Max whispered, “I see London, I see France, I see someone’s underpants.”
Indignantly, Beatriz shot back, “These are not underpants. They’re shorts.” She lifted her skirt to show us pink shorts. Wiesie came prancing across the street and said loudly, “Wow.” Wiesie was talkative and could often sound human.
“Shhh, Wiesie! Be quiet!” Beatriz petted her to placate her, but she said, “Wow,” again. “Go home, Wiesie!”
“Let’s go before someone sees us,” Ivan said.
Walking single file, Max in the lead, we hugged the hedges until we passed the Shreves’, and at the Montebiancos’ we crossed the street to the edge of the Pond Lady’s yard. There didn’t appear to be any lights on in the house, but the vines were so thick it was hard to tell. Just then we heard “Wow” again. Wiesie had followed us. “Rats!” Max hissed at her. “Go home, you dumbbell!”
I said, “Forget it—she’s not going to listen. You just keep quiet.”
As we tunneled one by one through the Virginia creeper, ivy, and honeysuckle, Ivan whispered fearfully, “I hope there’s no poison ivy in here,” although he knew better than any of us that poison ivy was everywhere in the neighborhood. Webs clung to our faces. It was a noisy night: Frogs croaked in the pond, crickets chirped.
We emerged in the yard to see the lazy twinkle of lightning bugs and the blue light of a TV screen glowing through a curtained window; the rest of the house was dark. We crept to the azaleas under the window and peered in through a gap in the curtains. There was the iron lung, looking as metallically space-agey and weird as it had in The Monolith Monsters: a shiny contraption the size and shape of a coffin, with wires and a lighted control panel. “Wow! Look at it!” Beatriz breathed. The TV glared with the sign-off pattern, its blue light reflecting off the machine, making it appear extra-extraterrestrial, or like some kind of Frankenstein experiment. The Pond Lady appeared to be asleep—we could see only her white head sticking out from the top of the thing. Josephine was dozing in a rocking chair, her feet propped on a low stool.
“I told you guys it was cool!” I said.
“How do you think she goes to the bathroom?” Max whispered.
“Maybe she has to wear a giant diaper, like astronauts,” said Ivan. “Or maybe there’s some kind of drain underneath.”
Once we’d gotten an eyeful of the iron lung, we moved silently toward the pond. Tall phlox and orange daylilies grew around it, and we could already see—and feel—more webs everywhere. I pulled out my penlight and snapped it on, keeping it low. Something plopped in the water and Beatriz squeaked. Wiesie, a striped shadow, prowled around and pounced on something, or nothing, and trotted off the way we’d come. A couple water striders were skating on the pond’s surface, but they didn’t interest us. Mosquitoes began buzzing in our ears and biting. I pointed the light around the decorative rocks. We saw a few ordinary spiders, and then some tiny eyes looked back at me—another wolf spider attempting to wrap up a luminous Hebrew moth. Then I shined the penlight on the webs draped on the tall daylilies, spotting a spider with a yellow ball on its back. “Marbled orb weaver!” I squealed, too loudly. I pulled a pill bottle from my pocket and trapped the orb weaver between the bottle and its cap. “Yay!” Beatriz whispered. I knew Ivan badly wanted to find something, but it was Max who spotted a six-spotted fishing spider next, and clapped it in his pill bottle.
Suddenly loud barking erupted from inside the Andersens’, two doors down. “Foggy!” I cried. Lights came on in the Andersens’ and the Pond Lady’s. We looked at each other in alarm. My neck prickled.
“Run!” Max hissed. As we were scrambling back through the vines to the street, Josephine spat out from the back door, “James, if that you tryin’ to creep up to this door, I told you we done, get on outta here!” Then, “If you boys be out there again, y’all better get gone fast ’fore I call your parents!”
“Help!” Ivan whispered urgently. “I’m stuck!” I turned to see Ivan struggling with a thick Virginia creeper vine around one leg. I quickly helped him wrestle it off, and we followed Beatriz and Max out of the thicket.
To avoid the lit-up houses, we beat it across the lane to Beatriz’s, where she turned and blew us a fast kiss and hurriedly tiptoed into her house. The boys and I slunk behind the Shreves’ and Goncharoffs’ front hedges, stopping when we got to the dark spot across from the Friedmanns’.
“Do you think anyone saw us?” Ivan whispered, breathing heavily. The barking had stopped and the Andersens’ and the Pond Lady’s houses were black again. Max pointed to his house, and we dashed across the lane.
At the maple, we caught our breath and composed ourselves. “Made it!” Max breathed. “I think we’re okay.” There was Wiesie, waiting for us. I clicked on my light. At Wiesie’s feet was Peachy, splayed out on his back like a tiny person. There were a few holes in him, and he was decidedly dead.
“Oh, no!” Ivan cried. “She gigged Peachy!”
“Wiesie! Why’d you do that! Bad kitty!” Max whispered angrily, shoving her with his foot. “We’ll bury him in the morning. If Wiesie or Linda and Rudo don’t eat him. Or we can dissect him.”
There was movement on Ivan’s porch across the street that caught our attention. A car—too dark to see the make—was parked in front of the house. We could see two figures in the shadowy recesses of the porch.
Ivan whispered, “It’s Elena and her date. If she saw us, she won’t tell.”
The screen door slammed and suddenly there was Josef, speaking loudly and angrily in Ukrainian. One of the figures—a man, we could see now—stood up from the swing and came quickly down the walk, got into the car, and drove off. Josef’s voice rose to a shout, and Elena answered, still in a normal voice, but excitedly. Then the two figures came together silently, in what seemed like a hug. We heard a loud slap, and a sharp gasp, and then the unmistakable sound of sobbing. It looked like Elena shoved Josef, and then she began coughing hard, making a hacking rasp between breaths. Josef shouted some more and the screen door slammed again. Elena stood alone, coughing and crying. Ivan pulled out his pocketknife. “I have to go help her!” he cried.
“You can’t!” Max whispered urgently. “Then we’ll get caught!”
“But it’s her asthma!” Ivan said, beginning to cry. “And it sounded like he hit her!”
Max said, “She’s got her inhaler and her pills, right? She’ll be okay. Just wait a minute.”
“What were they saying?” I asked. “Why was he so mad? Did Elena sit on The Throne?”
“He was yelling about her dates, like always. That she’s making him look bad with her boyfriends and refugees,” Ivan answered, pulling open his little knife. “She said he’s just jealous, and he is bad—a khlyst.”
I said, “What’s a ‘khlyst’?”
“I’m not sure. A creepy criminal, I think.” He kept crying.
Max said, “Jealous? Why would he be jealous?”
Elena continued to fumble around on the porch. We waited. We heard the swing creak beneath her weight. After a few minutes the coughing stopped, and we heard only sniffling.