“Root,” she called. He turned around and their eyes met. “We have to stop. He’s hungry and cold and you’re falling asleep at the reins.”
“Mataki, mataki-lo.”
“Please—we need rest, too, and so do the raccoons.”
Root knew she was right. In the last mile, the coons had begun to falter. Though reluctant to stop, he found a ravine where he hoped it would be safe to rest for a few hours.
Halfway down the slope, Root and Runnel dug a cave in the snow big enough to enclose the sled and raccoons, then dusted it with fox dander to cover their scent. They made a nest amid the animals’ warm fur and snuggled there with Shawn, who quickly fell asleep. After the tumult of the day, the quiet of the woods wrapped them in a kind embrace. The storm had subsided, and through a small opening at the front of their shelter, they could see the Big Dipper. They shared a smile, each knowing the other was thinking about the night of Shawn’s birth.
But their remembrance was broken by the telltale crush of snow. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. Footsteps. Big foot-steps. Silently they began to gather their belongings and harness the coons. With hearts pounding, they nudged Shawn, still half asleep, onto the sled. Now they could smell the Trogg’s stench and hear the muffled whimpering of other Jumpers, captive in its pouch.
When Root peeked through the opening, the Trogg came into view, thrashing wildly and yanking young birches from their roots, its tail sniffing. The noises scared Shawn, and he called out for Runnel. Shrieking, the Trogg spun around and raged toward their shelter. Root ripped open the hornets’ nest and launched a colony of angry hornets out the opening. They swarmed into the face of the charging giant, stinging it again and again and again. The Trogg swatted the air, yowling in angry confusion.
Bursting out of their snowy shelter, Root steered the sled right between the Trogg’s legs and sped down the slope. The hornets’ fury couldn’t last in the bitter cold. One by one, they fell out of the air and perished in the snow. The Trogg, its face swollen with red welts, charged after the sled. With pounding strides, the behemoth caught them from behind and yanked the sled into the air, tumbling Root and Runnel into the snow and dangling the helpless raccoons from their harness. The Trogg plucked Shawn out and prodded him with a scaly finger and sniffed him with its disgusting tail, mucus dripping from the nostril. The tiny human wailed.
Root and Runnel jumped onto the behemoth’s hairy leg, but the Trogg shook them off like bugs. Desperate, Root sped up a birch tree to a branch eye level with the beast. The Trogg dangled Shawn over its mouth, ready to eat him in one gruesome bite, when Root drew a nugget of sparkling quartz from a pouch and showed it to the beast, then made the stone disappear. The Trogg hesitated, distracted by the Jumper’s sleight of hand. Out of the corner of his eye, Root spotted a ten-pronged deer charging down through the woods behind the Trogg. Buying time, he revealed the quartz again, then made it vanish as the brave animal lowered his head and drove his antlers into the behemoth’s leg. Howling in pain, the Trogg dropped the boy into the snow and lunged at the deer. The animal stamped backward, snorting, readying another charge, with Buck riding high on his neck. Buck drew the cattail plunger from its quiver and fired a torrent of cold water. The geyser struck the Trogg in the neck, momentarily stunning it.
While Buck sparred with the Trogg, Runnel and Root dug Shawn out of the snow and escaped on their sled toward a frozen lake at the bottom of the ravine. Once they were away, Buck began his retreat, but the vengeful Trogg sent him catapulting through the trees with a vicious swat of its tail. The deer bounded away as the screeching Trogg careened after the sled, ripping trees and bushes out of the ground as it went.
Root forced the coons onto the icy lake, where they slipped and slid, their paws barely catching hold. Knowing that Troggs couldn’t swim, Runnel scattered a pouch of rock salt and sulfur dust off the back of the sled. As soon as the beast stepped onto the patch of softened ice, it crashed into the water. The Trogg bellowed in panic, flailing and kicking and furiously breaking ice all the way back to shore. Grunting and heaving, it crawled onto the snow. Two Puddlejumpers wriggled out of its pouch, the bristles softened by water, and fled into the woods. The prehensile tail snatched the third Jumper just before he reached the trees.
