“Probably someone who just loves babies,” Louella said, but that could be anybody. It would be easier to think of someone who hates babies, but if you hated them you certainly wouldn’t steal one.
Then Louella had another idea. “Let’s just walk down the street,” she said, “pushing the stroller. Maybe someone has seen Howard and when they see us with an empty stroller they’ll figure we’re looking for him and tell us where he is.”
I was pretty disgusted. “Louella,” I said, “you know that won’t happen.”
But it did. The first person we met was my little brother, Charlie, and the first thing he said was “If you’re looking for Howard, the Herdmans have got him.”
Louella looked relieved, but not very, and I didn’t blame her. If you had to choose between a total stranger having your baby brother and the Herdmans having him, you would pick the total stranger every time.
“What have they done with him?” Louella asked.
“They’re charging kids a quarter to look at him.”
“Why would anybody pay a quarter to look at Howard?” I said. “We can look at Howard anytime.”
“They don’t tell you it’s Howard. They’ve got a sign up that says, ‘See the Amazing Tattooed Baby! 25 cents.’”
“They tattooed him!” Louella yelped. “My mother will kill me!”
Actually, they didn’t tattoo him. What they did was wipe off the Vaseline and draw pictures all over his head with waterproof marker.
Charlie was dumb enough to fall for their sign. He paid his quarter to see an amazing tattooed baby, and of course he was mad as could be when it turned out to be Howard McCluskey with pictures drawn all over his head.
So he tagged along behind us, insisting that Louella get his money back, but we both knew that Louella would have all she could do just to get Howard back.
“If it was anything but the baby,” she said, “I wouldn’t even try to get it back—not from the Herdmans.”
“They already collected six-fifty,” Charlie said. “You ought to make them pay you some of that for the use of Howard.”
“I’ll probably have to pay them,” Louella grumbled.
She was right. When we got to the Herdmans’, there were three or four kids lined up outside the fence, and Louella marched up and said to Imogene Herdman, “You give me back my baby brother!”
But Imogene pretended not to hear her and just went on collecting money. “You want to see the tattooed baby?” She jiggled the money box at Louella. “It’ll cost you a quarter.”
“It’s no tattooed baby,” Louella said, “It’s my little brother.”
Imogene squinched her eyes together. “How do you know?”
“I just know.”
“You do not. It could be anybody’s baby. It could be some baby you never heard of. It’ll cost you a quarter to find out.”
Sure enough, it was Howard and he was a sight. The whole top of his head was red and green and blue and purple with pictures of dogs and cats and trees and tic-tac-toe games.
“I don’t know what you’re so mad about,” Leroy Herdman said. “He looks a lot better than he did.”
In a way Leroy was right. Howard looked a lot more interesting, but nobody expected Mrs. McCluskey to think so.
We took Howard out back of my house and tried to wash off his head, which is how we found out the pictures were all waterproof.
“Now what’ll I do?” Louella asked.
“Tell your mother the Herdmans did it,” Charlie said.
“She’ll just want to know why I let them do it, and how they got hold of him in the first place. Maybe we should use some soap.”
We tried all kinds of things on Howard, but the only thing that worked at all was scouring powder, and that didn’t work too well. It made his head gritty and it didn’t take off all the purple.
“If you don’t stand too close to him,” Louella said, “and then squint your eyes . . . does the purple look to you like veins?”
It didn’t to me. “But after all,” I told Louella, “I know what it is. Your mother doesn’t know what it is, so maybe it will look like veins to her.”
It didn’t. Mrs. McCluskey was so mad that she got a sick headache and spots before her eyes and had to lie down for two days. The first thing she did after she got up was go to work on Howard’s head to try and get the purple off, and she discovered two or three patches of soft fuzz.
So then she wasn’t mad at the Herdmans anymore. She said that something about all the drawing or the Magic Marker ink must have started his hair to grow. But she was still mad at Louella, which didn’t seem fair. After all, it could have been the scouring powder.