Maniac Monkeys on Magnolia Street & When Mules Flew on Magnolia Street (7 page)

We make up songs whenever we go fishing, and never afterward remember anything we've
sung. We've made up thousands of fishing songs. I think the fish like them, too, even though everyone says the noise scares them.

Me, Lump, and Billy grabbed all our fishing gear and ran down the ravine to the river.

It was a beautiful morning.

We walked for a few minutes along the river. Water bugs danced on the surface, and we listened to katydids calling. We have a special place that's just big enough for us. The bank is sandy, and there's enough room to put all our gear down and still stretch out while we're fishing.

“Great!” Lump said as he started to bait the fishhooks with cheese.

“Nothing like fishing,” Billy said as he pulled out a few comic books and the mosquito spray.

I took the Big Swooshies and put them into the river so the water would keep them cool.
It's early in the summer, and the water was still cold. The sun hadn't warmed up our part of the river yet.

I also tied up some loose ends of the net. It got a little torn last time, when Billy got bored with fishing and went looking for elk upriver. Even though Lump said he didn't think elk lived this far south, it didn't stop Billy, who ripped the net catching what he first thought was a bear but which turned out to be an old barbecue.

When Billy gets something in his head, you better not get in his way. It's best to join in; mostly, we do.

Soon we were all waiting for the fish to come. This is always my favorite part of fishing—waiting and looking into the water. It's exciting thinking that a fish could bite at any moment.

Mostly, though, they just take the bait, not the hook. Then we feed them more.

“It's good to be out of school for the summer,” Lump said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think the teachers needed a break. They were starting to daydream and not pay attention to their work.”

Billy said, “I caught Ms. Thorton playing with a yo-yo before class a couple of days before summer vacation.”

Lump said, “The whole class caught Mr. Kane blowing bubbles at his desk the day school let out.”

“I feel sorry for the teachers. It's hard for them all year long. I hope a few of them are out fishing someplace.”

“Yeah,” said Lump.

“Yeah,” said Billy.

I threw a couple of chunks of cheese into the water for the fish who might not make it to the fishing poles. Sid might be right about them making sandwiches, but I wouldn't tell him that.

It got very quiet on the river. We got quiet, too. Nothing like fishing, with the sun high in the sky.

Lump took out the sandwiches. We all love baloney. It's another one of the good parts of fishing. I took the Big Swooshies out of the river, and we drank them like we'd been in the desert all day. You'd just dry up and get blown away like a leaf if it wasn't for Big Swooshies. Fishing is hard, fun, and long.…

After the sandwiches and the Swooshies, we must have fallen asleep, 'cause when we woke up, the sun had warmed up the riverbank and our fishing poles were gone!

We all woke up at the same time. Maybe there was a noise in the woods surrounding us. Maybe someone blew a horn on Magnolia Street. Or maybe three fish took the bait at the same time, pulling our fishing poles away from the riverbank and waking us up because
they were laughing so hard that we could hear it coming from underwater.

Billy thought it was the last one.

Lump thought it was probably all of them.

I thought we'd just slept so hard for so long, like big old warthogs, it was just a matter of time before we woke up.

“What are we going to do?” Billy said as we watched our poles float gently in the middle of the river.

“Only one thing we
can
do,” I said.

Lump blew a bubble and nodded and said, “Yep, only one thing.”

Well, it was a good thing it had warmed up. It was also a good thing we were all excellent swimmers (even though the river comes up only to our waists), 'cause we were in the middle of the river for a long time.

I found river weed while I was trying to untangle the fishing lines. Lump decided Billy
would look good with it on top of his head. I thought Lump would, too.

In the end they both looked completely hysterical—like swamp monsters!

Billy splashed and jumped in and out of the water while I tried some river weed on myself.

Lump squished in his wet clothes as he went along the bank collecting frogs in the net. He got about twenty of them. They croaked loudly into the warm afternoon air.

After we sat in the water awhile listening to their song, we took handfuls of them at a time and let them go back to what they were doing. Then we screamed and splashed each other till we probably scared off the rest of the fish.

We laughed till we couldn't stand it anymore. After a while we waded back to the riverbank. Our wet clothes felt heavy as blankets. Lump passed the comic books around, and if somebody had come by us in a boat, they
would have wondered where the vine-covered sea monsters reading comics had come from.

A little while later we threw the rest of the cheese to the fish and drank the last of our Big Swooshies. Then each of us read a chapter of the Goober Kids out loud.

The five o'clock whistle at the peanut butter factory had blown when I heard Mom calling from the top of the ravine. We packed everything in a hurry and ran up to the street. After we'd loaded the car with everything but fish, we rolled down the car window and sang more fishing songs. Real loud.

It's really true, I thought as we headed toward home, Lump and Billy and me screaming our songs, there really is nothing like fishing!

omething weird is happening on Magnolia Street. I thought I knew what it was all about, but it turned out to be something totally different. At first I was kind of scared.

I even told Sid all about it, so I know I was pretty worried.

It didn't start off like a mystery. At least not like the mysteries in books I read. Usually, in those books, somebody is running down a dark road in the rain or has moved into an old house that has a secret room he can't get into.

