Maniac Monkeys on Magnolia Street & When Mules Flew on Magnolia Street

by Angela Johnson

When Billy gets something in his head, you better not get in his way. It's best to join in; mostly, we do.

  Soon we were all waiting for the fish to come. This is always my favorite part of fishing—waiting and looking into the water. It's exciting thinking that a fish could bite at any moment.

  Mostly, though, they just take the bait, not the hook. Then we feed them more.

  “It's good to be out of school for the summer,” Lump said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think the teachers needed a break. They were starting to daydream and not pay attention to their work.”

  Billy said, “I caught Ms. Thorton playing with a yo-yo before class a couple of days before summer vacation.”

  Lump said, “The whole class caught Mr. Kane blowing bubbles at his desk the day school let out.”

  “I feel sorry for the teachers. It's hard for them all year long. I hope a few of them are out fishing someplace.”

  “Yeah,” said Lump.

  “Yeah,” said Billy.

  I threw a couple of chunks of cheese into the water for the fish who might not make it to the fishing poles. Sid might be right about them making sandwiches, but I wouldn't tell him that.

  It got very quiet on the river. We got quiet, too. Nothing like fishing, with the sun high in the sky.

  Lump took out the sandwiches. We all love baloney. It's another one of the good parts of fishing. I took the Big Swooshies out of the river, and we drank them like we'd been in the desert all day. You'd just dry up and get blown away like a leaf if it wasn't for Big Swooshies. Fishing is hard, fun, and long.…

  After the sandwiches and the Swooshies, we must have fallen asleep, 'cause when we woke up, the sun had warmed up the riverbank and our fishing poles were gone!

  We all woke up at the same time. Maybe there was a noise in the woods surrounding us. Maybe someone blew a horn on Magnolia Street. Or maybe three fish took the bait at the same time, pulling our fishing poles away from the riverbank and waking us up because they were laughing so hard that we could hear it coming from underwater.

  Billy thought it was the last one.

  Lump thought it was probably all of them.

  I thought we'd just slept so hard for so long, like big old warthogs, it was just a matter of time before we woke up.

  “What are we going to do?” Billy said as we watched our poles float gently in the middle of the river.

  “Only one thing we can do,” I said.

  Lump blew a bubble and nodded and said, “Yep, only one thing.”

  Well, it was a good thing it had warmed up. It was also a good thing we were all excellent swimmers (even though the river comes up only to our waists), 'cause we were in the middle of the river for a long time.

  I found river weed while I was trying to untangle the fishing lines. Lump decided Billy would look good with it on top of his head. I thought Lump would, too.

  In the end they both looked completely hysterical—like swamp monsters!

  Billy splashed and jumped in and out of the water while I tried some river weed on myself.

  Lump squished in his wet clothes as he went along the bank collecting frogs in the net. He got about twenty of them. They croaked loudly into the warm afternoon air.

  After we sat in the water awhile listening to their song, we took handfuls of them at a time and let them go back to what they were doing. Then we screamed and splashed each other till we probably scared off the rest of the fish.

  We laughed till we couldn't stand it anymore. After a while we waded back to the riverbank. Our wet clothes felt heavy as blankets. Lump passed the comic books around, and if somebody had come by us in a boat, they would have wondered where the vine-covered sea monsters reading comics had come from.

  A little while later we threw the rest of the cheese to the fish and drank the last of our Big Swooshies. Then each of us read a chapter of the Goober Kids out loud.

  The five o'clock whistle at the peanut butter factory had blown when I heard Mom calling from the top of the ravine. We packed everything in a hurry and ran up to the street. After we'd loaded the car with everything but fish, we rolled down the car window and sang more fishing songs. Real loud.

  It's really true, I thought as we headed toward home, Lump and Billy and me screaming our songs, there really is nothing like fishing!

  omething weird is happening on Magnolia Street. I thought I knew what it was all about, but it turned out to be something totally different. At first I was kind of scared.

