Not a one of us seemed to want to answer him, because the answer would probably be yes, and we didn’t want to say out loud what our thoughts were already screaming at our minds.
In what seemed a very short time it was dark, and it wasn’t any nice, friendly dark, either, as it is up North along the creek. There weren’t any bullfrogs bellowing bass solos in the riffles, or any big night herons crying, “Quok-quok!” as they flew up the bayou, or any splashing of a big bass feeding in the lily pads, or any husky, rusty rustle of the blades of the corn. There wasn’t even the rasping of palm tree leaves, because this wasn’t any civilized park but one with only the native trees and bushes and shrubs of Texas growing in it.
“We’d better get a fire started,” Big Jim said, “so when he comes for us, or if he sends somebody else after us, they will see the light and know where we are.”
We brought it to a vote as to whether to try to follow one of the many crisscrossing dusty roads back through the brush to the highway—and thus run the risk of getting lost—or start a fire and stay by the river and wait. The vote was six to nothing in favor of staying where we were.
It certainly wasn’t comfortable feeling all alone in the lonely dark. The river flowing through the buttonbush willows sounded like the hissing of a snake, and when we did hear sounds in the brush behind us, there wasn’t a single sound I knew. It seemed we were not only at the bottom of Texas but also at the very end of the world.
9
The end of the world!
Of course, it wasn’t that, but when you are alone in a strange, wild country where lawbreakers hang out, and it is night, and your mind won’t quit imagining all kinds of things that might happen—even when you’ve been wanting an exciting adventure, you wish that whatever is going to happen will hurry up and do it, no matter how dangerous it is. You also half hope it won’t.
I guess one reason I was worrying was because I figured my folks were doing it back at the hotel, if they were home yet from Brownsville—or maybe by this time they were in the tent, wondering why we weren’t there too.
“Maybe Mr. Mulder had a flat tire,” Big Jim said casually, and I could tell he was trying to keep us calm by using a calm voice. “That rocky road leading into this wilderness is enough to give any tire a stone bruise or a blowout.”
Big Jim decided to start the fire right away because, as he said, “If there are any wild animals around here, it will keep them away.”
“Wild animals!” Dragonfly exclaimed in a frightened voice. “Where?”
“I said ‘if there are,’” Big Jim answered. But his tone of voice still sounded as though he was trying to keep the youngest ones of us from being even more scared than we were. Then he yawned the way he does when he is trying to be indifferent and started making a little wigwam of wood, using that which we had left over from our afternoon fire.
Just then Dragonfly said, “Psst! Listen! I hear something coming!”
I was used to hearing him hiss like that. It generally didn’t mean a thing—nothing very important, anyway, although sometimes it did. But when he hissed like that right in the middle of our tense huddle, it made me feel nervous.
We strained our eyes and ears in different directions. At first I didn’t hear anything at all.
Then Circus said, “It’s somebody coming across the river.”
I looked quick out over the shimmering waves of the Rio Grande, expecting to see somebody wading or swimming across. And actually, honest-to-goodness-for-sure, somebody was coming! I could see a long black shadow right out in the moonlit middle of the river.
“It’s the rubber life raft,” Poetry said.
I guess we all saw it at about the same time. And all the frightening things I had ever heard or read about illegals and trouble on the Mexican border—such as thirty-eight bodies being found in the river, the new migration, and the murder at Roma only yesterday—all those things came swarming into my mind like a half-dozen bumblebees at Sugar Creek when I accidentally poke a stick into their nest.
Big Jim quickly stopped starting a fire.
To move from where we were or not to move was the question. We could scramble up the bank into the brush and hide, but who wanted to get scratched up with cactus or mesquite or cat’s claw, or run the risk of getting hurt by a wild animal or something? So we hid ourselves as well as we could behind the nearby buttonbush willows.
It seemed we were all so scared we couldn’t move, and all the time, fast second after fast second, the black boat was coming nearer to our beach. I could already hear the splashing of oars in the water.
“Anybody see how many there are in the boat?” Big Jim asked.
“Looks like only one,” Dragonfly said, and it did.
“’S’matter? You cold?” I asked Little Jim, who was shivering against my shivering arm.
He didn’t answer for a second, but he did press a little closer. Then he astonished me by having a sense of humor right in the middle of that danger. He said, “I’m getting up close to you so you won’t be s-scared!”
“If there’s only one in the boat,” Big Jim said, “then he isn’t bringing any illegals over from Mexico. He’s coming over here to take some back with him!”
Well, that sent another shower of scared shivers all over me.
Big Jim added, “That means that somewhere behind us in the brush there is an immigrant or two or more hiding, waiting until the boat gets here. Then they will dash down the bank, climb in, and be rowed back.”
“See!” Poetry exclaimed. “He’s rowing straight for us!”
I might have guessed he would. Of course he would want the boat to be protected from sight by some growth along the shore, and the buttonbush willows we were hiding in would be just right.
Nearer and nearer the boat came and also—it seemed—faster and faster.
Then a flashlight in the boat went on and off three times. A second or two later, there was an answer—three fast, fleeting flashes from the bank up the shore.
