Taking Care of Terrific Read online

  I wedged my feet protectively around my backpack, which I had placed on the dock, and watched the final closing-up procedures. The ticket man locked his green wooden box and put it on one of the boats.

  "Do you think he put the money in that box?" I whispered nervously to Seth. "I don't want to steal any money."

  "Shhhh. No. He has the money with him, stupid," Seth whispered back.

  The six boys who'd been chaining the boats together now jumped over to the dock. With the man, they began to pull a huge, heavy chain from the water.

  "What's that?" I asked Seth in a low voice.

  "Shhh," he said again. "Watch."

  They unhooked the big chain and ran it through a fastener on the bow of the middle boat in front. Then the man, with the boy, began to pull slowly on the huge wet chain. The entire group of boats moved. There was no one aboard any of them, and it was eerie, watching them glide away from the dock empty, linked together in a group, out toward the middle of the pond.

  "That's cool," said Seth aloud."I never knew before how they did that."

  "I still don't," I said. "How does it work?"

  "It's a pulley system," he said, talking in a low voice again. "They've got the cable anchored out there, and they can just haul the boats out and in, all together."

  "It may be a cool system," I muttered. "But it sure fouls up our plan. I don't want to—" I glanced around to be certain nobody was listening. Especially the policeman. Even his horse; that horse looked smart. For all I knew, that horse could understand what I was saying. I pictured him opening his lips back over his big yellow teeth and saying in a loud voice to the policeman, "Hey, Ralph, did you hear what the girl on the bench just said?"

  But the horse was distracted now by a little boy who was scratching his ears gingerly. Horses do the same thing dogs do when their ears are scratched. They smile.

  "I just want to borrow one boat," I whispered to Seth. "I don't want all six. And what about all those chains and padlocks? This is beginning to seem like a dumb idea."

  Seth was frowning. His forehead was wrinkled and he was watching the boats, sitting out there now in the center of the pond, the swans staring straight ahead with their blank painted eyes.

  "Come on, let's go," he said, getting up from the bench. I put my notepad, with its brilliant, complicated spy notes: "Chained together. Small padlocks. Pulley system," into my backpack and followed Seth down the path. When I caught up with him, he announced, "We can still do it. I just have to figure it out. Either I have to get out there somehow, and get one of the boats loose, or we have to haul them all into the dock, then separate one."

  "But Seth," I said in frustration, "what about those chains? And that giant cable?"

  "Bolt cutter," he said.

  "What?"

  "It's a tool," he said impatiently, striding along so quickly that I almost had to jog to keep up. "A bolt cutter. We have one at the TV station. I'll borrow it over the weekend."

  "Seth," I said slowly, knowing the answer, "what exactly does a bolt cutter do?"

  "It'll cut that cable," he said.

  I guess it was then that I knew we were going to be in very big trouble.

  "A bolt cutter?" said Hawk. He shook his head back and forth slowly and whistled. "You're talking burglar tools, man."

  But he didn't say no. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his head down, his voice low, and began talking to Seth.

  It was the next afternoon, Wednesday, Seth's afternoon off, and I met him at the Garden and introduced him to Hawk.

  "Hawk, this is General Sethsandroff," I said with a flourish, glancing at Seth out of the corner of my eye to see if he would mind. But Seth grinned. There was something about the whole enterprise that was like a fantasy, and that made the fake names seem okay. Hawk was caught up in it too.

  "Of course," he said, holding out his immense brown hand to shake Seth's very ordinary white one. "The fearless and sinister Russian. Honored to make your acquaintance, my man."

  Next thing I knew, they were side by side on the bench, their knees practically touching, going over the plans that Seth had concocted. For a minute I felt a little left out.

  But I was, after all, the idea person. The plan had been mine. Hawk and Sethsandroff were only tightening up the logistics; and besides, the less I knew about the bolt cutter, the better I liked it.

  I sat in the grass nearby, while they talked in whispers, and played a game with Tom Terrific. Old Tom didn't know anything at all yet about what was going to happen on Saturday night. It wasn't that I didn't trust him not to tell. It was, I guess, that I wanted to surprise him with the biggest adventure of his so-far-not-very-thrill-packed life. He was looking forward with great glee to a tickling contest that night. I treated him to a few tentative tickles as we sat there together in the grass. I like to hear his chiming little giggle. But a tickling contest was peanuts compared to our real plans.