  I even told Sid all about it, so I know I was pretty worried.

  It didn't start off like a mystery. At least not like the mysteries in books I read. Usually, in those books, somebody is running down a dark road in the rain or has moved into an old house that has a secret room he can't get into.

  This mystery is the Carter family. They disappeared.

  A huge family, with about ten kids, five dogs (one that barked at everybody), three cats, and six guinea pigs, one day just wasn't there at all. I mean, just like that!

  One minute Ben Carter was squirting water at everyone with his mom's hose, and his little sister Dana was selling lemonade at a stand while their sister Vicky slept in the hammock in the front yard (though how she can sleep with all those people around I do not know). The next minute they were all gone.

  Well, not exactly a minute. It was two days.

  I went to borrow a few crab apples off their tree when I noticed that there weren't even lawn chairs in the front yard anymore. All the Big Wheels, bikes, and wading pools had also disappeared.

  Usually you could hear laughing and yelling real early in the morning at the Carters'. This morning no dog barked, and there wasn't one sound from the house.

  I went closer and I noticed that the bamboo shades on the front door were gone. The wind chimes that made tinkling sounds were gone, too.

  So I climbed onto the porch and looked in. I guess I half expected to see most everybody in time-out, the house being so quiet and everything.

  I ran the half a block to my house, crashing into my mom just as she was getting into her car to go to work. She'd dumped her purse on the front seat to look for something.

  “They're gone, Mom.”

  “Who's gone, Charlie?”

  “The Carters, Mom. All of them are gone. And so is all their furniture and even the dogs. They even took the barking dog. You'd think they'd just leave him for the neighbors to take care of, since we've gotten used to him howling.”

  “What?” Mom said.

  I kind of looked at her. I'd just told her all about the disappearance of the Carters, and she hadn't even heard me. I guess it wasn't a good idea to bug Mom when she was on her way to work.

  She smiled, then kissed me on the top of my head like I was a baby. (I wish she wouldn't.)

  “You shouldn't tease that dog, Charlie.”

  “What?” I said.

  “You shouldn't tease that dog of the Carters'.”

  Then she started the car and blew a kiss at me as she pulled out of the drive. She rolled down the window and called, “Pay attention to Sid. And try to eat something sensible. I don't think a hundred cookies a day is a well-balanced diet.”

  Well, paying attention to Sid was not something I wanted to think about, but I would try not to eat so many cookies. I was spending most of my days eating them.

  A good cookie can be the best thing in the world.

  That's when I went into the house to tell Sid about the Carters. Sid said we should be careful, 'cause if the mystery is what we all think it is (that a whole family just disappeared with aliens or something), we could all disappear. Just like the Carter family. But I caught him giggling as he left the kitchen. I might as well have been talking to one of my neighbor Mr. Pinkton's fish. Sid is never much help, but sometimes he can be such a pest that I feel like gluing a sign around his body that says

  ANNOYING BROTHER FOR SALE.

  I decided I'd go tell Lump and Billy all about the Carters. They'd believe me, and maybe e
ven help me find out what happened to them.

  Lump's uncle let me into their kitchen.

  “And what have we done to have the honor of your presence, Miss Charlie, on such a fine morning as this?”

  Lump's uncle always talks like that. I just smile a lot and look confused. A lot. I did say yes to the muffins he offered me, though. I sat in their sunny kitchen waiting for Lump to come down and remembered what Mom said about a well-balanced diet. I ate only three blueberry muffins.…

  “What's up, Charlieroo?”

  Lump was wearing a superhero T-shirt and still looked sleepy. I felt kind of bad because I know Lump likes to sleep late. Summer vacation to Lump is eating as much fruit as he can and sleeping as late as his aunt and uncle will let him.

  He'd found me with muffin in my mouth, so it took me a while to tell him what I wanted to. He sat down in the sunny yellow kitchen beside me and started eating muffins, too.

  “Lump.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The Carters are gone. I went to their house a while ago, and everyone and everything is gone. Dogs and furniture. Everything is gone.”

