I remembered one other thing my father had said that day across the table: “The way of the transgressor is hard.” And right that minute it seemed it was the whole gang’s business to help make that boy’s life a little harder for him.
I picked up the chair I had been tied to a little while before.
At the same time Dragonfly grabbed a stick of wood out of the woodbox. He raced over to stand beside Big Jim, and, with a savage voice, quoted a line from a poem we had had in school the year before, saying,
“‘Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,
but spare your country’s flag,’ she said!”
It was ridiculous to say a thing like that at a time like that. Nobody had a gun with which to shoot, and Dragonfly didn’t have an old gray head!
The bearded one with the knife doubled himself into a crouch and started moving toward the door Big Jim still had his back to, while the rest of us stayed behind him, ready to do anything we could. One thing was for sure: we were not going to let him get out that door with our box!
Behind me there was a stealthy movement, and I caught a glimpse of it without turning my head. There on the floor on his hands and knees was Leslie Poetry Thompson. I knew in a flash what he was doing and what he wanted one of the rest of the gang to do.
I moved with my chair toward the woodbox and sprang around in front of the bully with the knife. Holding the chair legs ahead of me like a lion tamer in a circus, I started toward him, yelling, “Back! Back! Get back!”
I was in a half crouch myself now, imagining myself facing a fierce-fanged Bengal tiger. Then I gave a shove with the chair and a run at the same time, and that’s also when the Son of Lucifer with the knife and the box stumbled backward over Poetry’s body. Down he went, striking his head on a corner of Sarah Paddler’s antique walnut bureau.
Like a streak of powerful-muscled fury, Big Jim was across the room, and the battle for the knife was on.
Almost on, that is. Big Jim got stopped by the same sprawled roly-poly boy the bearded one had gotten stopped by, and down he went.
Up rolled the Bengal tiger. He took a wild-eyed look at us and gave a worried listen to the bullhorn, which right that second came bellowing up from the cellar, “We’re coming up!” He dashed for the stairway down which Circus had come only a little while before.
No sooner had the bearded one gone clumping up the stairs, than there was a scramble of footsteps coming up from the cellar. Right away the cabin was full of boys and men. The boys were us, and the men were our favorite sheriff, Jim Colbert, and two of his deputies, all three of them wearing shining badges. And with them was the short-haired, beardless boy and a worried-faced neatly mustached man who looked like him and might have been his father.
We were all there except Circus. And then I heard him yelling from outside the cabin, “Come on out, everybody! Help! Help!”
9
In less time than it would take me to write it for you even in shorthand—if I could write it that way, which I can’t—Sheriff Jim Colbert and his two deputies and all the rest of the gang, as well as the beardless boy and his maybe father were outdoors in the rain helping Circus capture a runaway tiger.
There were flashlights with lights crossing and crisscrossing all around, shining on the railing of the upstairs porch, the open window up there, and the rainwater gushing from the downspout into a little cement spillway and through it to the outer edge of the patio.
Things were happening so fast that it was hard to see what was going on. It was like being in a big outdoor room, with giant-sized pictures all over all the walls and all the pictures having fast-moving people in them.
Then I saw the long-haired Son of Lucifer. He was way over on the other side of the upstairs porch where the ladder was, swinging his legs over the balustrade. In a minute, I thought, he would be down that ladder. He would then race across the old man’s patio, dive down the steep hill there, and get away. He could lose himself in the woods and maybe not get captured at all.
I had almost forgotten Darrel Inwood, but that’s when he flew into action. Like a quail exploding out of its hiding place in a fencerow when a dog comes trotting through the shrubbery, he shot out of our circle toward that ladder, yelling to all of us behind him, “Help, everybody!”
He got to the bottom of the ladder just as the bearded boy’s feet found the top rung and just as Jim Colbert got there. It was like watching a circus act to see what happened next. Jim Colbert and Darrel Inwood swung the top of that ladder out away from the porch gutter, and there, in the light of all the flashlights, was a boy with a beard on the top of a straight-up ladder five feet out from the porch. He was swaying in the air, but not with the greatest of ease. He was holding on for dear life with the two worst best friends a boy ever had.
