“See? She’s better,” I whispered to Ivan.
“Stop blubbering,” Max said.
Ivan got quiet, and then so did Elena. We heard the screen door screech open and close as she disappeared. Some time passed, and the house went dark.
“She’s okay, Ivan,” I said. “It’ll be okay. It’s just another little fight.” But we all knew it wasn’t a little fight.
“Your dad reminds me of another Josef—Josef Mengele,” said Max grimly. “Come on, we’ve got to get upstairs.”
Ivan pointed the hand with the knife at the porch, crying in a strained voice, “I hate him! I wish he was dead!” Max and I looked at each other. This was the kind of thing he or I might say, but was shockingly out of character for Ivan. We’d heard the fighting before, but the hitting was new—at least to me and Max—and had shaken all of us.
One by one, we clambered up the maple and into the bathroom. Wiesie came up behind us. “We’re not friends anymore, Wiesie,” Max said. She licked her lips. Max put the screen back in place. We turned on the light and saw that we were covered all over with webs and greasy orange-daylily pollen: hair, arms and legs, shorts, and T-shirts.
“We look like we’ve been rolling in Cheetos,” I said.
Peeling off our clothes, we all hopped in the shower and soaped up, trying to be quiet. Ivan was very subdued. I knew he was miserable about Elena, as well as sad about Peachy, and disappointed he hadn’t caught anything. We dried off with one towel and hung it back neatly. Ivan and I put on some of Max’s “clean” shorts from a pile of dirty clothes on the floor.
Max and I put our orange pill bottles on the windowsill, where we could see our new spiders, and he and I got in his bed. Ivan wanted to sleep on the floor, where the fan blew best, so he raked together a pallet from the dirty-clothes pile.
“Do you think we got away with it?” I asked sleepily. “Josephine said James. Why would James be in the Pond Lady’s yard at night?”
“Jeez. You’re such a dodo,” said Max.
“Takes one to know one,” I said back. But I really didn’t want to think about James at all and regretted bringing it up. “Do you think our new spiders are better than Slutcheon’s black widow?”
“ ’Course not,” said Max. “The marbled orb weaver and the fishing spider are cool, but we still don’t have a poisonous one for that creep.”
“Yeah,” Ivan said. “A spider that can really hurt somebody. Or at least rot somebody’s wiener off.” More rough talk from Mr. Tenderhearted. Max and I chuckled, but I was worried about Ivan.
Wiesie came in and Max told her, “You’re vanished from my bed, Wiesie.”
She went over to the pallet and stretched out alongside Ivan, who curled an arm around her. I was glad to see that. “You didn’t mean to be bad, did you, Wiesie,” Ivan said. “You probably thought you were bringing us a present.” Lit by the streetlight, Ivan’s sweet face was so clean and pale that I could see among his freckles the little circular scars that were vestiges of last summer, when he and I had had chicken pox. I thought about how much I loved Ivan, with only a drowsy twinge of guilt because I knew boys weren’t supposed to love each other. I didn’t feel wiggly about Ivan, but I would have done anything to protect him from what was soon to happen.
Within five minutes we were sound asleep, scratching our old crud and new mosquito bites, mumbling and dreaming who knows what.
I was confronted by Estelle early the next morning after eating most of a box of Frosted Flakes—dry. Brickie, the Colonel Saito of breakfast, had gone to work early. When I came home from Max’s at dawn, I’d stashed my pollen-and-web-covered T-shirt and shorts in the kitchen garbage, putting some other trash on top. I should have known better than to try to hide something from the ever-vigilant Estelle, but I hoped it might not be discovered until after my dad picked me up. “Who put these perfeckly good clothes in the trash?” she asked me, holding out the wad of clothes.
The first thing I could think of was “Those aren’t mine.”
“Then who they belong to? Your granddaddy?” Estelle demanded. “And what’s this orange mess all over them?”
“I don’t know,” I said, trying to sound concerned. “Let me see them.” I pretended to be examining them carefully. “Oh!” I said. “They are mine! I forgot—we had a Cheeto war.”
“Umm-hmm,” Estelle said. “John, you old enough to know better than to tell me lies. You take those out to the hose and squirt ’em off so they don’t get that mess on the other things in the washer.”
“O-kay,” I said grumpily. “Can’t anyone have any fun around here?”
“That about all you have around here,” she said. “You an’ those boys need some chores to do, keep you outta trouble. Y’all nuthin’ but.” Leaving the room, she turned. “You got all yo’ things ready fo’ your trip with yo’ daddy?”
“I don’t need anything but my bathing suit.” Then, to placate her, I added, “And my toothbrush.”
Estelle rolled her eyes. “You jus’ be ready—he’s comin’ fo’ y’all about noon.”
I went out back and hosed off last night’s clothes, leaving the wet wad in the sink.
Readjourning on Max’s porch, we discussed the night. We weren’t sure if Beatriz got caught, and we weren’t positive that Josephine or the Andersens hadn’t, or wouldn’t, still report us. Hating to, I asked Ivan, “Is Elena okay?”
“She has a big bruise on her cheek,” he said. “She told me that Rudo made her bang her face on the swing by accident.”
I’d hoped the sound we’d heard the night before had been Elena smacking Joe, not the other way around. “Maybe she did?”
Ivan shook his head sadly. “She didn’t see us, and I didn’t tell her that we heard everything.”
“What about your dad?” Max asked.
Ivan shrugged. “He went somewhere this morning. I hope he never comes back.”
“Let’s go get some candy,” I said. “That’ll make you feel better.”
I borrowed a silver dollar from a stack Dimma kept in her dresser and Max was returning a bunch of Coke bottles with boring bottling locations on the bottoms for two cents each. It was only about nine o’clock, but we headed to Doc’s, down on Brookville, to get some Zagnuts. They were Ivan’s favorite, and I wanted to treat him. At the corner we stopped at Beatriz’s house and shouted at her to come out, but she didn’t. We hoped she wasn’t being punished but was off doing some of her girly things.
At Doc’s, we got a sack of candy and started back, eating our Zagnuts warily, keeping an eye out for an ambush by Slutcheon. Back at my house on the brick steps, we polished off the candy and thought about more places we could hunt.
“We could go hunt around the basketball courts,” Max offered. Famous high school basketball stars from all over Washington came there to play. Once we’d gone with the Shreve boys and saw Elgin Baylor play. Or at least Beau and D.L. said it was him. “Maybe the Russians put spiders at the courts to kill our basketball heroes,” Max said.
“Russians don’t care about our basketball heroes,” I said.
“Sure they do! They just beat us in the world championships! But then they got disqualified because of some junk about China. They have a gigantic player named Krumins who’s seven feet three inches and shoots free throws underhand.” Max clapped at some gnats in front of his face for emphasis.
Thinking of Sputnik, I said, “They’re beating us in sports, too?” I’d have to run this by Brickie, but I knew he’d say that the Russians had cheated somehow. I heaved a sigh. “The world is the weirdest place on earth.”