Zack and the Turkey Attack! by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Author:Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books

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Twelve

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MOVING DAY

Zack was thinking so hard and so fast his brain hurt. The problem was that he had already tried all kinds of things with the wagon and the lazy Susan, and none of them had worked out. All week he had been going over ideas of what he would try next. He wasn’t sure of anything, but he had to say something.

“Next,” he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a pack of balloons left over from Emilene’s birthday party, “we need some water balloons,” and he handed one to Matthew, another to Josie. “You can fill them at the pump on the back porch.”

While Matthew and Josie were up at the house, Zack went digging desperately through the stuff on his grandpa’s workbench, looking for the lightweight pie tin he had seen before. He drove a thin, sharp nail through the center of it so that it stuck out the other side.

When his friends came back, he showed them the nail in the pie tin. “We need to arrange things so that the pie tin is standing up on edge with a water balloon behind it. When the ball shoots out the end of the rain gutter, it will hit the pie tin, which will fall backward onto the balloon; the nail will pop it, and there will be this big bang, with water all over the place.”

Now Matthew began to look a little bit interested. He took the gum out of his mouth, and stuck it to the floor of the wagon a few inches from the end of the rain gutter. He stuck the edge of the pie tin in the gum so that it was standing straight up. Then Josie placed her water balloon between the back of the pie tin and the rim of the wagon.

“Ready?” said Zack.

“Go!” Matthew and Josie said together.

Zack dropped the croquet ball down the top of the piece of rain gutter. It rolled out the other end and hit the pie tin, but only hard enough to tip it slightly, not knock it over.

This time Matthew didn’t make fun of it. He only said, “I think the rain gutter should be longer.”

“You’re right,” said Zack, and now his brain was in overdrive. “We need to start higher. A lot higher. Because when the water balloon bursts, that’s only the beginning.”

Josie was looking at him curiously, but Zack barreled on: “We have to build it someplace where it can stay awhile.”

“Yeah!” said Josie, watching him all the while. “If you can’t take the machine to the turkey, we’ll get the turkey to come to the machine.”

Zack couldn’t have said it better himself.

“Right. So I think we should build it in the barn,” Zack continued. “Grandpa doesn’t use it much in summer. And we can haul our stuff there on the wagon. Now we just have to figure out what to take.”

Matthew was already moving slowly around the shack, shaking cans to guess what was inside and opening boxes.

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