The Pond Lady’s yard on the corner was extremely overgrown—Dimma said that it wasn’t overgrown; it was an English garden and was supposed to be natural—and her stagnant pond was irresistible to us and all manner of creatures. When we’d snuck in before, we managed to get some good frogs’ eggs, which turned into tadpoles and then died. Ivan had fed them to Linda and Rudo, who gobbled them up like they were caviar. But we’d gotten caught and been cruelly punished by being separated for a weekend.
“You just want to see the iron lung,” I said, still worrying.
“I. WANT. A. SPIDER!” Max shouted.
Surprisingly, Ivan yelled, “I. DO. TOO! We only got caught last time because there was a full moon,” he said, always thinking. “And Josephine was still awake. It’s cloudy today, and if we go really late this time, we can do it.”
Max said, “I also wanna catch Peachy.” Max was obsessed with the transparent frog in the pond.
We decided that we’d use our usual ploy to sneak out that night: The adults would be told that we were all spending the night at Max’s house, which was easy to get in and out of because there was a good climbing maple outside the Friedmanns’ upstairs bathroom window.
That night, the boys and I quietly played poker in Max’s disheveled room to stay awake. We were prepared with a tiny penlight that would give us enough, but not too much, light. Brickie had all sorts of gadgets that he’d bring home from work. Sometimes he gave them to me, and other times, like this night, I lifted them from his bureau drawer.
A creaky hassock fan made enough noise to cover up any of ours. Brickie had taught me to gamble—he played a lot of cards with a group of friends at the Chevy Chase Club who called themselves the Jolly Boys. I taught Max and Ivan. We didn’t play with money because we rarely had any, and instead used things from our collections. So far, Ivan had won the promise of my neon-green grasshopper and a scarab beetle from Max.
Just before eleven, when everyone in the house seemed to be asleep, we tiptoed to the bathroom, where the window was already open. We had to jimmy the screen out, but it wasn’t a problem because the wood was soft with rot. I went first, then Ivan. Max came last in case someone caught us—he could think up the best lie. It was an easy climb down. We slunk to the yews across the lane. No Beatriz. Or so we thought—she was hiding, invisible in her uniform, and scared us to death when she whispered, “Hi, you guys!” Ivan and I pulled her up from her squatting position.
Max whispered, “I see London, I see France, I see someone’s underpants.”
Indignantly, Beatriz shot back, “These are not underpants. They’re shorts.” She lifted her skirt to show us pink shorts. Wiesie came prancing across the street and said loudly, “Wow.” Wiesie was talkative and could often sound human.
“Shhh, Wiesie! Be quiet!” Beatriz petted her to placate her, but she said, “Wow,” again. “Go home, Wiesie!”
“Let’s go before someone sees us,” Ivan said.
Walking single file, Max in the lead, we hugged the hedges until we passed the Shreves’, and at the Montebiancos’ we crossed the street to the edge of the Pond Lady’s yard. There didn’t appear to be any lights on in the house, but the vines were so thick it was hard to tell. Just then we heard “Wow” again. Wiesie had followed us. “Rats!” Max hissed at her. “Go home, you dumbbell!”
I said, “Forget it—she’s not going to listen. You just keep quiet.”
As we tunneled one by one through the Virginia creeper, ivy, and honeysuckle, Ivan whispered fearfully, “I hope there’s no poison ivy in here,” although he knew better than any of us that poison ivy was everywhere in the neighborhood. Webs clung to our faces. It was a noisy night: Frogs croaked in the pond, crickets chirped.
We emerged in the yard to see the lazy twinkle of lightning bugs and the blue light of a TV screen glowing through a curtained window; the rest of the house was dark. We crept to the azaleas under the window and peered in through a gap in the curtains. There was the iron lung, looking as metallically space-agey and weird as it had in The Monolith Monsters: a shiny contraption the size and shape of a coffin, with wires and a lighted control panel. “Wow! Look at it!” Beatriz breathed. The TV glared with the sign-off pattern, its blue light reflecting off the machine, making it appear extra-extraterrestrial, or like some kind of Frankenstein experiment. The Pond Lady appeared to be asleep—we could see only her white head sticking out from the top of the thing. Josephine was dozing in a rocking chair, her feet propped on a low stool.
“I told you guys it was cool!” I said.
“How do you think she goes to the bathroom?” Max whispered.
“Maybe she has to wear a giant diaper, like astronauts,” said Ivan. “Or maybe there’s some kind of drain underneath.”
Once we’d gotten an eyeful of the iron lung, we moved silently toward the pond. Tall phlox and orange daylilies grew around it, and we could already see—and feel—more webs everywhere. I pulled out my penlight and snapped it on, keeping it low. Something plopped in the water and Beatriz squeaked. Wiesie, a striped shadow, prowled around and pounced on something, or nothing, and trotted off the way we’d come. A couple water striders were skating on the pond’s surface, but they didn’t interest us. Mosquitoes began buzzing in our ears and biting. I pointed the light around the decorative rocks. We saw a few ordinary spiders, and then some tiny eyes looked back at me—another wolf spider attempting to wrap up a luminous Hebrew moth. Then I shined the penlight on the webs draped on the tall daylilies, spotting a spider with a yellow ball on its back. “Marbled orb weaver!” I squealed, too loudly. I pulled a pill bottle from my pocket and trapped the orb weaver between the bottle and its cap. “Yay!” Beatriz whispered. I knew Ivan badly wanted to find something, but it was Max who spotted a six-spotted fishing spider next, and clapped it in his pill bottle.
