The Seventeenth Swap (7 page)

Maggie flashed her dazzling smile, opened the back of the display case, and took out a rather battered tin beetle, which she wound briskly, then set to scuttling around on the glass counter. Eric couldn't help laughing—it was such a busy, beetle-y little contraption. But he couldn't pretend he needed any such thing. He shook his head again, then suddenly focused on something inside the case, just below where the beetle had whirred to a halt. Now
there
was something he could use. A campaign button, big as life. It said “I LIKE IKE” in big black letters.

“How much is that?” he asked Maggie in sudden excitement.

“The Ike button? Couple dollars. You like
that
better'n the beetle? Well, no accounting for—”

“No! No! But I know somebody who collects 'em. And if he doesn't have one like it . . .” Eric was suddenly back in business. “What would you swap for it?”

“Anything worth two dollars to somebody else. Whatcha got?”

Instead of answering Eric hurried to the back of the room, where he had earlier spotted a stumpy, heavy thing shaped like an iron without a handle, very like the one weighing the stack of
Wall Street Journals
on Mrs. Panek's counter. He pointed it out to Maggie. “I might be able to get one of those. What is it, anyway?”

“That? A sadiron. Your great-grandma might've used that, for ironing clothes. She'd 've had two or three, heating on the woodstove, and one changeable handle—like this—” Maggie picked up a semicircle of rounded wood lying nearby “—so she could switch to a fresh iron when the last one cooled off. They sell for two, two-fifty. Don't ask me why.”

“So you'd swap one of those for that campaign button?”

“Sure. It's a deal.”

“Wow!” exclaimed Eric. Now all he had to do was find out what Mrs. Panek would swap for . . . At that instant, before he even had time to feel a slight dismay, the idea he'd
nearly
had an hour earlier—then lost when Angel interrupted him—sprang back into his mind and solved his problem. At least, it might. “I have to find something out,” he told Maggie rapidly. “How late do you stay open?”

Maggie glanced at her watch and laughed. Her laugh was as big and easy as her speaking voice. “I'm already closed. Just been too busy to turn my sign around. Now, don't let that bother you.” She put a friendly hand on Eric's shoulder and piloted him toward the door. “I'm open on Saturdays and Sunday afternoon. I'll save that button till you show up. But listen.” She halted, pinning Eric with her bright blue gaze. “Once you've done it, and got your eighteen dollars,
then
will you tell me what it was all about?”

“It's a deal,” Eric told her with a grin. He waved as she closed the door behind him and turned the sign to “CLOSED.” He'd decided once and for all that he liked Maggie Teggly fine.

“Well! Don't you look all fresh and windblown, though!” exclaimed Jimmy's mother as she let Eric in Saturday morning. “Been out running, have you?”

“Not exactly,” Eric panted. “I mean, I just had an errand I had to do, that's all.” The fact was, he had run all the way to Mrs. Panek's to ask an important question, then all the way back, highly satisfied with the answer, and he had big doings planned for the afternoon.

“Well, take off your jacket—want me to hold that sack for you? What's
in
it, anyway?” Mrs. Nicholson held the tightly knotted plastic bag nearer to the light and peered at it. “Looks like one of my old dust rags.”

Eric hung his jacket on a hook, grinning sheepishly. “It's a smell for Jimmy. Is he still collecting them?”

“Good heavens above, I didn't know he'd started!” Mrs. Nicholson gave her little screech of a laugh and handed back the sack as she reached for her coat. “He must have been pleased last night—I let the peas boil over, and
nothing
smells worse.” Raising her voice, she
cried, “Bye-bye, honey, I'm on my way!” She grabbed her purse, adding to Eric, “Box of cheese crackers on the counter. Oh, and when Mrs. Abbington comes for her alteration job, there it is, and the bill's pinned to it. So long!”

Then she was gone, and Eric, with a glance at the bright blue dress hanging from a cupboard knob, went on into the living room. The first thing he saw was the cut-out ad for the boots, still fastened to the curtain. The table below was strewn with crayons and paper, and Jimmy's wheelchair was pushed up to it, but he was watching eagerly over his shoulder for Eric.

“Did you say you brought me a smell?” he demanded.