There was no way up, and no way down, and no other way but nowhere.
But the Son of Lucifer at the top of the ladder, with no way up and no way down, started to climb. Then, like a flying squirrel taking off from a high tree, he swung his body out and leaped off—landing in the arms of two deputies. In less than sixteen seconds he was handcuffed and a prisoner of the law.
They handcuffed Darrel Inwood also, because both boys had been fugitives from the law for quite a while.
Because it was still raining, it seemed like a good idea to go back into the cabin, which we did, getting in just as the telephone began ringing again. Jim Colbert picked up the phone, which happened to be not more than a foot from my outstretched hand at the time, and, as before, there was a voice saying loud enough for me to hear, “Hide everything.”
The phone went click.
Like a sphinx moth darting from a petunia to a tiger lily in Mom’s flower garden, the sheriff dialed a number from memory, one he had maybe called again and again in his business of enforcing the law.
The minute somebody answered on the other end of the line, he barked an order, saying, “Raid the Cliff Cottage. Surround it first so nobody can get across the bridge into the woods.”
To us he explained, “There’s a drug ring in the neighborhood, headed by a woman who calls herself Oliver Twist. She’d been using some motorcycle gangs to help deliver. Some of the boys who work for her are young runaways. She supplied them with wigs.”
Poetry and I interrupted our listening long enough to look each other in the eye and nod our heads.
My mind darted back to Jim Colbert’s explanation in time to hear him saying, “She moved into Cliff Cottage at the Bay Tree Inn about noon today. It would have made a perfect headquarters for her, with the footbridge, the dense woods, the island, the cave, and with Seneth Paddler in California. I guess she didn’t reckon on you boys—or else didn’t figure you’d be any problem, with half of you out of the neighborhood. There were only three of you, I believe—”
Dragonfly cut in to say, “There were nine of us!” He stopped as soon as he had started and grinned at Poetry and me.
Well, there were a lot of other things the Sugar Creek Gang wanted to know about what was going on and why. First of all, what was in the box on the table below Old Man Paddler’s prayer map?
The sheriff sniffed the air in the room. Then he spotted Sarah Paddler’s bone china saucer with the cigarette butts in it. Some of the stubs were larger than others, looking as if they had been hand rolled. And then he took a close-up smell.
“Roaches!”
I was surprised at that, because as many times as I had been in the old man’s always clean cabin, I’d never seen any cockroaches. And there weren’t any, dead or alive, in the saucer.
Jim Colbert must have heard my gasp, because he said with a grin, “A roach is a reefer, and a reefer is a marijuana cigarette.”
“And here,” one of the deputies said, “is another of Oliver’s aliases.” He lifted the little brown box, still tied with its tangle of red ribbon, moved with it to the lamp, and read aloud: “For liberal reward, return to Mary Jane Moragrifa.”
With the switchblade knife, the
deputy cut the ribbon and in a few seconds had the box open.
Beside me, Dragonfly, who was also trying to see what was inside, sneezed and dropped back out of the circle.
“Perfect manicure,” the deputy said. “Oliver’s finest brand.”
Well, that was the reason the box had been so important to the Sons of Lucifer. It was filled with hundreds of dollars’ worth of Mary Jane, which, the sheriff told us, was pure marijuana.
Behind us Dragonfly let out another sneeze and exclaimed, “I smell whirligig beetles!” He didn’t, of course, but his nose was saying no to the sickeningly sweet odor of what Jim Colbert told us, a few minutes later, was ruining the bodies and especially the minds of so many young people and causing pastors, teachers, doctors, and parents so much worry.
The minute the sheriff mentioned “parents,” I was startled by the beardless Son of Lucifer interrupting him to say, “If you boys’ parents don’t know where you are, you’d better phone ’em and let ’em know, so they won’t worry.”
