Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  “Stop that! Don’t sneeze like that!” he cried.

  “I didn’t sneeze,” I answered him. “You did!”

  “I did not!” he argued back. “He did!”

  “He who did?” I asked.

  That’s when he used the word in his normal voice, saying, “Snatzerpazooka did!”

  I looked at his dragon fly like eyes, which had a strange expression in them. “Who in the world is Snatzerpazooka?” I exclaimed. I was pumping a tin of water at the time. I tossed the water over the iron kettle into the puddle on the ground there, scaring a flock of yellow and white butterflies out of their butterfly wits and scattering them in about seventeen different directions.

  Dragonfly started to answer, got a mussed-up expression on his face, and let out another noisy, explosive sneeze with Snatzerpazooka mixed up in it.

  His father called then from the car, saying, “Hurry up, Roy! We have to get there before two o’clock!”

  “Just a minute!” Dragonfly yelled toward his father. Then he did the weirdest thing. He looked around in a circle and swung into a fast run out across the grassy yard, dodging this way and that like a boy trying to catch a young rooster his folks are going to have for dinner.

  “Stop, you little rascal!” Dragonfly kept yelling. “Stop, or I’ll leave you here!”

  Then Dragonfly’s father’s deep voice thundered over Mom and Dad’s heads toward his zigzagging son, now near the plum tree. “Roy! Stop running around like a chicken with its head off, or we’ll drive on without you!”

  Dragonfly stopped, and a minute later he was on his way to the gate. He was a little slow getting through it—over it, rather, because he was trying to do what Dad had ordered me never to do. He was climbing up the gate’s cross wires to climb over the gate, when all he would have had to do would have been to lift the latch and walk through.

  The minute Dragonfly was on the ground, he reached back and up with both arms, as if he was reaching for something or somebody, and I heard him say scoldingly, “Come on! Jump! I’ll catch you!”

  “Roy Gilbert!” Dragonfly’s father growled again gruffly. “Hurry up!”

  “I can’t,” Dragonfly whined back. “I can’t get him to get off the gate! He’s stubborn and won’t do what I tell him!” Dragonfly kept on not hurrying and not getting into the car’s open backdoor, which I could see his impatient father was wanting him to hurry up and do.

  A second later Mr. Gilbert’s temper came to life, and he was out of the front seat in a hurry. He scooped up his son in his strong arms, carried him struggling to the car, half-tossed him into the backseat, slammed the door after him, and quickly got into the front seat again beside Dragonfly’s worried-faced mother.

  The car engine ground itself into noisy life. In a minute the Gilbert family would go speeding down the road, stirring up a cloud of white dust that would ride on the afternoon breeze across the field toward Strawberry Hill.

  That’s when Dragonfly let out a yell with tears in it, crying, “Wait! Don’t go yet! He’s still back there on the gate!”

  Next, that little rascal shoved open the car door, swung himself out, scooted to the fence, helped his imaginary playmate off onto the ground, shoved him into the backseat, and climbed in after him.

  What, I thought, on earth!

  As soon as the Gilberts’ car was gone and the lazy cloud of dust was already on its way across the field, I heard Mom say to Dad, “At least our boy isn’t as bad as that! Whatever is wrong with Roy, anyway?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with him,” Dad answered. “He’s just a normal boy who needs a little brother or sister to play with. Not having any, he has created one out of his own lively imagination.”

  Hearing Mom and Dad say that to each other while they were still on the other side of the gate, I broke in with a mischievous grin in my voice, saying, “I don’t have any brothers or sisters, either.”

  That was before my little sister, Charlotte Ann, was born, which you know all about if you’ve read the very first Sugar Creek Gang story there ever was—the one that is called The Swamp Robber.

  I had my right foot on one of the cross wires of the gate as if I was going to climb up and over.

  Dad gave me a half-savage stare through the woven wire and, with a set jaw, exclaimed an order to me, which was, “Don’t you dare! And we have enough trouble keeping you out of mischief! What would we do with another one of you?”

