Project Sweet Life (6 page)

“Oh, this is
good
,” Curtis said, taking it all in. “This’ll be a piece-o-cake.”

“How do you figure?” I said.

“This is mostly a pool for kids! There isn’t even a lap lane. So he can’t swim laps or anything. He already agreed not to talk to your coworkers, right? So he’ll just come in, see you in action, and leave.”

“I still don’t understand,” I said. “I’m not really a lifeguard. How will he see me in action?”

“Leave that to me,” Curtis said.

Great
, I thought.
Now Curtis is getting all mysterious on me too!

The next evening, I found myself standing nervously just outside the pool office in a white T-shirt and a pair of Victor’s red shorts. My T-shirt didn’t say
LIFEGUARD
, but according to Curtis, that didn’t matter. He said if you got most of something right, people tended to fill in the rest of the details themselves.

Suddenly Curtis whirled around the corner. “Here
he comes!” Curtis said, ducking into the bushes.

There was a small metal sign just above my head that read
OPEN SWIM
. The lifeguards hung it out when the pool was open to the general public. We knew I couldn’t be inside the pool office when my dad arrived, but this was the next best thing.

A moment later, my dad rounded the corner carrying a rolled-up towel. “Dave?” he said. “What are you doing out here?”

“Hi, Dad,” I said, trying to act nonchalant. “We threw some guy out, so he came back and egged us. I’m just cleaning up the last of it.”

“Teenagers,” he said disdainfully, which I thought was interesting, since I hadn’t mentioned anyone’s age.

“I’ll be out by the pool in a minute,” I said.

He nodded. “Okay, I’ll see you there.” He ambled for the pool doors. Now I had to hope my dad would live up to his promise about not making any small talk about me to the off-duty lifeguard manning the cash register at the pool counter.

Inside the office, I heard my dad paying to enter. A second later, the door to the locker room squeaked.

He hadn’t said anything.

“So far, so good,” Curtis said. “Now on to part two.” He stepped from the bushes, then ducked into the locker room after my dad.

I waited a few moments, then followed them both in. I paid my dollar admission, as had Curtis, then slipped inside the locker room.

“That’s true, Mr. Landers,” I overheard Curtis saying to my dad, “but we’re all so busy with our summer jobs that we hardly ever see each other.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being busy,” my dad said. “Being busy is a
good
thing.”

“Oh, I couldn’t agree more, sir,” Curtis said, lying brazenly. “The harder I work mowing lawns at the golf course, the better it feels when I stop by here after work for a quick, refreshing dip in the pool.”

In short, Curtis had pretended to accidentally run into my dad in the locker room and was now distracting him so that I could sneak past him, out into the pool area. That way when my dad went out to the pool and saw me, he’d think that I got there through the office, as I would have if I was really an employee.

I held my breath as I stole across the locker room.

“Yessir,” Curtis was saying. “Nothing like hard work.
The harder, the better!”

Once in the pool area, I took in the scene. This late at night, there were only a handful of people in the water, with the two lifeguards in their usual positions.
You are who you surround yourself with,
I thought. Sure enough, the lifeguards looked well-groomed and attentive to their jobs. I was certain my dad would think they’d be great influences on me.

I waited until I heard the echo of Curtis coughing inside the locker room. That was the signal that my dad had changed into his suit and was now heading out for the pool.

I immediately veered for the tall lifeguard’s chair. I stood at its base looking out at the kids splashing in the water.

“Wow,” I said. “Not a lot of kids here tonight, are there?”

The lifeguard glanced down at me. “No,” she said. “Nights are usually pretty slow.”

“Must be nice for you guys. Not to have to deal with all those screaming kids.”

The point, of course, wasn’t
what
I said to that lifeguard. The point was that when my dad stepped out
from that locker room, he would see me out there on the pool deck, wearing red shorts and a white T-shirt and studiously conferring with the similarly garbed lifeguard.

Which was exactly what happened. I could
feel
him watching me. But that was fine, because I looked like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

“I’m sorry,” the lifeguard said to me. “I’m not supposed to talk to people when I’m on duty like this. If you have a question, you can ask at the front office.”

“Oh, I understand,” I said, exaggerating a nod. “I definitely, totally understand.”

This was an unexpected development. But fortunately, Curtis’s plan did not require that I keep talking to this lifeguard for much longer.

