—Maniac Magee—
by Jerry Spinelli

Chapter 40

 

He ran far that day, away from the town, letting the wind wash him.

When he returned to the West End, he heard in the distance Mrs. Pickwell whistling her children to dinner. Though he had heard the whistle many times, he had not answered it since his first day in town. Now he felt, as he had that day, that it was meant for him.

This time, of course, there was a difference. He was no stranger. He was Maniac Magee, the kid who had walked barefoot through the dump near their house. The Pickwell kids cheered when he showed up and treated him like a legend in the flesh. Mrs. Pickwell did better: she treated him like a member of the family, as if she would have been surprised if he hadn't come on the whistle. Nor was Maniac the only visitor for dinner. Mr. Pickwell had brought home a down-and-out shoe salesman in sore need of sympathy and a good meal.

As Maniac ate and talked and laughed his way through dinner, he couldn't help thinking of the Beales. How alike the two families were: friendly, giving, accepting. So easily he could picture the Beales' brown faces around this dinner table, and the little Pickwell kids' white bodies in the bathtub at 728 Sycamore. Whoever had made of Hector Street a barrier, it was surely not these people.

Fortified by his good time at the Pickwells', Maniac returned to the McNabs'. After the East End scare, Russell and Piper no longer demanded stunts of him in return for attending school. On the one hand, this was a relief to Maniac; on the other, it left him with less influence over them.

He could always extort a day or two in class from them with the free weekly pizza. Beyond that, he goaded them toward school any way he could. He organized a marbles tournament that could take place only in the schoolyard during recess. He tried reading to them, as he had to Hester and Lester and to Grayson, but they paid as much attention as the roaches. He took them to the library, then scrapped that idea after their shenanigans left the librarian blubbering and blue-faced.

Then May arrived with its warm weather and blew away what little power he had left. The boys began again to dream of travel. Wood appeared in the backyard. They were building a raft. "Gonna sail down the river to the ocean," they said.

One day he heard frenzied horn-honking and screaming. He turned to see an ancient, rusty, gas-hog convertible rolling by, with Russell behind the wheel and Piper jumping up and down and shrieking in the back seat. By the time Maniac caught up, they were gone and the car was shuddering against a telephone pole.

Another time, he had to run them down and haul them back to Dorsey's Grocery, where he made them empty their bulging pockets of the fifty bubblegums they had stolen.

It was a maddening, chaotic time for Maniac. Running in the mornings and reading in the afternoons gave him just enough stability to endure the zany nights at the McNabs'. When he asked himself why he didn't just drop it, drop them, the answer was never clear. It wasn't so much that he wanted to stay as that he couldn't go. In some vague way, to abandon the McNab boys would be to abandon something in himself: He couldn't shake the suspicion that deep inside Russell and Piper McNab, in the prayer-dark seed of their kidhoods, they were identical to Hester and Lester Beale. But they were spoiling, rotting from the outside in, like a pair of peaches in the sun. Soon, unless he, unless somebody did something, the rot would reach the pit.

And yet he held back. Oh, he prodded and persuaded and inspired and bribed the boys to do right, but he never forced them, never commanded, never shouted. Because to do so would be parental, and he was not yet ready for that. How could he act as a father to these boys when he himself ached to be somebody's son?

 

But then one day the boys went too far. He found them playing with the old glove Grayson had given him for Christmas. As if that weren't bad enough, they were using it as a football, punting it back and forth.

Maniac exploded. He popped off for a good ten minutes, got it all out. This was the last straw, he told them. From now on it was gonna be different. No more Mr. Nice Guy. "When I say 'Jump,' you say 'How high?' Got it?"

They got it. For the first time in their lives, the boys were speechless. Speechless as they did their homework that night. Speechless as they went to bed at nine o'clock. Speechless as they went off to school next morning.

The peace lasted three days. Shock accounted for the first day. The second and third days were a new game, called Obedience, or Being Good. When the game lost its appeal, Maniac lost his power. He told them to sit, they stood. He told them to stand, they sat. Instead of going to school, they worked on their raft. Instead of doing homework, they played war in the pillbox. They brought their plastic weapons down from the hole and stationed themselves at the two small gunnery slots in the cinder-block wall and blasted away at anyone moving through the house, not to mention imaginary "rebels" streaming through the door and over the windowsills.

"Stop!" Maniac finally yelled, and snatched the two red gun barrels protruding from the slots. In a moment, two more barrels appeared.

"Stop!" he commanded.

"Ain't shooting you," Russell whined. "We're shooting them rebels. Bam-bam-bam! Pow! Got one! Pow! Bam! Got another! Bam-bam!"

"I said STOP!" Maniac grabbed the guns, threw them on the floor, and stomped on them. He didn't stop till they were plastic splinters.

The only sound was that of the turtle scratching somewhere in the room. The gunnery slots framed the boys' dumbstruck faces.

Russell was the first to speak. "Get outta my house."

"Yeah," sneered Piper, "outta here."

Maniac went upstairs, got his satchel, and was gone.

 

That night and the next night he slept at the park. The following day, as he sat reading in the library, in came the McNab boys. They rushed to him. "Hey, Maniac," blurted Piper, "we been lookin' all over for ya. Ya gotta come to my birthday party. I'm having a party tomorra. Waddaya say, huh? Ya comin'? Huh?"

Maniac couldn't believe it. The ugly feelings of the other day showed nowhere on their excited faces.

"C'mon, Maniac. You gotta!"

And just like that, as he stared at them, the idea came, an idea as zany as they were. The words seemed to lift right off their faces, like sunburnt skin peeling. "Well, okay," he said, "on one condition."

"What's that?"

"If I can bring somebody with me."

"Sure! Bring everybody! We're gonna party!"

The librarian edged closer to the phone.