking in the shadows, just itching for action, the last thing we needed was for Rosasharn and Jeremy and Ethan to be running around Mr. Lindstrom’s property decked out as creatures from the underworld. Knowing Ray, by evening he’d have downed a few beers, and even if he didn’t start clubbing them on sight, we still wouldn’t be out of the woods. When it dawned on him that we were responsible for the original attack on his car, it could have a serious impact on his pride, which, in turn, could have a serious impact on our well-being—especially mine, since I was the one who’d sat right next to him and listened to him tell the whole cockamamie story without saying a word. And if I didn’t call ahead, it’d be just like Rosasharn to put on his stupid costume and go driving down the road right past Ray and then wave to him for good measure. It’d be Rogue Nun all over again.
I reached Bo at the pro shop and filled him in. He found a little more humor in the situation than I did but agreed it probably wasn’t a good time for the Green family to be out and about. He suggested we still meet at the pond and just make it a night of R & R before our Regents exams. That sounded good to me. Then we’d be close by if Ray did find something, which I half figured he might, based on some of the strange things I’d been seeing
around there lately.
Next I called Rosasharn and explained the whole nine yards to him. Then I made him put Sudie on the line so I could fill her in. This was in case Rosasharn saw some comic potential in all this and it clouded his better judgment—assuming Rosasharn had some better judgment to cloud. Sudie said she wouldn’t be able to meet us at the pond until later, but she assured me she’d keep Rosasharn’s costume under lock and key and that he’d be showing up in civilian clothes—or naked.
I couldn’t get hold of Jeremy, but I wasn’t too worried about that. Jeremy wasn’t the type who’d be likely to be parading around the neighborhood as Green Gal unless Rosasharn orchestrated the whole thing the way he did at the drug day, and since Rosasharn wouldn’t have his own costume, that wasn’t likely. Or so I figured at the time.
Pop called from the hospital to say that Mr. Lindstrom had taken a turn for the worse and that he and Ethan would stay on for a while to keep track of things and then have dinner in Cambridge. I offered to come over, but Pop said that wouldn’t be necessary, that Mr. Lindstrom was resting and it could be days or even weeks before anything happened. The way he said it, I had a pretty good idea what he meant by “anything.”
After I hung up the phone, I grabbed my biology book, figuring I’d give studying another try. It didn’t work. I kept picturing three things in my mind. The first was Mr. Lindstrom lying there on his hospital bed getting weaker by the minute, knowing—during his conscious moments anyway—that the only family member he had left in the world hated him. Other times I’d see that closet door in Andy Lindstrom’s room flying open and some crazy thing I couldn’t quite picture charging out at me as I stood there frozen in my tracks. And if those two images weren’t enough to distract me on their own, I kept getting this picture of Ray McPherson, bleary-eyed from a couple sixers of beer, reaching for Betsy and heading my way to dish out some justice.
• • •
I arrived at Blood Red Pond before everybody else and started reading a book I’d grabbed from my room. It was one of the books I’d read a while back about people dying and coming back to life. I’m not sure why that particular book caught my eye. It may have had something to do with learning that Mr. Lindstrom was going downhill, or it might have been because of Pop mentioning Judgment Day the night I found him listening to the Pogues. Or maybe neither. The fact is I’ve always been pretty much intrigued by death. Not like Joey Brooner, who when we were in junior high kept a scrap-book with pictures he’d clipped from the papers and Time and Newsweek of people who’d been gunned down or blown up and things like that. And not like Mrs. Quinby, who thought death was such an unnatural act that if you so much as heard about anybody who’d died, you needed crisis intervention. With me it was more of—I don’t know—an amazement, you might call it. The whole idea of dying has to be one of the most amazing and mysterious things in the world, and it’s probably one of the reasons I’m so interested in philosophy and religions and all that.
I skimmed through the book till I found the part I was looking for—the moment when the guy supposedly died, struck by a bolt of lightning so intense it actually melted the nails in his shoes. First he felt this excruciating pain, as you might imagine, but then a feeling of peace and tranquility like he’d never felt in his whole life came over him. Somewhere along the line he realized he was above the scene—looking down at his own body—and he watched as his wife desperately tried CPR on him and then as the ambulance guys loaded him onto the stretcher. Somewhere along the line as he was floating up there, it hit him how the body lying on the stretcher below him really had nothing to do with who he actually was—any more than, say, a hotel room he’d stayed in would. And except for feeling sorry for all the turmoil his dying was causing everyone else, he felt totally free and happy.
I was just settling into the part where he was traveling toward what he described as a Being of Light and feeling a thousand times more love and joy than he could ever remember feeling before, when I was pulled back to earth by the sound of what could only be Rosasharn’s car heading up the lane toward me. A minute later the car had lugged itself over the crest of the little hill that kept the pond hidden from the road. I shot a casual look its way and actually did one of those double takes, like in the movies. There was Rosasharn behind the wheel wearing a big goofy smile, and on the passenger side, not wearing any kind of smile was Green Gal, sitting there for all the world to see. I couldn’t believe it.