  For some reason my foot slipped off the cross wire, and I was quickly off to the big rope swing under the walnut tree to pump myself into a high back-and-forth swing. I was wishing at the same time that I did have a little brother to play with. I was also wondering what if I made for myself an imaginary playmate? What would he look like, and what would I name him? What a crazy name—Snatzerpazooka!

  And what a lot of crazy experiences we had that summer with Dragonfly himself.

  Dragonfly’s parents worried about their boy for a while—what with his all the time talking to his ridiculous playmate, acting all the time as if there were two of him, having fights and arguments with a person nobody except Dragonfly could see or hear. That boy certainly had a “vivid imagination,” Mom said one day.

  In fact, his parents got to worrying about him so much that they took him to a doctor in the city, a special kind of doctor who understood children’s minds. They found out it was almost the same as what Dad had already told Mom.

  “There’s nothing wrong with him that having a pet or a real-life playmate won’t cure. Snatzerpazooka will just fade out of the picture after your boy starts to school or when he begins normal boy-life activities,” the doctor told them.

  But Snatzerpazooka didn’t fade out. Dragonfly was so used to him and had so much fun playing with his imaginary playmate that even after he began going to school, and after the Sugar Creek Gang was started, he still hung onto him.

  Many a time when we were down along the creek somewhere or up at the abandoned cemetery having a gang meeting and something important was brought to a vote, Dragonfly would make us let Snatzerpazooka vote, too.

  Poetry worked harder than the rest of us trying to help Dragonfly forget his imaginary playmate. He refused to call him Snatzerpazooka but gave him the name Shadow instead. The two had an honest-to-goodness fight about it one day down at the spring. We had all finished getting down on our knees and drinking out of the reservoir the way cows do—that is, all of us had our drink except Dragonfly.

  He stood back near the board fence, waiting till we were through. Poetry, being in a mischievous mood, and still on his hands and knees at the reservoir, looked back toward Dragonfly and said, “Here, Shadow, come get your drink!” He then went through the motions of helping Dragonfly’s imaginary playmate onto his hands and knees, bent his head forward and down to the surface of the water, saying, “You’re a pretty dumb little bunny. Don’t you know how to drink like a cow? You look like one! Get your head down!”

  Then Poetry gave Shadow’s imaginary head a shove clear down under the water, his own right hand going under with it.

  In seconds, Dragonfly was like a young tiger. He leaped forward and down onto Poetry’s back and started whamming him with both fists, demanding, “You stop dunking him!”

  Poetry stopped all right. He was bowled over by Dragonfly’s flying attack and a split second later was on his stomach in the almost icy water. He came up sputtering and spitting water. Reaching behind him, he caught Snatzerpazooka’s live playmate by both his slender arms and ducked his head under as far as he had Snatzerpazooka’s imaginary head.

  Big Jim came to the rescue of both of them by stopping the fight and saying, “Come on, Snatzerpazooka! You come on up into the sunlight with me and get dried out. You’ll catch your death of cold.” With that he went through the motions of picking up the imaginary little boy and carrying him up the incline. Dragonfly himself hurried along after them.

  By the time I got there, our spindle-legged pal was as far as the stump we later named the Black W
idow Stump and on his way toward home. He had his right hand out behind him as though he was leading somebody, and I heard him say, “Come on, pal! Those roughnecks don’t know how to treat a gentleman!”

  No sooner had Dragonfly and his just-dunked imaginary playmate disappeared over the rim of the hill than Poetry started quoting one of the many poems he had memorized. It was one most of us knew by heart ourselves. It was by Robert Louis Stevenson, and in Poetry’s squawky, ducklike voice it sounded almost funny:

  “I have a little shadow that goes in and

  out with me,

  And what can be the use of him is

  more than I can see.

  He is so very, very like me from the

  heels up to the head,

  And I see him jump before me, when I

  jump into my bed.”

  Poetry was yelling the poem as loud as he could, so that Dragonfly could hear it. He started on the second verse but got interrupted by Dragonfly sneezing in a long-tailed, extraloud voice and exclaiming, “Snatzerpazooka!”

  Poetry yelled back a mimicking sneeze and cried, “Snatzerpashadow!”

