by Lisa Howorth
“I guess the sun bleached it at the beach,” I said proudly.
“It’s very becoming. We will have to send you to Hollywood to be in the movies, you sexy thing.”
Max said, “Yeah. Maybe Night of the Monster Scab Boy.”
I sang out, “What you say is what you are. You’re a naked movie star.”
“Sure hope you don’t get any flesh-eating screwworms in those little scratches,” Max said.
A block over on Raymond Street, we heard Tim’s truck, ding-a-ling-a-ling. Elena gave us the usual dollar, and we skittered to the street. I forgot to limp. While we waited, I remembered the rubber and showed it off. Max immediately blew it up into a pale balloon, making me and Ivan laugh. Then Tim’s truck swung around the corner at the same time Beatriz came running out of her house. She raced Tim up the lane to Ivan’s steps, beating him. Max quickly exploded the rubber and pocketed it. Beatriz and Tim saw my pitiful torso at the same time, and Tim said, “Jeez, kid!” Beatriz, out of breath, exclaimed, “John, what happened?” I was glad to tell them, but before I could, Leonardo’s Olds pulled up, stopping next door at the Allgoods’. “Rumble” twanged darkly from the car radio and was abruptly shut off.
Leonardo and Dawn emerged from the Olds and Leonardo briskly headed for the Allgoods’. Dawn, looking sexy in tight dungarees with a plaid blouse tied at her waist, strolled over to Tim’s truck. She stared up at the porch where Elena lay, lazily pushing her swing with one foot and reading a magazine. Dawn called out in an insincere singsong voice, “Leo, I’d love a cherry Popsicle,” although she looked like she didn’t love anything at the moment. Leonardo never broke stride and disappeared into the house.
“Uh-oh,” Max whispered to me.
Tim said, a little uncertainly, “Hey, what does everybody want?” He handed Dawn the cherry Popsicle she asked for and she paid, struggling to get the change from her tight jeans, but didn’t leave. Tim looked nervous. The humid air thickened with tension and gnats. We waited silently for our treats, swatting and scratching ourselves distractedly. Dawn peeled down her Popsicle wrapper in a slow and deliberate way, and then stood there with a bony hip out, sucking the bloody-red ice lasciviously, glancing at the porch. We couldn’t take our eyes off her. Neither could Tim. He wordlessly gave us our usual and finally said, “Take this to your aunt,” handing Ivan a Toasted Almond Bar.
We started up the walk when suddenly Dawn shouted, “Hey!” and we all turned to her. “Take this to your bitch aunt, too.” And she gave Ivan the sideways finger, which was worse than a regular one. Stunned, we watched her stomp away, her ponytail switching angrily from side to side.
His face bright red, Tim said, “Jeez. I don’t know what that was, but don’t let it bother you guys, okay?” He quickly drove off, not jingling at all.
Ivan was as pale as the vanilla ice cream dripping from his uneaten Good Humor.
Beatriz, wide-eyed, whispered, “Yikes! She’s really scary.”
Max rapidly scraped his whole Creamsicle off its stick with his teeth, and, producing the popped rubber, placed the end of it over the top of the stick. Stretching the rubber back, he let it go with a sharp snap, and it sailed over the yews and landed on the Allgoods’ walk just as Dawn went into her house, slamming the door. “Take that, you scag slut!” Max yelled after her.
“What was that thing?” Beatriz asked. “A snakeskin?” We didn’t answer. When we turned back to the house, Elena was nowhere to be seen.
10
We reported for duty at the Friedmanns’ the next day. I was doing much better; my scabs were dry, the bad foot no longer hurt—much—and I’d almost stopped coughing. Beatriz joined us, and I was glad because I worried about what Max had on his mind, and she was reasonable about things.
* * *
—
The climbing maple was shedding its seeds all around us. Beatriz split a sticky seed and pasted one of its wings on the bridge of her nose, where it protruded like a rhino horn. Ivan did the same.
“It’s time to get serious about the vinegaroon,” Ivan said very solemnly.
“What are you talking about?” Beatriz said, pasting a rhino horn on Wiesie, who’d come out on the steps. Wiesie tolerated it, perhaps to get back in our good graces after the gigging of Peachy.
I clued Beatriz in about the discovery of the poisonous pirate vinegaroons, and Max told her, “We’re going to get one of them and mess Slutcheon up with it.”