Suddenly loud barking erupted from inside the Andersens’, two doors down. “Foggy!” I cried. Lights came on in the Andersens’ and the Pond Lady’s. We looked at each other in alarm. My neck prickled.
“Run!” Max hissed. As we were scrambling back through the vines to the street, Josephine spat out from the back door, “James, if that you tryin’ to creep up to this door, I told you we done, get on outta here!” Then, “If you boys be out there again, y’all better get gone fast ’fore I call your parents!”
“Help!” Ivan whispered urgently. “I’m stuck!” I turned to see Ivan struggling with a thick Virginia creeper vine around one leg. I quickly helped him wrestle it off, and we followed Beatriz and Max out of the thicket.
To avoid the lit-up houses, we beat it across the lane to Beatriz’s, where she turned and blew us a fast kiss and hurriedly tiptoed into her house. The boys and I slunk behind the Shreves’ and Goncharoffs’ front hedges, stopping when we got to the dark spot across from the Friedmanns’.
“Do you think anyone saw us?” Ivan whispered, breathing heavily. The barking had stopped and the Andersens’ and the Pond Lady’s houses were black again. Max pointed to his house, and we dashed across the lane.
At the maple, we caught our breath and composed ourselves. “Made it!” Max breathed. “I think we’re okay.” There was Wiesie, waiting for us. I clicked on my light. At Wiesie’s feet was Peachy, splayed out on his back like a tiny person. There were a few holes in him, and he was decidedly dead.
“Oh, no!” Ivan cried. “She gigged Peachy!”
“Wiesie! Why’d you do that! Bad kitty!” Max whispered angrily, shoving her with his foot. “We’ll bury him in the morning. If Wiesie or Linda and Rudo don’t eat him. Or we can dissect him.”
There was movement on Ivan’s porch across the street that caught our attention. A car—too dark to see the make—was parked in front of the house. We could see two figures in the shadowy recesses of the porch.
Ivan whispered, “It’s Elena and her date. If she saw us, she won’t tell.”
The screen door slammed and suddenly there was Josef, speaking loudly and angrily in Ukrainian. One of the figures—a man, we could see now—stood up from the swing and came quickly down the walk, got into the car, and drove off. Josef’s voice rose to a shout, and Elena answered, still in a normal voice, but excitedly. Then the two figures came together silently, in what seemed like a hug. We heard a loud slap, and a sharp gasp, and then the unmistakable sound of sobbing. It looked like Elena shoved Josef, and then she began coughing hard, making a hacking rasp between breaths. Josef shouted some more and the screen door slammed again. Elena stood alone, coughing and crying. Ivan pulled out his pocketknife. “I have to go help her!” he cried.
“You can’t!” Max whispered urgently. “Then we’ll get caught!”
“But it’s her asthma!” Ivan said, beginning to cry. “And it sounded like he hit her!”
Max said, “She’s got her inhaler and her pills, right? She’ll be okay. Just wait a minute.”
“What were they saying?” I asked. “Why was he so mad? Did Elena sit on The Throne?”
“He was yelling about her dates, like always. That she’s making him look bad with her boyfriends and refugees,” Ivan answered, pulling open his little knife. “She said he’s just jealous, and he is bad—a khlyst.”
I said, “What’s a ‘khlyst’?”
“I’m not sure. A creepy criminal, I think.” He kept crying.
Max said, “Jealous? Why would he be jealous?”
Elena continued to fumble around on the porch. We waited. We heard the swing creak beneath her weight. After a few minutes the coughing stopped, and we heard only sniffling.
“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.”
“Yeah, sometimes it seems like we’re living on Pluto,” said Ivan. “What about the park? We haven’t hunted there yet, and that’s where Slutcheon found his black widow.”
“Unh-unh!” I said adamantly. “The Bridge Hoods will be there and might de-pants us.” In addition to smoking, cussing at people, and getting high on glue, the Bridge Hoods were known for this kind of humiliation. Liz said they’d strip girls and de-pants boys. She knew a girl who’d been stripped.
Ivan tried again. “The castle?” Rossdhu Castle was actually the abandoned gatehouse to a demolished mansion with a disgusting brown lake. It was haunted, of course, and kids went there to scare themselves.
“I’m done with ponds,” Max said.
“Well, I can’t go hunting today anyway, ’cause my dad’s picking me up in a while,” I said. “You guys better not catch anything good without me.” I was excited to be seeing my dad and going to the beach, but I didn’t want to miss out on bagging a good spider.
Max said, “You think if we find something, we’re going to say, ‘Oh, it’s okay, cool poisonous spider, we have to wait till John gets back to catch you’? ’Fraid not!”
I was miffed. “I’ll only be gone two days, Max! If you do it, you won’t be my best friends anymore!”
Ivan jumped up and said, “Stop! You guys are making my stomach hurt!” He ran over to a boxwood and threw up. “See?” he said. He pulled up his T-shirt to wipe his mouth. His scrawny white stomach heaved. “Guess I got too upset.”
Max snorted. “Guess you got too full of Zagnuts.”
Ivan did look a little green to me. “You look like you’re from Pluto right now.”
“I think I’m still tired from last night,” Ivan said, his voice very weak. I was concerned, and I knew he didn’t want to go home. But he and Max straggled off to their houses, wishing me goodbye—begrudgingly, in Max’s case. He’d never been to the beach.