Sure enough, at that exact moment, lightning flashed from somewhere beyond the chain-link fence. A second later, distant thunder rumbled.

A few moments later, it happened again.

It wasn’t real lightning, of course. It was Victor, standing just behind the green plastic fence clicking the flash on his mom’s digital camera against the big reflective sunshade from Curtis’s dad’s car, then
wobbling, ever so slightly, a flattened aluminum roasting pan.

This had been my idea. In lifesaving class I’d learned that they had to close the pool for at least thirty minutes after any sign of lightning, since water is such a good conductor of electricity and no pool wants to be legally responsible for a bunch of deep-fried kiddies.

Sure enough, the lifeguard stood up and announced, “That’s lightning, folks! Everyone out of the pool! And since we close at nine anyway, that means we’re done for the day.” I could hear the barely restrained glee in her voice about the fact that she was getting off work forty minutes early.

A chorus of disappointed groans welled up from the few remaining kids in the water.

The lifeguard, meanwhile, looked directly at my dad, who had still not gotten into the water. “We’ll give you a refund at the front counter.”

I looked over at my dad and shrugged helplessly. He rolled his eyes good-naturedly.

A few minutes later, I joined him in the locker room. “Sorry about that,” I said. “You didn’t get a chance to see me save anyone from drowning.”

He gave me a proud smile. “I saw enough.”

I nodded to the office area. “I’ve got to go put some stuff in the Dumpsters. I’ll see you at home later, okay?”

“Sure thing,” my dad said, turning to change back into his street clothes. “See you at home.”

“It worked!” I said when I met Curtis and Victor in the bushes in front of the pool. “My dad bought it completely.”

“What’d I tell you?” Curtis said. “Piece-o-cake!”

Even so, we waited until after my dad left so Curtis and I could go back and get our own dollar refunds from the pool office. After having spent thirty dollars on three voicemail services, we only had five dollars left between us, and we needed to keep every penny, at least until Saturday, when we were certain to win ten thousand dollars in the guess-the-number-of-jelly-beans-in-a-jar contest.

The announcement was scheduled for ten
A.M
., presumably so that all the people who’d come to see if they were the winner would then stay and shop at the mall. The winners weren’t required to be present, but Uncle Brad and Uncle Danny had insisted on joining us.

It was quite a presentation. They had jugglers, a brass band, and a master of ceremonies who was dressed up like—who else?—Mr. Moneybags, the Monopoly character who just happened to be the Project Sweet Life mascot. It was clearly a sign!

“Just think,” my uncle Brad said. “You guys might soon have
five thousand dollars
to split between the three of you.”

“Ten thousand,” Curtis said. “Not five thousand.”

“Sure, ten thousand: five thousand for you three, and five thousand for Danny and me.”

Uncle Danny whacked him on the chest. “That is
so
not funny.” He looked at the three of us. “He’s kidding. You guys did the work, so you guys get all the money.”

“Shhhh,” Uncle Brad said. “This is it.”

“So you guys wanna know how many jelly beans are in this jar?” the MC shouted.

“Yes!” shouted the crowd.

“Are you
sure
?” Mr. Moneybags said.

“
Yes!
” responded the crowd.

He went on like this for about ten more pointless minutes, which seemed even longer since we were on constant lookout for Curtis’s sister. But I reminded myself
that once we won this stupid contest, we wouldn’t have to set foot in public for the rest of the summer.

Finally, the MC announced, “The correct number of jelly beans is thirty-seven thousand, six hundred eleven!”

The crowd fell silent. They didn’t know how to react. After all, the total jelly bean count was meaningless data to them. Most of them probably didn’t even remember what they had guessed. They just wanted to know who had guessed closest to the total.

But the information was
not
meaningless to us. We
did
remember the number we had entered: thirty-seven thousand, five hundred seventy-two. Which happened to be a mere thirty-nine jelly beans from the total.

In other words,
we were within fifty jelly beans
! We had made the closest guess! The only way anyone could have
possibly
been any closer than us would be if they’d just happened to have made a completely random lucky guess—and what were the odds of
that
?

“It worked,” Victor whispered, as if he’d surprised himself. “Saint Billicus Gates, we’re rich!”

“And the winner,” Mr. Moneybags went on, “the person who guessed closest to the
actual
total, is…” He paused dramatically.