“I brought you five,” Eric told him, handing over the plastic bag. “Open that one last, it's the strongest. Here, try these first.” From various pockets he produced the trimming of leather from Mr. Lee's shop, the garlic clove his dad had brought home as promised, a piece of orange rind, and a little wad of cotton doused with the witchhazel Dad used as an after-shave lotion.

“Oh, wow!” cried Jimmy with his usual enthusiasm, and began to sniff each one in turn, chattering between sniffs. Eric fetched a paring knife from the kitchen to cut the garlic in two, and twisted the orange peel to intensify its scent. Eventually Mr. Lee's highly aromatic old shoe-polishing rag came out of its sack and into play. Even so, in a few minutes Jimmy was sniffing hard, then harder, then complaining in a puzzled voice that even the garlic had lost its smell. “No,
I
have!” he exclaimed a second later. “I remember—Ms. Morgan said I would if I wasn't careful. Now I have to let my nose rest.”

Ms. Morgan was the home teacher, to whom, Jimmy explained, he'd happened to mention the smell-collecting on Thursday morning. Friday, she'd brought a volume of the encyclopedia and read aloud to Jimmy much more than he really wanted to know about perfumes and where they came from and how people made them. “Part of it was interesting, though,” he admitted as he and Eric preserved each of his smelly new objects in plastic wrap. “Like about ambergris coming from the innards of sick whales—
y-y-yuck!
And did you know cinnamon is a kind of tree bark? And there's a kind of flower called ‘ylang-ylang'! Here, lemme read you that part.”

He wrestled the encyclopedia from the table onto his thin little lap and began to instruct Eric on the subject of perfumes, while Eric completed the plastic-wrapping and wondered how he was going to measure Jimmy's foot without arousing Jimmy's overactive curiosity. He had waked up this morning realizing that if he actually did find enough money for those boots, he wouldn't know what size to buy.

He was feeling daring but hopeful about his swap campaign. Last night on the way home from the Hobby-horse Shop he had stopped by to see Cholly, ostensibly to report that he had met Maggie Teggly, but really to steal another look at Cholly's kerosene container—the familiar grubby ginger beer bottle he had completely failed to appreciate before—and to study Cholly's shoes. He was pleased to note that the latter were in an advanced stage of dilapidation, and certainly needed reheeling. But when he had somehow managed to bring this up without sounding too tactless, Cholly only laughed and shook his head.

“Them! They need a good bit more than reheeling, son. They need a new pair!” He stuck a short, stubby foot out and turned it this way and that, examining it critically. “Or mebbe half-soling, and that costs nigh as much! Seventeen-fifty they want for it now! And that's this man-made stuff. Why, I usta get a pair of leather half-soles done for three-and-a-half, includin' shine! But I was workin' for peanuts meself, back in those days. It's all relative. That's what it is, son, relative.”

Eric had agreed, and shortly afterwards went on homeward through the gathering dusk, thinking hard. Scratch the reheeling job as a possible swap for that ginger beer bottle. He simply had no swap for it yet—he'd have to trade up to it. So much was certain. What was harder to figure was just how far along he'd be once he traded all the things he did have swaps for. Every time he tried to work it out, he got lost in a maze of possibilities. It was like trying to see around corners. There was only one way to find out where he'd wind up, and that was to start swapping.

By the time he went to bed last night he'd made up his mind to begin—today, as soon as his Jimmy-morning was finished. Everybody was likely to be available on a Saturday afternoon.

Meanwhile, here was Jimmy slamming the encyclopedia shut and changing the subject in his usual quicksilver way—back to the drawings he'd been working on when Eric arrived.

“Mom said she maybe could get me some thicker paper, and a box of watercolors if I'd be careful with the water. They'd work a lot better, don't you think so? Crayons are kind of clumsy. Look there—I couldn't
do the designs right at all. You can hardly tell what they are.” He was spreading his efforts out on the table for Eric to see—half a dozen drawings, large and small.

“I can tell what they are,” Eric assured him. They were all pictures of the boots. The most ambitious showed a boy-figure wearing them, though the boy was so sketchy and the boots so lovingly detailed that it was obvious which Jimmy thought more important. “They're pretty good, too. Want to draw some more?”

“No, I'm tired of drawing. Let's play Boggle.”