I tore over to the car, yanked Jeremy’s door open, and snatched his Green Gal headpiece off. Jeremy may have flashed back to the bee attack from earlier in the weekend because he grabbed the headpiece out of my hand and started swatting me with it.
“Get that costume off!” I yelled at him.
He swatted at me a few more times and then tried to get out of the car. I crammed the door closed on him. Assuming Ray was out in the woods someplace watching us, the last thing I wanted him to get was a full body view of Green Gal.
“What’s your problem, spaz?” Jeremy said, reaching out through the window and taking a swipe at the side of my head.
“Where are your other clothes?” I said. “What’d you do with ’em?” I managed to duck another swipe while still holding the door closed against him.
Jeremy finally quit trying to push his way out of the car and sat there looking out at me as if I’d gone totally bonkers. “In the back, ya spaz case.”
I reached in and grabbed his jeans and shirt which were strewn across the backseat. “Put ‘em on,” I said, shoving them in through his window. “Come on. Hurry up.”
I stood in front of the door, hoping to block the view as much as possible until Green Gal became Jeremy again. From behind me I could hear Jeremy grumbling and grunting as he wrestled his way out of the costume in such close quarters. “First the stupid tub tells me to get into the stupid thing and then spaz boy tells me to get out of it. Somebody oughta make up their mind.”
A few minutes later Jeremy’s door pushed into my butt and he climbed out and glared at me. “Ya happy now, scrub?”
I breathed a little sigh of relief. He wasn’t exactly GQ material yet, but at least he looked human again.
“Look, Jeremy,” I told him, “Rosasharn was supposed to tell you not to wear that stupid costume—unless you like the idea of getting hit across the head with a baseball bat.” I filled him in with a few more of the details as Rosasharn looked on smiling and nodding happily.
“You stupid tub!” Jeremy said with a fair amount of vehemence after I’d presented enough of the facts so he got the general flavor of the situation. “You stupid, stupid tub!”
“Not stupid,” Rosasharn corrected, waving his finger in the air. “I merely have an attention deficit.”
“You got a brain deficit,” Jeremy told him.
“That too,” Rosasharn said.
Jeremy poked at him. “Shut up, ya tub.”
I leaned on the car and had to smile. At that moment life felt more normal than it had all day.
• • •
The evening started out decent enough. We feasted around the campfire with the usual amount of banter and the usual minor skirmishes between Rosasharn and Jeremy. I told everybody about mowing Mr. Lindstrom’s lawn and how I thought I saw something in the window, and then about the picture of Andy that had been put back up on the bulletin board. Jeremy accompanied the narrative with his ghost noises.
“Wow,” Sudie said when I’d finished. “This is giving me chills. It sounds almost as if the dead kid doesn’t want anything in his room disturbed.” Sudie had arrived about halfway through dinner and had smacked Rosasharn a couple of times on Jeremy’s behalf when she found out how he’d convinced Jeremy to get into his Green Gal costume.
“Tell me about it,” I said. “I kept thinking some crazy thing was gonna come charging out of the closet any second and grab me.”
“It’d have to be crazy if it’d want to grab you,” Jeremy said.
Bo sat there shaking his head. �
�I don’t know. There’s gotta be some kind of logical explanation behind all this.”
Jeremy snorted. “The kid’s parents fly around their basement and he’s looking for logical explanations.” He looked at Bo. “I’m surprised you don’t believe in ghosts.”
“I do,” Bo told him.
Jeremy studied him for a moment to see if he was putting him on. “So you think there’s a ghost in the house?” he demanded.
“Not really,” Bo said. “But I’d like to find out.”
“You and me both,” I said. “Only tonight isn’t the best time to do it.”
“Do what?”
I almost jumped a foot in the air. The voice came from what should have been the empty spot right next to me. I turned my head and saw Ethan sitting on the other half of my rock. “Jeez, Ethe. I wish you wouldn’t sneak up like that.”
“I thought you saw me.”
“I wish. I oughta put a bell on you or something,” I said, poking him.
“We oughta put a bell on your stupid ghost,” Jeremy said.
“What ghost?” Ethan looked up and studied my face.
I told him what I’d already told the others about my afternoon and the moved picture and all that. “I was almost sure I saw something in that window,” I said. “And I know I left that picture down on Andy’s desk.”
Ethan took all this in without saying anything. But I could tell he was really hashing it over in his mind.
“So what do you think?” I still had a hunch Ethan knew more than he was letting on.
He shrugged. It was the same kind of shrug he’d given the day before when I’d asked him what he thought he saw when he kept looking out into the woods.
“Well, we can’t do anything about it tonight anyway,” I told him. “Not with Ray McPherson over there snooping around with a baseball bat, just waiting for somebody to make a move.”
Ethan glanced up at me. He didn’t say anything, but his face had kind of a stricken look to it. Sudie must have thought so too.
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