Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 1-6

by Paul Hutchens

  The man who had given them their checks was up there too, going from one cot to another, getting their names and putting each name down beside the number of his check. Men, men, men, all over.

  “I don’t think that’s Bob after all,” Poetry said to me.

  I looked again and decided maybe Poetry was right.

  Just before we left, the man who’d been taking names stopped at one of the cots and said to the man lying there, “Hey, buddy, put your head down at this end!”

  I didn’t like that. I thought a man had a right to put his head at whichever end of the bed he wanted to, but Barry explained it. “The law says that they have to sleep so they can’t breathe or cough in any other man’s face. That’s a health law.”

  And then I understood.

  I thought about my nice soft mattress at home in our upstairs, and the cool clean sheets, and of my neat mom who always had my bed turned down for me at night, and for a minute I couldn’t see straight. Some crazy old tears kept getting mixed up in my eyes.

  I looked at Little Jim, and I saw him turn his face away and give his curly head a toss, and I knew that somewhere on that wooden floor would be a couple of tears.

  Soon we were all going down the stairs to the main floor and out onto the street. We were going to Santa’s apartment, where at midnight he had a very strange surprise waiting for us.

  We stopped at the mission door, though, and they let us look over the list of names of the men who were upstairs. And would you believe it? There were five men who had the same name, and that name was “Frank Smith.”

  “Who are they?” Dragonfly asked. “Are they all brothers or what?”

  “Nobody knows who they are,” the mission man said. “We get a lot of men by that name.”

  There was even a man named John Doe on the list. I let my eye slide down the whole page, and there wasn’t anybody there named Bob Till, either, so I knew if it really was Bob, he had given a false name.

  Outside the mission we all stopped to get a drink at the little drinking fountain. The Chicago water didn’t taste as good to me as the water from the spring at Sugar Creek.

  When I looked up from getting my drink, a police car was parking right in front of the mission. Two big burly policemen climbed out and walked up to the door. They gave us boys a careful looking over, then they went into the mission, and we went on to Santa’s apartment, each one of us thinking his own thoughts.

  On the way, we went through a part of the city called Chinatown, where many Chinese people lived and where I bought a pound of tea. I asked the Chinese clerk to wrap it up and send it to my mom, who liked Chinese tea very much.

  In another store, we saw a half-dozen men sitting around a table. Each one had a little pile of money in front of him, and they were playing some kind of game using small yellow cubes with Chinese characters on them. The cubes looked like little pieces of cream cheese. In another store, a man was mixing perfume. In still another, we saw a Chinese paper dragon, as long as our barn at home. It was all-colored and looked like a big rainbow that had been straightened out, except that it had a fierce head with savage eyes.

  We couldn’t stay long in Chinatown, but it surely was an interesting place. Once I saw a cute, mischievous-looking, black-haired Chinese boy on the sidewalk. Some tourists were standing around in a little half circle, watching him and laughing at things he said and did. His mom, who was very pretty, was watching him too and acting proud, just as my mom does when people look at Charlotte Ann and tell Mom how cute she is.

  In the car, on the way to Santa’s apartment, Santa said, “You ought to visit our Chinese Sunday school sometime. We have over fifty teachers, one teacher for every student.”

  They talked about that a while, but Poetry and I still had our thoughts on Bob Till. We wondered to each other what those police officers wanted to go into the mission for.

  We would find out Sunday morning when we went to visit a boys’ jail.

  9

  At Santa’s apartment we had our strange surprise, and Little Jim taught me another important lesson.

  Mrs. Santa, or really Mrs. Farmer—I was learning to call her that—met us with a smile and a gurgling giggle that was very cheerful. She introduced us to their canary, Cheery, which was trained and could be let out of the cage and would fly around from room to room. It would stand on a dresser in front of a mirror and act very angry at its reflection, not knowing maybe that it was seeing only its very pretty yellow self.

