Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18

by Paul Hutchens

  We were almost there, and I was getting ready to reach out my hand and get the balloon, when quick as a flash I saw Little Jim’s line go taut! His pole bent down clear to the water, while he dropped his oar and quick grabbed his pole and yelled excitedly, “Hey, I’ve got a fish!”

  Just then Dragonfly’s line did the same thing, and then—wham!—my own line went tight. And the next thing we knew, most of us in our boat found ourselves in the middle of one of the most exciting fishing experiences of our whole lives. We yelled and pulled, and our lines went singing out as our reels unwound. And almost at the same time, Dragonfly and Little Jim and Poetry and I all landed a walleye apiece and laid them, flopping and splashing water in every direction, in the bottom of the boat.

  “We’ve struck a school!” Poetry cried. “My fish took us right to them! He knew exactly where they were!”

  7

  Well, you aren’t supposed to yell like a lot of wild men on the warpath when you start catching a lot of fish, because you might scare the fish away. So almost right away we all shushed each other and only made some noise when we caught a fish, which was just about as fast as we could bait our hooks and get our lines into the water again.

  We quick anchored right close to where the balloon was, and the other boat carrying the rest of the gang came rowing over as quietly as they could and anchored close by.

  Talk about excitement! We’d never had so much fishing fun in our whole lives as we were having right that minute. And then, just like Sugar Creek School getting out and the kids tumbling out the door and all going away from the red brick schoolhouse, our school of walleyes moved on, and we stopped getting bites.

  I knew something was going to happen the minute I saw the yellow balloon start moving fast out toward deeper water.

  “Look!” Dragonfly, who saw it first, said. “Wally acts like he’s scared. Look at him go!”

  Everybody looked. The balloon was bobbing up and down and even diving all the way under. Then it stayed under for a long time before bouncing back up and shooting almost a foot into the air and landing ker-smack on the water again.

  But we had enough fish for one day, so Big Jim said, “Let’s go back to camp and get supper,” which was a good idea. We would come back tomorrow.

  “What’ll we do with Wally?” Poetry asked.

  “He’s been a good friend,” Dragonfly said. “He ought to have some kind of appreciation.”

  Then Little Jim piped up good and loud, saying, “Let’s give him his liberty!”

  Well, we had enough larger fish, and Wally really deserved some kind of a reward for helping us catch so many fish to take home to Sugar Creek. So we pulled anchor and rowed out toward where Wally was making the balloon fish bob around in such a lively style.

  As soon as the boat had eased alongside, I reached down my hand, caught hold of the balloon, and started to haul Wally in toward the boat. But then my line went tight as though it was fastened onto a snag down on the bottom of the lake.

  I gave a tug but not too hard, because I didn’t want the line to scale off any scales from Wally’s tail. It is as hard on a fish to lose some of its scales as on a barefoot boy to stub his toe and knock the skin off.

  “He’s tangled up on something,” I said and gave another small pull. And then—wham! There was a fierce wild lunge down there somewhere, and I felt a scared feeling race up and down my spine. I knew Wally didn’t have that much strength. Whatever it was felt as big as an excited pig running in our barnyard back at Sugar Creek.

  I had hold of the line as well as the balloon, and the line was cutting into my hands. I couldn’t think straight but knew I didn’t dare let loose.

  Snow-in-the-Face, for the very first time, got excited and yelled something to Eagle Eye in their Indian language and then to us in English, “Some great big fish has swallowed him!”

  I held on, in spite of the line’s hurting my hand a little, and then, out there about ten feet, something with a big, long, ugly snout and fierce eyes shot up through the waves and almost two feet in the air, then dive-splashed back in again.

  There was a ferocious boiling of the surface as if a bomb had exploded down in the water somewhere. I was trembling inside the way any fisherman trembles when a fierce fast-fighting fish gets away after it’s been hooked—only this one hadn’t been hooked with a real hook.

  He had probably come swimming along down there, looking for an early supper, like a robin hopping around on our lawn at Sugar Creek looking for night crawlers, and, seeing Wally swimming lazily around, he had decided to eat him.

