by Dave Barry
“No,” said the little guy. “I was reaching for this.” He held up a barf bag. It looked full.
“Ew,” said Suzana Delgado.
The marshal looked at me and said, “Give me the backpack.” I gave it to him. He looked at the little guy and said, “Do you mind if I look inside?”
I thought the little guy hesitated just a tenth of a second before he said, “No, is fine.”
The marshal unzipped the backpack and looked inside. He looked up at the little guy and said, “Mind if I take it out?”
The little guy nodded. “Of course,” he said. “But please be careful.”
The marshal set the backpack down on a seat, reached inside, and pulled out…
A dragon’s head.
It was made out of some lightweight material and painted a million colors. It had big buggy eyes and an open mouth filled with long sharp fangy-looking teeth.
The marshal held it up and looked at it. “Nice,” he said.
“Thank you,” said the little guy. “I made it. I am artist. I make traditional folk art from my country.”
“And what country is that?”
“Gadakistan. Is near—”
“I know where it is.” The marshal put the dragon head back into the backpack and handed it to the little guy. He looked at Matt and me. It wasn’t a friendly look.
“Listen,” said Matt. “I still think…”
I grabbed his arm. “Shut up,” I said.
“But there’s—”
“Just for once shut up, okay?”
The plane was at the gate now, and the front door was opening. People were standing and getting their stuff down from the overhead storage. I reached down to get my backpack, hoping that somehow all this would just go away. But…
“Hold it,” said the marshal, putting his hand on my shoulder. “You boys are staying right here.”
Matt and I sat in our seats while everybody else got off the plane, except Mr. Barto, who stood with his arms folded, staring at us. The worst was when other kids went past us. Some of them were laughing. Suzana looked at me and just shook her head.
The two weird guys took their time getting ready to leave, so they were almost the last ones off. The big guy got his long black bag down from the overhead, and the two of them headed for the front of the plane. When they got there, the little one turned and looked back. He made sure the marshal wasn’t looking his way. Then he looked straight at me and Matt, held up his backpack, and smiled at us.
A really creepy smile.
The only good part about what happened next was that the Federal Marshal decided not to arrest me and Matt. He said he seriously considered it, but in the end he decided to let us off with just a lecture on the general theme that we were a pair of idiots.
The worst part was when I had to call my parents from the airport and tell them that Mr. Barto was maybe going to send me and Matt home from Washington. I didn’t really need my phone after I said that, because I could have heard my mother—did I mention that she’s Cuban?—yelling all the way from Miami. Basically she said she was going to kill me and ground me and take away my Xbox for the next three hundred years. Which didn’t make any sense, but it was not a good time to point that out to my mom.
After that Matt and I had to listen to another lecture, this one from Mr. Barto, which he delivered to us next to the bus at the airport with the entire class trip sitting on the bus watching and making faces. Mr. Barto said he was extremely disappointed in us because we were ambassadors for Culver Middle School and it was a privilege to be on this trip and if we pulled one more stupid stunt he was going to blah blah blah.
In the end he said we could stay on the trip. He claimed this was because he was a forgiving man, but I think mainly he was a man who didn’t want to deal with trying to get us home.
I was just glad I wouldn’t have to face my mom yet.
When Matt and I finally got on the bus the only seat left was (of course) right behind Cameron Frank, whose general area smelled like a Porta Potti in July. And of course Suzana was sitting far away with the other hot girls, near Jean-Philippe. But at least we were on the bus, instead of on a plane home. I was starting to feel less bad, maybe even almost a little good.
That feeling lasted about thirty seconds.
I didn’t see them coming. The bus driver had just closed the door. I was looking forward when Matt, who was sitting next to the window, grabbed my arm.
“Uh-oh,” he said.
“What?”
He pointed out the window. I almost yelped when I saw them.
The two weird guys from the plane. Running toward our bus. Looking very unhappy.
Their eyes were scanning the windows, and it wasn’t hard to figure out who they were looking for. I was about to tell Matt to duck, but it was too late: The little guy saw us. He ran straight to our window. He was holding up his backpack and pointing to it and yelling something at us. The big guy was right behind him. They looked really mad.
“What do they want?” I said.
Matt didn’t say anything.
Just then the bus started moving. This totally freaked out the two guys. They started running toward the front, shouting, but the bus was pulling away into the airport traffic. The weird guys started to chase us, but they ran into a cop directing traffic. We saw him block their way, holding up his hands for them to stop. They were arguing with him and pointing at us. The last thing I saw before we got out of sight was the little guy’s face. He looked really, really, really mad.
Mr. Barto and Miss Rector, at the front of the bus, missed all of this. The kids around us saw it, and they were asking us what was going on. I said I didn’t know, that maybe the guys were still mad about what happened on the plane.
Matt still didn’t say anything. Which, if you know anything about Matt, is very unusual. Suddenly I had a bad feeling.
“Wait a minute,” I said to Matt, keeping it quiet. “You know what that was about, don’t you.”
“Um, maybe.”
I grabbed his arm. “What? What?”