  All over the apartment were cots for us to sleep on. Santa’s study had two cots in it as well as a library.

  Mrs. Farmer seemed as tickled to see all of us as if we had been her own boys, which, just for fun, she said we were. She had sandwiches ready for us and gave each of us a glass of milk.

  After a half hour or more, we all got ready for bed. It was funny to see us decked out in our different colored pajamas, ready to climb into our cots. Poetry’s pajamas were white with reddish-purple stripes running around them, which made him look like a prisoner from some jail. We would have teased the life out of him if we hadn’t all remembered Bob Till and felt sorry for little red-haired Tom, so that joke was spoiled.

  Pretty soon we sang a chorus and said our prayers, each one saying his own quietly beside his own bed. Then we climbed in, and the lights went out.

  I was certainly tired. Dragonfly was in a cot beside me in the study, but I went right off to sleep and into a crazy dream with things scrambling around in my mind—canaries and stars and dinosaurs and dragons and fish.

  I was dreaming I’d turned into a giant-sized needle and was darning Dad’s socks, when I was awakened by somebody at the window, standing out there on the fire escape and dressed in a striped prison suit.

  Well, it didn’t make sense and was part of my dream, I thought, so I didn’t believe it—not until whoever it was began to rattle the window and to crawl inside, the screen having been taken off already.

  Dragonfly woke up scared, and pretty soon everybody in all the rooms was awake. The lights were turned on, and it was Poetry himself.

  “Just a new way to wake people up,” he said. He stood there in our room and yawned and acted indifferent until Dragonfly decided to throw a pillow at him.

  That made us all decide to do the same thing, which we did.

  But it was all a part of the surprise Santa had planned for us. We were supposed to be awakened at midnight to listen to a special midnight broadcast from the radio station we’d visited. So we gathered out in the biggest room, where the canary had been but wasn’t now, having been put in a covered cage in the kitchen.

  Santa turned on the radio while we found places to sit on chairs and on each other’s cots, and pretty soon the program was on.

  And then all of a sudden somebody began to sing, and it was a voice exactly like Circus’s voice, as clear as a bell, high and very resonant. I looked around quick, and there was Circus with a very funny expression on his already funny face. Then he scowled and acted bashful. Sure enough, it was his voice.

  Yet it couldn’t have been, because there he was, right in front of my eyes, looking sleepy and awake and bashful at the same time. And there was Little Jim too.

  “It’s canned music,” Santa explained. “They made a tape when you were in the studio.”

  It surely was a beautiful song:

  My sins are forgiven, I know,

  My sins are forgiven, I know.

  Not through works of my own,

  But through Jesus alone,

  My sins are forgiven, I know.

  They’d made that recording, and Circus and Little Jim hadn’t known it. If they had known, they’d probably have made a fizzle instead. All the way through the four stanzas of the solo, I kept thinking how very much I’d give if I had been Circus or Little Jim and could have had a sound recording made of something important that I could do.

  But I couldn’t do anything important—not sing or play the piano or any other musical instrument. I was just old
freckle-faced, red-haired William Jasper Collins, who hadn’t even learned how to control his temper.

  And there were Little Jim and Circus, who’d already decided what they were going to be when they were grown up. One was going to be a gospel singer and the other a missionary, and I—then I remembered that I was going to be a doctor, a genuinely Christian doctor at that, and perform operations on people.

  All the time I was thinking that—and maybe shouldn’t have been, because it was selfish—the song kept going on: “My sins are forgiven, I know. My sins are forgiven, I know. My sins are forgiven, I know …”

  Just then Little Jim slid over to me from the other end of the cot he and I were sitting on, and I looked down at his mouse-shaped face to see if he was proud of himself for playing so well, but he wasn’t. I know, because he leaned over and whispered in my ear one of the nicest things I’d ever heard or ever thought of in my whole life.

  “Do you know what I’m thinking about?” he squeaked.

  Of course I didn’t, so I asked him, “What?”