“Oh, I’d love to do that!” Beatriz said, unfazed. “Remember the time he pulled up my dress and almost goosed me, and I tried to punch him in the face?” I remembered; Beatriz was much braver than we were. “He’s a rotten jagunço! Where can we find those things?”
“Oh, they’re waiting for us at the National Museum,” Max said casually, sticking on a rhino horn. “We’re going to break in and steal one.” He added, “And who said you were coming with us?” He leaned back on his elbows and began humming “Ride of the Valkyries,” his favorite tune from a Merrie Melodies cartoon featuring Elmer Fudd killing Bugs Bunny. Wagner was verboten in his house.
* * *
—
Beatriz whooped. “Are you crazy? Break into the museum?” She laughed. “But if you guys go, I go, too.”
I groaned. “Max, that’s the worst idea you’ve ever had.”
“Well, nobody else has any ideas!”
Ivan said, very calmly, “I’ve thought about it. We were smart enough to get into the Pond Lady’s yard, right? It doesn’t have to be much differenter or harder than that. We sneak out again at night, ride our bikes down to the museum, get in, and grab it. Just like Nickie in The Secret Horse.” Ivan and I had a classmate whose mother had written a famous book about a girl who stole a horse. We loved the book, even though it was about a girl.
“But she was stealing a horse who was just in a stable, not in a museum,” I pointed out. “And she could ride him away. And horses aren’t poisonous.”
* * *
—
“Wait a minute! Will those vinegar things kill people?” Beatriz wanted to know, fooling nervously with one of her braids.
“Nah,” Max answered. “It will only make you sick, and maybe a little bit blind. Unless you’re a baby or a geezer, or already sick.”
“Okay. I don’t want to commit murder.” Beatriz crossed herself.
“There are a bunch of people I wouldn’t mind being dead,” Max said darkly. Ivan nodded.
Beatriz asked, “How do we actually break into the museum?”
Ivan said, “If we go at night, maybe we can pick the lock. We’ve done that at John’s with that thingie his grandfather has.” This was another gadget of Brickie’s that he called the Hand Jive. “Or we can go at the end of the day before the museum closes, and just hide till everybody’s gone and they close up.”
“Perfect!” said Max.
Beatriz and I were speechless. Then I asked, “Yeah, Ivan, but how do we grab it? I’m sure it’s in a glass tank.”
“We could wear gloves and smash a hole in the glass with something pointed, like an ice pick. Or a screwdriver. We have to wear gloves anyway so the vinegaroons won’t sting us. Remember that guy who stole the Gaboon viper from the zoo? He smashed the glass, too, but he was dumb and put the snake in a pillowcase, and it bit him on the bus when he was trying to get away.”
“Won’t an alarm go off?” I asked.
“It didn’t for the viper guy. He went in during the day and hid till closing time. If an alarm does go off, we’re so fast we’ll be back on our bikes before a guard or somebody gets there. We can do it! I know we can.” I don’t think I’d ever seen Ivan so determined, and certainly not about something of this magnitude.
“Hey!” said Max. “My dad has a glass cutter—he’s got every tool on earth. It would be easier and quieter than an ice pick.”
“Great id
ea!” Ivan exclaimed.
Beatriz asked Ivan, “Say we get in, and we break the glass case”—that she was now saying “we” instead of “you” was not lost on me—“then what do we do? Even if we grab it with gloves it can still spray our eyes, and we might breathe the poison.”
“Hmm…” Here Ivan was stumped.
“I know!” I was getting enthusiastic. “Swim goggles! I have some!”
So did Ivan and Beatriz, and I said Max could wear Liz’s.
“Yeah!” Max said. “And so we don’t breathe any, we can tie mouse mattresses across our mouths!” Max had shown me and Ivan bandage-like things his older sister referred to as “mouse mattresses,” informing us that girls peed blood every month and had to strap them on.
Beatriz was perplexed, so Max, a little embarrassed, explained what they looked like. “Oh! You mean Kotex! Sheesh—boys are so dumb!”
“I’m not putting those things over my mouth,” I said. “Why couldn’t we just wear bandannas, like the Lone Ranger?”
“Max is right,” Ivan said. “Regular cloth might not be thick enough.”
“Gah!” I shuddered, wondering why I hadn’t seen any mouse mattresses around my house.
“Okay—then what?” Beatriz asked, all business now.
Ivan continued. “Then whoever’s wearing gloves has to scootch the boy vinegaroon into a pill bottle and cap it fast.”
