by Jim Benton
“I don’t know. They’ve been inside for a while. Maybe they caught somebody.”
“I bet that hobo was looking for whatever it was that Mr. Wallace lost,” Mike said.
Maggie’s dad turned to Mike. He suddenly looked very serious.
“Wallace lost something?”
“Yeah. He lost something and he came back all the way from Florida to find it.”
Maggie’s mom laughed. “What could be so important that …”
She caught her husband’s eye. He wasn’t laughing.
There was a tension Jack didn’t understand, and all of his instincts told him to get the subject changed.
“Nice pj’s, Maggie,” he said.
It suddenly occurred to Maggie that she was standing there on her front lawn, in front of Jack and Mike, wearing her adorable tiny lavender short pajamas. Her face turned bright pink.
“You know,” Mike offered with a thin smile, “Jack sleeps in the nuuuuude.”
He bounced his eyebrows up and down.
Maggie’s little brother, Sean, began to howl hysterically.
Maggie’s mom pursed her lips in a tight, small frown.
“Yes, well, that’s all very nice. Inside, Maggie,” her mom said, quickly shuffling the family back into the house.
As the door closed behind them, Jack shoved Mike hard.
“In the nuuuude? What was that about?”
“It was one of my famous conversation killers. We both knew that conversation was going somewhere bad. You, my friend, only know how to change subjects. I destroy them. That’s why people call me El Destroyo.”
“Nobody calls you that.”
“You should call me that. People would think you were a lot cooler if you were friends with somebody named El Destroyo.”
As they walked back to his house, Jack looked over his shoulder at Maggie’s. Mr. Dooley was standing at the window, watching the police at the Wallace house.
“Maggie’s dad seem a little weird to you?”
“All dads seem a little weird to me, Jack. Every single one of ’em. Every time it snows, my dad runs outside to shovel it.”
“What’s weird about that?”
“After it rains, he doesn’t run outside with a mop.”
* * *
Maggie started up the stairs to her room.
“Maggie,” her dad began. He sounded concerned. “Come back down here. That thing that Mr. Wallace lost; do you know what Mike was talking about?”
“No idea.”
“You know it’s important for you to tell us if you hear about anything … strange.”
“Strange?”
“You know, if you see something or hear something that seems unusual. You’d tell us, right?”
Maggie thought for a moment. “There is one thing.”
Her dad’s eyes widened.
“Mike put a steak on the lawn to see if a mosquito would bite it.”
Her dad’s face went blank. Her mom smiled a little.
“I don’t think mosquitoes will bite something dead, but if you think about it, it would be pretty smart if they did, because that way, they wouldn’t get swatted.”
Maggie’s dad tried to smile, but there was deep concern hiding beneath it.
“That’s it? Nothing about Mr. Wallace?”
Maggie’s mom interrupted. “That’s a pretty strange thing to do with a steak, all right,” she said. “Now go upstairs, Maggie, and do something with your hair.”
Maggie walked up the stairs. She paused and waited quietly for a moment, hoping to overhear something.
As she went into her room she heard her mom say, “She doesn’t know anything. The other two don’t know anything. Stop worrying.”
Maggie’s dad agreed.
“I’ll try,” he said.
Across the street, just behind the police cars, Agent Washington spoke quietly into his phone, discreetly making careful notes about everything and everyone he noticed.
A little farther down the street, astride a bike, talking on her phone, was someone he didn’t notice at all.
“This is Marion. I’m checking on the intercepted message.”
By lunchtime, Mike and Jack had been chased out of Jack’s house twice. They had been chased out of Mike’s house once. They had come to the point in a lazy summer day where they were inventing things to do.
The first game of the afternoon was to stand on a basketball and see how far they could roll it up Mike’s driveway. Mike had seen bears do something like this in a circus act and he insisted that it must not be that difficult.
One second into his attempt, Mike fell off and went down hard on his back. This made his mom pop out their front door like the bird in a cuckoo clock.
