Taking Care of Terrific Read online

  "It's only fifty cents for under twelve," Seth said, pointing to the sign.

  "It's not the money. She's loaded. You should see their house on West Cedar Street. She just thinks the Swan Boats are—I don't know— tacky, I guess."

  Seth shrugged. "They are. So what?"

  I threw some pebbles out into the water, plink plink plink, and they made circles that expanded and expanded and expanded. Seth tossed his pebbles into the center of my circles. His aim was pretty good. He ought to try out for the Carstairs basketball team. They haven't won a game in three years, though they tied Milton last spring and lost in overtime.

  And now I was thinking about something else as the Swan Boats moved gently against each other at the center of the pond.

  "The bag lady, too," I said. "I saw her looking at the boats the same way Tom Terrific did. I bet she'd give anything to have a ride."

  "So? She doesn't have a mother who thinks they're tacky."

  "I don't know." I sighed. "Probably she can't afford the seventy-five cents it costs for adults. But that's not really it. You know what it is, Seth?"

  He waited.

  "It's because the bag ladies all feel as though they're not real people. They know they're different. Everybody looks at them funny and moves away when they walk by. After everybody's treated you like filth for a few years, probably you start feeling like you're really out of it, and—"

  Seth was looking at me a little oddly. Me, who had treated him as if he'd crawled out from under a rock for as long as I could remember. We both decided to ignore that thought.

  "—so you're not going to go stand in a line full of tourists wearing pink and green alligator shirts, not if you know everybody's going to nudge each other and move away from you, not even if you've got the seventy-five cents and want to sit in a Swan Boat feeling like Queen Elizabeth for twenty minutes.

  "It's not fair," I concluded, and I hunched up with my chin resting on my knees. It was starting to get chilly. "I wish sometime when no one was here, all those bag ladies could come and ride around the pond like Cleopatra's handmaidens so they could feel proud, and important, and peaceful, and—"

  Seth had stood up and walked away. I thought for a minute that I had started getting too sentimental and poetic for him, that maybe he was going to do a barfing imitation into the rhododendron bushes. Then I saw what he was doing. He was examining a padlock and chain on the dock. If I had been a comic book character at that moment, a light bulb would have appeared in a balloon above my head.

  "Seth!" I called in a loud whisper. "Do you think—"

  "Shhh," he said. He stood there chewing on his tongue for a minute. Finally he came back to where I was sitting on the bench.

  "Could they be quiet?" he asked. "If we did it at night, and they were absolutely quiet, we wouldn't get caught."

  There were twenty-four seats on each Swan Boat, plus the place where the operator sat and pedaled. I pictured twenty-four bag ladies, erect as royalty, their eyes bright, their shoulders straight inside their ratty coats and dresses, gliding silently, grandly, majestically, around the dark pond, with a breeze rustling the trees and a moon shining down.

  "Yes," I said firmly. "I'm sure they'd be absolutely quiet."

  "Could you get them all here together at the same time? At night?"

  "Hawk could," I said. "He organized them for the strike."

  "I need a little time to plan," Seth whispered. "I have to figure out those locks and chains. That's really the only hard part. I can pedal the boat okay."

  "Seth," I said suddenly, suspiciously, "you wouldn't arrange for a TV crew, would you? You're not thinking of this as a Heartwarmers spot, are you?"

  Seth exploded. "Really, Enid! You know who you sound like? My mother! As if you think I'm some kind of unreliable creep or something, like she does! Don't you trust me?"

  "I'm sorry, Seth," I said. And I was sorry. "I'm starting to trust you. But it takes a while to change your mind about someone, you know?"

  "Yeah," he said grudgingly. "I'm feeling the same way about you."

  On the way home I asked Seth somewhat nervously, "What would they call it if we got caught? Theft? A felony? Because we'd only be borrowing the Swan Boats. We'd be giving them back. And it would be for a good cause."

  "I think," said Seth, after he had chewed his lip for a minute, "they'd call it hijacking."

