Dreamland Lake (5 page)

After that, we didn’t quite know what to do with ourselves. I guess what we actually wanted was to relive a piece of the excitement without the full hair-raising effect of the first time. But instead, we were just standing around in the woods, and it was like nothing had ever happened there. So Flip said, “I hope I remembered to turn the film. Maybe we better take a couple more shots just to be on the safe side.” So we did. It was still a letdown, but I was feeling pretty good anyhow. Flip was probably right about climbing back on the horse, so to speak.

The sun was getting low by then, and I think he and I had the same thought at the same time. Maybe it would give us a charge to hang around the woods as it got dark. We were in the mood for a little mild spooking. So we wandered back to the roller coaster block, the one next to the creek I’d flopped on. Flip chose this to sit down on, which I didn’t particularly appreciate. But he didn’t say anything, and I sat down beside him. We started talking about what they’d probably done with the dead man’s remains. Flip thought the County must have buried him in the graveyard out at the Poor Farm.

I gave out the opinion there wasn’t enough left of him to fill a box; and so, they probably cremated him. Flip thought this was possible, and that got us to wondering if they’d yanked out his gold tooth before they disposed of him. Flip thought it would make a pretty good ornament for a key ring or a watch chain or to hang around your neck on a lanyard. So, as the conversation
went on and the sun went down, we managed to give ourselves a little minor thrill or two.

We were getting each other worked up pretty good and decided to tell
Dracula.
We hadn’t told
Dracula
in maybe two years. In grade school, that never failed to get to us. Sometime around fourth or fifth grade, I’d slept over at Flip’s house one night. They showed
Dracula
on the “Creature Feature Midnight Matinee of Horror” on Channel Twelve. The real, original, black-and-white version with the horses pulling the carriage turning into bats and the whole bit.

But it was no good. We’d outgrown it. Instead of scaring each other like in the old days, we kept arguing on the details of the plot. Finally, Flip said, “I guess we might as well head home. I’ve got to see the Nitwits get their dinner.” The Nitwits are Flip’s three younger sisters. His dad’s in the Navy and away most of the time and, when his mom was out playing golf or something, he had to ride herd on the Nitwits. This wasn’t his favorite duty, but I’ll tell you one thing: when he cracked the whip, the Nitwits jumped.

So we got up from the roller coaster block. Flip picked up his camera case and was just about to swing the strap over his shoulder when he froze and whispered, “Jeee-sus!”

Now this was more or less what he’d said when he’d found the dead man. And it scared me so bad I nearly wet my pants. Then I thought he was trying to pull something on me. But he wasn’t.

He was staring at the concrete block we’d been sitting on. And right where our bottoms had been, there it was—another swastika. It was carved just about as carefully as the one in the clubhouse, but
deeper and bigger. The concrete was kind of porous, so the detailing wasn’t as good. But it had taken somebody quite a while to do. Painstaking wedge-shaped cuts. It was a wonder we hadn’t noticed it before we sat down.

“Hitler strikes again,” Flip said finally, but his voice was shaky.

“That wasn’t there the other day,” I said. “We’d have seen it.”

“I know.”

Then a kind of hissing, swishing sound made us look up. We could see a flash of white through a break in the trees over by Dreamland Lake. One of the big swans was soaring in an arc up over the water, like something had stirred him up. He was moving his big wings in a slow, easy motion. Like a large albino bat.

“Home,” Flip said. And we hustled out of the woods, very close together.

The other ducks were kind of agitated by the big, swooping swan. They raised an unearthly racket, squawking at each other and swarming out of the water and up on the grassy bank. We were watching them as we walked along the shore path. They were tame as anything and waddled along ahead of us like a bunch of little old men.

So they got to the barricade closing off the condemned footbridge before we did. And they all waddled over something lying right in the middle of the path. At first, it looked like a stick that had fallen there, but when we got up close we saw it was a long, skinny, leather pouch with a little flap at the top fastened shut.

