Maniac Magee Chapter 35 Summary

  • Things are a little confused at first, and Piper and Russell enjoy the fact that Maniac is the Maniac who got an inside the park homerun off of McNab's frogball a little too much, but eventually Maniac saves the day by showing Giant John how to throw a stopball.
  • So, here Maniac is at home with the McNab brothers. And he immediately wishes he weren't.
  • Turns out the McNab house isn't a nice place to be. It's filthy (and not the kind of filthy that your mom always accused your room of being—there's actual dog poop on the floor!)
  • It's also falling apart: you can actually jump from the second to the first floor through a hole in the floor.
  • As bad as the house is, it gets a lot worse when Papa McNab comes home. He throws his Burger King bags on the table and that's the most fatherly thing he does all evening.
  • Oh, except for when he drunkenly slurs at the boys to do their homework (did he even notice that they were missing?).
  • While Maniac attempts to clean the place up a bit, Giant John's gang of Cobras comes in, drinks beers, and lights up cigarettes. So do Piper and Russell.
  • At some point in the night someone says something that lets Maniac figure out that the heavy front door and the war games actually serve a purpose: preparation for an invasion from the East End.