  Chapter 12

  I've never taken much time to think about Fate. Mrs. Kolodny believes in Fate, I know. "Well, that's Fate," she says cheerfully when her lottery number fails to win, week after week; and I honestly believe that if it ever does win her a million dollars, she will say just as cheerfully, "Well, that's Fate," and off she'll go on a round-the-world cruise, wearing a mink coat and her bright blue sneakers.

  Mrs. Kolodny also believes in horoscopes, Ann Landers's advice, fortune cookies, and UFOs.

  I am not at all sure about any of those things. But Fate certainly did make itself evident that afternoon when I went to West Cedar Street to pick up Tom Terrific.

  "Enid," said Ms. Cameron, "I mean, Cynthia. Sit down for a minute. I want to talk to you about something."

  Omigod, I said to myself, using Mrs. Kolodny's catchy turn of phrase. She's found out everything: that I changed his name from Joshua; that I let him eat Popsicles, talk to strangers, and touch dogs. That he made disruptive signs for the bag ladies' strike instead of drawing trees and birds. That I'm a dishonest person and a lousy babysitter to boot.

  I sat down apprehensively on the beige velvet couch in the living room and inadvertently glanced up toward the high ceiling. Up there somewhere, I thought nervously, was an ax that was about to fall. I smiled the kind of let's-get-it-over-with smile that Joan of Arc probably smiled as they tied her to the stake.

  "I find," said Ms. Cameron, "that I have to go out of town on business overnight on Saturday. Now ordinarily I would leave Joshua with his grandparents in Marblehead, but this particular weekend, his grandparents are entertaining a very large group of guests for dinner, and they don't feel up to coping with a four-year-old."

  She went on and on, and I relaxed. It wasn't grill-her-at-the-stake time, after all. She simply wanted me to take care of old Tom Terrific overnight. I could hear her chattering about how she knew I was only fourteen, and it was a big responsibility for someone only fourteen, but she thought—and so on.

  Liar, I was thinking. Did she think I was stupid? What was this story about going out of town on business? Ms. Cameron didn't even have a business. She didn't work. She spent her afternoons, while I took care of Tom, going to do-good meetings, having tea with friends, taking harpsichord lessons, and playing tennis. Now all of a sudden I was supposed to believe that she was going out of town on business. Enid may almost rhyme with stupid, and I may almost have flunked Geometry, but I'm not naive.

  Anyway, I thought it was kind of neat that apparently she had a boyfriend. I hoped they were going off to Nantucket or someplace for a romantic interlude. I hoped she'd get married eventually so that old Tom would have a father who would take him camping and stuff and let him get dirty.

  But of course I couldn't say any of that. I played along. I told her I was sure my parents wouldn't mind, that I was sure I could manage to keep her house and her son in good shape for two days, and that I'd be delighted to stay overnight on West Cedar Street on Saturday night.

  And all the while I was thinking: Fate. Fate had set things up so that we could hijack the Swan Boats, not only for the bag ladies, but for Tom Terrific, who had never been allowed to ride in one.

  And Fate had set the date. It was only four days away.

  "When you stay at my house and take care of me," said Tom Terrific happily as we walked down West Cedar Street that afternoon, "we can stay up late and watch TV, and we can cook hot dogs with mustard, and we can tell ghost stories, okay?"

  "Sure," I said. "We can do all of that." I couldn't tell him yet what else we could do. I had to set it up first, with Hawk, and the bag
ladies, and with Seth. I smoothed Tom's hair as he trotted along beside me, chattering about the prospects for Saturday night. We could eat monumental amounts of ice cream. Play Chutes and Ladders. Have a tickling contest.

  "Maybe we could call up my daddy," Tom Terrific said suddenly, looking at me out of the corner of his eye. "in California."

  So that's where his father was: three thousand miles away. Poor kid. My father may be behind a newspaper much of the time, but at least he's there, in my house.

  "Tom, old buddy," I said to him, "whatever we decide to do Saturday night, it will be terrific."

  "Yeah," he said contentedly, and he dropped my hand as he leaned over to pick up a worm from the brick sidewalk. We examined it carefully, squiggling in the palm of his hand, all the way to the Public Garden.

  It was a gorgeous, bright blue day, one of those early August days that already has a few of September's molecules floating in it. Days like that make you feel good. Everybody in the Public Garden looked cheerful, as if they had just gotten income tax refunds, job promotions, and new clothes.