I was not surprised right then to remember one of the most interesting stories in the Bible. It was about a boy who had run away from home. After a long time, when he was feeding pigs for a job and hungry enough to eat hog food, he came to himself right in the pigpen and started running back to his father’s house.
I looked quick at Darrel Inwood. He was standing beside his father, who, when his son said that, swallowed a lump in his throat and tightened his arm around his boy’s shoulders.
In less than three minutes, maybe, Big Jim, Poetry, Circus, and Dragonfly had telephoned their parents. Then it was my turn.
When my father answered and asked, “Where on earth have you boys been? What have you been doing? We’ve phoned all over for you!” I answered, “We’ve been helping the sheriff capture a couple of the Devil’s angels. We’re at Old Man Paddler’s cabin now, but we’ll be home as soon as we can.”
For some reason, my Farm Bureau speaker father wasn’t satisfied—not until Sheriff Colbert himself took the phone and explained.
Of course, we didn’t get to spend the night at Poetry’s as we had planned. All of us, including Darrel Inwood and the surly-faced other boy, went back down through the cave and to the branch bridge. From there one of the deputies drove the members of the gang to our different homes, while Jim Colbert drove his own car as fast as he could to the Bay Tree Inn to see what was going on there. And quite a lot was, I found out later.
The news came in on the deputy’s car radio just as we were getting in. I missed part of it because all of a sudden there was a startling sound only a few feet behind me. It was like a young calf learning to bawl and getting choked.
And do you know what? Dragonfly had accidentally stepped on a gunnysack that had seven bullfrogs in it, and one of the frogs in bullfrogs’ language had croaked, “Ou–ou–ou–ouch!”
My mind leaped back to the car radio in time to hear, “Oliver was in the middle of the footbridge with no way across and no way back, so she tried to climb over the railing and fell. The ambulance has taken her to the hospital.”
We drove home with $3.50 worth of frogs on the floor of the car at our feet.
At the Collins house next noon, our family talked it all over, after having talked about it part of the night before and most of the morning. There certainly was a lot of new news for the gang, for the parents of the neighborhood, and also for the reporters who came from all over to see what was going on.
We found out there would have to be a court hearing for the Sons of Lucifer we had captured in Old Man Paddler’s cabin and also for Oliver Twist, just as soon as the doctor said she was able to leave the hospital.
The island, we learned, had been the secret hiding place for the marijuana that Oliver and her gang had been selling, and they had been using our boat to ride over in.
And from the deputy who drove us home, we’d learned a lot of things every boy ought to know about how hard the way of the transgressor is.
At lunch I was maybe bragging a little to my parents as I told about my battle with the savage Bengal tiger and as I explained, “Mary Jane is slanguage for marijuana, and Moragrifa is another name for it. Manicure is high-grade marijuana which has been cleaned and has no stems or seeds.”
In my mind, as I talked to my parents—who maybe didn’t know much about what was going on in the country—I was the deputy. I repeated what he had told us in the car: “Anyone who smokes marijuana runs the risk of ruining his health and even his mind. Many people go from marijuana to stronger drugs and get themselves handcuffed to the Devil.”
I got stopped in my speech by my mother saying to my father, “It seems that sometimes a father does go after his prodigal son—like Darrel’s father did.”
“I’m afraid Darrel Inwood’s father was a prodigal father,” my dad answered. “He was a successful businessman but a complete failure as a father. And his mother loved her clubs and parties more than she loved her own boy. That’s partly why he ran away. He thought the gang he was running around with loved him. But they only wanted to get him hooked and make him a pusher.”
Mom had a faraway look in her eyes as she said across her plate of hash brown potatoes, ham, and applesauce to her husband, who was eating again, “Love is kind, but it sometimes has to be very firm. Love means discipline, but love is selfless. And love takes time.”
Then my father turned toward me and said from under his reddish brown mustache, “You need a haircut, Son, before Sunday. I don’t want the neighborhood thinking our son is a monster or a caveman.”
