“Viejo,” she said. “What do you want? Don’t step on my plants.”
e held out one of his flyers. She raised her hose and doused it. “I got enough
H
garbage around here. What does it say?”
il yanked his hand back, wrung out the wet sheet; calmly he told her about the
G
protest.
atilda stared at him. Her green eyes were sharp, a little scary. “I’ll bring my
M
bullhorn,” she said. “That’ll get the cops here.”
“ We don’t want the police involved, if we can help it,” Gil said, although he
anticipated some civil disobedience.
“Eh, what good is it then?” She turned back to her watering.
il looked ahead at the five houses still to be visited. He had no answer to
G
Matilda’s question.
104
Taking a break from his ant investigations, Andrew was kicking a soccer ball
around his yard. He was pretty good at soccer, his only athletic talent, thanks to
his grandfather’s coaching; Buelo called it “futbol,” and watched grownups play
it on TV. Buelo was getting older and weaker, though, and couldn’t move around
as much. A
ndrew batted the ball harder and harder, alternating feet, sometimes
kicking it away and chasing it. He recalled now what Buelo had said the other
afternoon, about horseshoe crabs, as the two of them sat looking out at the rocky
beach. They would cover the sand, said Buelo, and all you could see were their
shells and their pointed sword-like tails.
For days, Andrew hadn’t been able to get the picture of those crabs out of his
head: masses of crawling, armored creatures. He had asked his parents about
them, and he’d also done research. His mother thought they were disgusting; as
a little girl, she would run away from them. The boys would hold them by their
telsons (the name of the “swords,” Andrew had discovered) and shake them
at her. Dad and his friends would use sticks to turn the crabs over and watch
them squirm and try to right themselves. (Like bugs. They were, in fact, related
to spiders.) Around the Fourth of July, boys would set off fireworks inside the