  He waited till there was what is called an interlude between stanzas, which was piano music only, and then he said, “All those eighty-eight piano keys, from one end to the other, are going to be Little Jim’s ladder, reaching up to heaven, and each one will be a gospel step for people to go up on.”

  After that I was ashamed of myself for wanting to be famous, so I tried to think of what I could do with a surgeon’s knife that would help people’s souls. There are a lot of people in the world—even right in Sugar Creek—who ought to have their hearts operated on.

  Well, after the surprise, we all had to have a dish of homemade ice cream, which was already made and in the refrigerator waiting for us. Then we went to bed again and to sleep.

  The next thing I knew it was morning, with another whole day ahead of us, and still another one after that, and with our most exciting adventure still unhappened, the one that was a bit like the dream I’d had at Sugar Creek that day when I was pouring raspberry juice into a boy’s veins through a little tin funnel.

  Never in my life will I forget what happened and why—and neither will Big Jim and Big Bob Till, because it happened to both of them.

  10

  On Saturday we did a lot of things and saw even more than we had already. The very first thing we did was to go to the Brookfield Zoo, where we looked especially for Little Jim’s pet bear, which had had a white triangle on its chest, but we didn’t find it.

  You should have seen that zoo! Honest, there were more live things to look at and laugh at than you could see anywhere else in Chicago, especially the monkeys.

  Once when we were standing in front of a bear’s cage, watching three fuzzy baby bears eating their dinner in the way mammals do, for a minute I imagined I was back home listening to a million honeybees droning in the old linden tree that grows near the spring. If you’ve ever heard baby bears eat their dinner from their mothers, you know they sound like that. I could, for a minute, almost smell the perfume of the pretty creamy-yellow linden flowers I was thinking about. That is, until I smelled the bears’ den.

  The fuzzy little bears reminded Poetry of a poem that is good enough for me to write down for you. Here it is, which he quoted in his more-than-ever-squawky voice:

  Fuzzy-wuzzy was a bear,

  Fuzzy-wuzzy had no hair;

  Fuzzy-wuzzy wasn’t fuzzy,

  Was he?

  If you say that real fast, it sounds funny, and it is.

  We went riding in two taxis, looking out the windows to see everything we could see. Hundreds of trucks and trailers were going both directions on one particular street, and all along the way were sad-looking, dirty-faced store buildings with people living in their upstairs. The saddest and dirtiest were the ones that were closed and for rent. The windows of our taxi were open, so with all the traffic it was just roar, roar, roar all the time, like the Sugar Creek threshing machine at harvesttime, when you’re up close to it.

  Then we went walking and saw different things. On the lawn of a big building called the Exchange Building was a sculptured stone bust of Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president of the United States.

  Just as we walked past, Barry, who was behind us, said, “Boys, Abraham Lincoln was a farm boy. When he was your age, he hunted, fished, rode horseback, wrestled, and studied hard. He could shoot very straight with a rifle, and he made that a rule of his life—to be what is called a ‘straight shooter,’ which means he was always honest. In fact, he was called ‘Honest Abe’ by his friends.”

  I really can’t take time to tell you all the things we saw, but it was worth the walk—and also worth the smell, although inside the entrance office of the meat packing plant we were going to see, the air was fresh and clean on account of the office being air-conditioned.

  The meat packing place was interesting enough, but some of it was what Big Jim said was gruesome.

  If you don’t know what that means, you can look it up in a dictionary, which every boy ought to have anyway and ought to save his money and buy, even if he has to do without some candy and gum to buy it.

  11

  We ate dinner in a Swedish restaurant where you can eat all you want, if you want to. You can get up after you’ve had your first plateful and go back with a new, clean plate and eat all over again, which some of us did. I think the name of that kind of a dinner is called “smorgasbord.” Poetry especially thought it was a good idea.

