“We’ve done all the poster stuff,” said Max, “Maria’s going to make the cake, and Beatriz is doing the decorations, so we don’t really have anything to do until the day of the party but look for spiders, right?”
“But we haven’t figured out what the entertainment is going to be,” Ivan said.
“I know what it’s not going to be,” Max said. “That’s for sure.”
“Beatriz will figure it out,” I said.
We were outside, hunting and investigating—throwing worms and roly-polies into webs and watching the spiders scurry out to mummify and eat them. With Ivan’s knife we dissected some egg sacs—lots of them were starting to appear. Max found an orange-and-black calico spider that looked like a ballerina in its web, and I snapped a picture with my Brownie camera. We had worked our way down to the Allgoods’ house, where a yew was so covered with webs that, with its puffy red berries, it looked like a Christmas tree sprayed with canned flocking. We were so completely absorbed we didn’t notice a bike approaching until it screeched to a halt in front of us, startling us.
“What do you morons think you’re doing?” Slutcheon said.
“Nothing,” Max said, covering the Big Chief tablet listing our spider inventory.
Holding my camera behind my back, I said, “We’re just looking at spiders.” Ivan scooched over behind me.
“Oh, yeah?” he said. “What kind? Oooh, daddy longlegs? How ’bout this spider?” He reached out and snapped his middle finger at my arm, delivering a powerful sting.
“Ow,” I said, afraid to say anything else.
“I saw you guys are having a party,” Slutcheon said with a smirk.
Max said, “It’s just for people on our street.”
“But we’re buddies, right? I just might have to come.” He laughed, his mouth reminding me of Foggy, the Andersens’ dog.
Then Slutcheon pulled a cellophane cigarette-pack wrapper from his pocket. “I bet you don’t have one of these spiders,” he said. “I just caught it down at the park.” In the wrapper we could see a black spider with a red marking on its stomach.
“A black widow!” Max cried. “How did you catch it?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out.” He thrust the thing at us and we jumped back. Ivan let out a squeak.
“What are you gonna do with it?” I asked.
“Oh, let it bite somebody I don’t like.” He grinned threateningly and put the black widow back in his pocket. “Maybe I’ll bring it to your party. Hey, bend your arm,” he said to Max. “I got a new trick for you.” Slutcheon licked his palm, coating it with his disgusting saliva, and grabbed Max’s arm, knocking the Big Chief tablet to the ground. Max bent his arm obediently, knowing it was better to submit and get it over with. Slutcheon began rubbing the crook of Max’s elbow round and round, really fast, with his slobbery hand. After a minute, he stopped. The hairs on Max’s elbow were knotted into tiny balls. “Now stretch out your arm.”
“Yikes!” said Max, as the knots tugged painfully at his skin.
Slutcheon laughed. Having successfully tortured two of us, he turned his attention to Ivan. “Where’s your sex-bomb aunt, Rusky?” He leered. “Isn’t she usually babysitting you? You ever see her naked?” He sucked in some drool.
We said nothing.
“Her tits are huge, right?” he said. “She better stop bringing Commie refugees into my neighborhood, like that idiot Gellert. My dad’s going to get rid of them. He’s a big shot in the Immigration Service.” He reached out to me. “Let me see that camera.”
What could I do? I handed over my Brownie.
Slutcheon popped open my camera and yanked out the film, exposing every photo. Then he chucked the ruined film into the bushes. “This thing is a piece of shit. I just got a Polaroid.” He handed the Brownie back, fumbling like he was going to drop it on the street. Which he did.
I couldn’t speak. I could tell Brickie, who would call Slutcheon’s parents, but then the next time we saw him, he would just do something worse to us.
Just then a ’53 black Oldsmobile 88 convertible came down the street and pulled up at the Allgoods’, its radio blasting “Ooby Dooby.” Leonardo, Dawn Allgood’s older hood boyfriend, didn’t usually have much to do with us, but he hopped out of his car without even opening the door and strode over. “What’s going on here, squirts?” he said, really addressing Slutcheon. Leonardo picked up my Brownie and the Big Chief pad and gave them back to us.
“We’re…uh…talking about spiders,” Slutcheon mumbled.
“Really?” said Leonardo. “This doesn’t look like a cheerful conversation to me.” He stepped closer to Slutcheon and grabbed a fist full of his T-shirt. “Just in case you’re messing with these guys,” Leonardo growled, “don’t do it again, punk.” He let Slutcheon go with a shove, and our nemesis pedaled off furiously on his fancy Schwinn. At a safe distance, he yelled, his voice higher, like a girl’s, “You’ll all be sorry!”
“That kid’s a loser,” Leonardo said, and spit into the street. We agreed enthusiastically, and thanked him. “Where’s your aunt?” he asked Ivan. Naturally he had a crush on Elena; they sometimes talked when Dawn wasn’t around, and then there was Max’s report that he’d seen them making out one night. We were shocked and skeptical when he’d described what sounded to us as if Elena had been nursing Leonardo, like Mary and baby Jesus, but Max had retorted, “That’s not nursing, you dopes. Gah!” Maybe Dawn had gotten wind of it, and that might be why she hated Elena, and why I’d heard her yell at Leonardo, “That spy slut needs to go back to Russia, where she belongs.” I didn’t know what a slut was, but Max asked his older sister, who told him it was a “bad girl.” But we were intrigued with Leonardo, “our local rebel without a cause,” as Brickie referred to him, and we admired his cool car, dungarees, and greased-back ducktail with sideburns. He had a rockabilly band, Terry and the Pirates, who’d recently had a hit record.
