She came out then and walked over to a bench beside the palm tree. The man with the guitar came from behind the tree trunk, and they sat down on the long bench together, one on one end and the other on the opposite end, and the man began to play and sing again.
It looked as if even though our adventure had come to life, the kind of life it had come to wasn’t any of two boys’ business, so I whispered to Poetry, “Let’s get out of here.”
“Yeah,” he said in a disgusted tone of voice, “let’s. That’s probably a Mexican singing for his sweetheart”—which Dad says is what some Mexican senors do when they court their senoritas (a senor being a man and a senorita being a lady of some age or other, who for some reason isn’t married yet).
Pretty soon, between the senor’s verses, we heard some different music coming from farther away, and this time it was a lot of people singing a hymn!
Poetry and I started out as fast as we could go, both of us in the same direction this time, toward the new music, and we got back to the tent just in time to see and hear the boy evangelist dismiss the service. It was also in time to stop at least two of our chaperons from starting to worry about us.
We had had a queer adventure, but I was disappointed because we had lost our twenty-five-cent boy. If only we could find out where he and his dad had gone—if he was his dad. I felt as bad as Mom does sometimes when she loses her glasses and Dad and I have to stop doing whatever we are doing and help her look for them until she finds them again, right where she had thought they were in the first place.
But really, I needn’t have felt so bad about our adventure being a flop, because it certainly wasn’t over yet. You see, when Poetry is with us, he being the kind of boy he is, whenever there is anything that even looks like it might have an adventure in it, he always wants to investigate, and sometimes we run ker-smack into one when there wouldn’t have been any at all.
As I said, I needn’t have worried, because we did see Dad’s twenty-five-cent Mexican boy again.
If I can, I will get going on that very exciting part of this story for you in the next chapter of this book.
7
Next day we drove to Old Point Lighthouse at Port Isabel, but we couldn’t get in because it had been closed for years and locked. Then we went fishing off the jetties in Laguna Madre in the Gulf of Mexico near Padre Island. Some of the water in the Gulf, a few drops of it anyway, used to be up in Sugar Creek, we decided, and we had probably gone swimming in it. But I guess the fish in the Gulf didn’t know the difference.
Anyway, they didn’t want to bite. The wind was blowing hard, and the waves were high, and it was the lonesomest-looking place I’d ever been in. Not a one of us even got a bite except Big Jim, who landed two anemic-looking catfish that weren’t any longer than from his wrist to his elbow. About all we got out of that day was a good launch ride; the name of the launch was Gulf Pirate.
Our guide for the day was the boy evangelist’s friendly father, who drove us all around the country in his van. The boy evangelist went along. It was very interesting to discover that he was also a human being who enjoyed having fun as much as if he was an ordinary boy or a member of the Sugar Creek Gang. He and his dad had brought with them some gospel tracts and invitations to the tent meetings, which they distributed everywhere we went.
It was a good idea, we thought, so at Port Isabel the gang scattered itself all over the town, passing out tracts in all the stores to nearly everybody we saw.
“Where’s that fish as big as a boy you were bragging about?” Poetry asked me that afternoon as he and I, side by side, went into and out of stores in a town called Mercedes, handing out pamphlets and invitations to the tent meetings.
“What fish as big as what boy?” I said, defending myself with an indifferent tone of voice.
Saying it, I thought how much more fun it would have been fishing with a dead bamboo pole and landing a six-inch-long chub out of the riffle just below our Sugar Creek swimming hole. At least a guy could get a bite in Sugar Creek, anyhow.
Before we went back to the hotel where our chaperons would be waiting for us to eat supper, we drove out to see a place called “The Cat,” which was the absolutely most interesting and most sad-looking place I ever saw. “The Cat” was about forty houses, made out of sticks and pieces of tin and palm branches and woven willows. The whole place was about as big as the three-acre plot below the pignut trees on our farm.
A dozen bashful-acting, half-dressed Mexican boys and girls stopped playing in their grassless yards and stared at us.
But I guess they must have known the boy evangelist and his dad, because the minute his father stepped out of the car with a handful of tracts rolled in red paper—making them look like a handful of stick candy—the children came running from every direction. We helped pass out maybe a hundred Spanish gospel tracts.
While driving on to the hotel, Poetry, who was seated beside me in the middle seat of the van, said, “What’s that song you’re whistling, Bill?”
“What song?” I asked and pulled my thoughts back from “The Cat,” where they had been, and fastened them onto the tune that had been galloping around in my mind when I didn’t even know it. The song was “I Will Make You Fishers of Men.” I was surprised to find out what it was, and for just a second I thought about what a funny thing a boy’s mind is. He could be thinking about “The Cat” and riding in a van and at the same time be whistling a song and not even know that he was whistling it.
Well, the days flew by too fast. Almost before we realized it, there were only two days of vacation left. Our chaperons had been having a wonderful time, they said, just sitting around in the sun in their hotel patios, and the gang had been doing different things that boys like to do. We even borrowed and read some books from the public library, which was in a basement room under the bandstand in the park across from the hotel.
