Flyers (9781481414449) (10 page)

“No sweat,” I'd say every time he got done singing in my face. “No sweat.”

The last bale
dropped off the side of the conveyor. I heaved it over to Jeremy who was stacking along the roofline a little below me. A few seconds later both the elevator and conveyor stopped, ending the nerve-wracking screech the chains made as they slid along the metal trays. I collapsed onto the bale behind me. It had to be at least one hundred and ten degrees in that haymow. Jeremy's father had never made the switch to haylage, which was the way more and more farmers brought in their early hay—chopped and blown into an automatic unloading wagon and then shot through a blower into a silo without ever being touched by a human hand. And he didn't go for those giant round bales that you left sitting around outside until you needed them either. So there we were in that sauna of a haymow doing grunt work.

“You look like a wet rat,” Jeremy said, coming over to where I was and sitting on the side of the conveyor.

“And
you
don't?” I said, looking up at him. We'd long since pulled our shirts off and were both slimy with sweat. I grabbed my shirt off a beam and wiped the sweat out of my eyes.

“Anybody alive up there?” we heard through the opening in the side of the barn where the elevator attached to the conveyor. It was Jeremy's father, calling from the hay wagon below.

“No,” Jeremy yelled down.

“Sorry I don't have any more to send you boys just now, but that's it for a few minutes.” You could hear the laughter in his voice. He'd spent enough time in
sweltering haymows in his day to know what we were going through.

“Ha, ha,” Jeremy said, not even having the energy to make his voice carry to down below.

“Don't you worry though,” his father continued. “I'll be back quick as I can with a fresh load.” His laughter wafted up through the haymow doorway.

At one time I actually started thinking Jeremy must have been adopted. His parents were two of the most jovial people you'd ever want to meet, and they both seemed to enjoy nothing more than a good laugh. Even their property was set up for laughs. In addition to a second mailbox perched about ten feet over their regular box and labeled “air mail,” they also had the full line of yuk-yuk lawn ornaments, including the bending-over fat lady and the little boy who's dropped his drawers and is supposedly peeing in the bushes. This adoption theory was making more and more sense to me until one day when I happened to be sitting on the Wulfsons' porch waiting for Jeremy to come in from the field. I hadn't waited very long before I spotted him walking across his yard toward me. Not knowing anybody was there watching, he stopped and did a second take at the fat lady's backside (that's the only side she had, really), and all of a sudden he actually began to smile—a real, regular-person kind of smile. He wiped it off his face as soon as he saw me, of course, but by then I already knew: Jeremy was a closet humorist.

“Well, get going, rat boy,” Jeremy said, looking down at me from the conveyor.

“Get going where?” I asked.

“Weren't you gonna call your little
sweetie?”
he said, puckering up his face on the word “sweetie.” “Or have you chickened out already?”

I had actually forgotten, which goes to show just how hot that haymow was. “You were gonna
call your
sweetie too,” I reminded him.

“I know,” Jeremy said, and then started doing this spastic shaking on the conveyor. “Oh, I'm
so
scared.”

“Don't worry,” I said, acting as cool as I could manage under the circumstances. “I doubt any female would say yes to you anyway. Not one of the higher primates, at least.”

We climbed down through the nearest chute and headed for the milk house. Jeremy reached for the hose used to wash the milk tank and turned on the faucet. After drinking from the end of the hose, he started rinsing off his arms, which is a good way to begin cooling down after a tough session in a haymow. I started doing the same thing at the faucet to one of the large stainless-steel sinks. When I turned around again, Jeremy was bent over (like the fat lady on his lawn) spraying water over his face and through his hair.

“You're getting good at that, Jeremy,” I told him. “One of these days I bet your parents'll start letting you use the shower in the house.”

“Shut up, ribsy,” he said, and shot some cold water my way.

The ribsy thing was an exaggeration. Jeremy was every bit as lean as I was, although he was probably a little more muscular—I'll give him that. He had what I always thought of as one of the basic farm boy builds. There's pudgy farm boy and there's wiry farm boy, and Jeremy was definitely the latter.