“What’s wrong with catching the girl one?” Beatriz asked.
“The girl one is preggers,” I said, using a word I’d heard Liz use. “She’s got about thirty eggs on her stomach and we don’t need those hatching and running around.”
“Although it might be good to have a supply,” Ivan mused.
“No, it wouldn’t,” I said firmly.
Max asked, “After we’ve trapped the vinegaroon, then what, Ivan?”
“We’ll keep him hidden and scare Slutcheon!”
Max spat. “You think Slutcheon won’t tell on us? As if.”
“Only scare him?” said Beatriz.
Max was laughing. “We could put it in a potato-chip sandwich and give it to him!”
I realized that I’d come around to the plan and said, “Or we could sneak it into his clothes, or that little bag on his bike. It won’t kill him—it’ll just make his life miserable!”
“Yeah!” Max said excitedly. “We’ll deny everything! And he’ll get blamed for stealing it and get sent to Charlotte Hall!” Charlotte Hall was a frightening military school where out-of-control boys were sent. Brickie occasionally threatened me with it.
Ivan’s expression turned doubtful. “The only thing is, how can we get the vinegaroon back after it gets Slutcheon?”
I cocked my head quizzically. “Why do we want him back? He’ll get squashed as soon as that jerk finds him anyway. Don’t be Ivan the Tenderhearted about a vemonous pirate vinegaroon.”
“Yeah, but it seems sad….I guess…I guess I was thinking it’s too bad we can’t keep him awhile, after we’ve made all these plans.”
Max shook his head. “You made the plan, and it’s good. Sometimes you’re like Einstein, Ivan. It’s almost scary.”
“Yeah,” I said appreciatively. “You’d make a great Russian spy.” Ivan gave me one of his pitiful looks and I quickly amended, “I mean, an American spy.”
He grinned. “Let’s call it the Heist!”
I resignedly pasted a rhino horn on my nose to signal our solidarity.
“When do we do it?” Max asked.
It was odd to have Ivan in charge. But since he was the mastermind of the Heist, we let him figure it out. He said that if we were going to pull it off, it needed to be before school started, with homework, early bedtimes, and more adult scrutiny in general. And with the Fabulous Family Fiesta taking place in a few days, we needed to do it now.
“Boys,” Beatriz said, “I might know something that will help our plan. I’ve got ballet now, but I’ll tell you more later, okay?” She stroked Wiesie, the furry rhino, and ran off down the lane.
“Bring us something to eat!” Max called. “I shouldn’t have even told Beatriz about the vinegaroons,” Max said to me. “This is a boy job. She doesn’t care about spiders.”
“She’s great at secret stuff! And she’s the best liar of all of us, if something happens.”
“She is!” Ivan agreed. “Plus, she knows downtown a lot better than any of us.”
“Hmpf,” said Max. “She better not slow us down.”
“She won’t,” I said stubbornly. Beatriz was fast on her bike and was the first of us to ride with no hands, which had made Max bitter.
“Let’s go check out the glass cutter and Brickie’s lock picker,” I said.
Around the back of the Friedmanns’, big wooden barn doors opened to the dirt basement, so we could go right into Mr. Friedmann’s workshop, although it was off-limits to us without permission. The workshop walls were hung neatly with garden tools, saws, hammers, spools of wire in all colors, hoses, and contraptions we didn’t recognize. Buckets and sacks of fertilizer stood around, organized and labeled in German. Farther back in the dim space, there was a large table. Max opened a wide drawer and held a tool up. “Here’s the glass cutter!” It was an eight-inch piece of notched steel, its stem painted orange, with a ball on one end. Max said, “See this little wheel? That’s the cutter—you roll it on glass where you want it to cut, it makes a line, and then you tap it with the ball and the glass breaks.”
Max sneaked it out under his T-shirt. We then went to my house. I said, “You guys wait here.”
I went straight to Brickie’s gadget drawer and stole the Hand Jive lock picker. When I was back with the boys, Ivan said, “Let me see.” It looked like a fat Swiss Army knife with picks opening out like blades, each one having a different crimped, twisted, or bent end. “I love this thing!” Ivan said softly.
There was discussion about which route we’d take for the Heist—we didn’t know exactly how to get to the museum; we only knew from trips to the Mall that basically we’d go straight down Connecticut Avenue, but after that it got confusing, as Washington streets often are.