Our adventure would have to hurry up and come to life again, I thought, or we would have to go back to Sugar Creek without knowing how it would have ended. Since I didn’t have any fish as big as a boy to talk about, it would be hard to take all the kidding that the people would give me.
Dad, who had been reading the news, found out that the coal miners’ strike was over, so we didn’t have any excuse for not going back home to the ten-below-zero weather they were having up there and to the seventeen boy-battered desks in our one-room, red brick school-house, which would have to have a roaring coal fire in its Poetry-shaped iron stove. The kids who sat up close to the stove would be smothering, and the ones in the back of the room would be able to see the frost in the air every time they exhaled.
We’d soon all be suffering our way through arithmetic and history and also geography. I knew that every time I looked at a map of the United States, my eyes would drop down to the bottom of it to the Mexican border, and I would wish summer would hurry up and come to Sugar Creek. I decided that I liked summer in the summertime at Sugar Creek better than I liked summer in the winter on the Mexican border.
Poetry and I were seated on the glider on our over-the-garage apartment porch when all of a sudden he, who had been reading the Rio Grande Valley News, gasped and said, “Hey, Bill, look, will you?”
First my eyes took in a wide circle all around our porch. I noticed that not a one of the rest of the gang was there. They were down on the lawn tossing a softball around and making a lot of boy noise.
Then I looked at the headline Poetry’s forefinger was pointing to, and it said:
Illegal Migration Costly in Lives and Money
“It’s a shame to let all that excitement go on without our gang getting mixed up in it,” Poetry said.
“I don’t think it’s fair myself. Hey!” I exclaimed. “What—”
The softball Circus had just thrown to Little Jim down by the palm tree struck the top of Little Jim’s glove, glanced off and up, and hit the side of my head, which I had been resting against the screen. It startled me out of what few wits I had.
“Watch your s
tep down there,” I yelled down to the gang, and Circus called back, “That wasn’t a step—that was a softball hitting a soft head,” which I didn’t think was very funny.
“Hey, you guys,” Big Jim called up to Poetry and me. “The van is stopping out in front. We’re going on another drive!”
“Who wants to go on a dumb drive?” I called back.
What I really wanted to do was to find out where the illegal had been killed last night and go and see the place myself. As I said, it didn’t seem right for there to be so much adventurous excitement going on so close by and the Sugar Creek Gang not having a chance to get into the middle of it. It’s like when a whirlwind starts moving across one of our fields back home—I always stop whatever I am doing and race out to it and try to run in the middle of it wherever it goes.
I told Poetry what I thought, but he answered, “It’s too far—way up the Rio Grande near a little town called Roma. Besides, you might get your head bashed in.”
“It might be safer than staying around here,” I said, feeling the side of my head where the ball had struck it.
Our four chaperons had gone to Brownsville that day, where two of them were going to do some exciting shopping in some exciting shops to get a lot of useless trinkets to stand on our mantels and window ledges at home. Also they had promised a lot of other Sugar Creek mothers they’d bring back something for them. So the boy evangelist’s father was taking care of us—even though not a one of us needed taking care of. He was going to drive us to a park where we would cook our own supper in Indian style on a sandy beach along the Rio Grande.
So far I had only seen the Rio Grande on a map and from a high bridge while we were crossing it. Of course, I had seen some of its brown water flowing through irrigation ditches, but today, our next to the last day in the valley, we were going to see it close up.
8
After we had left the main highway, we drove for what seemed miles and miles over dusty, narrow roads and through the dusty brush, which I later found out was made up of prickly pear cactus, bald cypress, horse chestnut, cottonwood poplar, ebony, burr oak, huisache, and what is called honey mesquite. There were also a lot of fierce-looking cacti called Spanish bayonet, but most of the cacti were prickly pear cactus, which the Indians feed to their cattle after they have cut off all the prickly parts.
After quite a long while we came to a little clearing, and there in front of our eyes was the wide, muddy river. It was bordered with different kinds of willows, which I found out later were mostly sandbar and black and buttonbush willow. Some of the buttonbush willows were growing in the water close to the shore.
For a while Circus seemed kind of glum. Even though there were plenty of trees, they were all different from the kinds that grew at Sugar Creek. Hardly a one of us felt at home. In fact, I felt almost as bashful in that park with all those strange trees standing around staring at us as I do when we have company at our house. A lot of the trees had thorns on them, which meant we couldn’t climb them or play games in them. Besides, they were too dusty. We would get our clothes all dirty if we did.
But we did have a lot of fun. We didn’t expect to be left alone all to ourselves, but the boy evangelist’s father had to drive back to town to do some shopping and to broadcast a special program advertising the tent meetings. He planned to be back in time to have supper with us and drive us all back to the tent.
Not a one of us thought about running into any danger, because, after all, we were in what was called a public park. I say it was called that. If it had been a Sugar Creek park, there would have been dozens and dozens of people around and cars and picnic baskets and a lot of kids yelling and playing, and you wouldn’t have to make your own excitement to be having a good time.
“I should be back around six o’clock for supper, but don’t wait for me if I’m a little late. I’ll be back in plenty of time to get you to the meeting tonight,” the boy evangelist’s father said. “You have everything you need, Big Jim?”
Our fuzzy-mustached leader nodded his head yes.
