The Magic Spectacles (4 page)

“Why would anyone do that? John’s mother asked.

The first policeman scratched his head. “Nobody knows,” he said. “Probably it’s just a nut.”

“A nut,” their father said. “That would explain it. It’s probably the same nut that stole the fish out of our refrigerator. Three trout just vanished from the freezer yesterday afternoon. Someone’s been stealing potted plants off the porch, too. Probably it’s a gang of nuts.”

Both policeman looked at him as if
he
was the nut, and John wished that his father wouldn’t talk like that, especially around people like teachers and policemen, who usually didn’t know he was trying to be funny.

There was a shout from the man in the coveralls, and a few moments later his head appeared in the crawlspace. His face was streaked with dirt. “Got it!” he said, and pulled himself through onto the driveway carrying a canvas bag full of stuff He dumped it out in a pile and raked through it with his fingers. Mixed in with the glass jewelry and marbles and prisms were a scattering of bones, mostly fish skeletons, as if someone had been having a fish picnic under there, one of the other bones, maybe from a rat, had hole drilled into it, like a flute.

By now, more neighbors stood around out on the sidewalk and watched. The wind blew leaves across front lawns, and the sky was full of racing clouds. Across the street, Mr. Skink was asleep on the grass, and six or eight crows hopped around him, picking up fallen walnuts. More crows dropped the walnuts from telephone lines into the street, and still more crows hopped around on the street eating the broken nuts.

Harvey Chickel rode his skateboard up and down the sidewalk, edging around people and shoving his way through. Whenever he could get John’s attention he nodded his head slowly, as if to say, “I told you so.” Once or twice he drew his finger across his throat and pretended to drop dead.

John wondered if Harvey Chickel had been the one that called the police. It would have been a rotten thing to do.

“They’ll think it’s us that stole it,” Danny said to John.

“No they won’t,” John said. “They’re finding stuff all over the place.”

There was a shout from the man who lived next door to the Skinks.
His
crawlspace had been meddled with too. Everyone moved across the street, including John and Danny and Kimberly. The policemen checked the neighboring houses. The Skink’s crawlspace was nearly hidden by bushes. Although it was closed, there was a heap of fish skeletons lying just inside the screen.

The man in the coveralls didn’t look very happy, but one by one he climbed under each house and came out again with more treasure and more skeletons. He smelled like dead fish. Under Mr. Skink’s house he found the skin of two rats. The heads and tails were still attached, as if someone had taken the guts and bones out in order to turn them into a pair of bedroom slippers.

Mr. Skink was still asleep on the lawn, but his wife woke him up to show him the rats, and he told her to leave him alone, that he didn’t want to see any rats. “It’s the cats,” he said, shaking his head darkly. “Too doggone many cats. I oughta…” Then he fell asleep again with his head on a pile of leaves.

Each time another treasure was found, the mystery grew.

“Must be pirates,” John’s father said to a policeman. “They used to bury treasure all over the place instead of spending it.”

The policeman blinked at him, as if what he said was gibberish. But it didn’t sound like gibberish to John. How else could you explain it. Even Harvey Chickel, who sometimes seemed to do things for no good reason at all, wouldn’t have stolen the stuff and then left it lying around under other people’s houses.

That was crazy – nearly as crazy as all the fish skeletons.

There was only one way in which the fish skeletons weren’t crazy. The morning had been
full
of fish skeletons. Downtown Orange seemed to have become the fish skeleton capital of the world. One or two fish skeletons didn’t mean anything. But here in one morning there was about a million of them, hanging in windows, drawn on the covers of books, painted on the lids of decorated cans, scattered under half the houses on the block.

There was no use mentioning any of this to the police, who clearly didn’t care as much about rats and skeletons as about stolen jewelry. Rats and skeletons only confused things, and, like Mr. Skink, the police were happy enough to blame all that on cats. What would really confuse things would be to bring up marbles and moon coins and goblin tunnels, even though John was certain by now, even though he didn’t know why, that all of them were connected. And whatever they were connected to didn’t have anything to do with cats….

Just then Harvey Chickel hit Mr. Skink in the head with a walnut. He woke up looking mad and rubbing his forehead. Immediately he pointed at Harvey and started yelling. Everyone was leaving by then, walking away across the street. But they turned now to watch.

Harvey put his hands out to his side and opened his mouth, as if he couldn’t believe that Mr. Skink would accuse him of such a terrible thing as throwing a walnut.

“It was a crow,” Harvey said, pointing to the birds on the wire overhead. “I swear!”

“It was
not
a crow,” Mr. Skink said. “You deliberately hit me in the head with a walnut!” He turned to the two policemen, who were standing by their car now. “Arrest this boy for assault,” he said.

“Honest!” Harvey said. “I didn’t do anything, did I, John?” He looked at John and winked.

John stood there silently.

“Did I?” Harvey said. He made a pleading face.

“I think it was a crow,” John said after another moment.

He waited. If anyone else had seen Harvey throw the walnut, then they were both done for. It was bad enough to lie, but worse to be caught lying.

Mr. Skink gave him a dirty look, and that was worse yet. There was nothing really wrong with Mr. Skink; he was just a little bit gruff, and he didn’t like Harvey. John didn’t want to be disliked, even by Mr. Skink, but that’s what had happened. It only took an instant.

Nobody else noticed or seemed to care. Even Harvey didn’t care. He started riding up and down on his skateboard again. Tomorrow, even Mr. Skink probably wouldn’t remember. Only John would.

Everybody went home. The police left. The street was nearly empty. Harvey rode past on his skateboard as John was walk-in up the driveway toward the porch.