  He had probably slowly nosed his ugly long snout up to Wally and then all of a sudden made a savage rush at him with his mouth open, had swallowed him whole, and started to swim away. That had scared all the other fish, which was why we’d all stopped getting bites at the same time.

  Anyway, right after that fighting fish lunged up out of the water and down in again, he made a dive straight for our boat, shot under it, and pulled so hard that I had to hold on for dear life. If I’d had a long line on a fishing rod with a reel, I could have let the reel spin, as fishermen do when they have a wild walleye or an enormous northern pike on their lines. I could have “played” him until he was tired out, then hauled him in. But with my line only a dozen or more feet long, I was pretty sure I didn’t have a chance in the world to land him, and the next thing I knew, I found out I was right.

  Seconds, it seemed, after he dived under our boat, I felt my line go sickeningly slack, and I knew I’d lost him. I couldn’t tell whether he’d broken my line or whether he’d swallowed backwards and Wally was free again.

  The gang was groaning with disappointment, because everybody had seen what had happened. And while I was pulling in the lifeless line to see what was on the other end, I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, the kind a fisherman gets when he loses a big fish.

  And then I was holding up the end of the line for us to look at.

  Dragonfly, seeing it, said, “Poetry’s slipknot slipped.”

  We would have been a terribly sad gang if we hadn’t already caught a lot of middle-sized walleyes.

  Circus called to us from the other boat and said, “We could have put a lot of kidnapper’s ransom money in a fish that big, if we’d caught him.”

  “There wouldn’t have been much room left with Wally already inside of him,” Poetry said.

  For some reason I was looking at Little Jim when Poetry said that, and I noticed a sad expression come over his small, mouselike face. I thought he had a couple of tears in his eyes.

  But it had been a wonderful fishing trip, and we couldn’t afford to cry over a lost northern pike, which is what we all decided the big fish was. So after the other boat had pulled anchor, we started our motors and steered around the island toward camp with our caught fish lying in the bottom of the boat.

  Little Jim was sitting in the seat in front of me, facing me as we roared along with Poetry running the motor. Different ones of us were talking and yelling to each other about all the different things that had happened—all except Little Jim, who, I noticed, was extra quiet, and his eyes still had that sad look in them.

  Pretty soon I leaned over and half whispered to him, “What’s the matter?”

  He swallowed, then said, “Nothing.”

  “There is, too,” I said, just as he turned his head and gave it a quick shake. When he looked back in my direction, the tears that’d been in his eyes a second before were gone. That is the way Little Jim gets tears out of his eyes—he just turns his head away, jerks it real quick, and that shakes the tears out.

  Dragonfly, who knew Little Jim had that cute way of getting tears out without using a handkerchief, so that nobody would know he had had tears in the first place, saw him do that and said to him from behind me, “Don’t you know tears are salty? Freshwater fish that live in lakes don’t like salt water.”

  “That’s not funny,” I said to Dragonfly over my shoulder, mad at him for not having
more respect for Little Jim’s hurt heart. I knew Little Jim’s heart was hurt when he said to me, “That wasn’t much of a reward for Wally, after all he did for us.”

  Then just as sometimes happens to my mother when she says something that has a sad thought mixed up with it, Little Jim’s eyes got a couple of new tears in them, which he quick shook out into the lake. Then he said, as he reached his small hands toward me, “Let me hold the balloon fish for a while.”

  I pushed the yellow balloon toward him, and the way he took it, made me think of the way my little two-year-old baby sister, Charlotte Ann, would reach out her chubby little hands for it when I got home and showed it to her.

  For a minute, while our two boats plowed along through the water—which, with the sunlight shining on the moving waves, looked like a big lakeful of live silver—my thoughts took a hop, skip, and jump across the lake to the shore. I leaped over the Chippewa Forest and high up over a lot of other lakes, like Paul Bunyan himself.

