Maniac Monkeys on Magnolia Street & When Mules Flew on Magnolia Street (3 page)

Once, this man walked on dressed as a carrot. He read a book until his stop—a supermarket! There was also the time this woman sang songs about zoo animals really loudly until we got off the bus.

I patted Billy on the back because I know he really loved that baseball cap.

He bit into the plum, and it was so juicy it squirted us both.

Later, right around the time my mom was trying to put two huge pink ribbons in my hair, Billy poked his head through our morning-glory vines.

Billy said, “Mr. George Pinkbelly has my baseball cap.”

Mom pulled my hair and looked at Billy.

“Mr. George Pink
ton
you mean, Billy.”

Billy smiled at us and pulled a leaf off the morning glories to make a green mustache. Billy's famous on Magnolia Street for giving people nicknames.

“Yeah, I mean Mr. Pinkton.”

“How do you know?” I asked, scrunching up so Mom wouldn't pull my whole face off trying to get my braids tight.

“You know him, Charlie. He never wears a hat. Today, though, he is wearing a cap that looks just like mine.”

I looked up at Mom. She was shaking her head. I looked at Billy sideways, like he was growing a beard. Everybody knows Mr. Pinkbelly—uh, Pinkton—has a shiny bald head that he is real proud of. He always shows off his head.

Mom finished my hair and kissed me on the side of my face.

“Now you look more like a Charlene than a Charlie.”

Billy said I look like a big-haired bunny rabbit.

Then he grabbed my hand, and off we went to get his baseball cap back.

Mr. George Pinkbelly's yard is full of the biggest rosebushes I've ever seen. Everybody always stops outside his gate and looks in. The roses are beautiful.

Mr. Pinkbelly also has an attack cat named Murray. Billy calls him Murray the Mugger because he's been known to sneak up on people from behind and jump them. Murray was sitting in front of the gate.

“Here, Murray,” Billy said.

He gave Murray a chunk of ham from his pocket. We opened the gate and ran right past him while he was gobbling up the treat.

Even though Billy thinks Mr. Pinkbelly has his favorite baseball cap, he can't say anything
bad about the rose garden. Every color in the rainbow is here.

Standing in Mr. Pinkbelly's yard is like standing in a honey-scented box of crayons.

Me and Billy just stood and breathed.

“Do you think he's wearing my cap in his house, Charlie?”

“Maybe… maybe not.”

Billy tiptoed up to the porch and almost fell into a rosebush in a pot. He looked through the screen door.

I said, “Billy, we shouldn't be spying on Mr. Pinkbelly. It's not right.”

“Wow!” Billy said.

I moved Billy aside and looked into Mr. Pinkbelly's house.

“Wow!” I said.

Mr. Pinkbelly's house was filled with fishtanks.

Fishtanks everywhere! On the floor. Built
into walls. Sitting on tables. There were even a few goldfish bowls hanging from the ceiling.

Suddenly Murray was behind us. Boy, can he eat fast. He growled and blocked our way off the porch.

“Good tiger,” Billy said.

“Good kitty,” I said.

Billy said, “I'll bring you the whole pig next time, okay, Murray?”

But Murray wouldn't move. Now he was hissing. Me and Billy figured there was nowhere left to go but inside.

In a second, we were standing in Mr. Pinkbelly's living room full of fish.

“Hello,” someone said.

We looked around the room and all we saw were thousands of fish.

“Hello,” we said.

We walked farther into the room and just past a tankful of yellow and blue fish. Mr.
Pinkbelly was busy scooping out tiny fish with a net. He put them in a tiny bowl with some other fish babies so that they could grow up together.

He said, “These fish have just had babies. Have a seat.”

Billy and I sat on a soft cushy couch with tropical fish painted all over it. We sank about a mile into it.

Mr. Pinkbelly kept talking as if we'd been invited.

“I love these guppies. When I go to feed them, they do tricks.” Mr. Pinkbelly looked at me and Billy real close.

“Fish tricks?” Billy asked.

Mr. Pinkbelly got the joke and laughed. He laughed so hard me and Billy started laughing, too.

Mr. Pinkbelly waved his arms all around.

“Look around, look around,” Mr. Pinkbelly said, then went right on tending his fish.

We wandered through the whole house. Sometimes there was furniture, and if there was, it was mostly to hold fish.

Billy pressed his face against one of the tanks. There was magic in his eyes.

Billy was in love with Mr. Pinkbelly's fish. I think he forgot all about his favorite baseball cap. Anyway, Mr. Pinkbelly didn't seem the kind of person who went around taking people's favorite baseball caps off of buses.

We ended up downstairs, where Mr. Pinkbelly was saying as we walked in the room, “Fish are my life.”

He offered me and Billy nut-covered brownies and lemonade in tall fish glasses.

Then Mr. Pinkbelly told us about the sea.

He said that when he was young, all he wanted to do was sail away. He became a merchant marine and sailed all over the world. That's how he started loving anything from the sea.

Mr. Pinkbelly told stories about beautiful castles and strange animals. He said that once he thought he might have even seen a mermaid.

Billy's eyes were far away, and maybe he saw it, too.

“Then I got too old to sail anymore, so I came to live on Magnolia Street.”

“Don't you miss the sea, Mr. Pinkbe—Pinkton?” I said.

Mr. Pinkton got up off the floor and spun around the room laughing.

“I brought the sea with me!”

We laughed, but it's true. There is a whole sea on Magnolia Street.

“Where did you get Murray?” Billy asked.

“I saved him from the pound,” Mr. Pinkton said.

I didn't say it out loud, but I really thought he'd saved the people who worked at the pound
from Murray. He'd probably eaten a few people before Mr. Pinkton could get him out of there. I think I'll check the newspaper to see if anybody who works at the pound has been reported missing.