Curtis, Victor, and I all had stupid smiles plastered on our faces. Even Uncle Brad and Uncle Danny grinned. They knew what our guess was too.

We’d done it! We’d actually done it!

“Lani Taito!” the MC finished.

Wait,
I thought.
It didn’t sound like the MC called either Uncle Brad or Uncle Danny.

That stupid smile plastered on my face? Suddenly the plaster cracked, and the smile fell to the floor in little dry pieces.

I looked at Victor. The smile had crashed from his face too.

“No!” he said. “The odds of anyone making such a totally random guess—”

“It wasn’t a guess at all,” said Haleigh, stepping up behind us as Lani headed toward the MC, her mother in tow. “We had a plan.”

“You did?” Victor said. “What was it? You used one jelly bean as a reference point to figure out the volume for the whole jar, right?”

Haleigh considered. “Interesting idea. Another possibility is to buy an exact replica of that jar and just…fill it up with jelly beans.”

“But—?” Victor said. “How—?”

“Oh, it wasn’t that hard to figure out,” said Haleigh. “I mean, we guessed they bought that jar here at the mall. And sure enough, we found that exact same one over at Planet Warehouse.”

What Haleigh had said made perfect sense. Why hadn’t we thought of that?

If we had, we’d have ten thousand dollars!

But we hadn’t, and so we didn’t.

Weirdly, I wasn’t all that disappointed by our failure to win ten thousand dollars in the jelly-bean contest. Our guess had been remarkably accurate—it’s just that someone else had been even
more
accurate. Yes, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades (and on Mrs. Stewart’s biology tests, if you argue long enough). But our close guess, coupled with our resounding success at the fool-my-dad-at-the-Fircrest-Pool con, proved we were not incompetent, just that we were having a spot of bad luck.

However, Curtis and Victor weren’t taking it nearly
as well. They spent the rest of the weekend kicking bottle caps and complaining about the unseasonably overcast skies.

Maybe they had more invested in the Project Sweet Life schemes so far because technically they’d been
their
ideas. Curtis had come up with the garage sale and the plan to catch the bank robbers, and it had been Victor’s idea to guess the jelly beans.

Meanwhile, it was now the fourth week of July, and I hadn’t come up with any ideas at all. That made me wonder if I was pulling my own weight. It also made me wonder if I wasn’t a little dim.

So Sunday morning, I decided I was going to be the one to come up with our next project. And my idea, unlike the others, was going to be the one that would finally make us that seven thousand dollars.

But it’s easier to
decide
to come up with a great idea than to actually come up with one. Short of finding buried treasure, how did one go about suddenly getting a huge amount of money?

As I was getting ready to leave the bomb shelter on Sunday night, I happened to spot
Trains and Totem Poles: A History of Tacoma, Washington
, the book that Curtis had
bought at that estate sale. Maybe there was something in there, I thought—something about a lost treasure buried somewhere in the city.

Yeah, right.

I spent the next few days reading every word in that book. And wouldn’t you know it? Tacoma just might have been home to a buried treasure after all.

“The China Tunnels!” I announced at the bomb shelter that Wednesday.

“The what?” Victor said. He still sounded grumpy, but I forgave him because we’d been sitting on a cold, bare floor for over two weeks now.

“The China Tunnels,” I repeated. “That’s how we’re going to make the seven thousand dollars we need—plus a lot more.”

Every kid in Tacoma knew all about the network of tunnels that supposedly ran under the city’s downtown area. People said they’d been dug back in the nineteenth century when Tacoma was a major West Coast port. They got their name because Chinese laborers dug them, and because smugglers used them to carry Chinese opium and other contraband up from the waterfront shipyards
to the bustling saloons and brothels along Pacific Avenue, the city’s main street.

“Saint Ludicrous,” Victor swore. “The China Tunnels don’t really exist. They’re an urban legend.”

Wordlessly, I led them inside Curtis’s house to their family computer. I quickly looked up Tacoma on Wikipedia. I scrolled down until I came to a paragraph that I’d found the night before.

Tacoma is also known
, it read,
for having an extensive network of tunnels underneath its downtown streets. Referred to as the China Tunnels because they were once used to smuggle Chinese opium, these passageways are not open to the public, but have been explored and documented by urban tunnelers
.

“See?” I said. “It’s
not
an urban legend!”

“It’s Wikipedia,” Victor said. “
Anyone
could have written that.”