Poetry, on the other side of me from Little Jim, whispered, “Anybody want to play a game of illegals and robbers now?”
“It’s the wrong time to be funny,” Circus said.
And Big Jim cut in with a calm, low voice, “There isn’t anything to be afraid of. We are getting a good education without having to study. In a minute we will see acted out in real life the things we have been reading about—immigrants being transported across the Rio Grande. In years to come we can tell about it to our children and our grandchildren.”
Dragonfly interrupted him by saying, “If we live that long.”
When the boat came to within twenty-five feet of the shore, all of a sudden it stopped coming nearer, and the lone man in it began rowing faster, up along the shore and around a little neck of land at the end of our beach.
“Maybe he saw us,” Big Jim said.
We were all sitting there, wondering, What next? when all of a sudden, right in front of our eyes, the boat was empty! The river’s current had caught it and whirled it about, and it was floating back downstream with nobody in it. One minute the man had been in the boat, and the next he wasn’t.
We hadn’t seen him climb out—or even fall out. And now, instead of carrying the boat on past us downstream, it looked as if the current was pushing it toward the beach again. Next thing I knew, it had come to rest against the shore in a little cove not more than twenty-five yards from the buttonbush willows we were hiding in.
My eyes started chasing up and down the river to see where on earth whoever it was had gone.
“You think he fell out and drowned?” whispered Little Jim.
Poetry whispered back, “He might have seen or heard us and thought we were officers and got scared and jumped out and swam to shore—or maybe swam back toward the other shore, swimming under the water.”
“But nobody saw him in the water,” I said. “And he would have to come up for air sometime.”
“Maybe somebody up there in the brush sh
ot him with a gun that had a silencer on it,” Poetry said, “and he just tumbled out.”
It didn’t seem possible that, with our twelve eyes watching the boat, not a one of us had seen what happened.
I turned the idea over in my mind. At the same time my mind itself seemed to be turning over and over.
Well, a gang of inquisitive boys couldn’t be quiet too long, or they would get the heebie-jeebies, so Poetry said, “Let’s send out a couple of spies to the boat to see what happened”—which meant that he was still halfway between playing a game and real life. Then he added, “Maybe he did get shot and just fell into the bottom of the boat, and that’s why we can’t see him.”
Big Jim didn’t like the idea of sending out spies. He said, “If somebody shot him, then the very minute any of us stepped out into the open, we’d probably get shot ourselves.”
Only a second after that, things really started to happen. Quicker than a flash, from up the bank came running steps. A man and a boy darted out into the moonlight, dashed past our hiding place, and raced on to the boat.
“Our adventure again,” Poetry hissed to me.
“Dad’s twenty-five-cent boy,” I said back to him.
Talk about brain-whirling excitement! Suddenly there were three people beside the boat instead of two. The third one rose up from behind the boat with an oar in his hands. With a fast, fierce movement he raised the oar high and brought it down with a smash on the head of the other man, who let out a wild yell, threw up his arms, staggered backward, and slumped down into the sand at the edge of the water.
Before I could get my muddled brain to thinking, Dad’s twenty-five-cent boy and the third man were in a fierce, one-sided fight, and I could hear grunts and socks and clothes tearing. I could also see the boy’s fists flying faster than mine did that time I had my fierce fight up North with Shorty Long.
Any minute I expected the boy to get knocked flat, which he would have if the man’s fist ever hit him just right.
“Let’s rush out and help him,” Circus said, saying what most of us probably thought.
But Big Jim stopped us, saying firmly, “No, not yet. That might be an arresting officer employed by the Mexican or the American government, whose business it is to stop illegal immigrants.”
But then something else began to happen. There was the sound of more quick running steps, and I saw the little guy running across the sand straight toward our hideout. He got two-thirds of the way to us before the man caught up with him, grabbed him, and slammed him on his back to the ground. A second later the man was on top of him, holding him down and saying a lot of angry-sounding Spanish words!
Talk about anybody’s temper getting ready to explode! Mine was like a lighted firecracker with a very short sputtering fuse. I wanted to see the boy get away because I was not only sure the savage man was a robber, but my sense of fair play made me want to see the man get the living daylights knocked out of him. I also had a lightning-flash mental picture of that little guy down on his knees in the tent, giving his heart to God.
Along with my ready-to-explode temper there was a warm love for the little guy. It wasn’t any of my business whether he was an illegal immigrant or not, but it was my business to do something to help keep a human being from getting hurt by a big bully.
The man kept on yelling down into the boy’s face some terribly fast Spanish words that sounded as if he was swearing at him.
Well, if there is anything that makes me sadder in my heart than anything else, it’s to hear a person use the Savior’s name or the heavenly Father’s name that way. I wondered quick what Little Jim was thinking. I knew swearing not only made him feel sad, but it also blew up his small temper till it was as big as a balloon at a county fair.
As you maybe know, Big Jim understood a little Spanish, so when he said to us, “He’s swearing,” that was too much for Little Jim.
And that’s how our whole gang got mixed up in the fight. We had to get into it—or let Little Jim get the living daylights knocked out of him.