“Told you so,” Harvey said, and pushed John on the back. Laughing, he rode away down the sidewalk and around the corner. John stood there watching him go.

“The jerk,” Danny said. “You should have pushed him off the skateboard.” He walked away toward the porch.

John shrugged. Maybe he
should
have pushed Harvey back. But why? The only thing that would come of it was more trouble. He hated trouble. He hated pushing and fighting. He hated it when people were mean for no reason at all. What he couldn’t understand, ever, was why people like Harvey Chickel
liked
it.

Suddenly John thought that if he could invent one thing in his life, just one, it would be a giant eraser. The first thing he’d do with it would be to use it to erase the last few minutes. That’s what the world needed, a fat rubber eraser that you could carry in your pocket and use to get rid of your mistakes. He decided to write it down in his book along with his gravity ideas.

It was impossible to divide the marbles up. They flipped a coin to see who would chose first. There was no problem with that. But there was no way to separate them into two piles. The marbles kept running back together, as if there was dip in the floor. They tried putting them into jars, but there was something wrong with that, too. The little puddles of marbles in the jars were too small, for one thing. In the fishbowl the marbles had looked like a collection. Now they looked like a collection cut in half. Then one of the jars fell over, and Danny tried to grab it, and accidentally knocked the other jar over too, and the marbles ran together again like two rivers flowing into a lake.

They tried again, switching marbles back and forth and being careful with the jars, but it still wasn’t any good. When they were done, the fishbowl sat there empty on the floor. Full of marbles, it had been almost magical, like a treasure chest in a cave. But now, empty, all the magic had gone out of it.

Then Ahab came into the room and walked straight through the jars, t knocking them over again. Maybe thinking they were bugs, he began to push them around with his nose. The sound of their rolling was loud on the wooden floor as they disappeared behind the dressers and toybox, bumping into the wall rolling away again along the floor mouldings until they all ended up under the bed. Danny crawled underneath and rolled them back out, and John caught them and dropped them back into the fishbowl, all except the last two.

One of those was white, with a red and green swirl through it like a piece of Christmas candy. John put it into his pocket. “I want this one for a good luck charm,” he said. “It’s all I want. You can have the rest.”

“Let’s just leave the ret in the fishbowl,” Danny said, holding one last marble in the palm of his hand. “I’ll keep this one.” It was pink and blue, the color of an Easter egg or of a springtime sky at sunset.

The wind blew harder than ever outside, making a moaning noise around the window. It was a cold wind, and the sky was full of clouds. In the western sky, the sun shone from beneath the clouds like an orange half-hidden by a china plate. That morning it had seemed to John that something unusual was about to happen, something big. But now, late in the afternoon, the wind had scoured most of the mystery out of the day.

There was nothing left to do but clean up their bedroom. That, for some reason, had to be done every Saturday, no matter what. It would be easier just to shut the door, so that no one could see in, but somehow that wasn’t good enough for their parents. The room had to be cleaned because it had to be cleaned.

Danny put books away on the shelves while John picked up toys and tossed them into the toybox and into baskets lying around on the floor. They found a pile of old, dried-out banana peels behind the toy box along with an empty carton that had once held frozen fish sticks.

“That’s not
my
trash,” John said, pointing at it. “What was this, some kind of midnight snack?”

“Don’t look at me,” Danny said. “I’m
sure
I eat frozen fish sticks out of the box.”

“Then who put it there? Dad?”

“You tell me and we’ll both know,” Danny said.

John picked all of it up anyway. The banana skins were as stiff as cardboard. He smashed it all down into the trash can and then shoved a lot of old scrap paper on top of it, stomping it flat so that the can was only half full and didn’t have to be emptied. He pitched a few dirty clothes out into the hallway, and the room was nearly clean except for a couple of things that were hard to put away but that fit just fine under the bed.

“Watch me do a trick,” John said finally.

There was a certain amount of dust and sand and shreds of paper and who knows what-all kinds of tiny stuff left on the wooden floor. John held his jacket by the neck, gave it a flourish like a magician’s cape, and whipped it back and forth through the air, a couple of inches above the floor. As quick as winking, dust and debris swirled into the air, sand and craps shot away under the bed and dressers. Like magic, the floor was clean. He bowed, dropping his jacket onto his bed.

There were three books that wouldn’t fit into the bookcase, so Danny stuffed two of them into his shirt drawer and said that he was through too. “I’ll read this one,” he said, and then flopped down on his bed and opened the third book.

John sat down on his own bed and stared out the window. Someday someone would invent a robot to clean bedrooms. Once he and Danny had built one out of tin cans tied together with string, but it wouldn’t stand up. Because of that they had called it “the sleeping robot” for a while, but then Harvey Chickel had stepped on its head and smashed it. After that they called it “the dead robot” until it was left outside in the rain and got rusty and their father threw it away.

The house was quiet now, with only the sound of the wind whispering outside. It was a late-afternoon sort of quiet, lonesome and still, and it reminded John of being in the curiosity shop that morning. The whole room was washed in underwater colors from the sunlight shining through Mrs. Owlswick’s window.

The spectacles lay on the windowsill where John had put them an hour ago. He had forgotten all about them. The watery light shone through them, too, and reflected from the wooden floor in green, over-lapping circle.

Something seemed to be moving through the spectacles light, like dim pictures on a movie screen. There were leafy tree waving in the wind and the shadow-shapes of distant hills. Specks of dust floated through the light like drifting autumn leaves. Then clouds moved across the sun outside, and the green light dimmed and was gone.

(Chapter 7 continues after illustration)

John picked the spectacles up and put them on in order to look out the window. And what he saw through the window was curious – as curious as anything that had happened so far that day.