“Okay! Let go!” He yanked his arm away. He looked around to make sure nobody was looking our way, then reached into his pocket and pulled something out. He kept it low and showed it to me. It was some kind of electronic thing, a greenish-brown box with a little Plexiglas dome on the top and some switches and buttons on the side.
“Where’d you get that?” I said, even though I pretty much knew.
“From the weird guy’s backpack. It was in the outside pocket.”
“Why’d you take it?”
“I thought it was maybe a detonator. I thought he was gonna blow something up with it.”
“Blow up what? His dragon head?”
“I didn’t know he had a dragon head in there.”
I looked at the box. “Why didn’t you tell the marshal about it?”
“I was gonna. But you told me to shut up. Then I decided it was better to just keep quiet about it. I didn’t want to get in any more trouble.”
We both looked at the box for a few seconds.
“Maybe I should just throw it away,” he said.
I shook my head. “He seemed really upset about losing it. It might be valuable. We should give it back.”
“How?”
“I dunno.”
“How would we even find those guys?”
“I dunno.”
“Do we even want to find those guys?”
I looked out the window. The bus was out of the airport now, on a highway. I thought about the two weird guys back there, probably still arguing with the cop. I pictured the little guy’s face, the way he looked at us as the bus pulled away.
“Not really,” I said. “I hope we never see those guys again.”
Pretty soon we crossed a bridge into Washington. Up ahead we could see the Capitol and a bunch of other Washington-y stuff. Mr. Barto got on the bus P.A. microphone and started pointing out historic things, but since he’s Mr. Barto he kept getting th
em wrong. Like he’d say, “Over here to the left you can see the Lincoln Memorial,” and Miss Rector would whisper something to him, and he’d say, “I mean the Jefferson Memorial.”
Our hotel was a big grayish building called the Warren G. Harding Hotel. It was really old. I think it was the official hotel of every Washington class trip since the Civil War. The lobby had saggy sofas that looked like some kind of farm animals gave birth on them. One kid claimed he saw a rat heading into the coffee shop. But nobody really cared, because we were in a hotel and our parents weren’t.
Mr. Barto gathered us all together to tell us he was expecting everybody to behave in a manner blah blah blah. Meanwhile Miss Rector got the room key cards from the guy at the front desk and handed them out. I was in room 313 with three roommates: Matt, Cameron (of course), and a kid named Victor Lopez, who was new to Culver, so he didn’t have a lot of friends, which is why he ended up with us. He was in my science class and didn’t say much, but he seemed pretty smart.
We got into an elevator that made clunking noises and moved really slow, like it was tired of being an elevator and wanted to retire and just be a closet or something. We got off on the third floor and found room 313, which smelled like a small animal once died in it and they never found the body. It had a rattling air conditioner and an old boxy TV that probably ran on coal. We unpacked our suitcases and put our stuff away. Matt put the detonator, or whatever it was, under his clothes in his drawer.
We decided that, between the room smell and Cameron, we needed to open the window, which was hard because it was kind of painted shut. When Matt and I finally shoved it open I leaned out and saw that our room was right over the roof above the hotel front driveway. While I was leaning out I heard a voice say “Hello,” which surprised me so much that I jerked my head straight up and banged it on the window frame. The voice giggled, and I looked to my right and saw it was Suzana leaning out of the next window over. She gave me a smile that made my stomach jump.
“Does your room smell as bad as ours?” she said.
“Worse,” I said. “We have Cameron in here. I’m thinking of sleeping with my head out the window.”
She laughed—I really like it when I make her laugh—then said, “So what was that about back there? In the plane?”
I shook my head. “Those two weird guys…You saw them, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I let Matt convince me they were trying to blow up the White House.”
“On the plane? Blow it up how?”
“With a missile. Or something.”
She blinked. “A missile?”
“I know it sounds stupid. It is stupid. I can’t believe he got me to take it seriously. I think Matt has this ability to lower the IQ of everybody around him. It’s like a superpower.”
Suzana laughed again. Suddenly this was seeming like not such a totally horrible class trip.
So of course Matt had to ruin everything.
He stuck his head out next to mine and said, “Hey, Suzana! You know Wyatt loves you, right?”
“Shut up, idiot,” I said, trying to push him back inside.
“Wait for him, Suzana!” shouted Matt. “He’ll get taller someday!”
“Shut UP,” I said, still pushing.
“Maybe not this year, Suzana!” shouted Matt. “Maybe not for many years! But some day, when you’re seventy, you might start shrinking, and Wyatt could catch up to you! Wait for him!”
I shoved him really hard. The two of us stumbled back into the room and fell on the floor, and he finally stopped yelling, because he was laughing too hard to breathe. I got back up and stuck my head out the window.
Suzana was gone. I turned around and looked down at Matt.
“You are such an idiot.”
“Maybe,” he said, catching his breath. “But at least I don’t think Suzana Delgado might actually like me.”
“She does like me.”
“As a friend. Which is also how she likes her dog. And which is not how she likes J.P.”
I didn’t have an answer for that, since it was true.