  I had said to Mrs. Kolodny before I left the house, "It's a fabulous day. You ought to go out for a walk."

  She had just untied her shoes, put her feet on the coffee table, and settled down with a cup of coffee in front of the TV. On the screen, a woman with masses of red hair was saying, "Pregnant? I can't be!" and a doctor was nodding solemnly at her in response, shuffling some lab reports in his hand.

  "Shhh," said Mrs. Kolodny. "That's Suzanne. She thought it was menopause symptoms, ha-ha."

  I watched with a weird kind of fascination. For seven minutes, Suzanne did variations of her "I can't be pregnant!" line. She dabbed at her well-made-up eyes with a tissue. The doctor sorted his papers again and again and said medical things sternly. "You must take vitamins, Suzanne," he said several times.

  A commercial came on, and a gray-haired woman began telling a flustered bride how to make good coffee for her hubby. Mrs. Kolodny lowered the sound.

  "Suzanne," she explained, "is pregnant because she got involved with the lawyer who's going to defend her son at the murder trial. The son, Lance, killed a drug dealer, but it's first-degree murder even though it was a drug dealer because it was premeditated, and the reason it was premeditated was because the drug dealer had been responsible for getting Lance's fiancée hooked on heroin. She's in a hospital now. Lance is in jail, of course, waiting for the trial, and Suzanne hired this hotshot criminal lawyer, Greg, even though she had to mortgage her home to do it, and then Greg seduced her after they had dinner together to talk about the case and she drank too much wine."

  I nodded in a kind of horrible concern for these idiotic people. "Will the lawyer get Lance off?" I heard myself asking.

  Mrs. Kolodny nodded. "Suzanne doesn't know this, of course. But Greg knows that Lance has an identical twin brother, Vance. If they can find Vance and produce him at the trial, how will the witnesses be able to say for sure that it was Lance they saw with the gun?"

  "Wait a minute. What do you mean, Suzanne doesn't know that Lance has a twin brother? Didn't you say he's her son? She gave birth to twins and didn't know it? Come on, gimme a break, Mrs. Kolodny."

  She waved her hand impatiently. "All of that was a long time ago. Suzanne was in a coma when the twins were born. She had a brain tumor and she was going to die, so they took the babies away for adoption. Later her brain tumor cleared up, so she got Lance back. But she doesn't even know that the other one, Vance, exists."

  "How does the lawyer know?"

  "He was the twins' father, see. Suzanne doesn't know that, either, because after this brain tumor she ended up with amnesia. Shhhh." Mrs. Kolodny turned the sound back up.

  "Mrs. Kolodny," I said as I headed for the door, "it's a beautiful day. You should go out for a walk."

  Real life was certainly a lot less complicated than soap opera life, I thought, as I entered the Garden with Tom Terrific. He scampered off and knelt by a bush, to deposit his worm in a new home. Beyond the flower beds, I could see Hawk, sitting on a bench with our bag lady. They were both slurping brown Popsicles, and I grinned; the Popsicle man had kept his promise. I strolled over to greet them and to tell them that we had a new partner in crime, the Russian general Sethsandroff, and that on Saturday night we were going to capture the navy.

  Hawk rolled his eyes apprehensively when I described the plans. He leaned back and made a Whoooo sound with his mouth. "I gotta cogitate on that one," he said.

  But the bag lady didn't have to cogitate at all. She grinned, her mouth full of root beer ice. She swallowed the last bit of Popsicle and said, with her eyes sparkling, "Let's go for it."

  Chapter 13

  The telephone conversation between me and Seth sounded like something out of his Robert Ludlum thriller.

  "Meet me to check things out." (Seth. Low voice, almost a whisper. Humphrey Bogart, maybe, calling from a phone booth in Vienna.)

  "Where? When?" (Me. I wish I had a throaty voice and a slight accent from some Balkan country. But it was only me with my mouth full of chocolate chip cookie. I had just gotten home from Tom Terrific's house.)

  "Six. The boat dock."

  "Right."