“You want to break your back?” she yelled. “And be in a wheelchair the rest of your life? Stop standing on the basketball!”
Then they went over to Jack’s house and started sword fighting with sticks.
Jack’s mom yelled out the window. “You’re going to put an eye out with those. Stop it! You want to get an eye put out?”
Mike and Jack dropped the sticks.
“She always says that,” Jack said. “It’s always ‘you’ll put an eye out.’ If sticks were really that dangerous, wouldn’t bank robbers use them?”
Mike laughed. “Yeah, they’d be all like, ‘I’ve got a stick and I’m not afraid to make your vision, like, half as good!’”
“Yeah, and then the police would rush in with their automatic sticks that could put out twenty eyes per second.”
“Yeah, and like, ‘Two people were injured in a drive-by eye-putting-out today. Police have a suspect in custody and are doing tests on the stick to see if it is, indeed, the putting-out weapon.’”
The boys laughed for a long time and Jack grabbed the basketball from Mike. He set it down on his driveway and balanced on it for a mere second before his mom popped out the front door.
“You want to break your back?” she yelled. “You’ll be in a wheelchair for the rest of your life! Stop standing on the basketball!”
He hopped off. Mike and Jack stared at each other, both somewhat puzzled.
“Did she just say the exact same thing my mom just said?” Mike asked slowly.
“Pretty darn close,” Jack said. “How weird is that?”
“I told ya—don’t get me started on moms. If Mom had her way, she would toss out everything that I could hurt myself with. And that’s a lot of things.”
He stared seriously at Jack.
“I’ve accidentally hurt myself a lot.”
Jack looked blankly at Mike. He could feel a thought assembling in his mind.
“Like even pizza. Remember that time I hurt myself with a pizza? Who could hurt themselves with a pizza?”
Jack nodded. “It was a frozen pizza and you tried to use it for a bike wheel,” he responded absently.
“Yeah, but—”
Jack interrupted him.
“Hang on. You said that your mom would throw all the stuff away.”
“Yeah, and—”
It suddenly occurred to Jack. He paused on every word, giving each its own special emphasis.
“Threw. It. Away.”
“Yeah, okay,” Mike said. “Threw it away.”
“I just remembered. I took a box from the Wallaces’ trash and hid it in my gara—”
Mike instantly sprinted across the street and fumbled with the handle on Jack’s garage door before Jack could even finish the sentence and scramble to his feet. It always amazed Jack that, for a chubby guy, Mike could move pretty quick when he wanted to.
“Where? Where is it? Where is it?” Mike shouted. He was already in the garage rooting around.
“Be quiet,” Jack said. “You want my mom to come out?” He moved the plastic sled, the golf clubs, the broken pogo stick, and the recycling bin out of the way, and dragged out a cardboard box.
“Close the garage door,” he said. “Let’s take a look at what we have here.”
“This is it,” Mike said. “We’ll always remember this as the moment we became millionaires.”
“What do you mean we? I’m the one that grabbed the box.”
“Look, unless I tell on you right this second, I’m an accomplice in this. That means that I’ll wind up taking half the blame, so I’m entitled to half the money.”
“I don’t know,” Jack said.
“I understand,” Mike said calmly. “I understand perfectly. Well, see ya later. I have to go tell on you now. Hey, Mrs. Hartfield?”
He began walking to the door, watching Jack’s reaction over his shoulder.
“Okay. Okay. Sit down. You can have half.”
Mike smiled. “I really don’t like sticking a loaded mom in somebody’s face, you know. But you left me no choice.”
“Whatever. Just … just help me figure out what we have here,” Jack whispered.
“Okay, but if you find any game controllers in there, they’re automatically mine,” Mike added. “Since I’m the game master and everybody calls me THE GAME MASTER.”
“I thought you said that everybody called you El Destroyo.”
“I am known by many names, child.”