That took my mind back to our own cave and to all the excitement we had had there last night—and to the battle for the box among the lilacs. It wasn’t any time to try to be funny, but I answered my father, “Until my hair gets long enough, I could maybe wear a wig.”
The phone rang then, and Dad went to answer it. When he came back into the kitchen, he had a very serious look on his face. “It was Seneth Paddler. He’s at the airport. He sounded pretty shaken up over the news about his brother. He is going to need all the love we can give him for the next few days and weeks.”
That brought my thoughts back to the box on the top shelf of our upstairs closet—the ashes of Old Man Paddler’s twin brother, Kenneth, who had asked that he be buried in the cemetery on the slope of Strawberry Hill.
After lunch, while my father was driving to the airport to get Old Man Paddler, and while my mother was in the living room typing the last chapter to the book The Christian After Death, and while I was proving that love is a many-splendored thing by washing the dishes, and Charlotte Ann was helping by getting in the way, it seemed I wanted to go upstairs for a while just to be alone with my thoughts.
I stopped at the living room door before heading for the stairs and said toward Mom’s flying typewriter keys, “I have the dishes washed and rinsed and in the drainer, letting nature dry them. I think I need a thought break.”
Mom looked up with a faraway expression and also tears, I thought, in her eyes. She nodded. “I’ve been up several times today myself.”
For some reason after I reached the top of the steps, I slowed down and was walking on tiptoe when I went through the north room door. The little brown box, I noticed, had been moved from the closet shelf and was sitting on the dresser in front of the wide mirror. From the angle I was looking at it, its reflection in the mirror was as clear as the box itself. For a second, it seemed I was looking at twin boxes, one in the room and the other in another room on the other side of a window. Even though it was a sad thought, at the same time it made me glad to be alive in a real body with a real mind and to think I probably had a long life ahead of me.
From the woods across the gravel road there was the happy sound of different kinds of birds singing. I could see Strawberry Hill and the tall old pine tree that grew there. From its top branches a flock of blackbirds took off as though they were in a hurry to go somewhere in their blackbird world. It was too early in the season for blackbirds to gather t
hemselves into flocks for their flight to a warmer part of the United States to spend the winter. They always waited until September to do that.
I watched them—maybe fifty or more—flying helter-skelter toward the trees in the bayou. Then I turned back to take another look at the two brown boxes on the dresser.
A happy thought came into my mind then, though it was a little sad too. It was: Kenneth Paddler doesn’t live in this world anymore. His spirit has gone to a very special place—not just for the winter, but forever.
My mind came all the way back to the Collins family world when I heard Charlotte Ann starting to come up the steps. I quickly hurried to the head of the stairs and called down to her, “Love is a two-way stairway! You come on up, and I’ll come on down, and we’ll meet each other halfway.”
Halfway down, I swooped my chubby little mischievous-minded sister up into my brawny arms, which at the time felt strong as iron bands like the Village Blacksmith’s, and carried her giggling and kicking all the way down to the bottom step, through the kitchen, and outdoors.
The minute the screen door slammed behind us, old Mixy, our black-and-white cat, looked up from her afternoon catnap near the grape arbor and came stretching and yawning toward us as if she was the most contented and best-loved cat in the world with all her nine lives still ahead of her.
Hearing a sound from the direction of the twin hickory nut trees, I looked up the road and saw a pickup driving through the gate that leads toward Strawberry Hill. The decal on the side of the truck said “The Sugar Creek Nursery.”
In the back of the truck was what looked like a four-foot-tall evergreen, just the right size for a Christmas tree, standing as straight as if it were growing along the creek or the bayou.
I didn’t get to find out what the very pretty, extragreen evergreen was for until two days later at Kenneth Paddler’s funeral.
It seemed nearly everybody in Sugar Creek territory was on Strawberry Hill that afternoon. There were cars and cars and more cars parked everywhere. Some of them were in the woods at the bottom of the hill. One was only a few feet from the Little Jim Tree, where, in one of the gang’s most exciting experiences, Little Jim had killed a fierce old mother bear.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 25