  "Let us have your pencil and paper a minute," called Seth.

  I took it to them, and Seth and Hawk each wrote something on a slip of paper. They exchanged the slips, folded them, and slipped them into their pockets.

  I nudged Seth. "Here she comes," I said.

  The bag lady was shuffling down the path toward us.

  "Hi!" called Tom Terrific in his sweet, clear, happy voice.

  "Good morning," said the bag lady. It was odd. Ever since the Popsicle strike, she'd stopped mumbling. Now she spoke up with great dignity. She still walked as if she had weights in her shoes and couldn't lift her feet; her clothes still billowed around her, too heavy for summer; and her gray hair still flew around her head like spiderwebs wrenched loose from a cellar ceiling. But she talked now. And she smiled.

  "I think it's time to consult with my lady," said Hawk to Seth and me. "Her and me'll go buy a couple of Popsicles and have us a chat. We have to start mobilizing the troops again. Looks like we just got three days. And we need to set a time."

  We were silent for a minute, the three of us: Seth, Hawk, and me. The bag lady had stopped to visit with Tom Terrific and to admire a bug he had caught.

  Then: "Midnight," we said in unison.

  "Long as she doan rain?" asked Hawk, laughing.

  "Long as she doan rain," Seth and I responded.

  Later, Seth went with me when I took Tom Terrific home.

  "Right here," I explained when we reached the corner of Chestnut and West Cedar streets, "is where Tom Terrific changes back to Joshua Cameron." I could see that Tom was looking anxiously at Seth to be certain he would understand, to be sure he wouldn't laugh.

  But Seth didn't. "Good spot," he said solemnly. "I might as well change here, too, from General Sethsandroff back to Seth Sandroff, ordinary adolescent nudnik."

  Tom Terrific giggled. He liked the word "nudnik."

  "Presto, Chango!" said Seth in a loud voice, waving his hand in a magician's flamboyant gesture.

  "Presto, Chango!" echoed Tom Terrific.

  Ms. Cameron looked a little taken aback when she saw the three of us at the door. Her eyes narrowed. You could tell that she was trying to decide how to say, "You are not to entertain boys while you are babysitting my son."

  But I knew just how to cut her off at the pass. "Ms. Cameron," I said, "this is my friend Seth Sandroff. We ran into him on the way home. Seth's mother is Wilma Sandroff."

  The magic words. "Wilma Sandroff," Ms. Cameron cooed in the voice that adults reserve for church dignitaries. "My goodness, you're Wilma Sandroff's son? I saw her on the Donahue show! I just happened to have the TV on—I rarely watch television."

  It's okay, Ms. Cameron, I wanted to say. You don't have to apologize for watching television. Everybody watches television. Mrs. Kolodny never apologizes.

  Seth grunted. We said good-by to Tom Terrific, alias Joshua, and fled.

  "Tom Terrific really liked that when you said you were changing back to Seth Sandroff, nudnick," I said to him, walking home.

  Seth chuckled. "He's really cute," he s
aid. "I like little kids."

  "I don't mean to sound stupid—even though it practically rhymes with Enid, I know—but what's a nudnik, Seth?"

  He looked at me in pretend amazement because I was so—well, so stupid. "It's a nothing," he explained. "A blah. A moron."

  "SETH! Don't call yourself that! You're not a nothing!" At the same time I heard myself saying that—and meaning it—I was remembering the way I had treated Seth Sandroff for years. Like a nudnik.

  He just shrugged. I though of something else. "Seth, what was the piece of paper that Hawk gave you?"

  "Oh, I meant to show you." He took the folded paper from his pocket. "It's his phone number. And I gave him mine. Just in case we have to get in touch about Saturday night."

  I looked at the seven meaningless numbers written in pencil on the slip of paper. They weren't entirely meaningless; I recognized the exchange as Cambridge. So that was where Hawk lived.

  It was a little weird, thinking about where he lived. To me he was just a Public Garden person. A friend from the green place. It made me uncomfortable to think, as I did for a minute, about what his house might be like, about whether he had a wife, or children. How on earth did they survive—or, in fact, did he survive—on those few coins that people tossed into his saxophone case?