We stayed in Mr. Pinkton's house until the sun started setting. When the sun was coming right through his front window, he opened the blinds.

And then, right here on Magnolia Street, there was magic. The tanks caught the sunlight and glowed…

Mr. Pinkton stood in the center of the room, bowed to us, and said, “The sea.”

He sent me and Billy off with a paper bag fall of brownies and plastic bags full of guppies.

Murray the Mugger was nowhere to be seen as me and Billy walked out of the house of fish and down the path of roses.

“Great brownies,” Billy said while we were sitting on my porch swing holding our fish.

“My mom's going to be surprised by these fish,” I said.

“My mom won't be,” Billy said.

“I don't know, Billy. Would you say she was surprised by those hundred Japanese beedes you had?”

“Well, she wasn't before they escaped the house I built for them and got into her room.”

We swung a while longer until I remembered something.

“Billy, your favorite baseball cap! We didn't get it.”

Billy stuffed a whole brownie in his mouth and nodded, then pulled his cap out of his back pocket and smiled a chocolate grin.

“I always did want to see what the inside of Mr. Pinkton's house looked like,” he said.

We swung on as the bees buzzed around us and our bag of brownies.

“Me too, Billy,” I said.

Then the wind brought the scent of roses through the air, and Pm not sure, but I think it also brought the sea.

The Pumpkin Box

I
t all started because I'm a digger.

Digging is something that I can't help. I have done it since I was a little baby. Dad says I used to try to dig my way out of the playpen.

I don't talk about my digging too much 'cause every time I dig it usually gets me in trouble.

Billy understands about my digging. He says that he knows how hard it can be to break a habit like that. He has a nosy problem and that is pretty hard for him.

When we moved to Magnolia Street, one of the first things I noticed was a vacant lot that looked like the perfect place to dig.

So—

I had been trying not to dig for a long time. But a few nights ago, I dreamed I was in a cave that had treasures and fossils. I woke up digging in my sleep. It was time to do something about this digging problem.

When I asked Billy what I should do about it, he blew a big bubble and spun around on his skates.

“Dig!”

So what was I going to do?

I'd been looking at the empty place across the street from my house for a long time. I decided to drag Billy away from his skating. I had to tell him I was pretty sure that there was a sabertooth tiger or something just waiting for us to dig up.

“Okay, Charlie, where is it?” Billy said, munching on an apple and looking real unhappy.

I expected more from Billy, even though I
know that everybody is not a digger. But I figured that Billy should have been a little happier that I was sharing with him.

“Billy?”

“What?”

“Guess what?”

“What, Charlie?”

“What are you going to do with your part of the sabertooth tiger bones you find?”

“Well, I guess I'll put them together with yours.”

“Then you'll help me dig?”

Well, I can say this about Billy, and it's probably why we're friends, if you bug him enough he'll join in sooner or later. He even looked like he might be getting excited about the saber-tooth across the street.

While we were both hanging upside down in Miss Marcia's apple tree, Billy asked, “What do we need to dig? You know we have to be
careful. We don't want to break any sabertooth bones or anything.”

I thought for a while.

“A shovel might be too much. Anyway, my mom won't let me use it after that flower-digging accident I had.”

Billy swung by his legs faster.

“What flower-digging accident?”

I closed my eyes, remembering all the dirt and flowers lying around the backyard. I only meant to move the different flowers around so all the colors would be lined up together. Well, I got kind of tired and there was this funny movie on television that Sid was watching.

Mom wasn't happy.

So I just said, “Nothing.”

Billy jumped down from the tree.

“My dad has digging tools he uses for the garden out back. They're small, and I'm sure he won't miss them.”

“Yeah, he probably won't miss them. FU get some bags to keep the bones and other stuff we find.”

Me and Billy were set.

The digging was hard in the beginning. An old house used to be there, but the only thing left from it was part of the chimney. You wouldn't believe the things we started to find underneath the dirt. I just knew that there had to be a sabertooth or something there.

The first thing we dug up was spoons.

Billy said, “We could clean these things up. They probably are gold!”

Billy put the gold spoons in the bag that was for everything else but bones.

After a while it started getting real hot. I could almost make believe that me and Billy were digging way off in a desert somewhere. We were far away from home with only a little water. We were famous archaeologists.

I would find bones.

Billy would find gold spoons.

I would find fossils.

Billy would find gold spoons.

I would find a whole city buried way down underneath the desert.

And there, Billy would find more gold spoons.

Me and Billy didn't even talk to each other while we dug. We were too busy finding all kinds of treasures.

Billy found a cracked mirror.

I found a scrub brush.

Billy found a bottle with a metal top on it, and I found an old can.

The non-bone bag was filling up, and I noticed that Billy was smiling. Sometimes you just have to bring out the digger in some people.

Just as I was starting to get a little worried 'cause we hadn't run into any bones yet, I hit something with the little hand shovel I had. I
took a while to dig it up 'cause I didn't want to wreck any of it.

I'd found something better than a saber-tooth.

It was a pumpkin box.

It was metal and square, and somebody had pasted paper pumpkins all over it.

Billy said, “Can we open it?”

“I don't know.”

“Try.”

So I did. I just wiggled the lock a little and it opened right up.

And the things inside. I knew then that to be a digger was probably to be one of the most exciting things in the world.

Me and Billy sat side by side and stared at the pumpkin box. Most of the pumpkins had fallen off, but there were a couple left. Inside, there was magic.

Billy looked at me and smiled.

I looked at him and smiled.

The first thing we found in the box was a yo-yo.

It was red and wooden.

We laid it out beside the pumpkin box. We didn't want to put it in the non-bone bag.

Next we found three nickels tied up in a handkerchief. They had buffaloes on them.