“True,” I said, “but that also means anyone could have
corrected
it. And no one has! The author of
Trains and Totem Poles
talks all about the China Tunnels. He says there’s all kinds of evidence that they really exist—old newspaper clippings that talk like they’re real and WPA reports from the 1930s.”

“That’s cool,” Curtis said. “But what does it have to do with Project Sweet Life? Finding the tunnels won’t make us any money.”

“Ah!” I said proudly. “Yes, it will! Remember the Calvin Labash coin robbery?”

Over a year earlier, right in the middle of the day, a masked thief had held up a rare-coin shop downtown. The owner of the shop, Calvin Labash, had activated a silent alarm, but by the time the police arrived, the thief had run off on foot, carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in rare gold coins. The police followed but somehow lost him in an alley.

It was the perfect crime, except for one thing: Mr. Labash, who prided himself on his uncanny sense of smell, recognized the thief’s cologne, an obscure European scent ironically called Bandit. Mr. Labash knew of only one person in the whole town who wore that scent: City Councilperson Ron Haft. The police questioned Mr. Haft, who even allowed them to search his home and downtown office. But when no evidence of the missing coins ever turned up, they dropped the case.

Mr. Labash, however, was
certain
that Mr. Haft had stolen his coins. He went to visit the councilperson.
Tempers flared, Mr. Labash pulled a gun, and Mr. Haft ended up dead. Calvin Labash was sentenced to life in prison for killing Ron Haft but committed suicide right after the verdict. Meanwhile, no one ever found his missing gold coins.

“What are you saying?” Curtis said to me. “You think the missing Labash coins are somewhere down in the China Tunnels?”

“Think about it,” I said. “Mr. Haft stole the coins, then ran off
on foot
? Down an
alley
? The only way anyone would have done that would be if he
knew
he had the perfect getaway. And he did! There must be an entrance to the China Tunnels in that alley where he lost the police. He hid the coins somewhere down in the tunnels, thinking that he would return to collect them later. But he made a mistake in wearing the same cologne that he wore every day. Even so, he would have been fine, since the coins were still safely hidden, and there was no other evidence connecting him to the crime. I’m sure that’s why he let the police search his home and office. But then Mr. Labash lost his head and killed Mr. Haft. So those gold coins are
still
down there. I can’t believe no one ever thought of this at the time!”

“No one thought of it at the time,” Victor said, “because the China Tunnels don’t really exist.”

“But if they
did
exist,” I said, “who would be most likely to know about them? A city councilperson! He’d have access to city records. See how everything fits together?”

Curtis nodded. “It does make sense. It makes
perfect
sense! You thought of all this?” he asked me.

“Yup!” I said proudly.

I had impressed Curtis—but then he had a tendency to jump to conclusions. Victor still looked skeptical.

“Maybe it
is
a long shot,” I said. “But catching the bank robbers was a long shot too, and we did it, even if we didn’t get the reward.”

“What robbers?” Victor said. “What bank?” Even now, he was still pretending like that thing with the bank had never happened.

“I’m in,” Curtis said, just like I knew he would.

Victor sighed. “Okay. But let’s start tomorrow. Today let’s see about getting some new furniture for the bomb shelter. Sitting on this concrete is killing my butt.”

One of the best things about a fictional job is that you can completely set your own hours. The hours I set for my “lifeguarding job” were afternoons and evenings. That meant that I could sleep in every day of the week, and there was nothing my parents could do about it (except grumble continuously and bang pots and pans in the kitchen during breakfast, proving once and for all that adults are not necessarily any more mature than the teenagers they criticize).

The next day, I met Curtis and Victor at eleven
A.M
. sharp. It’s a long way from the suburbs to downtown, even farther than it is to the North End where Uncle Brad and Uncle Danny live. But with only five dollars left, we couldn’t afford bus fare, so we rode our bikes.

A hundred years ago, downtown Tacoma had been a bustling place, the western terminus to the Northern Pacific Railroad, outshining even neighboring Seattle thirty miles to the north. But after that, it had been a long slow slide for the city. At its lowest point, which I guess came in the 1970s, downtown had basically been a wasteland of porn shops and abandoned buildings.

But lately, the area had been showing signs of life
again. New condos were going in everywhere, and the old buildings were being converted into offices, restaurants, and shops. There were museums and a big new convention center, even a light rail system that ran from one end of downtown to the other.