  We hung up without saying good-by. It seemed appropriate. Spies never say good-by.

  The timing was important because six o'clock was when the Swan Boats closed up. We wanted to see exactly how they did it, how they secured the boats each night, so that on Saturday night we could undo it.

  When I met Seth at the dock by the duck pond, I was still wearing the jeans I had been wearing all day. But Seth, having just come from work, looked surprisingly respectable and un-Sethlike in chinos and an L. L. Bean shirt. He sauntered over to the bench where I was sitting, sat down beside me without saying anything, looked around, and then muttered out of the side of his mouth, "You got a pencil and paper?"

  I nodded and reached into my backpack.

  "Take notes," Seth said in a low voice. He was really into the spy routine. I felt as if we should be wearing trench coats and dark glasses.

  No one was paying any attention to us. To any observer—even to the mounted policeman who came up the path now and stopped his horse near the dock—we were just a couple of fourteen-year-olds sitting on a park bench. The policeman was keeping his eye on a shabby-looking man who was leaning on a tree, his eyes a little glazed as if he were stoned.

  The horse had his eye on a rhododendron bush. You could tell he wanted a bite of it. But the policeman held the reins firmly in his hand.

  The tourists in the park were tired now. Earlier in the day they'd been full of energy, folding and refolding maps, reading the bronze plaques on the bases of statues, taking pictures, pointing out landmarks to each other. Now their shoulders sagged and their children whined.

  "I know we were going to walk back," I heard a woman say grouchily to her husband, "but my feet hurt. A taxi wouldn't cost that much, would it?"

  One after another, the Swan Boats glided to the dock and unloaded their last passengers. Two toddlers had fallen asleep in their mothers' laps during the ride; their mothers deposited them, still sleeping, into strollers that had been parked on the dock.

  A young couple came running up to the dock, a small, pigtailed child between them.

  "Are you going around one more time?" the woman asked the man at the ticket booth.

  "Sorry," he said, shaking his head. He set a CLOSED sign up at the front of the booth. The child burst into angry tears and her father picked her up and patted her back. The couple walked away.

  Seth nudged me and nodded toward the place at the side of the dock where three empty boats were now moored. The teenage boys who paddled the boats were climbing around on them, removing the small American flags from their short poles and then bending down to attach the chains that secured the boats to each other front and back.

  "Take notes," Seth muttered again.

  I groaned a little to myself. Seth was too much. He was really ge
tting into this spy scene. I jotted down in my notebook: "Chained together. Small padlocks."

  A fourth boat was empty now, and the boys hooked it up beside the first three. At the ticket booth, the man in charge was filling a green wooden box with things: the flags, a clock, some papers, a portable radio.

  A pair of college-age kids, boy and girl, went up to the policeman on his horse. They were arguing with each other.

  "Excuse me," the girl said to the policeman. "Is there any way to report a stolen purse?"

  "Stolen around here?" the policeman asked them.

  "About fifty yards from here," the girl said, pointing toward some benches near a clump of bushes.

  "What did you do, put it down and somebody grabbed it?"

  The girl nodded in despair. The boy with her said angrily, "Of all the idiotic things to do, Marcia!"

  "Did you see who took it?" the policeman asked. He was looking around the Garden; the horse's ears were suddenly alert. You could tell he was thinking: Wow. Action. The horse, not the policeman.

  "No," said the girl. "I was reading a magazine, and when I reached for my purse to get a cigarette, it was gone."

  "Of all the idiotic things," the boy began again.

  "Well," said the policeman in a resigned voice, and the horse's ears relaxed, "you can go report it at the precinct if you want. But if you didn't see who took it, there's not much they can do. It might turn up in a trash can, but the money'll be gone. Was there much cash in it?"

  The girl shook her head. "No. But my address book, and my make-up, and my whole class schedule. Now I won't even know where my classes are, and they start next week."

  "Come on, Marcia," the boy said furiously. "He can't do anything." He pulled her by the hand and they walked away, the boy talking loudly.

  "Think of it as a learning experience," the policeman called after them cheerfully.

  Now the last two boats were empty, and the six were fastened to each other with chains. Together, they formed a hugh flotilla beside the dock.