Jack shook his head and slowly opened the box. Their faces, lit only by a couple garage lightbulbs, were frozen in joyful expressions of greedy delight as Jack extracted the first priceless treasure.
It was an old electric drill.
Mike grabbed it from his hand. “It’s a rare antique drill!” he said, and he ran over and plugged it into a wall socket. He smiled broadly, pulled the trigger, and got an enormous crackling shock that knocked him backward onto his butt.
The lights in the garage flickered and Jack helped Mike to his feet.
“Th-that wasn’t the treasure,” Mike said, and he walked slowly back over to the box, wiping some drool off his chin.
Mike reached in and pulled out a book titled Favorite Turnip Recipes of the World.
“Turnips? Gross,” he said. “This sure ain’t the treasure either.”
Jack pulled out a broken picture frame, two coat hangers, a doorknob, and a handful of nuts and bolts.
Mike pulled out a pair of pliers that were rusted shut, a crusty paintbrush, and what looked like a wheel from a tricycle.
Jack looked at all the stuff. He looked at each individual item from different angles.
“Maybe we have to assemble these things somehow. Maybe these parts fit together or something.”
Mike sat down and tried putting things together.
“Yeah. Like maybe it’s some sort of doomsday device. Like to destroy the world,” he said hopefully.
Jack joined him. They crammed the paintbrush into the spokes of the tricycle wheel. They bent the coat hangers around the doorknob. They balanced the picture frame on the pliers.
After a while, Mike stood up and shook his head in disgust.
“This is junk. Pure junk. This isn’t what they were looking for,” Mike said. “I’m going to go check on my mosquito steak experiment.”
Mike and Jack loaded the miscellaneous stuff back in the box and slid it behind the sled, the clubs, and all the other clutter.
“You’re right,” Jack said. “I’ll have to keep it all hidden until I can put it out next trash day. I don’t want to get busted for garbage picking.”
“It’s almost dinnertime,” Mike said. “I’ll see you later.”
Jack watched Mike walk down the driveway and cross the street. Mike stopped for a moment to miss a shot with his basketball before he went into his house.
Jack closed the garage and opened the door to the house. He looked back to see if he had remembered to turn off the light and noticed that he hadn’t put the turnip recipe book back in the trash.
“No use digging the box out to put this one book back,” he said to himself as he grabbed it and took it inside with him.
He plodded slowly up the stairs, still trying to figure out what Mr. Wallace was after.
He walked into his bedroom, tossed the book on the floor, and walked back down for dinner.
Fifteen minutes later, Jack found himself staring at the casserole on his plate. He had only taken a little nibble of it, and he could feel his mom and dad staring at him as they slowly chewed their food.
Dad broke the silence. “Why do we have to go through this every single night at dinner? What’s the problem, Jack?” he said.
“No problem,” Jack said.
“Why aren’t you eating your dinner?” his mom asked.
“I don’t like casserole,” Jack said.
“Of course you do,” she said. “You’ve been eating it since you were a baby.”
“Then I guess I must have eaten all I’ll ever need.”
His mom and dad looked at each other and sighed deeply.
“I know, I know,” Jack said. “I can just sit right here until I finish it, right?”
“Jack, Jack, wake up,” Jack’s mom said softly as she sat on the edge of his bed and shook him gently.
“Mmghblrg. Glur bluh,” Jack grumbled.
“Jack,” his father said. “C’mon, wake up, buddy.”
“Blurf. Pudding. Flurb,” Jack mumbled, still very much asleep.
“WAKE UP!” Mr. Wallace shouted, and Jack’s eyes popped wide open.
“Mr. Wallace? What are you doing here?”
“Jack, listen to me,” Mr. Wallace said anxiously. “Did you happen to grab anything we had out on the curb? You know, any stuff we threw out?”
“What time is it?” Jack asked, his voice still dry and hoarse.
“It’s morning, son,” Jack’s dad said. “Get up. We need your help.”
