Ivan and I started our summer mornings as if we had a job we had to do, and we would report to Max’s front porch and wait quietly for Max to get up. This particular morning, we’d intended to discuss the Beaver Plan, but Ivan and I had woken to find all the yards up and down the lane festooned with clouds of spiderwebs. Hedges were frosted with them, and in the trees overhanging the lane, the webs looked like strings of crystal beads lit with dewdrops that sparkled spectacularly in the early sun, connecting all the yards, as if the neighborhood were one big carnival. Ivan and I were beside ourselves, hollering like maniacs under Max’s window until he busted out of his house in nothing but his underpants.
“Can you believe this?” I shouted at him.
“Man, oh man!” he yelled. “How did this happen?”
Some webs stretched horizontally between trees that were a good thirty feet apart, and some soared way above our heads, like the gossamer riggings of a ghost ship.
“How do they do that?” Ivan said.
I was clutching the front of my shorts, an unfortunate habit when I was extremely excited. Ivan was spinning around, taking it all in. “There are thousands of them! Maybe millions!”
“Do you see any actual spiders?” Max called. “Let’s catch them!” He raced over to the privet hedges in front of the porch. “Here’s one! A big one with yellow stripes! His web has a sort of zipper thing right down the middle! Here’s another one!”
Mrs. Friedmann stepped out from behind the screen door in her robe. “Vaht’s all the commotion?” she demanded. “It’s only seven o’clock!”
“Mutter, spiders are everywhere!” Max shouted. “Look down the street!”
“Oy gevalt!” she exclaimed, shaking her head with a hand to her mouth. “Your fahzer is not going to like zis. Max, come inside and put some clothes on!”
“Rats!” He ran back inside.
Ivan and I continued around the yard, examining the wild profusion of spiders easily within our grasp. Like tiny nets of diamonds, the webs even covered the scrubby lawn.
“Here’s one with a huge butt!”
“There’s a big moth stuck in this web and he’s wrapped like a mummy! He’s still moving!”
Max emerged with shorts on, carrying some jars. “C’mon! We can have an instant collection before anybody else!”
“Boys! Zhey might be poison! Do not bring zhem into zhe house!” Mrs. Friedmann shuddered and went back inside.
“Look at this one, you guys!” Max cried. “He looks just like a tiny crab!” He fiddled with a jar, trapping it.
Just then, Beatriz came squealing up the lane, waving her arms. “Boys, boys! What is this? Look what happened to me!” She was alarmed but laughing, her head and shoulders veiled with webs.
But just as we all began twirling into the nearest webs, laughing and winding ourselves like spools of thread in the gluey, silken lines, Beatriz screamed, “Help! A spider went down my blouse!” She danced around frantically until something big and black fell out of her shirt, and the spider ran to a hole in the ground and disappeared. “Ick! The webs are fun, but I don’t want any spiders on my personal body.”
Max, still twirling, guffawed and said, “I guess that spider was a sex maniac and wanted to see your bosoms!” He was always saying stuff like that to Beatriz, to either get her attention or annoy her, I wasn’t sure.
Beatriz said back, “I don’t have any bosoms, Max, so shut up and stop talking about bosoms all the time.” Max just laughed.
Ivan had fallen to his knees to examine the hole. “Wow—do some spiders live in the ground?”
Mr. Friedmann shouted from inside the house, “Don’t go near zhe garden today, kids. I’m going to put poison on zhe wegetables to kill zhe spiders.”
“Not even a spider would want to eat his flabby eggplants,” Max said. Mr. Friedmann had so many eggplants in his garden that the family ate them every night, to Max’s disgust. “Yech. They taste like fried flip-flops.”
Ivan, abandoning the spider hole and wiping his hands on his shorts, said, “These webs are too itchy. Let’s wash off in the hose.” Ivan was often itchy. Max pulled a hose around from the side of the house, squirted himself, and Ivan and I stripped off our sticky, sweaty T-shirts and he hosed off the two of us.
Beatriz, still on the sidewalk, watched. “What about you, Beatriz?” Max said, grinning; his little wet nipples pinched up from the cold water.
She said, “As if! See you guys later.” She flounced off home. If one can flounce in polka-dot short-shorts.
We were in hog heaven. We liked spiders but didn’t know a lot about them, though, of course, we’d all read Charlotte’s Web and loved it. But Max and Ivan and I were rabid collectors, and this spider plague opened up new collecting opportunities. Past summers it had been rocks, fossils, and shark teeth from the Chesapeake Bay, and then snakes, although we gave that up because snakes presented too many problems: Ivan the Tenderhearted cried about the little pink-and-white mice we had to feed them, so he started to liberate his mice in the house, which hadn’t gone over well with Maria, and one of my garter snakes had gotten out and just about given Estelle a heart attack—the only time she’d ever threatened to quit. And there was an unsettling event at the Friedmanns’ involving Max’s sister and his queen snake.
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.
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.
“It must be nine thousand degrees up here!” Max complained. “I quit!” He began descending the ladder.
“Yeah, me, too,” Ivan said, clambering behind him. “Too bad we’re not collecting horseflies.”
“I know,” I said, sighing. “The spiders in here sure aren’t doing much to kill all these stupid mosquitoes, either.”
“These butterfly jars are too big to carry around,” Max said. “And how are we going to keep the grown-ups from seeing the spiders, since we’re keeping them alive?”
We thought. Then Ivan said, “I know! Prescription bottles! We catch them in those, because nobody will notice them in our pockets. And we transfer them to jars to keep.” This seemed like a good idea to me and Max, although we said the grown-ups would kill us if they found them. It was decided that Ivan would keep them, because no one was paying much attention at his house.
There were plenty of pill bottles around all our houses; mostly for Miltown, the most popular of the new “Mother’s Little Helper” drugs, which I’d seen advertised for the “tense and nervous patient.” My mother had certainly been tense and nervous, and she’d had the pills for as long as I could remember, but it surprised me that Dimma, Mrs. Friedmann, and Elena took Miltown, too. But I’d also seen the drug recommended for a disease called menopause, so I thought that maybe Dimma and Mrs. Friedmann had that. Elena had even more Miltowns than my mother. She said they helped with her asthma, but she still suffered from attacks, and always carried her inhaler with the pills.
Feeling better about things, we gathered up all the Miltown bottles we could find, putting nail holes in the tops. Max and I had orangey pill bottles and Ivan had Elena’s green ones, from Mexico. We were set, but we knew that the spiders would die soon, and, unlike Charlotte, they wouldn’t be leaving babies behind because of all the DDT the newspapers said was being marshaled against them. We’d have to find our prize spiders fast. School would start in a couple weeks.