Brickie and I were having breakfast when he told me he’d found a brown recluse in a file drawer in his office. He was not happy about it, to put it mildly. He had his face in the Post, drinking his morning coffee. I was trying to eat the scrambled egg he made me every day. “Eating a good breakfast is like lighting a fire: It will keep you going for the rest of the day” was Brickie’s credo. One of many. But I’d already eaten two bowls of Frosted Flakes before he was even up.
“Did you see the little violin on his back?” I asked, slamming down my juice glass in excitement.
Not looking up, he said, “No, because I immediately smashed the hell out of it.”
“Gah, Brickie! You could have caught him for me! We need a brown recluse!”
Brickie lowered his paper and peered at me thoughtfully over his reading glasses. “Sometimes I wonder about you, son.” He went back to the paper.
“Why do you think it’s happening, Brickie?” I ate some scrambled egg—now cold—and spit it back on my plate. “And if you didn’t see his violin, it might not have been a brown recluse.”
“We don’t know what’s going on. Yet. I have a theory, though, and if I find one more damn spider in my office we’re going to see World War Three. It was a brown recluse because the lab said it was.”
“Why do you have a lab at your office?” I couldn’t imagine why there would be a lab at the USIA office. “You think some Russian spies are doing it?”
“The lab is not in my office, it’s…just close by,” he said. “Russians have a long tradition of poisoning their enemies. In fact, they have a place called Laboratory 12 where that’s all they do—figure out how to poison people.” He looked at me again. “Don’t leave the table until you finish your breakfast—every bite.”
“There’s a common house spider up in that corner, over your head,” I said. “At least I think that’s all it is.”
While Brickie craned his head to look, I took the opportunity to scrape my cold egg onto the floor. “Jesus Christ. Estelle! Can you come in here, please?” he called.
Estelle appeared with a broom and dustpan and quickly knocked the web down, stepped on the spider, and swept it up. “Thank you,” Brickie said. She spotted the egg on the floor and swept that up, too, giving me a look. “Uhm, uhm, uhm,” she said, and bustled off.
“Why doesn’t anybody just ask the Russians if they’re doing it? Don’t they always love to brag about stuff?”
Brickie snorted. “John, the Soviet idea of truth is very different from ours. They call their newspaper Pravda, which is Russian for ‘truth,’ and it’s nothing but propaganda. They lie to their own people, which is something we’d never do in America. Russians are the greatest storytellers on earth. They can’t help but lie.”
I squirmed in my chair, desperate to get away and report Brickie’s news to the boys, so I stuffed the last corner of toast into my mouth and washed it down with the last of my orange juice. “Well, if the Russians were trying to get you they would put more than one brown recluse in your office because just one bite probably wouldn’t kill you unless your ‘health is already comprofied,’ ” I said, trying to quote from the Britannica.
Brickie sighed. “That word is compromised. And my office has been thoroughly sprayed now.”
He made a dismissive sound. “This conversation is over. You’re excused.”
I hopped up and tried to run off but was intercepted in the hall by Dimma, who said, “John, don’t put your feet in your shoes without checking! Don’t put an arm through a sleeve or your leg through your pants without shaking them thoroughly! Look between the cushions before you sit on the sofa! Check the drawers! Check your toys! And don’t collect any of them!”
“We decided to be exterminators, Dimma. We’re going to hunt them and kill them. You should be glad.” A lie, of course. I went on, “Also, spiders are actually good because they eat roaches and mosquitoes and moths.”
Recognizing a lost cause, Dimma said, “Is that right, Otto the Orkin Man? Just as long as you kill them and keep them out of the house. Please be extremely careful, and wear gloves. Your mother won’t appreciate it if you die of a spider bite.”
Calling on our research, I said smartly, “Since 1950, only fourteen-point-one percent of bites from vemonous insects were lethal. Most bites won’t kill anybody. They might make you sick, or your arm might rot off, but that’s all.”
“Oh, I see. I guess your mother would be okay with that,” she said sarcastically. “It’s pronounced ve-no-mous.” Then, always her last words, “And you heard me!”
Ivan and Max were on the Friedmanns’ bottom step, waiting on me, for a change. Ivan was idly turning over rocks. A daddy longlegs and a few roly-polies were under a concrete chunk and Max picked them up, wrapped them in a piece of Popsicle trash, and stashed it in his pocket to feed Tallulah Flathead, the yellow queen snake whose head had been stepped on and mangled a little bit by his sister. For some reason Tallulah refused to die but loved to eat.
I blurted out what Brickie had said, or what I’d decided he’d said: “Brickie thinks the Russians planted all the spiders to poison everybody in Washington!”
“Really?” Max exclaimed. Then he asked skeptically, “How does he know that?”
“Um, I’m not sure. I guess he knows people who know.” I looked apologetically at Ivan. “And he said Russians are the biggest liars on earth.”
“We’re not Russian. We’re Ukrainian,” Ivan corrected. “And not all Russians lie—I think just the government.”
Max said, “Well, Russian and Ukrainian people hate Jews, and tell lies about them all the time.”
I was getting confused about all of this—Soviets, Russians, Ukrainians, and why did everybody hate Jews?—and I said, “Let’s not talk about that stuff.”
“Yeah,” said Ivan. “Let’s just collect spiders.”
After gathering some peanut butter and mayonnaise jars from Max’s kitchen, we went over to the old stable behind my house, which seemed like the perfect place for spiders to hide, particularly up in the hayloft, with its crumbling rafters. After a couple hours of scrounging, we hadn’t caught much. One or two good specimens—a leopard-legged silver argiope in a zigzag web, and a wolf spider under some bricks—but mostly it was the same boring spiders we didn’t care about. We hadn’t even glimpsed anything dangerous. It was dawning on us that spider-collecting was tougher than we’d expected—hot, sticky, and frustrating, with mosquitoes, flies, and gnats feasting on us.