  And all of a sudden I landed right inside our kitchen at Sugar Creek, where I knew I’d be in just a few days. In my mind’s eye, I saw Mom standing by our kitchen stove near the east window, which has a green ivy vine trailing across the top of the outside of it. I could smell the aroma of raw-fried potatoes frying and see the steam puffing up from the hooked spout of our old teakettle.

  If, when I came in, I accidently carried in a little mud on my shoes or bare feet, Mom would say, as she nearly always does, “Would you like to get the broom, Bill, and sweep out that mud which a little while ago came walking in on two feet?”

  I would know whose two feet she meant, and I’d grin, and right away I’d step to the place where we keep our broom, which is behind the kitchen door. I wouldn’t any more than get started with the dustpan and broom than Mom would say, “Be careful not to sweep hard, or we’ll have dust in our fried potatoes.”

  While I was doing that, all of a sudden I’d get tangled up with something, and, turning around, I’d see my neat little sister, Charlotte Ann, with her tiny toy broom, sweeping it around awkwardly the way little girls do when they’re just learning how to sweep.

  Now that she’s learned to walk, she tries to do everything any of the rest of us do. She follows Mom around, sweeping when Mom does, washing her hands when Mom does, and when Mom or Dad sit down to read a book or a magazine, she gets a book or a magazine and tries to read, nearly always getting it upside down, though. Sometimes when Mom is getting supper and Charlotte Ann can’t see high enough to see what Mom is doing, she gets cross and whines and fusses and pulls at Mom’s dress or apron and makes a nuisance out of herself. She doesn’t know she’s a nuisance. Maybe she thinks Mom is making a nuisance of herself, instead, for not letting her help get supper.

  Yes sir, I was getting homesick for my folks and could hardly wait till I got home next week to tell them all the exciting adventures we’d had. Also, it’d be fun to watch the mail every day to see if maybe Little Jim would get any letters from anybody who would find the gospel messages that he’d been tossing out into the lake in whiskey bottles.

  Thinking that, I remembered John Till and wondered where he was and what he was doing.

  And all of a sudden I remembered what Poetry and I had been thinking and talking about in the station wagon when we’d been at the source of the Mississippi River. He had found a Bible verse that said if any two of the Lord’s disciples were agreed about something they wanted to pray for, they could pray for it, and the heavenly Father would do it.

  Thinking that, I turned around to Poetry, who was running the boat, and looked at him, and he looked at me. I pointed to my shirt pocket, which had its flap buttoned to keep my New Testament from falling out.

  His eyes looked where my finger was pointing, and the expression on his mischievous happy-looking face changed to a very sober one. He squinted his eyes as a boy does when he’s thinking about something or somebody someplace else. He lifted his free hand (the other being on the rubber grip of the motor’s handle) and, with his forefinger, pointed to his own shirt pocket. We just looked into each other’s eyes a minute, and for some reason I felt fine inside.

  Then I swung my eyes around over the lake and in the direction where the sun was going to set after a while. I was glad I was alive—for the same reason Little Jim was glad he was alive. In a little while, we’d be to shore.

  There was only one thing about a fishing trip I didn’t like, and that was having to help clean the fish afterward. But, boy oh boy, when you start sinking your teeth into the nice snow-white fish steaks, which restaurants’ menus call fillet, you don’t mind having had to clean them at all. Yum, yum, crunch, crunch … Boy oh boy, I certainly was hungry.

  As our boat cut a wide circle and swung up beside the dock in front of our big brown tents, I could see that a fire was already started in the Indian kitchen we’d made. That meant that, just the minute we had our fish cleaned, Barry’d have them sizzling in the skillet for us.

  That night just before we went to bed, Tom and I were alone a minute at the end of the dock, and he had both hands clasped around the slender flagpole. He was swaying his body forward and backward and sideways, not saying anything for a while, and neither was I. Then he said, “I wish I could find my dad.”

  There was a tear in his voice, and I knew he was feeling pretty awful inside, and because I liked him, I felt the same way for a minute.

  “Nobody knows where he is,” I said.