  Because we all liked Dragonfly a lot, we decided at a special meeting to pretend along with him, letting him take Snatzerpazooka along with us whenever he wanted to, waiting for the imaginary little rascal when we had to, helping him over the fences, even carrying him when Dragonfly said he was too tired to walk.

  Dragonfly didn’t cause us much trouble that first summer. The only thing was, Snatzerpazooka began to change a little. From being a helpless, innocent little fellow that had to be carried or helped over fences, he began to get ornery. Sometimes we’d hear Dragonfly quarreling with him and calling him names.

  One summer day when I was down along the bayou not far from the Black Widow Stump, I felt a sneeze coming on. I twisted my face into a Dragonflylike tailspin and burst out with an explosive “Snatzerpazooka!” loud enough to be heard all the way to the clump of evergreens at the edge of the bayou.

  Poetry was with me at the time, and being in a mischievous mood he mimicked me with a sneeze just like mine, which in his squawky voice sounded like a guinea hen with a bad cold. His sneeze, in the middle of which he cried, “Snatzerpashadow!” instead of “Snatzerpazooka!” hadn’t any sooner exploded out across the bayou than there was a saucy yell from behind the evergreens crying, “You stop that! There isn’t any Snatzerpazooka!”

  Then, from behind those evergreens shot a spindle-legged, pop-eyed boy. A brown-and-tan puppy with a crank-handle tail leaped along beside him.

  That was when we found out there wasn’t any Snatzerpazooka anymore—or wasn’t supposed to be, anyway.

  Dragonfly was both mad and glad: mad at us for sneezing the way we had, and happy all over because his parents had gotten him a dog playmate. He told us how much the dog cost and what a good trailer he was.

  “Looks like a bloodhound,” Poetry said. “Here, Red, come here and let me cheer you up a little!”

  He was one of the saddest-faced dogs I’d ever seen. His hair was smooth but seemed very loose, as if he had three times as much as he needed, or as if his mother had made him a hair coat that was a lot too big for him. His skin was extrawrinkled on the forehead, and his ears were long and floppy.

  “He is a bloodhound,” Dragonfly boasted. “He’s half bloodhound and half beagle. That’s how come it was so easy to find you guys. I put him on your trail, and he led me straight to you. See here?”

  Dragonfly held out to me my old straw hat, which that very morning I’d been wearing around the house and barn and had left on the ground under the plum tree.

  “How come he didn’t bawl on the trail?” Poetry asked.

  We’d all hunted at night with Circus’s dad’s hounds, and when they were trailing, there was plenty of dog noise.

  Dragonfly’s proud answer was “He’s going to be a still trailer.”

  That was hard to believe, yet there was my old straw hat, and here was Dragonfly with his hound pup, which right that minute was sniffing at me and wagging his crank-handle tail as much as to say, “Here’s your criminal! He smells just like his hat! Now what do you want me to do?”

  You never saw such a happy little guy as Dragonfly over his droopy-faced hound. The doctor had been right. Dragonfly needed a real-life playmate—a human being or a pet, he had said.

  “How do you like that?” Poetry said to me one day a little later. “Having us for playmates wasn’t enough. He had to have a floppy-eared, droopy-faced, crank-tailed, loose-skinned half bloodhound!”

  Dad explained it this way: “He could be with you boys only part of the time. He needed a playmate all the time for a while—at home as well as at school and at play. He’ll be all right from now on. You just wait and see.”

  We did wait and see. But Dad was wrong, as wrong as he had ever been in his life. Just how wrong, I’ll tell you in the next chapter.

  2

  For quite a while we didn’t hear any more of Snatzerpazooka, Dragonfly’s ornery little shadow, except for when one of us would sneeze. Now and then we’d cry out the way Dragonfly used to do, exclaiming, “Snatzerpazooka!” just for fun.

  We stopped doing even that when we woke up to the fact that it really hurt the little guy to be teased about what a dumb bunny he used to be.

  “Snatzerpazooka’s dead!” he told Poetry and me one day. “He died yesterday, and Redskin and I buried him down by the mouth of the cave.” Redskin was the name Dragonfly had finally settled on for his hound.