On the other side of the lake, Root followed a deer trail up a steep gorge into the woods. When the sled reached the plateau, gathering clouds obscured the stars and snow began to fall. Root and Runnel could hear Buck’s mournful cry in the distance. He was hurt, but they couldn’t go back to help him.
In a hollow, two ridges away, Runnel stripped off Shawn’s wet clothes, then bundled the shivering boy in the warm fleece. The storm showed no sign of letting up. Shawn drank the last of Pav’s tea while Root fed the coons some honeycomb. Before departing, the Puddlejumpers brushed the snow to make it appear that no one had ever been there. They wondered what had happened to Cully and Chop. They hoped they could make it on their own.
Root and Runnel were farther from their den than they’d ever been, and the journey had barely begun.
Root and Runnel sledded through the night in a terrible blizzard. When the raccoons could no longer bear the weight of their prized load, Root was forced to abandon most of their supplies. Even with the Jumpers trudging alongside, the coons still struggled. They were beyond exhaustion.
On a treeless plain, icy and bare, the raccoons finally collapsed. Refusing to quit, Root and Runnel grabbed the coons by their halters and pulled with all their might. Step by step, they inched the sled through the drifting snow until the runners got caught in an icy trough. Root yanked on their harness and Runnel pushed from behind, but the valiant coons couldn’t budge the sled.
Out of the dark, a rising stench and a coarse breathing gripped Root’s spine. Runnel put her arms protectively around Shawn. They squinted into the raging snow and what they saw ended their last hope of escape. Four monstrous silhouettes, their tails arched overhead like scorpions ready to strike, emerged from the trees onto the frozen plain.
Suddenly a mechanical drone and an eerie light penetrated the storm. Root, Runnel, and the Troggs all turned to look into the glare of an enormous eighteen-wheeler as it blasted out of the darkness like a ghostly phantom, its air horn blaring. With snow flying off its locked wheels, the truck skidded along the icy surface until it stopped just inches from the sled.
The cab door, sporting the moniker Bleacher Bum, creaked open. A black man in his early fifties, wearing a Chicago Cubs baseball jacket and cap, descended from the cab. Joe Beason was a bear of a man with a day’s worth of stubble on a round face. He waded through the snow to the front of his rig. When he crossed through the headlight beams, he thought maybe his mind was playing tricks. There in front of him were four raccoons harnessed to a small sled buried in a snowdrift in the middle of the Interstate. No matter how hard he tried to explain it to himself, it just didn’t make any sense. And as much as he wanted to ignore the muffled cries coming from the bundle on the sled, he knew that he couldn’t. He reached down and tentatively opened the wool covering. It was a boy—wide-eyed, trembling, and completely naked but for something draped around his neck that looked like a crystal in the shape of an acorn. “Hell’s bells,” he mumbled, crossing himself. “Now I’ve seen everything.”
A shrill hoot pierced the night.
Beason felt the hair on his neck rise. He peered into the swirling snow, then shouted, “Hello? Anybody there?”
An unearthly bellow answered.
He buried his nose in his jacket sleeve. There was a stink he’d never smelled before and hoped he’d never smell again. Cussing under his breath, he opened his jackknife to cut the raccoons free from their harness, then hoisted the boy into the air. Shawn kicked and screamed with all his might.
“Settle down now, I got you,” the trucker assured, tucking him inside his jacket. The raccoons crawled away as he hustled back to his rig. Whatever was out there, he had no intention of making its acquaintance.
Beason pin
ned the wild child on the seat beside him, revved the engine, and eased the truck into gear. The gargantuan tires crushed the sled as the eighteen-wheeler plowed onward down the Interstate.
The Troggs lurched onto the pavement, raging at the disappearing taillights. At the edge of the highway, beneath a road sign, NEXT EXIT, CIRCLE, Root and Runnel burrowed deep into the snow. They trembled in each other’s arms, devastated.
The Puddlejumpers had lost their precious Rainmaker.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Trouble Behind, Trouble Ahead
FORGING THROUGH the blizzard, Joe Beason shifted his gaze from the road to the urchin beside him babbling some crazy gibberish he couldn’t understand. Unnerved, he tugged his Cubs cap a little tighter and wondered what he’d gotten himself into. He picked up his radio mic to tell somebody, anybody, what had happened. All he got was static. Then he remembered. It was Christmas Eve and there wasn’t another truck on the road.