  The Wrigley Building was next. While we were up in it, we looked down at a large parking lot, which looked very small from where we were. The cars away down there looked like toy automobiles.

  “Look!” Dragonfly said, squeezing in between Poetry and me. “They look like a counterful of toy cars,” which they did, and for once Dragonfly’s eyes were right.

  The afternoon flew by too fast, and also that night, and then Sunday morning came, when we all went to a boys’ jail. And there we found out why the police had gone into the mission that night. They were actually after Bob Till, and they’d found him upstairs on the third floor, lying on one of the cots.

  I guess I never saw Little Tom look so sad, because right on the front row, in a roomful of hundreds of boys who hadn’t been trained up in the way they ought to go, sat Bob, looking down and looking very unhappy. His nose, I noticed for the first time, was hooked a little at the end just like his dad’s nose is, and I thought that maybe his soul was just as crooked and that his dad had bent it for him.

  But Little Tom had good stuff in him! He stood up right after Circus had sung his solo and told that big crowd of quiet-faced boys how he became a Christian, and when, and why he was glad for it. (You remember it had happened while we were all on our camping trip up north that summer.) He must have felt very topsy-turvy inside, because he kept swallowing.

  His brother, sitting down there on the front row, had one fist on his right knee and the other on his left. Then he began to swallow too and to blow his nose, which is what a boy does when there are tears trying to get out of his eyes and some of them run down on the inside of his nose instead of on the outside. That’s why nearly all people have to blow their noses when they cry.

  It was when Big Jim was standing up giving the story of his conversion, which means when and how and why he became a Christian, that I realized how different he and Bob were. They were the same size and age, but that was about all.

  Then Poetry, who was sitting beside me, called something to my attention. He leaned over and whispered while Big Jim was talking, “Look! Look at Bob’s fists. They’re all doubled up!”

  They certainly were, and there were two fires in his eyes too. You could see that Bob hated Big Jim and that he wished he could spring right up out of his seat and knock the daylights out of him. You see, Big Jim was the only boy in the world who had ever licked Bob. The only one. Of course, Big Jim’s being a great guy and with clean habits didn’t help matters either.

  Things began to happen fast after that. When the meeting was
over, Barry and Mr. Farmer and the authorities at the jail talked a while, and there was some telephoning going on between Chicago and Sugar Creek. And the next thing we knew, Bob Till was free!

  It happened that quick, although I found out afterward that there had been some telephoning during the night before also. Old Man Paddler had wanted Bob to be let out on parole because it wasn’t good for a boy to be sent to jail for his first offense. They were going to parole him to Little Jim’s parents, and he was going to work for them that fall. Mr. Simondson, our grocer, had decided not to bring charges, so Bob got out of jail.

  The result was that when we left that morning, Bob was walking along with us. He even had on a new shirt, which Barry had bought for him.

  He was giving Big Jim dirty looks, and I kept walking right along beside them on the way to the car, because I didn’t trust Bob. The reason was that once I heard him swear at Big Jim under his breath and say, “Think you’re smart, don’t you? Telling people you saw me breaking into that store.”

  “I did not!” Big Jim said, and his upper lip was trembling.

  “You did too! And as soon as I get a chance, you’ll find out Bob Till won’t stand for anybody telling lies on him.”

  I sat beside Big Jim on the way to church, so I said, “You didn’t tell any lies on Bob Till, did you?”

  “Of course not,” he said. “Nor any truths either. I didn’t tell anybody anything, but he thinks I did because I saw him with my own eyes running out of Mr. Simondson’s store that night.”

  Well, right after church it happened. We boys were all to ride to Santa’s apartment on the El. He hadn’t gone with us to church since he was preaching at his own church in another part of Chicago.

  Zippety-sizzle, roarety-sizzle, bangety-sizzle, our elevated train threaded its way between the tall buildings. We sat side by side on each side of the car, looking at each other and out the windows, listening to the noises, and watching all the kinds of people who were riding with us.