“Well?” I said, taking a deep breath. “Are we gonna do it?”

“What's the big deal? You just do it.” He grabbed the phone book, found the number he wanted, snatched up
the receiver to the wall phone near the doorway, and started dialing. I have to admit—I was impressed.

“Hello, Amy?” he said, after what must've been only about two rings. “This is Jeremy Wulfson. You wanna go to that drug thing with me this afternoon?” As he paused for the answer, the look on his face changed, first to a look of puzzlement and then back to its usual deadpan. “Oh,” he said after a while. “Okay. Yeah. Bye”

“Well?” I said when he hung up. “What'd she say?”

“Nuthin',” he told me.

“Whaddaya mean nothing? You asked her out, and then you stood there listening. She musta said
something.”

“It was her mother.”

“Her
mother?”
I started laughing. “Didn't you make sure you had Amy before you started asking her out?”

He shrugged. “I thought I did, but her mother's name must be Amy too.”

This whole thing was cracking me up more by the minute. And the thing I found the funniest about it was that Jeremy really didn't see any humor in the situation at all.
Nada.
And not because he was embarrassed or disappointed or anything like that. He just plain didn't think it was funny. To him it just didn't stack up to the plywood fat lady bending over in his yard or the bare-butted kid peeing in his bushes. The more I thought about it, the more I cracked up, until I was practically lying across the milk tank and howling.

“How was I supposed to know?” he said. “I've never heard of a girl being named after her mother.”

I hadn't either, but that didn't make it any less funny to me. “So what'd she say?” I asked when I could speak again. “What'd Amy
senior
say?”

“She told me the other Amy was at church camp for
the weekend, and she didn't figure I'd want to take
her,
which she was right about because I've seen her, and I said ‘okay' and hung up.”

“Oh, God,” I said, straightening up and wiping my eyes. “Why couldn't I have had Bo's video camera? The rest of humanity shouldn't be deprived of this.”

“Shut up and make
your
call, Gabe-boy,” he said, and stuck the phone in my face.

Seeing the phone close-up like that had a sobering effect on me. Jeremy noticed the difference and pressed his advantage. “Take it in your
hand,”
he said in a Mr. Rogers voice. “Now put it up to your
ear.
And then you
dial.”

“If you were really Mr. Rogers, you wouldn't tell me what to do,” I said. “You'd ask me how I feel about it.”

“Shut up,” Jeremy said, reverting to his regular personality “Just dial the stupid phone.”

“You're so touchy,” I told him, and started dialing. You'll notice I didn't need any phone book. Katie's number had already been imprinted on my brain after one glance at it, the same as her eyes had been earlier in the week.

I was pretty nervous when I was dialing, but the full force of what I was doing didn't actually hit me until I heard the first ring. Then my heart started racing like mad. For a few seconds I wasn't sure if I'd even be able to speak.

Somebody picked up the phone and said hello. It was a female voice but I knew it wasn't Katie. I'd heard little snippets of her conversations during some of my girl-scouting trips down the freshman hallway, and there was no way I'd mistake her voice. I even heard it in my dreams.

“May I speak to Katie?” I was finally able to blurt out.

“I'm sorry,” the voice said. “She's with her father right now. Could I take a message?”

I kind of froze for a second—not sure if I should leave my name or not.

“Ah, no . . . I'll . . . I'll call again sometime. Thanks.”

I took the phone down from my ear and stood there with it. I was still wrestling with the notion of whether I should have left my name or a message. If I'd done that at least I wouldn't have to start from scratch the next time I called. Which would be
when?
I hadn't even asked if she was gone for the morning, for the day, or for the whole weekend.

Jeremy yanked the receiver out of my hand and hung it up. “We put the phone back when we're through,” he said in his Mr. Rogers voice. “So much to learn and such a dumb student.”