“Hooty-hoo!” cried Shawn, lunging for the door, but Beason yanked him back by the foot and pasted him against the seat with his big hand. “You stay right where you are, mister,” he warned. “I got enough problems without you taking a flyer.”
His passenger’s only response was to jabber indignantly. Still spooked, Beason furrowed his brow. “What language are you talkin’, boy?” He lifted his cap to scratch his bald head as he pondered the hair bracelet on the boy’s wrist. The kid smelled strange. It wasn’t a bad smell, just different. It was as if somebody had bottled the great outdoors and sprayed it on him like cologne.
The storm showed no sign of letting up. Beason was tired and struggled to make sense of what was happening. He’d been driving for close to eighteen hours and was determined to reach Chicago for Christmas. He’d been invited to his sister’s place for dinner, but, more than that, he had ideas about breakfast at the Kosmikon, a little diner on Martin Luther King Boulevard that he especially enjoyed. The pancakes and grits weren’t on his new diet, but Shona, the pretty waitress who poured his coffee, always welcomed him with an especially warm smile. He wished he were looking at that smile right now, because that would mean all of this would be over.
Beason kept one hand on the wheel and the other on the crazy little kid, who was working himself into a full-blown tantrum. He reached across and buckled him into the seat belt. It was a loose fit, but it was better than nothing.
The cab interior was filled with Cubs memorabilia, including baseball cards pasted on the dashboard and ceiling. Joe Beason had named his truck Bleacher Bum because he was a dyed-in-the-wool Chicago Cubs fan. For him, there was nothing better than to see a game at Wrigley. If he was working, he loved listening to the game on the radio. But it was winter, he was a long way from Chicago, and the wild child was still bawling his eyes out.
As Beason downshifted on a tight curve, one of his baseball cards popped unglued from the ceiling and fluttered end over end to land smack-dab on the boy’s lap. To Beason’s great surprise, the kid went quiet for the first time. Being somewhat of a superstitious man, he took a long look at the familiar face on the card, then at the boy studying it in fascination.
“That’s right—he’s a man to live up to, and you can start right about now,” declared Beason.
With one hand clutching the card and the other on the Crystal Acorn draped around his neck, Shawn blurted, “Kadudee, matadie ra!”
Joe Beason just shivered. “Listen up, Ernie Banks—you sit right smart in that seat and stop talkin’ crazy. And don’t be pointin’ that rock at me neither.”
It was still dark on a bitter cold Christmas morning, in lightly falling snow, as the eighteen-wheeler navigated past a silent Wrigley Field. Joe Beason thought about going to the authorities, but the more he thought about it, the less he liked the idea. Who wants to spend Christmas explaining a story to the police they probably won’t believe anyway? The best thing is to leave the boy with people who know what to do. Everybody will be better off in the long run. He turned his big semi onto a narrow street adorned with Christmas decorations.
The truck wheezed to a halt in front of an undecorated six-story tenement. The word ORPHANAGE was chiseled in concrete above the door. He knew the place because he’d spent the first seven years of his life there. Beason descended from the cab with the kid, finally asleep, swaddled in his Cubs jacket. He laid the bundle on the icy stoop, rang the bell, then hurried back to his truck.
Little Ernie would never know how he got there. No one would. Not even Mrs. Annie McGinty, the stern-faced matron of the Lakeside Home for Boys, who was up early that morning getting ready for Christmas. Mrs. McGinty was five feet tall, with thick arms and legs. Her red hair was coiffed with obsessive neatness and she always kept her nails well manicured. She had a ruddy complexion and her face turned bright red when she got mad, which was often. She was thirty-eight years old, but the worry lines etched around her eyes and her constant frown made her look much older.
Mrs. McGinty waddled down the hall and opened the door just as the big semi disappeared in the swirling snow. She was surprised to find a bundled Cubs jacket on her stoop and even more surprised by what she found inside. In a tart Irish brogue, she muttered, “And on Christmas morn, what a shame. As if I didn’t have enough trouble already.”