Jack slowly sat up on the edge of the bed. He looked at Mr. Wallace, who had never looked worse; his shirt was torn and sweaty, his hair was a dirty mess, and he was covered in dust and dirt.
“What happened to you, Mr. Wallace?”
Mr. Wallace stammered, “I, uh, was doing some household repairs. Just a little dusty.”
“In your old house? Is that why the police came?”
“Yes, but it was a misunderstanding. Back to the point, Jack. I threw away some stuff when we moved. I set it out on the curb, almost a week ago. You didn’t take any of that stuff, did you, Jack?”
Jack’s mom interrupted. “Jack’s not allowed to trash pick, so I know for a fact that he didn’t get into anything you had piled out on the cur—”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “I took a box of junk.”
Jack’s mom put her hand over her eyes and shook her head gently.
“But I didn’t think you wanted it. It was out in the trash. I didn’t mean to take anything important …”
Mr. Wallace smiled hopefully. “Of course, Jack. Of course. I know you would never take anything you shouldn’t. You’re not in any trouble. But I lost something, and I think I might have thrown it out. Where is this box of junk now?”
“It’s in the garage. I’ll show you.”
Mr. Wallace thumped him happily on the back. “Good man, Jack. Good man. There might even be a reward in this for you.”
The four of them walked out to the garage, and Jack’s dad opened the door for extra light. Across the street, Mike was in his driveway, missing free throws as always. Mike saw the garage door open and began walking over, dribbling his basketball as loudly as he could.
Jack’s little sister, Jessica, wandered into the garage and buried her face in Jack’s mom’s leg, grumpily rubbing the sleep from her eyes.
Jack pushed the sled, recycling bin, and other clutter out of the way and dragged out the cardboard box he had taken from the Wallaces’ trash. Mr. Wallace impatiently nudged in next to Jack and started digging through the contents.
Mike stopped dribbling the ball. He walked in and stood next to Jack.
Mr. Wallace pulled everything out. He dumped the box over, every last nut and bolt clattering on the hard cement floor. He pawed through it all.
“It’s not here,” he said.
He looked behind the sled and tore the lid off the recycling bin. He spun around, scanning the entire garage.
“It’s not here,” he said, the panic in his voice rising. “It’s not here. Was this everything you found, Jack? You didn’t find anything else? Like a book?”
“A book? What does it look like?”
“It looks like two cats sucking a lemon, Einstein,” Mr. Wallace snapped angrily. “It’s a book, Jack. What do you think it looks like?”
Mike blurted out an answer before Jack had a chance to respond.
“Nope. No book. That was all of it,” Mike said. “Noth-ing else.”
Jack and Mike were very good at conveying messages to each other with nothing more than a subtle glance. They could communicate everything from I think it is very funny that you are getting yelled at right now to Somebody has made a bad odor and I believe it might be you.
But with the particular glance that Mike was shooting at Jack that very moment, he was saying We are lying about the book. Stay with me on this.
Jack understood the message.
Mr. Wallace eyed Mike with suspicion. He knew that whenever a foul word was written in the street with chalk, or noise was being made too early on a Sunday morning, or when something weird, like a steak, turned up in your front yard, it was usually Mike who was responsible.
“How do you know what was in the box, Mike?” he asked suspiciously.
“Jack always shows me what he trash picks. We went through it last night. Your old drill electrocuted me. But I probably won’t sue you for it. Although I could, what with me being a child victimized by the carelessness of an old wrinkly adult and everything. A lot of juries would assume you did it on purpose, since most attempted murderers are all shriveled and wrinkly, no offense.”
While Mike spoke, Jack’s dad was considering the old drill being discussed for his own workbench. He held it up by the cord.
“So this is no good?” he said to Mr. Wallace, who shook his head no. Jack’s dad unhappily tossed the old drill back in the box.
Mr. Wallace stooped down to talk face-to-face with Jessica.
“Jessica, honey, did you notice Jack carrying around an old book?”
Jessica smiled.
“Did you, sweetheart? Did you see Jack with a book?”