Ivan told Leonardo he didn’t know where Elena was, so Leonardo sauntered off, saying, “Yeah, well, tell her how I saved you guys, okay?” In the Allgoods’ window, we could see Dawn and her blond combination ponytail-beehive peering out, and then she rapped on the glass impatiently, even though Leonardo was nearly to her door. We’d heard the story about the girl who had roaches in her beehive, and the Shreve boys swore they’d seen one crawl out of Dawn’s hair.
“Man, look at this,” I said. My Brownie had a crack on its side, and it rattled. “Do you think it’ll still work?”
“My dad can fix it. He can fix anything.” Max was rubbing the angry red spot on his arm. “We need to get back at that moron. We’ve got to find a spider that’s at least as cool as his black widow and we’ve got to find it now.” He slapped his leg with the Big Chief pad for emphasis.
“Yeah,” Ivan said. “If we don’t find one soon, all the spiders will be dead.”
“I’m telling you guys,” Max said. “Pond Lady’s.”
“Maybe we should think about it,” I said.
“ ‘Maybe we should think about it’!” Max echoed me with a prissy voice. “Think about this!” He cocked a leg and cut a big one, one of his specialties. “I say we go for the Pond Lady’s tomorrow.”
Ivan said, “I do, too!”
I reluctantly agreed, remembering that I had to go to the beach with my dad the day after, so this might be my only chance.
“All for one and one for all!” Max put an arm around me and Ivan and we stumbled up the lane together, singing the only verse we knew of a Coasters song we liked to associate with ourselves:
Three cool cats, three cool cats
Parked on a corner in a beat-up car
Dividing up a nickel candy bar
Talking all about how sharp they are, these
Three cool cats
I couldn’t resist asking Ivan, “Have you ever seen Elena naked?” I’d walked in on my sister once and she slapped me, even though it was accidental. Sort of. Also not very interesting, since she was about ten at the time.
Ivan said, “I saw her in her slip once, and I could see through it. It was scary! But she didn’t care.”
“My sister told me if I ever tried to peek at her she’d make earrings out of my nuts,” Max said. Then, “I hope that black widow bites Slutcheon on his stupid butt and it rots off.” He broke away from our embrace and pulled down the back of his shorts, mooning us, and started hopping down the lane, hands on his rear, crying, “Oh, no! My butt’s rotting off! My butt’s rotting off! I’m pooping everywhere!” Ivan and I doubled over, laughing at him.
Later that evening, as we were idly riding our bikes in circles, Beatriz appeared, coming toward us up the lane, her red hula hoop rotating expertly around her hips as she walked. “That’s amazing!” Ivan cried. “How can you do that?” We boys weren’t great hula-hoopers—maybe it was not having hips or butts? We could only hula hoop on our arms. Or get them hung up in trees; mine was actually on our roof. Beatriz stopped in front of us and kept swiveling, a big grin on her pretty face.
“Cool, man, cool!” Max didn’t hand out a lot of compliments, especially to Beatriz, but that’s how impressed he was.
Still hooping, Beatriz said, “Wait till you see my routine for the Fiesta!” We begged her to show us, but she wouldn’t. “Surprises are more fun!” She stopped her hoop and we threw down our bikes by the Friedmanns’ porch. Then she declared, “And I decided that for the entertainment you guys can do what you’re already good at—Max can do his yo-yo tricks, Ivan will do magic tricks, and John can do archery! That way we don’t have to worry about learning anything new!”
Max said, “Good. I’m sick of learning all the time.” He was always cranky about having to go to Hebrew school and regular school.
We told Beatriz—we could trust her—about our miserable encounter with Slutcheon earlier and spelled out our plan to get into the Pond Lady’s yard to find a revenge spider, although I was having serious reservations. She said, “I want to come, too!” She didn’t care about catching spiders, but she also wanted to see the iron lung. “I like adventures and I never get to have any.”
“How can you go with us?” Ivan asked. “You can’t spend the night with boys.”
“My mama and papa are going out tomorrow, and they’ll be home late, and my brother just stays in my parents’ room and talks on the phone all night.”
We agreed to meet the next night at eleven o’clock, among the yews across the lane, where there wasn’t a streetlight. “Everybody wear dark clothes!” I said, sucked into the excitement and proud that I’d thought of something.
Beatriz said, “I don’t have any dark clothes. Except my school uniform.”
Max said, “Well, wear that, Miss Priss.”
“Okay,” said Beatriz, concerned. “But I can’t get it messed up.”
“Anybody who’s worried about messing up their clothes isn’t ready for an adventure,” Max scoffed.
“Well, I am ready, and I’m coming,” she said defiantly, stomping a foot. “So there.” I wondered why so many females, with the exception of Elena and my mother, seemed like our leopard-legged silver argiope, who would eat the males in her life if she felt so inclined.