This mystery is the Carter family. They disappeared.

A huge family, with about ten kids, five dogs (one that barked at everybody), three cats, and six guinea pigs, one day just wasn't there at all. I mean, just like that!

One minute Ben Carter was squirting water at everyone with his mom's hose, and his little sister Dana was selling lemonade at a stand while their sister Vicky slept in the hammock in the front yard (though how she can sleep with all those people around I do not know). The next minute they were all gone.

Well, not exactly a minute. It was two days.

I went to borrow a few crab apples off their tree when I noticed that there weren't even lawn chairs in the front yard anymore. All the Big Wheels, bikes, and wading pools had also disappeared.

Usually you could hear laughing and yelling real early in the morning at the Carters'. This
morning no dog barked, and there wasn't one sound from the house.

I went closer and I noticed that the bamboo shades on the front door were gone. The wind chimes that made tinkling sounds were gone, too.

So I climbed onto the porch and looked in. I guess I half expected to see most everybody in time-out, the house being so quiet and everything.

I ran the half a block to my house, crashing into my mom just as she was getting into her car to go to work. She'd dumped her purse on the front seat to look for something.

“They're gone, Mom.”

“Who's gone, Charlie?”

“The Carters, Mom. All of them are gone. And so is all their furniture and even the dogs. They even took the barking dog. You'd think they'd just leave him for the neighbors to
take care of, since we've gotten used to him howling.”

“What?” Mom said.

I kind of looked at her. I'd just told her all about the disappearance of the Carters, and she hadn't even heard me. I guess it wasn't a good idea to bug Mom when she was on her way to work.

She smiled, then kissed me on the top of my head like I was a baby. (I wish she wouldn't.)

“You shouldn't tease that dog, Charlie.”

“What?” I said.

“You shouldn't tease that dog of the Carters'.”

Then she started the car and blew a kiss at me as she pulled out of the drive. She rolled down the window and called, “Pay attention to Sid. And try to eat something sensible. I don't think a hundred cookies a day is a well-balanced diet.”

Well, paying attention to Sid was not something
I wanted to think about, but I would try not to eat so many cookies. I was spending most of my days eating them.

A good cookie can be the best thing in the world.

That's when I went into the house to tell Sid about the Carters. Sid said we should be careful, 'cause if the mystery is what we all think it is (that a whole family just disappeared with aliens or something), we could
all
disappear. Just like the Carter family. But I caught him giggling as he left the kitchen. I might as well have been talking to one of my neighbor Mr. Pinkton's fish. Sid is never much help, but sometimes he can be such a pest that I feel like gluing a sign around his body that says

ANNOYING BROTHER FOR SALE.

I decided I'd go tell Lump and Billy all about
the Carters. They'd believe me, and maybe even help me find out what happened to them.

Lump's uncle let me into their kitchen.

“And what have we done to have the honor of your presence, Miss Charlie, on such a fine morning as this?”

Lump's uncle always talks like that. I just smile a lot and look confused. A lot. I did say yes to the muffins he offered me, though. I sat in their sunny kitchen waiting for Lump to come down and remembered what Mom said about a well-balanced diet. I ate only three blueberry muffins.…

“What's up, Charlieroo?”

Lump was wearing a superhero T-shirt and still looked sleepy. I felt kind of bad because I know Lump likes to sleep late. Summer vacation to Lump is eating as much fruit as he can
and sleeping as late as his aunt and uncle will let him.

He'd found me with muffin in my mouth, so it took me a while to tell him what I wanted to. He sat down in the sunny yellow kitchen beside me and started eating muffins, too.

“Lump.”

“Yeah.”

“The Carters are gone. I went to their house a while ago, and everyone and everything is gone. Dogs and furniture.
Everything
is gone.”

“Wow!” Lump said.

I almost fell on the floor when Lump got excited. He hadn't put in his morning gum yet. So I know he said “Wow!” Sometimes you really can't understand Lump when he has a mouthful of gum.

Lump moved closer to my chair.

“What do you think happened to them, Charlie?”

“I don't know, but I think we should find out.”

We said at the same time, “Let's go get Billy.”

Well, I don't think Billy ever sleeps at all. I remember his mother once saying she thinks she's slept maybe a total of twelve hours since Billy has been able to walk. I told my dad that, and he laughed so hard I thought he was going to bust a gut. I don't know why that was so funny.

Anyway, Billy was up. That is, actually he was down—hanging upside down from a branch of the tree in his backyard.

The first thing he said when we found him was “Did you know the Carters have disappeared?”

You have to have mystery gear.

I have it and have been waiting to use it for about a year.

It includes a big orange flashlight, a magnifying glass, fingerprint powder, binoculars, a coil of rope, and a packet of cheese crackers in case I fall into a dungeon and can't be found for a few days. Lump and Billy supplied bottles of water and some crab apples from the disappeared Carters' tree.

I said, “Billy, you look in the side windows. Lump, you look in the front ones, and I'll go around to the back to look through the kitchen window.”

It was still pretty early in the morning, but looking through the window of the Carters' empty house was kind of like walking through a scary house at midnight. The strange thing was there was not so much as one piece of paper left on the floor of the house.