Most recently we’d gotten into butterflies. Max and I had our favorites—buckeyes, red admirals, various swallowtails, and question marks—along with some obligatory blues, painted ladies, and sulphurs pinned to boards in our rooms, and a few colorful, spiky caterpillars. Ivan didn’t have many because they were so beautiful he couldn’t bear to kill them, and he was more interested in studying their behavior anyway.
He was an excellent observer, and, following his lead, we made it our business to find out everything there was to know about whatever we collected—or at least everything there was to be found in our little pocket Golden Guides, or, the ultimate authority, Brickie’s Encyclopaedia Britannica. We also ransacked the rickety green bookmobile that parked every Thursday in front of Doc’s pharmacy on Brookville Road, but they didn’t have much. Sometimes we nagged Elena until she took us to the National Museum, its monumental presence on the Mall a holy shrine to us boys, stuffed with sacred relics in the form of dinosaurs, gems, fossils, insects, and butterflies that we could worship, and covet, up close. So we already knew some things about insects, making the shift from butterflies to spiders a natural progression.
“Spiders aren’t insects, you know,” Ivan pointed out, always the smartest of us. “I think they’re arthropods, like crabs and lobsters. And I think scorpions, too, maybe?”
“Then can people eat all arthropods?” I asked. “We could make a spider stew and get Beau and D.L. to eat some. Or Slutcheon!” Slutcheon was an older kid we hated and feared. He lived on Quincy, one of those “hoity-toity” streets several blocks away. Slutcheon was so bad he made the Shreve boys look angelic in comparison.
Max said, “Yeah! Slutcheon! Maybe we could make him sick. Or die.”
“Yeah, the Shreves eat those crappy crawdads all the time,” I said, faking a gag. To us, crawdads were crayfish, small, pale creatures we found in the sandy bottom of Rock Creek, a Potomac tributary that wound its way through the wooded parts of Northwest Washington, a few blocks from us. Estelle had said that crawdads were eaten only by “crazy white folks.” She was not a big fan of the Shreve boys and didn’t like them coming around our house.
“It would be funny to see Beau and D.L. eat spiders, but not as much fun as killing Slutcheon,” Max said.
Ivan was ruminating on this. “If we killed anybody we’d have to go to reform school.” He was always so practical. “But if we just make somebody sick, we might get away with it. Let’s just catch every kind of cool spider we can.”
“We can take them to school and everybody will be jealous of us,” I said.
“Yeah, and we can scare girls with them,” Max added, inspired as always by visions of mayhem. Girls weren’t afraid of butterflies, but they would be of spiders. I was thinking of how horrified my sister, Liz, would be to find one in her pillowcase. I’d have to make this happen before she went off to boarding school.
“And if we mess Slutcheon up, maybe he’ll leave us alone,” Max added darkly.
“Or maybe he’ll want revenge and kill us,” I said.
Max looked at me contemptuously. “Don’t be such a chicken! Gah!”
“Takes one to know one,” I said, unfazed. Max wasn’t really mean. He and I both were regularly beaten down by our older sisters, so I understood his need to assert his seniority over me and Ivan.
Ivan, ignoring the bickering, said, “We have to figure out how to catch the poisonous ones. Our butterfly nets won’t work with them because we can’t touch those.” We’d figure something out—we always did, the way we figured out how to kill the gnats that drove us nuts every day by taking my grandfather’s giant world atlas, holding it open in a gnat cloud, and slamming it shut on them. Of course, Brickie yelled at me when he went to use the atlas and its pages were stuck together with gnat bodies. Then we resorted to making a flamethrower with Dimma’s Aqua Net hairspray and Max’s matches, which annihilated whole swarms of gnats in seconds.
Ivan said, “Let’s do some research!” We liked to do research. It’s what Brickie spent a lot of time doing. It felt important and scientific. We spread our books out in my living room. Normally, we would have done this on the Goncharoffs’ wide front porch, in hopes of Elena coming out and joining in, but Ivan said doubtfully, “Josef’s home today. He’ll just bother us.” And if Josef was home, chances were that Elena wouldn’t be.
Dimma came through the living room, still in her robe. “These spiders are simply horrid,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it in all my life.” She looked down to see what we were reading. “Good Lord! Don’t even think about it!”
“We’re not, Dimma,” I said. “We’re just doing research about them, so we can find out how to get rid of them for you.”
“If I find you bringing any spiders into this house, I’ll be doing research on how to get rid of you. That snake was bad enough.”
We giggled but made no reply. She said, “You heard me!” and went off in a Chesterfield cloud. Estelle came through in her crisp white uniform, dragging the Hoover. We greeted her, always polite to keep in her good graces, but I protested, “Estelle, we’re doing something important here.”
“Important—hmpf!” she huffed. “It cain’t be as ’portant as me gettin’ my work done. How I’m gone vacuum in here with y’all all sprawled out?”
“Can you do it later? Please?” I beseeched her. “We’re trying to figure out how to get rid of the spiders.”
“You’re not foolin’ nobody!” She began lugging the Hoover away. Then she turned to us and said, in a sonorous voice: “Y’all act with hostility against me and unwillin’ to obey me, I’m gone increase the plague on you seven times ’cordin’ to your sins.” She moved off, laughing and muttering to herself about snakes, bugs, and boys.
“Did you hear that! Seven times as many spiders!” Ivan said.
“That’s just some Bible stuff,” Max said. “The Bible always talks about plagues.” We went back to our work, happily discussing spider facts until Estelle returned and evicted us. But we’d found what we needed; we had our list of the poisonous spiders we intended to trap: black widows, brown recluses, and tarantulas.
Over the next few days Estelle’s prophecy came true. The Washington Post and The Evening Star reported on what was apparently a citywide spider infestation. Not content with festooning the streets, spiders were now inside people’s houses, offices, and cars, making all the grown-ups crazy. The papers said that experts weren’t certain why it was happening. There was speculation that it was the unusually hot weather, or less rain, or more smog, or, because some of the spiders being found weren’t native to the Washington area, that immigrants and refugees were bringing them in. (Max had been right: Scorpions were being found, and we added them to our list.) Brickie had his own theory—insect warfare. He might have been kidding; sometimes it was hard to tell. But however they got to Washington, spiders were everywhere: in shops, restaurants, trains, and planes. It was all people talked about. They were in corners, dressers, mailboxes, pots and pans, pianos, bookshelves, lampshades, and shower stalls. Everyone walked around thrashing and sputtering through the webs, which hung invisibly in doorways and stairwells and clung to faces, arms, and knees. Estelle reported it was the same down in Southeast DC, where she lived, and that the bus she rode to work was full of spiders and webs, “An’ people lookin’ like lunatics tryin’ to keep ’em off!” When Estelle arrived at our house those mornings, Dimma helped her check her clothing for spiders, and plucked webs off Estelle’s sleekly curled hair. Then when Dimma came back from an outing, Estelle did the same for her. They both were terrified of spiders.