Pedro! Singing! Poetry and I gasped at the same time, and my imagination picked me up and carried me over the top of the mesquite and cottonwood poplar and bald cypress and prickly pear cactus to a grapefruit grove and a weather-scarred, tin-roofed house. I was seeing a black-haired senorita lighting a candle before a boy-sized crucifix, and a man with a guitar singing behind a palm tree.
Boy oh boy! Poetry and I had been a whole lot closer to a live adventure that night than we’d realized. Pedro had probably been following the twenty-five-cent boy and his dad that very night, trying to find out when they were going back to Mexico.
In the excitement of things, I had almost forgotten the boy and his dad—if it was his dad. I had even forgotten my own dad and our other three chaperons and the boy evangelist’s dad, who still hadn’t come for us.
But a little later, while we were still on the beach, the van came swinging down one of the park’s dusty roads to where we were. All three dads were in it—the boy evangelist’s, Dragonfly’s, and mine.
It took only a little while for them to explain why nobody had come sooner. The police had set up a roadblock at the park entrance, and no cars except police cars had been allowed to enter.
“It’s this way,” one of the officers explained. “We discovered that illegal immigrants were using rubber life rafts from army surplus stores. An illegal would row across the river, tie the boat to shore, and leave it for some other illegal to use for a return trip. Pedro, just out of jail, found out about that and was cashing in on it, and—well, you know the rest of what happened. Thanks to you boys, he tried it once too often.”
And this has got to be the last part of this story, because nothing else happened that was very important until we got back home to Sugar Creek.
In the van on the way to town, Dragonfly, who was sitting beside me in the middle seat, sneezed three times in fast succession—the first time I’d heard him sneeze that many times that fast for an hour or two.
“Don’t start that again!” I said to him. “You haven’t sneezed for over an hour. How come?”
Dragonfly giggled and said, “I guess I forgot. I can sneeze anytime I want to, though!”
“You cannot,” Poetry challenged him.
“I can too,” Dragonfly argued back.
“All right, then, let’s hear you do it.”
Dragonfly answered in a saucy voice, saying, “I’m sorry, but I don’t happen to want to”—which was an old joke and was maybe a little bit funny.
Well, we’d had a wonderful vacation, and especially a wonderful next-to-the-last day, but I wasn’t satisfied. Most every minute of the way to town, it seemed that my mind’s eye was seeing the little Mexican boy swimming like fury out to a rubber boat, climbing in, and then helping the man row as fast as they could out across the moonlit Rio Grande to their own country. I didn’t like the idea of having him swim out of my life like that. I might never get to see him again. He would probably never get to become a citizen of the United States.
Little Jim helped me feel better about it when he said, “Maybe if he and his dad were really saved in the tent that night, they’ll hunt up a preacher in Mexico who knows how to be saved the way the Bible says, and they’ll join his church.”
I could tell by the tone of voice Little Jim was using that he was getting sleepy. He rested his head against my shoulder, sighed a heavy sigh, and kept still, which made me feel pretty fine. If there’s anything a boy likes, it is to have a boy he likes like him back.
I felt fine for another reason too. After another day we would be leaving Texas and would be on our way back to Sugar Creek.
We hadn’t caught any fish as big as a boy, but we had caught a fierce criminal, and by doing that we had maybe helped keep a lot of illegal immigrants from getting killed.
I was surprised when Poetry said from beside me, “What’s that song you’re whistling, Bill?”
“What song?” I asked and listened to my thoughts. I was whistling “I Won’t Have to Cross Jordan Alone.”
It was a good song. I knew I would never forget it as long as I lived. And because I was a Christian, I would probably remember it after I got through living. I might even sing it on my way to heaven.
During the week we had been in the Rio Grande Valley, we had heard the quartet sing that song nearly every night. So when somebody in the van started to sing it, the rest of us started to help him.
Maybe some of us sounded a little like Mom’s hens singing in our barnyard. Poetry’s changing voice actually did sound like the snoring croak of a middle-sized bullfrog, and mine didn’t sound like anything.
Only Circus’s was good, which it always is—maybe because he practices more than the rest of us. Sometimes he does it from the top branches of the elm sapling that grows along the bayou—right where the old rail fence starts its lazy climb up Strawberry Hill, on top of which is the abandoned cemetery, where Old Man Paddler’s wife is buried, and where …
Hey! Did I ever tell you about the time the gang was coming home one dark night from fishing for catfish just above the Sugar Creek bridge, and on the way home we decided to pass close to the cemetery to convince ourselves we weren’t afraid to—and just as we got there, we saw a lantern and somebody digging a hole behind a thicket of chokecherry shrubs?
I can’t seem to remember telling you about that. So maybe my next story will be all about that mysterious adventure and the very strange-acting person who was digging there, and why.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18 Page 43