I leaned back against the wall and took a couple of deep breaths. I could feel Jeremy's eyes on me, so I took another one—an extra long one—just to make him wait.

“Well
Scrubby?” he said before I'd even finished inhaling.

“No luck,” I said. “She wasn't home.”

Jeremy scowled about that for a minute. “Maybe she knew it was you calling,” he offered finally.

I walked over and leaned on the tank alongside him. “Look,” I said, “Just because I struck out, that's no reason you should have to go to the drug day alone.”

“Whaddaya mean?”

I looked him in the eye. “Here's what I'm thinking: Why don't you get over there, pick up that phone, and call Amy's mom back before somebody else asks her.”

I was quick enough to avoid the headlock, but he caught me with a wicked thump to my back as he chased me out the door.

I have one
of those minds that kicks into overdrive at the drop of a hat, and whenever it does the world around me tends to fade into kind of a background noise. This can sometimes cause difficulties for those in my general vicinity—in this case Jeremy, who was back to stacking hay a little below me. A few different times I landed bales on top of him, which didn't do anything to improve his disposition. After he got whaled the third time, he decided that
he
should be the one working up by the conveyor.

The thing was, I couldn't get my mind off Katie Lyons and the call I'd just made. Part of me was still giving myself grief for not leaving a message, and part of me was still glad I didn't. Part of me was disappointed that Katie wouldn't be going to the drug rally with me, and part of me was actually
relieved
about the whole thing, if you can figure that out. After my mind had slalomed through those issues for a while, it slid into the whole notion of Katie herself. Ever since I'd discovered her I'd had this image of her as coming from one of those
Leave it to Beaver
kinds of families—you know with two parents waiting at home whose lives pretty much revolved around her. (For some reason I'd assumed she was an only child although I didn't know that for a fact.) Now I was coming up with a whole different picture. Her mother (the lady I
think
was her mother) had said she was with her father,
which at the time I'd taken to mean that she'd
gone
someplace with him. But as I pored over those few words again and again in that sweltering haymow I started thinking that what her mother had meant was that she was
with
her father—like for the whole weekend. Which meant (I was becoming more sure of it by the minute) that her parents must be divorced or separated.

This sudden realization gave me a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach. All I could think about was how she must spend her time being yanked back and forth between her two parents, loving them both and feeling guilty and miserable about one whenever she was with the other. Meanwhile they were both trying desperately to come up with ways to win her over to their side (even in this new version I still had her down as the center of their existence). The more I played this over in my mind, the more dramatic and tragic it seemed, and the bigger and hollower the feeling in the pit of my stomach grew until I found myself pleading with her to believe it wasn't her fault, that
she
was an innocent victim in all of this. I was so caught up in the whole thing that it didn't dawn on me at the time that this was pretty much the same kind of spiel Mrs. Quinby fired off with mind-numbing regularity at her WAFA meetings. All I knew was that
I
wanted to be the one to save Katie from the excruciating torment she must be experiencing as a result of this parental tug-of-war. Over and over in my mind's eye I set her parents straight once and for all. After dealing with that, I saw myself taking Katie to the movies and on long walks (or on drives when I got my license) and giving her the kind of pressure-free existence to which she was entitled. Her parents would resent me at first,
maybe, seeing only how I was stealing their precious daughter's heart, but then they'd come around and see that I was right, that their behavior had been out of line, and that I was giving her a new life, a life of happiness and fulfillment she'd never known before.

At this point a bale slammed into my back and I came close to ripping my scalp open on a few of the roofing nails poking down a few inches from my head. I pulled the bale off me and gave Jeremy dirty look.

“Oh,
I'm
sorry,” he said in a mincing voice. “I must have been
daydreaming.
I'm just awful like that.” Then he fired another bale at me which I managed to snag in time and shove up under the eaves. This didn't put a complete stop to my Katie speculations or my different savior scenarios, but it did pull the here-and-now world of the haymow into at least a partial focus, and it was harder for Jeremy to catch me off guard during the rest of the load.