“Now what,” I said, as Flip picked it up.

“I don’t know, but something’s inside it.” He unfastened
the flap, and there was the handle of something inside. He let the leather sheath fall. And then he was holding the wickedest-looking knife I’d ever seen. Polished to a high chrome finish and razor-sharp.

If knives are your thing, this one was a beauty. It was like a bayonet, and the handle was perfectly shaped for a good grip. Flip stood there holding it and gawking, completely dumfounded—a look he generally tried to avoid.

“This is worth something,” he said. “Get the leather thing.” We walked off, and he held it away from himself. It was one mean-looking weapon. “It’d cut your damn fingers off if you took hold of it by the blade,” he said.

Up by the tennis courts, we sat down on the bleachers they have there for tournament time. Flip laid the knife down between us. “Look, we both found it so it’s ours, but I’ll take it home.”

“How’d we come to that decision so quick?” I asked, even though I figured it would naturally stay in Flip’s possession.

“Because if you take it home, your mom will find it. And if I take it home, my mom won’t.” It was as simple as that. My mom notices everything. His mom notices nothing. “Slip it back into the holster or whatever you call that leather thing,” he said, “but be careful.”

Then we made our final discovery of the day. Right on the handle where Flip had been carrying it, there was a design worked into the black wood. It was getting toward evening, so we had to bend over it to see. There was a little wreath of leaves, very tiny and intricate. Inside that there was an eagle, looking to one side, with stiff, straight wings. The eagle was perched
on a little round thing like a ball or a circle. And inside the circle—you guessed it—another swastika.

“Is that . . .”

“Yeah, it sure is,” Flip said. “And this one’s the real thing. I mean it’s a real Nazi relic from Germany.” He was standing up and sort of hopping around in excitement. “From World War II or before. Authentic.”

“But what’s this all about?” I said. “There aren’t any such things as Nazis anymore. They lost the war. Besides, there never were any in Dunthorpe. Couldn’t have been.”

“That’s what you said about the roller coaster,” he said, giving me this keen, squint-eyed look, “but there was.”

And so we started off home, feeling like we’d gotten a little more than we’d bargained for out of that afternoon, but not being sure what. When I turned in at my house, Flip said, “Not a word about this—to anybody.” And I gave him my if-you-can’t-trust-me-you-can’t-trust-yourself look.

Then he went marching off down Oakthorpe Avenue with his camera swinging around his neck and the Nazi sword held out in front of him—heading home to feed the Nitwits.

If they had their supper that night—the Nitwits, I mean—they got it on the table themselves with no supervision from Flip.

When I walked in the back door, my mom greeted me with, “You’re in big trouble. The
Commercial
called to say not one of your papers got delivered. No doubt you have a reasonable explanation.” I was saved from giving it to her because the phone was ringing, and of course it was Flip.

“That damn Elvan. Bugging out on the papers. I
should’ve known better than to trust that fat-butt. Offered him a dollar twenty-five to do it too.”

“Not in advance, I hope.”

“Are you kidding. Come on. We’ll have to get them out. Those subscribers’ll have our heads for this.”

We delivered the
Commercial
after dark that night, and just about everybody was out to greet us with a few well-chosen words. About the mildest came from Mrs. Kitty Riordan, who said to me at the same minute I was handing her the paper, “Naughty boy, where
is
my paper?” It didn’t make any difference that it was right there in her hand. She had to give out with something.

But, of course, Old Man Sanderson was the real treat of the evening. There he stood on his top step, scowling out into the night. I was nominated to walk up and hand the paper to him. “Just four hours late!” Old Sanderson snarled. “That’s all. Just four hours. I’ve called the
Commercial
six times, I’ll have you know, and if I have anything to do with it, you two louts’ll lose the route.”

