—Maniac Magee—
by Jerry Spinelli

Chapter 39

 

During the night, March doubled back and grabbed April by the scruff of the neck and flung it another week or two down the road. When Maniac slipped silently from the house at dawn --- the only way he'd ever manage to get away --- March pounced with cold and nasty paws. But Maniac wasn't minding. The reunion had been ecstatic and tearful and nonstop happy, and inside he was pure July. He was half a block up Sycamore before he stopped tiptoeing. Minutes later he crossed Hector. The streets were dry. An occasional scrap of chewed rawhide was all that remained of the worms.

Hours later, Russell and Piper spotted him three blocks off.

"Maniac! You're alive!"

"We thought they got ya! We thought they slit yer throat!"

"We thought they strangled ya and pulled yer tongue out!"

"We thought they chopped yer head off and... and..."

"And boiled ya!"

"Yeah, boiled ya!"

"And drunk yer blood!"

"Yeah!"

"And drunk yer brains!"

"Ya don't drink brains, ya moron meatball!"

"Yeah, ya do. Brains're like milkshakes. Like Dairy Queen. You can drink 'em with a straw. You can hear 'em sloshin' if you shake yer head hard enough. Listen---"

"Hey --- get off my head! Hey! Help!"

They were off and running.

Maniac couldn't help laughing. In spite of their twisted, ludicrous impressions of East Enders, the concern and the tears in their eyes had been genuine. They had really missed him. They had really been afraid for him.

Two houses away he could hear the thump --- almost feel it --- and father George McNab's voice: "Lay 'em down easy, I said. Easy!" Followed by son John: "This easy enough?" Thump! Followed by a string of curses from George McNab that fried the cold morning like an egg.

The living room was hazy with dust. At the back end of the dining room, they were bringing in the cinder blocks --- George and John and a handful of Cobras --- lugging and grunting them in from the backyard and dumping them onto the floor. Thump! Thump!

"Hey, kid" --- George McNab was pointing through the haze. Three months and he still didn't know his tenant's name. "Get yer lily hide over here. Start luggin' these."

Maniac waved. "Later. Gotta go." He shut the door and headed up the street.

 

So, they were really doing it. He had heard them planning it for weeks. Making drawings. Buying, or stealing, cement, trowels, a level. "A pillbox," they called it.

Once it was done, they'd be ready. Let the revolt begin. Let the "rebels," as they called the East Enders, come. Let 'em bust through the newly installed bars over the plywood on the windows. Let 'em bust through the steel door. They'll find themselves staring down the barrel of a little surprise. They squabbled over what the surprise should be. Uzi. AK-47. Bazooka.

"Why?" Maniac had asked Giant John one day.

"Why what?"

"Why are you doing all this?"

"To get ready, what else?"

"Well, what do you thinks going to happen?"

"What's gonna happen?" Giant John swatted a squad of roaches from the kitchen table and sat down. "What's gonna happen is, one of these days they're gonna revolt."

"Who says?"

"Who cares who says? You think they're gonna make an announcement?"

Maniac tried to picture Amanda and Hester and Lester and Bow Wow storming the barricades. "When's all this supposed to happen?"

John shrugged. "Ya never know. Maybe this summer." He jumped up, grapped a beer from the fridge, flipped it open. "They like to revolt in the summer. Makes 'em itchy. They like to overrun the cities. This time we'll be ready."

And he told Maniac what he often imagined, lying in bed: the blacks sweeping across Hector one steaming summer night; torches, chains, blades, guns, war cries; marauding, looting, overrunning the West End; climbing in through smashed windows, doors, looking for whites, bloodthirsty for whites, like Indians in the old days, Indians on a raid...

"That's what they are," Giant John nodded thoughtfully, "today's Indians."

The cockroach strolling up his pant leg wasn't the only thing making Maniac feel crawly. He shook off the roach. He moved to the center of the kitchen, to surround himself with as much space as possible. "But other people," he said, "I don't hear them talking about revolts. Nobody else wants to make a pillbox."

Giant John tilted the last of the beer into his mouth. "Maybe when we do," he grinned, "they will."

That had been weeks before, and now the pillbox was under way, no longer an idea in the backyard but a reality in the dining room. Now there was no room that Maniac could stand in the middle of and feel clean. Now there was something else in that house, and it smelled worse than garbage and turds.