  “Wow!” Lump said.

  I almost fell on the floor when Lump got excited. He hadn't put in his morning gum yet. So I know he said “Wow!” Sometimes you really can't understand Lump when he has a mouthful of gum.

  Lump moved closer to my chair.

  “What do you think happened to them, Charlie?”

  “I don't know, but I think we should find out.”

  We said at the same time, “Let's go get Billy.”

  Well, I don't think Billy ever sleeps at all. I remember his mother once saying she thinks she's slept maybe a total of twelve hours since Billy has been able to walk. I told my dad that, and he laughed so hard I thought he was going to bust a gut. I don't know why that was so funny.

  Anyway, Billy was up. That is, actually he was down—hanging upside down from a branch of the tree in his backyard.

  The first thing he said when we found him was “Did you know the Carters have disappeared?”

  You have to have mystery gear.

  I have it and have been waiting to use it for about a year.

  It includes a big orange flashlight, a magnifying glass, fingerprint powder, binoculars, a coil of rope, and a packet of cheese crackers in case I fall into a dungeon and can't be found for a few days. Lump and Billy supplied bottles of water and some crab apples from the disappeared Carters' tree.

  I said, “Billy, you look in the side windows. Lump, you look in the front ones, and I'll go around to the back to look through the kitchen window.”

  It was still pretty early in the morning, but looking through the window of the Carters' empty house was kind of like walking through a scary house at midnight. The strange thing was there was not so much as one piece of paper left on the floor of the house.

  How did a big family like the Carters just disappear and not even leave shoes or something behind? We weren't going to find out what happened to them by just looking in through the windows… so I climbed up the backyard trellis to the roof.

  I loved being up high, even though I still didn't find out what happened to everybody. I did scare Lump and Billy real bad, though, when I howled down at them.

  They ran around to the front of the house before I could tell them it was me. I got them good.

  Boy, was that funny!

  Lump and Billy even thought so. I found them lying on their backs underneath the Carters' crab apple tree, laughing, and I laughed with them.

  “Good one, Charlie,” Billy said.

  “Yeah, I thought the ghosts or aliens who took the Carters were just about to jump down on us,” said Lump.

  Lump finally stood up, blew a bubble, and said, “What next? I don't think an empty house is going to tell us what happened to the Carters.”

  He was right. All the evidence was gone.

  “We'll have to start questioning everybody in the neighborhood today. I'm sure somebody has seen something.”

  Billy said, “What if they won't talk?”

  Maybe the neighbors would think it wasn't our business to know anything. I said, “Well, we'll just have to trick them into talking. Or if they're anything like us, they are pretty nosy and want to talk.”

  So we walked around Magnolia Street looking for neighbors to question. When we caught somebody outside, we acted sort of friendly, then asked a million questions about the Carters. Billy wrote down everything.

  Ms. Multree lives on the right side of the Carters. She said:

  “Don't know where they went, but I got a good night's sleep for the first time since they brought home Woof.”

  “Who's Woof?” I asked.

  “That barking dog of theirs is Woof.”

  “I thought the dog's name was Peanut.”

  “It was Woof to me because that's the only thing that ever came out of his mouth.”

  Then Ms. Multree almost skipped away down the sidewalk. She didn't miss the Carters one bit!

  Mr. Warren, who lives on the other side of the Carters, said, “Who?”

  We really never see Mr. Warren out in the daytime. Back in the winter I thought he might be a vampire, but Mom says he worked nights. He was kind of pale, though, and a little confused about who the Carters were.

  Billy said, “Well, he was no help.”

  The rest of the neighborhood was no help, either. It was almost like the Carters had never been there. It was almost like ten kids never tore through the neighborhood or emptied the ice cream truck before anybody else got Pop-sicles or beat everybody who challenged them in football.

  I looked down the ravine with my binoculars to make sure the Carters weren't living there. Billy sprinkled fingerprint powder all over the neighborhood and lost the rope when running from Mrs. Perkins after accidentally sprinkling her just-washed car.

