Maniac Magee Read Online Free PDF Page B

he called it. When even those who went to work the earliest were still sleeping behind their second-story shades. When it seemed as if the whole world had been created just before he woke up on his bedroom floor --- the red brick rows of houses, even the windows resting from faces, the cool, silent sidewalks and streets. So quiet you could hear the water running far below the sewer grates while the sun shinnied up the rainspouts.
    He loved the silence and solitude.
    But he also loved the noise, which came later in the day.
    He loved the sound of pancake batter hissing on the griddle.
    He loved the noise of the church they went to on Sunday mornings, a church called Bethany --- when the minister would thump on the pulpit and the peopie would call out "Amen" and the choir would swing this way and swing that way and would sing "Hallelujah!" to the people and the people would sing "Hallelujah!" right back to the choir, and everyone just got happier and happier, and it all made him want to do more than run. So one day he just jumped himself up onto the pew bench and threw his arms to the sky and shouted at the top of his lungs: "Hallelujah! Amen!" And this time nobody looked funny at the crazy kid yelling by himself. Then two members of his own family, Hester and Lester, jumped onto the bench with him and shouted away: "Hallelujah! A-men!" And everybody laughed and clapped and sang.
    He loved the Fourth of July block party, when the whole East End converged for a day and night of games and music and grilled chicken and ribs and sweet-potato pie and dancing until the last firecracker, and then some.
    Maniac loved the colors of the East End, the people colors.
    For the life of him, he couldn't figure why these East Enders called themselves black. He kept looking and looking, and the colors he found were gingersnap and light fudge and dark fudge and acorn and butter rum and cinnamon and burnt orange. But never licorice, which, to him, was real black.
    He especially loved the warm brown of Mrs. Beale's thumb, as it appeared from under the creamy white icing that she allowed him to lick away when she was frosting his favorite cake.
    He loved joining all the colors at the vacant lot and playing the summer days away. Stickball, basketball, football. Half the time he forgot to go home for lunch.
    One day a new kid, tall and lean, came to the vacant lot, spinning a football. He spotted Maniac and stopped cold. He came closer, bent over, stared. Then he broke open a billboard grin and called out, "Hey, everybody! 'Member I said 'bout the little white dude snatched the pass off me in gym class? Here he is. This is the dude!"
    And this, of course, was Hands Down.
    The first thing Hands did, when they chose up sides, was to pick Maniac for his team.
    "You crazy, Hands," a high-schooler laughed. "He's just a runt. His peach fuzz ain't even come in yet."
    Everybody laughed.
    But Hands took him anyway and played quarterback and threw passes to Maniac all day long. They huddled and scratched their plays in the dirt. Down to the tin can and break for the goal. Stop and go at the rock. Curl around the junked tire.
    If Hands's pass was anywhere near Maniac, if Maniac could get at least two fingertips on it, the ball was good as caught. The high-schoolers and junior-highers went crazy trying to stop him. Nobody kept official records that day, but legend has it that by the time Amanda Beale showed up and called, "Jeffrey ---dinner!" Maniac had scored forty-nine TDs.
    And when they played stickball, and they saw him poling the ball out to the street and into backyards, they started putting two and two together, and somebody came up to him and squinted in his face and said, "You that Maniac kid?"
    And somebody else said, "You that Maniac?"
    And pretty soon everybody was saying it, including Hester and Lester; and, finally, in the kitchen one day, as he licked white icing from her thumb, Mrs. Beale said it: "You that Maniac?"
    He told her what he told