“Everybody’s fine.” Ivan smiled.
“What you boys need to be doing is getting ready for the Fiesta!” So bossy, but thank God for Beatriz.
“That’s what we’re doing!” I said.
Ivan said sheepishly, “You saved the day the other night, Beatriz. Thanks.”
“Yeah, you were pretty brave,” Max said.
“We were all brave! We all did our part! Hey—let me get the decorations I made.” She ran off, returning with a stack of colorful paper flags. “They’re the flags of all the neighbors’ countries! America, Brazil, Holland, Austria, Ukraine, England, Mexico, and Hungaria, for Gellert!” she said excitedly. “And look at this special one I made for you guys!” Beatriz held up a skull and crossbones against a crayoned violet background. “Nobody but us will get it!”
We laughed, admiring them all. “Perfect!” I said.
Then her face fell. “But I’m afraid it will rain and everything will be ruined.”
“Nah,” Max said. “Look—the sun’s coming out. A little bit.” The sun was indeed peeking from the overcast sky, the low haze drifting and dissipating. The temperature seemed to immediately shoot up.
“I gotta go. My mama and I are making quindim right now for the Fiesta,” Beatriz said. “I’ll see you later! I can’t wait!”
We left Beatriz’s magnificent flags in my yard and went to Max’s, where Mr. Friedmann was in the kitchen washing dishes, a web punctuated with egg sacs hanging high over him. “Come back in a few minutes ven I finish and vee can pick vatermatoes for your party.”
We gathered a few kitchen chairs, a couple stools, and a rusty lawn chair and stashed them in my yard. From there, we sneaked out three of my grandmother’s ancestral walnut dining room chairs and a potty chair with a high, soft seat that my grandfather had used when he’d had his hemorrhoids. Luckily we didn’t run into Dimma, who was probably upstairs enjoying her first Cutty and Chesterfield of the day. We crossed over to the Shreves’, where we hoped Beau and D.L. might help us out, if they weren’t in the mood to rough us up or play war.
“Wah, gennlmen!” Mrs. Shreve said, opening the screen door. “How nass to see you. Ah’m afraid the boweez are at baseball practice.”
“Can we borrow some chairs for the Fiesta?” I said. “Beau said you had some folding ones you take to baseball games.”
“Of cawws you can, sweethot. They are raht thaya in the cahpowut—just take ’em. We are so lookin’ fowud to the potty.”
We spent some time arranging the furniture in our yard. Then, figuring it was time to collect the watermatoes, we went to Max’s backyard, where Mr. Friedmann was fooling around in his garden. It was amazing, even in September—overrun with shiny green peppers, tomatoes, head-size cabbages, yellow squash and zucchini on hairy, contorted vines, leggy string beans still dangling from their stick teepees. Mr. Friedmann picked his way over to his eggplants, where the deep-purple fruit hung nearly to the ground, the leaves riddled with holes. “Ach, zhese lacebugs! Vhy can’t you boys collect zose?”
Dozens of yellow cabbage butterflies danced over the squash blossoms in the hot, brightening air, indistinguishable from the small locust leaves that were falling from the trees.
“Come, boys! Zhese vatermatoes are all for you. Pick vhat you vant.” In a corner of the garden, fenced off with chicken wire to keep the “warmints” from eating them, were Mr. Friedmann’s watermatoes. Nobody else was able to grow them because he had a secret formula—Max told us his dad peed on them—to produce pretty, round fruits a little bigger than cherry tomatoes but with the wonderful taste and crisp consistency of watermelon. We thought they were miraculous, but were forbidden to pick them. Dimma said that Mr. Friedmann could get rich with his secret technique, but I don’t think the Friedmanns cared about money. Giving Max a colander, Mr. Friedmann showed us the least damaging way to pick the watermatoes, saying, “And you can eat a few—it’s nearly lunchtime—but leaf plenty for your party.” He went in the house and returned with thick hunks of dark bread slathered with butter. “Now you don’t eat so many!” Mr. Friedmann said, adding, “Never put zhyself in the vay of temptation; even David could not resist it.”
“Aww, Pop,” Max said, handing over the full colander. “Always with the Talmud.”
“I’ll go vash zhese and bring zhem to your party.”
We were so hot we ran the hose over our heads to cool off, although I was careful not to ruin my new war paint. Then we lay in the shade of the climbing maple to rest. Looking up, we could see one or two silken lines strung horizontally between trees, which we now knew were made by “ballooning”—spiders floating on the breeze like parachutists. Gold and red maple leaves drifted down around us. “Your dad’s so nice,” Ivan said.
I asked Max, “Who’s David?”
Max said, “You know—the shrimpy guy who killed a giant moron named Goliath with a slingshot.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, remembering. “I have that in a storybook Estelle gave me. What could David not resist?”
“I forget, something with some lady?”
I wondered why Max knew so many Bible stories, so I asked.
“Almost everybody in the Bible is Jewish, dummy! Jesus was Jewish! Jews taught Christians everything they know!” Max thought for a second. “But Jews do have too many dumb rules. Sheesh.”
Now I was really confused. Jesus was Jewish? I thought my family was Christian, and I said to Ivan, “Are you guys Christian?”
“Elena told me once that my grandfather was Jewish, back in Ukraine in the olden days. Some bad Cossack guys had a club called SMERSH, and they put him in jail till he died.”
“What’s a Cossack?” I asked him.
“Like a Nazi cowboy, I think.”
Max whistled. “How come you never told us that?”
Ivan shrugged again.
I was realizing what a man of many secrets Ivan was, and his revelation confused me more than ever. “Are Catholics Christian?” I asked, wondering about Beatriz.
“They have that Pope guy,” Max explained. “And he’s like a king, and then Mary, who’s like a queen, but I’m not sure about Jesus. And they have some secret knights who are supposed to take over the world. At least that’s what I heard at Hebrew school.”
I wondered if I should ask Brickie about all this news, but it might be a can of worms that didn’t need opening.
Max sighed. “I hate when the leaves start to fall.”
“But they’re pretty,” Ivan said, catching a rosy maple leaf.
“Yeah, but it’s reminding me that we gotta go to school tomorrow.”
This was too much sad talk for me. “Maybe it’s been two hours and we can decorate the cake.”
“Let’s go see,” Ivan said.
In the Goncharoffs’ kitchen, Maria gestured at the big golden cake on the counter. “Your cake es ready. You wash your hands first.” She exited, leaving it to us. I really hoped that Josef wasn’t around, and I knew Ivan felt the same way.
On the counter next to the cake was the bowl of blue icing we had requested, plus a flabby rubber icing bag that put me in mind of a scary device I’d seen in my grandparents’ shower—not the enema contraption, but close. Max grabbed a spatula, dredged up a blob of icing, and flung it onto the cake.
“Hey,” I objected. “You don’t get to do it all.”
Ivan put his hand into the bowl, added another blob to the cake, and smeared it around with his fingers. “We can do it faster this way.” Happily, Max and I joined in.