Philip and the Sneaky Trashmen (9781619502185) Read Online Free Page A

for bringing him broken junk?”
    “ Yup.”
    Philip’s and Emery’s eyes
met.
    “ You have broken stuff,
don’t you Emery?”
    “ Tons of it. My sisters
break things all the time.” Emery had two baby sisters only a year
apart.
    “ Look,” said Philip, “get
all your broken junk together, and when we go to Mr. Sorino’s
tomorrow to get my stuff back, we’ll give him yours. Maybe he’ll
give us money.”
    “ Us?” said Emery.
    “ Yeah, us.”
    “ My broken stuff is ‘us’?”
    “ You wouldn’t know about it
if it wasn’t for my broken stuff.”
    Emery’s eyebrows came together. “I
guess.”
    Leon gave one of his yuk yuk laughs. “Both of
you wouldn’t know if it wasn’t for me.”
    The boys turned slowly toward Leon, who
wilted under their gaze. He shuffled his feet and said, “Uh, well.
I guess I’ll go home. Time for dinner. Want me to come with you
tomorrow?”
    “ No,” said Philip and Emery
together.
    “ Well, bye.” Leon continued
on, pulling his red wagon along behind him, and the boys watched
him depart.
    Finally, Philip said, “Emery, we can
get lots of broken stuff.”
    “ How?”
    “ We can go knock on
people’s doors and ask them for their broken stuff. Then we take it
to Mr. Sorino and get money. We can do that all summer. We’ll be
rich.”
    “ You think so?”
    “ Why not? Hey,
look.”
    Emery turned. Two houses away a man
rolled a plastic trash can to the sidewalk. He set it at the curb
and went back inside the house.
    “ Emery, tonight’s the night
people put out their trash. We can find stuff in the
trash.”
    “ You mean go through trash
cans?”
    “ They gotta be full of broken
stuff.”
    “ If I had an idea like
that, you’d call it stupid. Who wants to look through people’s
trash? Your trash had that yellowy, gooey stuff . . .”
    “ We’ll wear
gloves.”
    Emery frowned.
    Philip tried again. “Well
then, how about we only look? We don’t have to touch anything unless we see
something good.”
    Emery thought it over. “All right. All
right. Maybe they’ll put something out separately. You know, all by
itself and not in a bag. I guess it can’t hurt to look
around.”
    “ Right. We gotta do it
before Leon thinks of it.”
    “ Just look, remember. Not open up bags and
empty them out.”
    “ Of course not. We’d get in
trouble if we did that. Hmmm. If my father knows we’re looking through trash,
he’ll figure out we looked through the trash in the garage. Maybe
we better not mention anything.”
    “ Right. So we’ll just walk
around the neighborhood and see what people put out? That’s it? No
yellow gooey stuff.”
    “ Right. No any color gooey stuff.
That’s easy to do, isn’t it?”
    Emery nodded slowly. “I guess we can do
that.”
    Philip started off. “First, let’s go to
your house and find all of your broken stuff. When we finish that,
we can walk around the neighborhood.”
    Emery followed along.

Chapter
Six
     
    The next morning Philip and Emery were
on their way to Mr. Sorino’s, each carrying a plastic supermarket
bag half filled with broken things they’d found at Emery’s
house.
    “ I can’t believe anybody’d
give us money for this junk,” said Emery.
    Philip swung his bag in front of him.
“You saw what he gave Leon. What about the big stuff we saw sitting
outside last night?”
    “ We can’t carry a TV, a
sofa, a big table.”
    Philip pointed. “There he
is.”
    Mr. Sorino stood on his porch talking
to another man. When the second man drove away in a small truck
with an open deck in the back, the boys crossed the street and
waved.
    “ Oh, hello, boys. You come
to check over your things?”
    “ Yeah,” answered Philip.
“And we brought you these two bags.” Philip handed Mr. Sorino his
bag.
    Mr. Sorino looked inside the bag and
then glanced at Emery.
    “ You have a bag,
too?”
    “ Yeah, here. We got all the
broken stuff from my house. Maybe you can use it?”
    Mr. Sorino took the bag from