  "It's Cambridge he goes home to," I said. "I wonder where the bag lady goes. All the bag ladies."

  "Maybe it's better not to think about that," Seth said as we turned onto Marlborough Street. "Anyway, we know where they'll be going Saturday night at midnight, right?"

  "Long as she doan rain," we said together. Then we both laughed, and suddenly Seth reached over abruptly and took my hand. A little awkwardly, we held hands the rest of the way to my house.

  I don't think it was for romantic reasons or anything. I think it was because we were both scared.

  Chapter 14

  It rained on Thursday, and it rained on Friday. But Seth told me on the phone that he could absolutely guarantee that it was not going to rain on Saturday.

  "Howie Friendly says so," Seth explained.

  Ha. Howie Friendly (if you need a description; if that disgusting name isn't enough) is the weatherman on Seth's father's TV station. He wears polyester plaid sport jackets, has dyed hair, and his only claim to fame, as far as I'm concerned, is that he can draw lightning bolts, snowflakes, and smiling suns left-handed while he talks.

  Apparently he was drawing smiling suns on Saturday's weather map.

  "Trust Howie," said Seth.

  Would you trust a man wearing an orange and green sport jacket? I ask you.

  I talked a lot to Seth on the phone those two rainy days. Mrs. Kolodny began to make a lot of dumb jokes about "Enid has a boyfriend," and then my parents took it up too, grinning a lot, my father tousling my hair (my God, do you know of anyone who actually had their hair tousled since 1902?), and my mother suggesting that maybe now I'd like to go clothes shopping. "Now" meaning "now that a boy finally likes you."

  If they had only known the truth. The only clothes I needed as a result of my new relationship with Seth Sandroff were black cat-burglar clothes, not what you'd find in the Prep Shop at Bloomingdale's. We—Seth, Hawk, and I—had agreed that we would all wear black on Saturday night. The better not to see you with, my dear.

  As for the bag ladies: well, we couldn't tell them what to wear. None of them probably had anything beyond what was on their backs anyway.

  And Tom Terrific? Once when I'd helped him look for a sweater, I had seen a little black velvet suit with short pants hanging in his closet beside all the corduroys and ginghams. Somehow a black velvet suit didn't seem appropriate for this particular adventure. I'd have to come up with an outfit for him that night after his mother had left.

  It was all set. Hawk and the bag lady had somehow organized the others, and Hawk told Seth on the phone that there would be at least twenty of them at midnight on Saturday. Obviously we'd gotten a few converts since the success of the Popsicle strike.

  On Friday evening, after he'd come home from work, Seth told me that he had the bolt cutter hidden away in his closet. One of the best smuggling jobs since the Hope diamond was stolen, he said. It occurred to me that the Hope diamond was probably considerably smaller than a bolt cutter, and he was darn lucky he hadn't been collared at the door to the station as he left, with an unwieldy contraption of metal and wood wedged under his jacket.

  Ms. Cameron had called to confirm that I was to arrive at six Saturday evening because she was to leave for her, ha-ha, business meeting at six-thirty.

  I had worried a bit about getting to the Garden with Tom Terrific at midnight. I'm not a nervous sort of person, but for a fourteen-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy to walk the streets of Boston in the middle of a Saturday night, there has to be some death wish involved. At first Seth said he'd come and walk with us. But, much as I was beginning to like Seth, I wasn't sure he would be all that much protection, not at midnight. He was almost six feet tall; but somehow his body had forgotten to add any flesh to those six feet. He looked a little like a gross picture I had seen once in one of my mother's medical books. Its caption was: Failure to Thrive.

  Hawk announced that he would pick all of us up in his car. Now it became "Synchronize your watches, men" time. He would pick Seth up at the corner of Commonwealth and Clarendon, a few doors from his apartment building, at eleven-forty. Ten minutes later, at eleven-fifty, they would collect Tom Terrific and me from the house on West Cedar Street. We were to be waiting just inside the door. As Hawk pointed out to Seth, and Seth repeated to me, if the residents of West Cedar Street noticed a black man idling his beat-up car there in the middle of the night, every telephone around would be dialing 911, the emergency police number.