Even so, Curtis, Victor, and I didn’t go downtown much. You know how cities are sometimes divided into parking zones—where you need a particular sticker on your car to park someplace for more than an hour or two? It’s like downtown Tacoma has been zoned “adults only,” and not just for cars. The YMCA, for example, doesn’t allow anyone under sixteen. And even the Dungeon Door, a new gaming shop for Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing geeks, had always made it clear that we weren’t welcome, that they’re only interested in
adult
gamers.

We stopped our bikes on the hill above downtown. Tacoma doesn’t have skyscrapers exactly, but dingy bank buildings rose up from below like overturned cardboard boxes. Like San Francisco, the downtown was built on really steep hills. But unlike San Francisco, there are no cable cars to take you up and down.

I was wary. None of our immediate family members
worked downtown, but that didn’t mean no one ever went there. We were supposed to be at our jobs right then, and all it would take for our whole plan to be exposed was one family member driving by in a car. It was funny how I kept telling myself we only needed to be seen in public “one more time”—but it never seemed to work out that way.

“Let’s go,” Curtis said, rolling forward on his bike. I think he also realized what sitting ducks we were on the downtown streets.

“Hold on, Indiana Jones,” Victor said. “First, we need to stop by the library.” The main branch of the Tacoma Library was just down the street.

“The
library
?” Curtis said. “Libraries are for wusses!”

“I want to see these newspaper clippings and WPA reports,” Victor said. “They might give us some clues.”

Victor had a good point; I wished I’d thought of it.

The downtown library has an entire room devoted to local history. It’s located in the oldest, mustiest part of the building, under a big dome with peeling blue paint. The librarian was a fat man with fire-red hair and bad teeth.

“Excuse me,” Victor said to the librarian. “We’re
looking for information on the China Tunnels.”

His eyes widened ever so slightly. Then he regarded us from head to toe (disapprovingly, natch).

“They don’t exist,” he said firmly. “It’s an urban legend.”

“Oh, we know
that
,” Curtis said matter-of-factly. “But we’re looking for information
about
the urban legend.”

“What for?” the librarian said.

“School project,” Curtis said, using his catchall lie, one I’d heard him tell a hundred times before.

“In July?”

This is exactly what I mean about downtown not being very welcoming to people our age.

“It’s a
summer school
project,” Curtis said. “Look, will you help us or not?”

The librarian sighed, but then he showed us how to use the computer archives that stored old newspaper articles.

Once the librarian left us alone, Curtis whispered, “He
knows
something! He was lying when he said the China Tunnels don’t exist.”

Victor rolled his eyes. “Obviously.” He looked at me.
“Dave, I’m sorry about what I said before. You were right. The China Tunnels are real.”

Most of the newspaper references to the China Tunnels seemed to involve buildings in the Old City Hall District. The Old City Hall is this big terra-cotta brick structure that was once city hall but has since been remodeled into lawyers’ offices. The building was on the cover of
Trains and Totem Poles
, with a big clock tower and everything.

We locked our bikes at the top of the Spanish Steps, a set of white stairs that’s a re-creation of a Roman landmark. The steps connect the upper streets of downtown with the lower Old City Hall District.

Many of the buildings we came across in our research are still standing. For example, 709 Pacific Avenue, once called the Bodega Bar, is now a place named Meconi’s Pub. One of the articles mentioned something about an open entrance to the tunnels in the basement of this building, so that’s where we went first.

Directly in front of the pub was a double row of purple sidewalk lights—small glass squares set in concrete
to allow light into an area below. A few of the squares had been broken, so we crouched down to see what we could see.

Curtis peered through one of the holes. “There’s definitely something down there,” he said.

“It’s too dark to see,” Victor said. “It could just be a basement.”

I poked my nose in one of the holes and took a whiff. “Smells pretty musty,” I said.

We stood up, brushed ourselves off, and strolled in through the front door of Meconi’s. The afternoon crowd was light. The air smelled like men’s cologne and onion rings.

We’d barely gotten ten feet when the waitress said, “Sorry, boys! This is a pub. You have to be twenty-one to be in here.”

“Oh!” Curtis said with practiced innocence. “Sure thing. But hey, do you mind if we use the bathroom real quick?” I especially liked the way he quivered a little and gestured to his crotch when he asked this, like he was a little kid who might not be able to hold it.