Almost the very second Big Jim told us the man was swearing, Little Jim was gone from beside me. I saw a streak of moonlit curly-haired boy shooting out from the shade of our willows across the sand and making a flying-tiger leap straight for the back of the bully. He got there only about five seconds before five other boys did.
What a scramble. That really was one. Our battle with that fierce-fighting wild man was something. I say wild because, when six boys landed on him from about six different directions at the same time, he started acting like a man that had suddenly gone crazy or like a chicken that has just had its head cut off.
I didn’t know much of anything for a while—a boy doesn’t when he is excited or mad and in a fight. But I did sort of realize three things: one was that our robber wasn’t an American, because he was swearing in Spanish; also he was all wet, which meant he had slipped out of the boat when it was still in the river and had swum along behind it, pushing it to shore, making it look as if there wasn’t anybody in it at all; and third, he was as strong as an ox.
If we hadn’t been a husky gang of boys, we could have all been badly hurt. For a half second I even thought I was glad my parents had made me hoe potatoes and do all kinds of other hard farm work, because when I got my arm around the man’s wet leg, I shut my eyes and gritted my teeth and held on like a bulldog. Circus had a hold on his other leg; and Big Jim, Poetry, Little Jim, and Dragonfly were doing other things to the rest of him. Also the minute he could, Dad’s twenty-five-cent boy scrambled to his feet and helped us hold the man down.
“Get me one of the gunnysacks, Bill,” Big Jim ordered me.
“Why?” I asked.
I could tell that already Big Jim was feeling fine. He said mischievously, “To put our fish in. Didn’t you say you were going to catch a fish as big as a boy? Well, here’s one as big as a man.”
I was back in a whiz with the gunnysack.
“Now,” Big Jim said, panting and holding onto the man’s arm, “get the fishing line out of my hip pocket.”
In only a minute or two we had the man’s feet shoved into the gunnysack and Big Jim’s fishing line wrapped round and round his ankles.
Almost the second we finished tying his legs, a car swung onto the shore above us, and a spotlight lit up the whole beach.
And then the most astonishing thing happened. The light hadn’t any sooner focused on our tangled-up scramble than our little Mexican boy took one frightened, eye-blinking look at it, jumped like a scared rabbit, whirled around, and dashed for the river. He plunged in and splashed his way out through the shallow water until it was too deep for him to wade any farther. Then he began a fierce, fast swim toward Mexico.
10
Crazy things were really going on on the Mexican border that night. The story the Sugar Creek Gang could tell to their grandchildren was going to be very exciting as well as very interesting. The only thing was, if we told it to our grandchildren at night as a bedtime story, they wouldn’t want us to stop in the middle but would cry for more. And if we kept on till we got to the end, it’d be too late for the littlest ones to stay up.
I could very easily imagine myself being a grandfather with a couple of wriggling, squirming grandchildren on my lap and maybe one of them using my long, thick reddish whiskers for a pillow.
Well, there we were—six panting boys holding a wild man down on his stomach on a sandy beach along the Rio Grande. A bright spotlight from somebody’s car was shining on us. Another man with a hurt head was lying up the beach from us, and the Mexican boy we had tried to rescue was swimming like mad toward his native land, crossing the Rio Grande alone.
That is, I thought he was going to have to cross it alone. For a second the spotlight swung away from us and focused on the swimming boy out in the river.
“Hey!” Poetry, whose eyes were looking where mine were, exclaimed. “There’s another boat out there! He’s climbing into it!”
My half-light-blinded eyes l
ooked quick toward the place where the first boat had been, but it wasn’t there.
Also gone was the man who ten or more minutes before had gotten his head socked with an oar and had been lying beside the boat. That could mean only one thing, and that was that the boy’s dad (if he was his dad) had regained consciousness (if he had lost it) and still had strength enough to paddle the boat.
By the time my eyes could get back to the twenty-five-cent boy again, he was already in the boat and was helping row back to the other side.
All this time our prisoner was struggling fiercely, and we were still holding on for dear life. We knew we didn’t dare let loose for a second. If he had a knife, as some criminals do have, he’d probably use it on us.
And then two men who had been in the car that had the spotlight were hurrying down the bank to our battlefield to take our prisoner off our hands.
In a minute the officers—which is what they were—were taking charge and doing the different things that arresting officers do, such as putting handcuffs on our prisoner and asking us a lot of questions and stuff.
They had us tell the whole story, which we did, using six different excited voices to do it. It turned out that we had caught one of the worst criminals Mexico had ever had. He had broken out of a jail named the Black Palace, in Mexico City. Both the United States government and the Mexican government had been looking for him. The only thing was, as soon as he gave up he didn’t act like a vicious criminal at all. In fact, he didn’t even look like one. He had a haircut and shave, and he answered questions in a polite voice. Also, he could talk English almost as well as Spanish.
“It’s a wonder one of you boys didn’t get slashed to pieces,” the tallest officer said to us.
“Which one?” Dragonfly asked.
The shorter officer, whose face I could see pretty well in the moonlight, grinned and said to Dragonfly, “You, probably.” Then he added, talking to our prisoner, “Well, Pedro, let’s get started. You’re going back to live in the Palace again. They’ve been missing your singing down there.”
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18 Page 42