  And the bag ladies would get to the duck pond on their own. I worried for a minute about that. But Seth pointed out that they were used to it. Most of them probably slept in subways and parks anyway. They were a little subculture of survivors.

  Frankly, I was beginning to hope that we would all survive this.

  ***

  I arrived at Ms. Cameron's at six with my backpack on my back. She took it from me politely and set it on a tufted Victorian sofa in the front hall. I wondered if she was puzzled by its bulkiness, but she didn't say anything. Probably she assumed that it contained a toothbrush, a frilly Lanz nightgown, and a matching quilted robe. Maybe a pair of fuzzy slippers.

  Actually it contained a black turtleneck sweater, my newest jeans, which hadn't faded much yet so they were still dark blue, and a pair of dark brown hiking boots. That was as close as I could come to an all-black ensemble. Also in the pack was a navy blue knitted ski cap. You could feel a little silly wearing a ski cap on a warm August night. But my hair is light; I figured I could reduce my visibility by stuffing it into the cap.

  I wonder if full-time burglars ever get over feeling silly as they select their burglaring outfits.

  It was not raining. Thank you, Howie Friendly.

  Now, as for Ms. Cameron and her bogus business trip. For this alleged business trip, she was dressed in a blue silk dress, low necked with lots of cleavage, high-heeled sandals, and dangling silver earrings. She was wearing make-up, which she never wore in the daytime, and White Shoulders perfume.

  (Whenever I'm wandering through the first floor of Jordan Marsh, I squirt myself with one of the sample perfumes. Then I rush home so Mrs. Kolodny can guess what it is. If there is ever a TV quiz program where perfume identification is the competition, Mrs. Kolodny can be a contestant and win thousands of dollars. White Shoulders is a pretty easy one. The one Mrs. Kolodny hasn't mastered yet is Lagerfeld's Chloe. I can always stump her on Chloe.)

  It made me feel (a) stupid, that Ms. Cameron thought I would believe that she had a business engagement, and (b) sordid, that I was dressed in last summer's too-small sundress when she was decked out in silk. Both adjectives, of course, go nicely with the name Enid.

  Her "business partner" arrived in a Merce
des; he was handsome in a Marlboro-ad sort of way (though he was dressed up in a dark suit and tie) and his name was Dave Guthrie. She introduced us. Tom Terrific knew him already; obviously he'd been around before. He said "Hi, sport" to old Tom and tousled his hair. There was an awful lot of hair tousling going on lately, if you ask me. When Dave Guthrie was looking in another direction, Ms. Cameron smoothed old Tom's hair back into its neatly barbered little arrangement.

  Ms. Cameron gave the number where she would be, I tucked it into the pocket of my backpack, and off they went after she had planted a lot of teeny-weeny tasteful kisses around her son's head and shoulders. She had already given me lots of not kisses but instructions: nourishing supper, dutiful bath, no TV, two bedtime stories (nonviolent), diligent brushing of teeth, lighting of nightlight, and tucking in at eight P.M. sharp.

  I planned to ignore all of her instructions.

  With great chortles of glee we dumped the little meat loaf and the little baked potatoes and the little salads down the little garbage disposal, which ate them up with little crunching sounds. Then we had a grossly loaded pizza delivered. It cost me nine dollars, but what the heck; this was a special night, and I'd already banked almost ninety dollars of babysitting money this summer.

  By the time we had both pigged out on pizza, it was after seven. Four and a half hours to go.

  "Tickling time!" said Tom Terrific, and he lunged at my armpits.

  We rolled around on the living room floor for a while, tickling and giggling, until we were afraid we'd barf up nine dollars' worth of pizza.

  I tried to think of dopey things that I liked to do when I was younger.

  "Hey, Terrific," I said. "You want to make some phone calls?"

  He shook his head solemnly. "I'm not allowed to touch the telephone," he said.

  "You watch then," I told him. "And listen." I picked up the telephone book, turned to a page at random, and dialed a stranger's number.

  "Is your refrigerator running?" I asked in a serious voice when someone answered the phone. "You'd better run after it before it gets away!" I said next, then hung up quickly.