Victor was standing by the door, watching us with a frowny expression, like he was looking through a microscope and we were some kind of fungus cells.
“We’re supposed to be in the lobby,” he said. “For the bus tour.”
So we got into the sad old elevator and clunked down to the lobby and stood around in clots waiting for the bus. I didn’t even want to look in the direction of the Hot Girl clot because I was so embarrassed about what Matt yelled out the window to Suzana. But I glanced that way and just for a second she looked at me and smiled and I kind of smiled back and then looked away, trying to look casual, like I had other things on my mind besides her, except of course I didn’t and my face was probably the same color as a stop sign.
How do girls do this?
The bus came and we got on for our tour and I was happy about two things:
1. I didn’t get stuck next to Cameron.
2. Instead of Mr. Barto, we had an actual professional tour guide. His name was Gene Weingarten. You know those joke disguise glasses that make you look like Groucho Marx, with the big nose and the huge bushy black eyebrows and the bushy black mustache? Well, Gene—he said we should call him Gene—looked exactly like that, except he wasn’t wearing disguise glasses. That was his regular look. But he was a way better guide than Mr. Barto, because he seemed to actually know what he was pointing to.
We drove around Washington looking at famous things, with Gene explaining what they were and Mr. Barto grabbing the microphone about every three seconds to tell us that if we didn’t pay attention he was going to take away everybody’s phones and blah blah blah. Some of the things were pretty cool to see, like the Capitol. Some of the things were basically just big buildings where, according to Mr. Weingarten, something historic happened inside, but from the outside to be honest they just looked like buildings.
The bus parked near the Washington Monument and we all got out and sat on the grass and Miss Rector handed out box lunches with sandwiches containing some kind of slimy meat that looked a cross between a really sick chicken and a really pale ham. Chickham. I ate the potato chips and gave my sandwich to Cameron, who ate it in like three bites, which probably explains the way his digestive system works.
After lunch we had a few minutes of free time. A bunch of boys, including Matt and me, went to this kind of dumpy store that sold supposedly funny T-shirts and joke items and patriotic souvenirs of Washington made in China. Matt bought a cigarette lighter that looked like a gun. You pulled the trigger and the flame appeared at the end. I bought a T-shirt that said U.S SECRET SERVICE on the front, although I imagine a real Secret Service agent would never wear it because then they wouldn’t be very secret.
After that Gene took us on a walking tour to the World War II Memorial, the Korean War Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, and the Vietnam Memorial, which is a lot of memorials and a lot of walking, plus it was a warm day, not Miami warm, but warm. Mr. Barto, who was carrying that giant backpack he always had on, looked like he was going to pass out. After those monuments we stood in line to go up in the Washington Monument, which was a long wait but a pretty great view from the top.
When we came out there were a bunch of guys flying kites near the monument. Gene told us they were practicing for a huge kite festival that was going to happen in a few days. Some of the kites had really cool designs, like a fish, or a centipede, or a giant spider, or just a lot of weird shapes. Sometimes you couldn’t even imagine how they could fly, but they did. Some of the kites were huge. One of them actually lifted the guy holding it off the ground for a few seconds before he could get control of it.
From there we walked to the White House, and I have to say it was pretty amazing to say we were at the White House, even though we weren’t actually going in, just walking along the big iron fence outside it.
Gene told us that for a long time, there was
no security at the White House. Regular people could just walk in off the street and see, like, Abraham Lincoln. But now there was tons of security—bulletproof glass, motion sensors above and below the ground, lasers, Secret Service guys everywhere, snipers on the roof, even missiles in case they had to shoot down an airplane.
“It’s basically a fortress,” Gene said. “An army couldn’t get into that building.” He said every now and then somebody climbs the fence, but they always catch the person right away. We asked what happens to those people.
“You don’t want to know,” he said.
We walked along the gate on the Pennsylvania Avenue side and took a bunch of pictures of ourselves smiling like morons with the White House in the background, which is also what about ninety million other tourists were doing. After a while Miss Rector said we had to get back to the bus and started herding us. We reached a corner and turned down a street that ran alongside the White House grounds near where our bus was parked. We were kind of flowing along in a big river of tourists, and I was looking forward to getting to the bus and sitting down after all that walking. That was all I was thinking about.
Until I saw a bald head.
It was up ahead, bobbing along in the tourist river, sticking out over the rest of the heads.
The bald head of a big guy.
I sped up, got a little closer, a little better look.
The bald guy was wearing a black T-shirt.
I did not want it to be the guy from the plane. I tried to convince myself that it probably wasn’t. I mean, Washington was a big city full of people. There was probably more than one big bald guy wearing a black T-shirt. This is what I told myself.
But I wanted to make sure. I started walking faster. I got past a bunch of people, so I was maybe ten yards behind the bald guy. That’s when I saw the snakes tattooed on his arms. And the weird little guy walking next to him.
I stopped so fast that the person behind me bumped into me, which was okay because it was Matt.
“Hey!” he said.
“Problem,” I said.
“What?”
I grabbed his arm and tugged him to the side, so he could see past the people in front of us. I pointed ahead.