I kept trying to hand him the paper, and he kept raving. Then he jerked it out of my hand and hauled off like he was going to smack me across the face with it. I didn’t flinch, but Flip stepped up behind me and said, “Go ahead and hit him, Mr. Sanderson. And I’ll be down at the police station in ten minutes to tell them you knocked Brian all the way down the porch steps and probably concussed him.”

Old Man Sanderson looked at Flip like he couldn’t believe his ears. Then he turned back toward the door, muttering, “Damn brats. I got a good notion to call the
Commercial.
”

We headed off down Prairie Avenue, and Flip said,
“You got to be meaner than they are or they walk all over you.”

What you learn from a paper route. It makes you dread turning into an adult. About the only house where we didn’t have to take some kind of sass was Old Lady Garrison’s. Her door was shut tight with only the little light on over the door bell that nobody ever rang. We figured she probably didn’t know whether it was daylight or dark.

“Wait,” Flip said. “Just wait till we get hold of Elvan Helligrew tomorrow. There isn’t an excuse in this world that’ll get him off. None.”

“Maybe he was rushed off to the hospital with the acute appendicitis,” I suggested, just to whip Flip up.

“I’ll take out his appendix for him,” Flip muttered, “and maybe a couple of his teeth.”

There never used to be anything specially strange about Elvan Helligrew—unless you’re not used to his name. He was always fat, though. Not puppy fat. Fat.

But you know how it is, there’s a fat kid in every class. Nobody gave him a hard time about it as far as I know. He wasn’t jolly, either, like round people are supposed to be. He wasn’t really much of anything when it came to personality.

Once, though, back in the spring of fifth grade when we were all kind of naive, he created a sensation in a way. It was just before school was out for vacation. We’d turned in our books and everything. The teacher, Mrs. Vogel, didn’t know what to do with us. So, we had Open Discussion. She asked if any of us had any special plans about how we were going to spend summer vacation.

Right off, Elvan put up his hand, and Mrs. Vogel looked kind of startled. In this funny, high voice he had, he said, “I’m going to a trim-down camp in the State of New York.”

That was a real conversation-stopper. Nobody knew what a trim-down camp was, including Mrs. Vogel. She was all set to say, well-that’s-nice-Elvan, but he started fumbling in his hip pocket for his wallet, which was wedged in back there pretty tight. He took out a newspaper clipping and carefully unfolded it. It was an advertisement for a camp for overweight boys.

This place promised to trim from fifteen to fifty pounds off any fat kid who went there. They have this entire staff of medical doctors, and star athletes, and a special diet table. There was even a picture of a kid in the ad. He was holding the waistband on a pair of pants way out from his belly to show how much weight he’d lost just from going to this camp.

Mrs. Vogel looked a little bewildered. But since that was the first rise she’d had out of Elvan all year, she said, “Well, I’m sure everybody wishes you good luck in this enterprise, don’t we, boys and girls?” And we all said we sure did.

Then on the first day of that next fall, we were in the sixth-grade room with a different teacher. But Mrs. Vogel came right into the room during class time and walked up to the new teacher who didn’t know any of us yet. And she said to him in a fairly loud whisper, “I wonder if I could take a look at Elvan Helligrew.”

But Elvan heard her, wiggled himself out of his desk, and said, “Here I am, Mrs. Vogel.”

“Why, Elvan,” she said, kind of embarrassed.

“I gained twelve pounds at that camp,” he said in sort of a proud voice.

But on the day after Elvan didn’t deliver the
Commercial
, I was a little worried about what Flip might do to him. I always thought I was a pacifist by nature. That’s what comes of being the tallest kid in the class, which I always have been, but not the toughest, which I never will be. But Flip had been known to be somewhat scrappy. I wasn’t worried that he’d do any real harm to Elvan exactly. It’s just that it seemed pretty useless when it’s too late to do any good. Why bother?

Flip caught up with Elvan in the lunch room that day. I knew he would. For once, I felt like not having lunch with or near Flip. After all, I had other friends, but I couldn’t think of any at the moment.