So they played a noisy and hotly contested hour of Boggle, with Jimmy winning three games out of four as he always did. Then they had some milk and cheese crackers, then Mrs. Abbington came for the dress Jimmy's mother had altered, then Jimmy's nose was rested enough to smell his collection again, and the time was going and
still
Eric hadn't figured out how to measure Jimmy's foot. At last he remembered something, and it all became simple.

“Did you know your foot's as long as your fist is big around?” he asked Jimmy idly as he headed for the kitchen with the milk glasses.

“No. Who says?” Jimmy was already making a fist and looking at it calculatingly.

“My dad. If I had a tape measure I could show you.”

“Mom's got one! In her sewing basket, right over there!”

So Eric picked up the tape on his way back into the room, and two minutes later the thing was done. It was a big relief, and he enjoyed the rest of his morning. Mrs. Nicholson came back at half-past twelve and invited him to lunch, as she always did, then it was time
for Jimmy's rest and Eric's departure. He bounded upstairs to 309, went directly to the little Chinesey box and got out the triangle stamp, and after a last fond study of it, took a deep breath and dialed Willy's number. After that he phoned Steve. Shortly after that he trotted downstairs again and left the building.

His next couple of hours were busy ones. He went first to Willy's and surrendered the stamp. Willy was gloatingly glad to get his hands on it at last and insisted on mounting it in his album immediately, while Eric waited. He would have had to wait some more, long enough to be shown the rest of the stamp collection in slow detail, if he had not convinced Willy that they'd have much more time on Sunday.

“Okay,” Willy said at last. “Then come back tomorrow, soon as you can after lunch. And hey—we could do that Language Arts stuff together, you want to?” Willy was weak in Language Arts.

“If you want to do the math together too,” Eric said firmly.

“You drive a hard bargain,” Willy complained with a grin, but he agreed, and—after being reminded—fetched the Corgi Jaguar and handed it over.

Eric departed, casting a carefully unenvious glance at Willy's bright red Schwinn—only two years old—lying on the grass beside the front walk. He could not see why Willy kept talking about a twelve-speed, when he already had this. Maybe for the same reason he'd switched to stamps from Corgis. He just got bored fast. Anyway, it was lucky for Steve Morris.

Steve lived six long blocks from Willy, around the near end of the lake and halfway up the hill, where the streets had names like Appleblossom Court Way and
people's houses had a View. But it was worth the hike. Steve received the Jaguar with a rapture worthy of greater things, went immediately to fetch the thunderegg and would have thrown in the broken-bladed Swiss Army knife if required to. Eric was satisfied to take the thunderegg and start for home. He was a little anxious about the next swap.
He
considered the thunderegg a beauty—it was as big as his fist, and the cut and polished face showed lovely striations of brown and azure. He could only hope that a rock expert like Mr. Evans would not dismiss it as ordinary.

He need not have worried. After keeping him in anxious suspense for a full two minutes of scrutinizing the offering, then slowly lumbering to the window to study it more closely still, Mr. Evans gave a solemn nod and transferred his gaze to Eric's face. “Nipe 'pecimen,” he said earnestly. “Bery nipe color! Glad to hab it.”

“Oh, good,!” gasped Eric on a rush of pent-up breath.

“Now you'll want tat Petoshkey tone,” Mr. Evans went on benevolently, shuffling across to the corner behind his chair and eventually producing the stone. “Here y'are, then. I'm satispy ip you are.”

“Oh, sure, I am! Thanks ever so much, Mr. Evans. I'll—I've got to go now. See you! Thanks again!”

Leaping and bounding with excitement—everything was going so well—Eric headed toward Mrs. Panek's shop for the second time that day. From the way she'd answered his question this morning, he was hoping the next swap would go without a hitch.

She had a customer when he reached the shop. Before she finished with that one, another came—some kid Eric didn't know, who took forever deciding
between a Mars bar and a Hershey. Finally the coast was clear, and Eric, who had been lurking just outside the doorway, went inside.

Mrs. Panek was still looking gloomily after the candy-purchaser. “That boy's gonna grow up broad as he is tall, and teeth rotted to the roots before he's thirty!” she told Eric. “Don't you ever squander
your
money on candy, candy, candy! You get you an apple or ornj, something that's good for you!”