  Lump fed the cheese crackers to the Perkinses' cats while he was using the magnifying glass on them to count their fleas.

  We were exhausted from a day of being spies.

  The sim was going down on Magnolia Street. We all sat in my front yard feeling tired and unworthy of spyhood.

  I waved to Lump and Billy as they dragged themselves home.

  I went to sleep swatting a mosquito away and wondering what happened to the Carters.

  Well, like I said at the beginning, this mystery didn't start off like the ones in books. No one saw them leave or knew they were leaving, but the Carters were gone. Dad said it was a real conundrum. When I looked confused, he said that was the same as a mystery.

  Sometimes, though, a mystery isn't a mystery at all. Sometimes it's just that you don't have the information. And sometimes it helps if you leave your neighborhood with your friends to buy fish food and guppies for Mr. Pinkton.

  Billy was holding the bag of guppies we had just bought at The Sea Hut. I love going to The Sea Hut. Me, Lump, and Billy stayed there for hours looking at the fish. We always feel better after leaving The Sea Hut.

  You can get pretty sad when you're a failed spy. (And we were sad.)

  But just as we were walking out of The Sea Hut, something went running by us. Peanut Carter! We knew it was him by his woof.

  “C'mon!” I yelled.

  The chase was on. We chased Peanut all over and under town. He was one fast little dog. Just a hint about how horrible it was for us to follow Peanut: Only dogs and a few other four-legged animals can crawl under barbecue grills.

  I ripped my pants, Billy lost his hat, and Lump lost a shoe… but… we found the Carters!

  I was pretty disappointed I wasn't a good enough spy to figure out what happened to the Carters, but we know now.…

  Nothing!

  That's what Ben Carter said while he was standing in their yard on Maple Grove Road squirting people who walked by while one of his sisters swung in the hammock and another one sold lemonade in front of their bigger house.

  When I told Sid that the Carters had moved in the middle of the night
'cause that was the only time they could get a truck, he laughed.

  “I knew it all the time,” he said. “Ben came over for boxes a few days before they moved. Mystery, huh?” Sid laughed again.

  Something very mysterious is happening on Magnolia Street.

  All of my brother Sid's skateboards and inline skates just up and disappeared. Nobody knows what happened to them. I told him it must be a mystery. I figure any good mystery can start in an attic. And that's exactly where they are.

  Although when Sid's not home, me, Lump, and Billy roll all over Magnolia Street on his skateboards and skates.

  We might come across a mystery on a dark road or have to chase a fast dog. Spies need wheels.

  here's magic now, on Magnolia Street.

  A couple of weeks ago the Magics bought the Carters' house, and nothing will ever be the same on our street again.

  In the beginning the Magics' moving day looked a lot like the day my family moved to Magnolia Street last summer. People were yelling for kids to get out of the way of the movers. Boxes that sounded like they were filled with glass tumbled down the stairs.

  Me and Lump and Billy watched from underneath the crab apple tree in the front yard of the Magics' house as the boxes and furniture moved out of the truck, up the porch stairs, and through the door.

  The Magics have two teenage girls. They waved to us every now and then when they weren't carrying things into the house. They looked like they might be fun. We all smiled and waved back.

  Their dad came out and waved at us, too. A few seconds later he looked at them and said something, then looked at us and waved his arm around the girls.

  With a puff of smoke, the girls disappeared.…

  Wow!

  Magic on Magnolia Street.

  Billy jumped up.

  “Where'dtheygo?”

  I jumped up, too.

  “They disappeared, right in front of us.”

  Lump jumped up and blew a bubble. He didn't say anything, but the bubble grew huge, then exploded all over his face.

  Billy asked, “Where do you think they went?”

  “Gone,” I said.

  “Gone where?” Billy asked.

  Lump pulled a crab apple off the tree and took a bite out of it. How he can chew gum and eat food at the same time, I have no idea.