  Poetry looked at me and I at him, and he said under his breath, “He’s still imagining things!”

  “I am not!” Dragonfly, who heard him, exclaimed. “Come on, and I’ll show you!”

  He did show us. Under the hollow sycamore tree just off the path that leads into the swamp, there was a small oblong mound of new earth, the kind you see in cemeteries after somebody has just been buried. Erected at one end was a slab of wood and on it some crudely lettered words:

  SNATZERPAZOOKA GILBERT

  Horse Thief. Died by Hanging.

  There wasn’t room on the slab for any other words. I stood looking down at the grave and at the marker, and there was the strangest feeling in my heart. It almost seemed maybe a real person was buried there. A lump came into my throat and almost choked me. I could hardly see the grave or the marker for the tears that all of a sudden were in my eyes.

  I looked into Dragonfly’s own red-rimmed eyes, and there were tears there too. He swallowed hard a few times and sniffled a little. Also, I saw his face start into its usual tailspin and look as wrinkled on the forehead as his dog’s, and I knew he was going to sneeze.

  That was when I learned for sure that in Dragonfly’s mind his imaginary playmate was really dead, because his long-tailed sneeze came out like anybody’s ordinary “Ker-choo!”

  That summer passed, and the mound of earth settled until it was level with the other soil around it. Autumn leaves fell on it, and winter snow covered it. The only thing left was the wooden marker. Then one day when the gang was trying to start a fire at the mouth of the cave, Dragonfly brought the marker from the grave and, with his Scout hatchet, split it into kindling wood, and we burned it.

  And that was the end of Snatzerpazooka until the summer this story started.

  A lot of other things started that summer, too. One of them was a lot of new trouble the gang had with a boy who had moved into the neighborhood. You’ve probably read about him in some of the other Sugar Creek stories. But just in case you haven’t, his name was Shorty Long. I’d had my very first rough-and-tumble fight with him on a snowy day in the book called Palm Tree Manhunt and the last one in the summer in The Blue Cow.

  Shorty Long was one of the fiercest fighters I had ever had to lick. He was also the worst one that had ever licked me a few times.

  Shorty was the kind of boy who liked to have a playmate he could boss around, or he wasn’t happy. Dragonfly had been his first choice, and he had ruled that allergic-nosed l
ittle guy like a wicked king ruling a slave. For a while we almost lost Dragonfly in the blue cow story, because at first Dragonfly liked Shorty Long and enjoyed being ordered around by him.

  Dragonfly was the kind of boy that had to have a close friend, too. Maybe that was the reason he had used his imagination to create his make-believe playmate, Snatzerpazooka.

  As soon as Dragonfly was free from the bully, though, he had come back to us, and the gang was happy again. All of us got together as often as we could.

  Shorty Long’s folks went away nearly every winter to Florida or to some other warm place, so it was mostly in the summer that he was our biggest problem.

  The only other boys that had caused the gang trouble were Bob and Tom Till, who lived across the creek. Bob was also the bully type of boy and was always lording it over his red-haired, freckle-faced little brother.

  Tom, as you may remember, was almost a member of the gang and played with us a lot. Their father, old hook-nosed John Till, was one of the worst men in the county and spent about half his time in jail and the other half out. He never took the boys to Sunday school or to church, which was maybe one reason his boys were like ragweed instead of sweet clover.

  Well, the summer this story started, Shorty Long was just back with his folks from Arizona where they’d spent the winter. Right away Shorty picked out a boy in the neighborhood to chum around with. Not being able to rule any of the gang, he managed to get Tom Till instead.

  Tom was a poor boy and did not have much money to spend, and Shorty’s folks were rich enough to go to a warm climate every winter, so Shorty bribed Tom by giving him spending money for things Tom couldn’t afford—things such as a new Scout knife, a pair of field glasses, even a cook kit with aluminum utensils. All the parts of the cook kit nested and locked together and didn’t rattle when you carried them in their khaki carrying case.

  Also, they pitched Shorty’s tent on the other side of the creek, down below the Sugar Creek bridge under the tall cottonwood. It was straight across from the mouth of the branch on our side.