We did have everything we needed for a real Indian supper. There wouldn’t be any danger of a brushfire, because we were going to build our fire on the beach itself, where the only thing that could burn would be what we ourselves carried there.
We had had Indian suppers before, especially when we were on our camping trips in the summertime in the Far North of the United States—but you know all about that if you have read our exciting experiences in the book called Screams in the Night.
Right away we dug our eighteen-inch-square hole in the ground, far enough up on the beach so that there wouldn’t be any Rio Grande water seeping into the bottom of it. We lined it with stones and then filled it with kindling wood and sticks. We piled other pieces of wood on top until the pile was about two feet high.
Then Big Jim started the fire. We let it burn for a whole hour, feeding it with dry wood to keep a very hot fire all that time. At the end of the hour we scooped out all the ashes and live coals, leaving the lining of terribly hot stones. Then we lined the whole hot hole with green leaves, mixing in a few lettuce leaves, which Big Jim had brought along on purpose.
As quick then as Mom could have done it herself, Big Jim laid in a big slice of steak apiece for each member of the gang and one for the boy evangelist’s dad. He also put in some potatoes and corn on the cob and carrots (which almost none of the gang liked but had to eat to keep our parents happy; besides, carrots are supposed to be good for us, and maybe they are).
On top of that we put on more leaves, piled more stones on top of the leaves, and then spread on a couple of soaking wet burlap sacks.
It was enough to make a nice little mound like a small grave in a cemetery.
After about two hours, our supper would be all cooked by the terribly hot steam from the hot rocks and the wet burlap sacks.
While we were waiting, we played different games and told stories. It was fun imagining ourselves to be pirates who had sailed in from the Gulf of Mexico and up the Rio Grande to bury our treasure there.
We even played illegals and robbers, some of us filling our pockets with small stones representing money that we had earned in the States picking grapefruit or pulling carrots and stuff. The rest of the gang would hide in the willows down by the river to waylay us. Somebody would yell, “OK, gang, it’s dark now! It’s time for the illegals to come out of the brush and get their backs wet swimming the river!”
Only, of course, we didn’t even get our feet wet. That river was such a big, wide, unfriendly thing that any boy would be silly to wade out into it. It certainly was different from Sugar Creek, where we knew every inch of the bottom for a mile each side of the spring. We knew where every big rock was and every little riffle and every stepoff. We even knew the names of some of the big bass that hid out in the deep water below the Sugar Creek bridge and nobody had caught yet.
It gave me the creeps to imagine myself taking even a few steps out into that big coldhearted Rio Grande. Besides, it certainly wouldn’t be safe.
Well, time flew by fast, yet hardly fast enough for me, because I was hungry even before we buried our uncooked dinner in the ground.
“OK, illegal,” Poetry said to me when he and I were alone and close to the water’s edge. He quick stooped, scooped up a handful of the Rio Grande, and splashed some of it on my shoulders. “Let’s go hide in the brush up there on that hill.”
“Stop it,” I exclaimed. I swung around and grabbed up a handful of water myself and made a “wetface” out of him.
But it was innocent fun and nobody let himself get mad, which is silly for a boy to do when he is playing any kind of a game.
“Look,” all of a sudden Poetry said, “see that black log over there across the river on the Mexican side?”
I looked across the unfriendly river toward the gray-and-brown hills on the other side, and sure enough there was a big black log. “What about it?” I said.
“It’s too black for a log. You kno
w what that looks like?”
“No, what?”
“It looks like an inflated rubber life raft. I’ll bet somebody uses it for a boat. Somebody maybe gets paid for taking illegals back and forth.”
I wished I had my binoculars, but of course I didn’t.
“Don’t tell Dragonfly it’s a rubber boat,” Poetry said mischievously, “or he will be allergic to it and start sneezing.”
Right that second, from somewhere behind me, Dragonfly did sneeze, but it was because a little whirlwind of dust had come spiraling out of the brush and was heading across the beach toward the river.
“Hey!” I yelled at the whirlwind, starting toward it on the run. “Don’t you dare cross that river. You can’t carry all that dust across into Mexico without permission.”
By the time I had said that, I was right in the center of the whirling dust and leaves and stuff that the whirlwind was stealing from Texas and was trying to take across into Mexico without paying duty on it.
Pretty soon it would be time to take our steak supper out of our hot-rock cooking utensil. The van still hadn’t come, but when six-thirty came, Big Jim said, “OK, gang, come and get it.”
It took only a few minutes to get the sand off the steaming burlap sacks, the top layer of stones off the leaves, and the leaves off the yummiest supper a boy ever cooked without a mother to worry about all the dirt he might accidentally eat.
After supper, when it began to get dark and still no van came, we started to look at each other’s half-worried faces and to wonder how long we’d have to wait. It was about the lonesomest park I’d ever seen. Not a single other human had showed up all afternoon, and we’d not even heard the sound of a car.
The sun had already set, and even though the afterglow was a very pretty pink and purple and gold, for some reason I didn’t seem to enjoy it.
“Are there any wild animals down here?” Little Jim asked from within two inches of me, where he sat crowded up close.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18 Page 41