I knew exactly when my mother was coming home and had been thinking how wonderful it would be if she came for the party. “But, Dimma, don’t you think that it would be fun for Mama to be at the Fiesta? She loves parties!”
Dimma looked sad. “I don’t think she’s up to attending parties yet, John. She’s still very…tired. I think she only wants to spend time with you and Liz. Not with all the neighbors.”
Without Elena, and with nothing else to do, we decided to mount our bikes and ride to our empty school to hunt for spiders there. This late in summer, they’d be cleaning and readying the building for the new year, and it was always weird and fun to sneak in when only the old deaf janitor, Mr. Offutt, was around. We’d sneaked in the year before, and on our teacher Mr. Sullivan’s desk, we saw a list of students and their IQs. We didn’t know what IQs were, but we were shocked to see that our refugee friend Gellert had an IQ of 135, when everybody else’s scores were just over 100. We’d decided that IQs must have something to do with a student’s height or athletic abilities.
We were pedaling down the lane when Beau and D.L. came out of their house and summoned us to play war. We didn’t want to, but it was best not to rile the Shreve boys up. They carried their guns—we weren’t sure if they were toys or actual pellet guns, but the Shreves were very realistic and could shoot dried black-eyed peas. They aimed them at us.
“Our mom just made cookies,” said Beau. “We can have some after.”
That made the offer slightly more enticing. “Okay,” said Max. “But we can’t play too long because we’ve got something to do.”
“What? Looking for more bugs?” said D.L.
“Don’t you guys even care that Russian spies dropped a spider bomb on Washington?” I countered.
Beau and D.L. looked at each other, skeptically amazed. “How do you know that?” Beau said.
“My grandfather told me. He found a poisonous one in his office.”
“We’ll ask our dad. He’ll know if it’s true. The FBI knows everything,” D.L. said.
Then Beau addressed Ivan. “So your dad probably knows, too, since he’s a Russian spy.”
“He is not,” Ivan said. “He’s not even Russian.”
“Oh, sure,” Beau sneered.
“And your aunt is, too,” said D.L. It disturbed me to hear Elena dragged through the mud with Josef, and I knew it had to offend Ivan. “She’s definitely a Commie and hangs around with them.” They kept their guns trained on us—also disturbing.
“No she’s not and no she doesn’t,” Ivan said, as forcefully as he could, his face flushed. “They left Russia to get away from Commies.”
“That’s just propaganda,” I said to Beau, pretty sure Brickie’s word meant lies.
D.L. looked me in the eye through his gun sight and said, “And your grandfather has a secret pen name for the stuff he writes: ‘Guy Sims Fitch.’ ”
“What?” I sputtered. “No he doesn’t!” What was D.L. talking about—could Mr. Shreve know things about Brickie that I didn’t know?
“Are y’all gonna play, or not?” Beau demanded.
“Not if you keep saying stupid things to us,” Max said.
“Okay,” Beau said. They lowered the guns. “We take it back.” Beau put one hand behind his back, no doubt crossing his fingers.
I sighed. “Which war and which battle?” I asked.
D.L. said, “We haven’t played Bridge on the River Kwai in a while. Let’s play that.”
“Aww, rats,” said Max, who knew he was going to have to be the pompous collaborator, Colonel Nicholson. Beau and D.L. liked to humiliate all of us, but especially Max.
“We should get Kees and Piet to play,” Beau said. “Or we won’t have anybody to play the chickenshit guy.”
“Unh-unh!” I said. “The last time we played war with them we made Kees and Piet be Jews and we pretended their own Airstream was a gas chamber and locked them in. We were the American troops coming to liberate the camp, but the General caught us, and he went crazy and said if we did it again, he’d ‘spank us blue as a mulberry.’ ” This was the moronic event that had ended our swimming privileges at the De Haans’.
“Wow!” said D.L., impressed. “Where were we? I bet the General has some special Nazi spanking things.”
We dumped our bikes and began taking directions from D.L. and Beau. We made the infamous bridge with some planks and sawhorses hauled from the Shreves’ shed, which was chock-full of webs, but Beau and D.L. wouldn’t give us time to examine them. For the prison camp, we wrenched a few cinder blocks from under Mr. Shreve’s fishing boat, causing it to list dangerously. We set the cinder blocks around a campfire made with sticks and trash. Beau lit it. I had to put on Beau’s baseball cap with a washcloth hanging down the back of my neck because I was the evil Colonel Saito, which wasn’t all bad because I’d get to abuse the heroic Allies, Joyce and Warden, played, naturally, by the Shreves.
The Ally soldiers, Beau, D.L., and Ivan, gathered around the campfire, smoking their stick cigarettes, talking tough and complaining about being forced to build the bridge by a bunch of Japs. Max, as the traitor Colonel Nicholson, ranted at them about how crappy their bridge was and insisted they build one that would be a monument to British military genius. After he left, the Allies talked about what an asshole he is, and spit a lot. Then I came over with a willow switch, hollering in fake Japanese, and whipped the three of them, which I did harder than necessary to Beau and D.L. I made the Allies stack and unstack cinder blocks, over and over in the broiling sun, until Beau took out a Rich’s shoe box rattling with cherry bombs and put it under the bridge. The Allies pretended to go to sleep, whispering plans to kill Saito and blow up the bridge. Then I forced the Allies to march around in a circle. They began whistling the movie theme song and wouldn’t stop, even though I was screaming at them. Then Beau stabbed me with a rubber knife and ran to light the shoe box as Ivan and D.L. yelled, “Here come tons of Japs on a train!” This was the point where D.L. always began reciting “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” which had nothing to do with Bridge on the River Kwai, but D.L. loved the Little Rascals episode where Alfalfa did it: “ ‘Half a league, half a league / Half a league onward / All in the valley of death / Rode the six hundred.’ ” Then the cherry bombs caught and the train and bridge “blew up.” Beau and D.L. kicked my and Max’s dead bodies a few times, also harder than necessary. Ivan stood on top of the Shreves’ mulch pile, shaking his head sadly, saying, “Madness! Madness!” We were all still for a moment in the cherry-bomb smoke, as if the movie credits were rolling.