  And Tom surprised me by saying, “Only one Person knows.”

  As quick as I realized what he meant, I said, “Yes, that’s right. He knows everything in the world at the same time.”

  The moon shining on the water looked the way it nearly always does in the moonlight-like silver or like a field of oats on Dad’s farm would look if somebody had painted it white and the wind was blowing.

  Santa, who had his cabin not far up the lake from where we were camped, had gone away for the night, and Big Jim and Circus had been selected to stay all night in his cabin to sort of look after things for him. They were the biggest members of our gang, and Barry gave them permission.

  All the rest of the gang were in the tents, maybe undressing, and Tom and I were really alone, when all of a sudden I heard a sound on the shore and a voice calling in a low husky whisper, “Tom! Hey—Tom!” And I was sure I had heard the voice before.

  Then I saw the bushes part and a dark form move out into the moonlight. At the same time Tom let go of the flagpole and made a dive for the shore, beating it up the dock as fast as he could.

  I was so surprised I couldn’t move. I felt weak in the knees and sick at the stomach. Tom was over there in a flash, and I watched him and somebody standing side by side, talking in whispers.

  Then the dark form I’d seen come out of the bushes darted back again, and a second later I heard footsteps going lickety-sizzle up the lakeshore.

  Then Tom started back to me, and I met him in the middle of the dock.

  “Who was it?” I asked, thinking I knew. “Was it your dad?”

  “No,” Tom said, “it was my brother, Bob. I gave him the letter from Mother, and he’s going to give it to Dad.”

  8

  Can you imagine that? Big Bob Till, Big Jim’s worst enemy and, except for Big Jim, the fiercest fighter in the whole country anywhere, maybe! He was what people called a “juvenile delinquent,” which means he didn’t like to behave himself and had done many things that were against the law.

  Maybe I’d better tell you right now, in case you don’t know it, that Mr. Foote, Little Jim’s dad, had used his influence back at Sugar Creek to keep Bob from having to go to reform school. Then Bob had been paroled to him. Little Jim had been glad, because he’d rather anybody would be good than to have him be bad and have to be punished for it.

  But Bob was still not behaving himself, because he hadn’t been trained at home like most of the rest of us. Even we were having a hard enough time to be even half as good as we thought we were, and we had h
ad training all our boy lives.

  When Tom said to me, there in the moonlight on the middle of the dock, that he’d given his mom’s letter to his brother, and I realized that Bob was up here in the north woods, you could have knocked me over with a moonbeam, I was so surprised. Of course, he was gone now—somewhere or other—but where?

  I asked Tom a question then. “Where is your dad?”

  And he said, “I don’t know, but Bob does, and he’ll take Mother’s letter to him.”

  It seemed the rest of the gang ought to know Bob was up here, and for some reason it seemed that Poetry ought to know it first. So the very second I had a chance after I got into our tent a little later, and the lights were out, and Dragonfly had been quieted down from talking and laughing—in fact, his noisy nose sounded as if he was asleep—I reached out my hand and touched Poetry and said, “You asleep?”

  And he whispered quietly, “Yes,” which meant he wasn’t. So I told him about Bob, and he said, “That explains a lot of things.”

  “What, for instance?” I asked.

  And he said, “It explains who opened the icehouse door and let John Till out.”

  Then Poetry and I decided to get up and go outside where we could talk without being heard.

  I was surprised we were able to get up and out without being stopped by Dragonfly’s waking up and asking questions or insisting on going along. He is never able to let a guy have any secrets without wanting them to be divided up with him.

  A good place to talk without being heard would be down at the dock, we decided, so away we went toward the lake, where the waves were sighing and lapping against the shore and dock posts and making the boats rock a little. One boat was making a little scraping noise against the dock.

  “Where was Bob standing?” Poetry asked, and when I pointed to the bushes, he started straight toward them. As you maybe know, he wanted to be a detective someday and was always looking for what detectives and the police and the FBI call “clues.” And often Poetry was finding one—or something he thought was one.