We made a run to the Esso station down at the shopping center and got a free street map and laid it out on Max’s porch, crouching over it with a red crayon.
“It looks like the easiest way is down Connecticut, where it turns into Seventeenth Street,” Ivan said, tracing the route with the crayon.
I said, “Wow, that’s really far, isn’t it? That’s farther than my dad’s apartment when he lived at DuPont Circle.”
“We’ve ridden through Rock Creek Park that far before, don’t you think?” Ivan said.
“No, I don’t think,” Max said. “That does look far.”
Ivan ignored us both and said, “After that, we’re practically right on the Mall. All we do then is get on Constitution Avenue, go down to Tenth Street, and there it is.”
Max and I weren’t exactly having second thoughts, but it was sinking in that the Heist was now moving swiftly toward reality. Ivan, sensing our misgivings, gave us an odd, steely gaze. “I know we can do it.”
“Are we going to do it at night, or do like the Gaboon-viper guy and wait till it closes?” I asked him.
“If we do it at closing time, it’ll be night anyway,” Ivan said. “They’re open late in summer.”
Beatriz came running hard up the lane, still in her pink leotard, tutu, and tights. Sweaty and excited, she held out a box of Fig Newtons.
Max, surprised, said, “Wow—thanks, Tinkerbell.”
She smiled at Max. “You’re welcome. Guess what? I checked—my parents will be at a wedding in Georgetown tomorrow, so they’ll be drunk and go to bed early, and I can sneak out!”
I was happy to hear it; having Beatriz around gave me courage. Max, his mouth full of Fig Newtons, asked,
“So whash thish big idea of yoursh?”
“I’ve heard my dad talk about this old man named Hampton who goes around to the museums every single night and collects all the tinfoil junk in all the trash cans in the buildings. It’s for some crazy thing he’s building. He’s a janitor at one of the museums, and they all know him, so he’s allowed to do it.” She stopped to catch her breath for a second. “So if we can go to our museum at night and wait there, the Hampton guy’ll probably come, and the door will be open and we can get in easy!”
The boys and I looked at each other. “But what if we miss him?” Ivan asked.
“Well, then we might have to pick the lock. But I doubt it, if we just wait.”
“But how do we know what door he uses?” I asked her.
“It must be a back one, because wouldn’t that be the door a janitor would use?”
“Yeah,” Ivan said. “That makes sense. But how do we keep him from seeing us?”
“We just have to be sure he’s looking for trash somewhere else in the building when we get in.”
We showed Beatriz our tools, and the Esso map. She got down on all fours in her tutu, her butt looking like a big pink flower. With her finger she traced the route Ivan had drawn. “This looks right, I think. But I know how to go without a map—I go to all those museums down there with my dad all the time.”
“Okay,” said Ivan. “So tomorrow night?” He looked to Max. “We’ll spend the night at your house, just like the Pond Lady night?”
“Okay. It’ll be Shabbat, so my parents will probably drink a lot of wine and they’ll go to bed early, too.”
“I’m so excited!” Beatriz jumped up and turned a pirouette. “It’ll be like we’re in a movie!”
I fervently hoped that our movie wouldn’t turn out like The Asphalt Jungle, in which most of the thieves died or went to jail.
11
We spent the next morning gathering what we needed for the Heist: Ivan’s green pill bottles because they were bigger and the tops were already fixed with air holes, the glass cutter, the Hand Jive, an ice pick just in case, stocking caps from Max—“It’s what burglars wear, right?”—goggles, a paper bag to wrap the vinegaroon bottle in, and four Kotex pads Beatriz had stolen from La Senhora and fitted with rubber bands so we could keep them on, and four Hostess CupCakes—“In case we need energy”—from me. Max and I just had thick wool mittens, but Ivan had Elena’s red kid gloves, which were lined with fur and fit snugly. All of it was stashed in Max’s book bag—he was the only one who had a book bag, because it was required for Hebrew school. I’d have Brickie’s penlight in my pocket. We checked and oiled our bikes and covered the reflectors with masking tape. Our darkest clothes were selected, and we figured that long pants would be best so our legs wouldn’t stand out. Beatriz would have to wear her Visitation uniform again, because she didn’t have any dark pants, but she’d wear her longest kneesocks. Max then complained that her knees would still show, and she said, “At least my skin is brown. Your big ghost clown paleface is what’s gonna show.” To counter that, we agreed to smudge her knees and our faces with charcoal from Ivan’s grill.