The child was asleep and stark naked except for a strange necklace around his neck and a filthy hair bracelet on his wrist. He was clutching an Ernie Banks baseball card in one hand and a scribbled note in the other. The note read as follows:
To Whom It May Concern, this is Mr. Ernie Banks.
Please give this little Cub a good home.
Yours truly,
A concerned Bleacher Bum
Mrs. McGinty looked in both directions before fingering the ice-blue crystal hanging from the boy’s neck on a dirty piece of twine. It was a perfect replica of an acorn and the most unusual piece of jewelry she’d ever seen. She held it to one eye and squinted through the glass like a greedy jeweler checking stolen goods. Her view of the naked child multiplied as the image fractured into a hundred Ernie Bankses. She leaned close to inspect his bracelet. “One thing’s for sure—you won’t be bringin’ this disgusting thing into my house.” She ripped it off his wrist and threw it in the gutter.
Unannounced, a stream of warm pee geysered up to squirt her in the face. McGinty recoiled in horror. Startled awake, Ernie Banks recoiled, too, and shouted something that sounded like “Hooty-hoooooo!”
From that moment on, Ernie and Mrs. McGinty began what would become a very difficult association.
Nine Years Later…
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A Merry Little Christmas
BEFORE HER ALARM clock could ring, Mrs. Annie McGinty woke in her tidy room on the first floor of the Lakeside Home for Boys. With a stretch and a yawn, she got up and got started. She took off her flannel nightgown and put on her best outfit, a red business suit with white buttons and a bow on the side. Today was Christmas, the day she enjoyed more than any other, and this year she was ahead of schedule. The night before, the Salvation Army had delivered fifty wrapped presents and stowed them under the donated fir tree in the big front room on the second floor.
When Mrs. McGinty climbed to the second landing, she saw that the Christmas tree was lit, which she always unplugged just before going to bed. She also noticed that someone had pilfered Santa’s cookies and drunk his milk. Not someone, she thought. It was Ernie Banks and none other. He craved milk like no other boy she’d ever met. “I swear that boy will be the death of me,” she grunted, then squatted to pull the plug on the Christmas tree. Electricity was too expensive to waste, and Lakeside ran on a strict budget.
Mrs. McGinty glanced out the window. It was snowing and the city was already blanketed in white. She sighed, remembering it had been snowing like this the morning she’d found the boy abandoned on her doorstep. She silently cursed and wondered how her life might have been different if only she’d been able to find a home for Ernie Banks.
Mrs. McGint
y climbed the back stairway to the third-floor kitchen, where she put a kettle on the stove. This was the one peaceful moment of her day. While she waited for the water to heat, her mind wandered back to the Lauers, the first family who took him home. Fred and Molly had been happily married for three years but unable to have children of their own. Beaming with pride, they left with Ernie walking hand in hand between them. Three weeks later, they returned with frayed nerves and sunken eyes, embarrassed to be returning him. But return him they did.
The problem, they said, was Ernie’s bizarre behavior, which included his nonstop gibberish that no one could decipher. He also had a very unnerving tendency to hoot when least expected, and they practically jumped out of their shoes every time he did it. Even worse, he cried morning, noon, and night. He cried so much they couldn’t get any sleep. But it was more than crying. Molly said it sounded like something not of this earth.
The Lakeside doctor examined him but couldn’t find anything wrong, though he did remark on the strange spiral birthmark on the bottom of his foot.
As Mrs. McGinty sipped her morning coffee, she cringed at the memory of those early years. Ernie had refused to speak English and wouldn’t eat anything that was packaged or canned. When she strapped him into his chair at mealtime, it was always a battle. He’d fling food in every direction, all the while protesting in high-volume mumbo-jumbo. To combat his ranting, she would turn her portable TV up loud and go about the daily chore of pulling bits and pieces of food out of her hair and scraping breakfast, lunch, and dinner off the wall, floor, and ceiling. Sometimes it got so bad that she just left him strapped in his chair and escaped to her room to eat by herself. Frankly, Ernie scared her.
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