Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 1-6

by Paul Hutchens

  It surely was fun. As soon as we got over the first thrill, we began to look down toward where the people of the earth lived and to mention different things we could see.

  “We’re going right straight toward Sugar Creek,” I heard Circus say.

  I looked over at him, and he had on his monkey face. He’d rather be up high in the air than any place else, that maybe being the reason he was always climbing a tree or a barn or something. And maybe that was why, when he practiced the songs he was going to sing in the Chicago church and over the radio, he’d nearly always climbed up in a tree to do it.

  I sat there, feeling the safety belt across my stomach, just above my lap, looking around for a minute. Up in the front, I saw the little chrome-colored door, which was closed and on the other side of which, I knew, were two expert pilots who had probably received basic instruction in the United States Army or maybe in the Navy or Marine Corps. I knew that they were in good health, each one having to pass a physical examination every six months, like all pilots who drive planes with passengers in them.

  I knew that the copilot could run the plane just as well as the pilot could, because he’d had the same training, and if anything should happen to the pilot, he could fly it himself. They were sitting side by side like two people in the front seat of a car. I knew that because I’d seen them, just before they had shut the door.

  It didn’t take many jiffies before we were riding over the hills above Sugar Creek. Yet it seemed we weren’t even moving, we were so high. The hills looked like little anthills.

  “Look!” Dragonfly exclaimed. “There’s Old Man Paddler’s cabin!”

  It wasn’t. It was the big creamery where my dad sold our cream and was ten times as big as Old Man Paddler’s house with its clapboard roof.

  “And there’s Sugar Creek itself,” Tom Till said.

  It was, all right, though it looked like a little, twisted, crooked silver thread. I tried to see the swimming hole but couldn’t. I did see Bumblebee Hill though, where we’d licked the stuffing out of that gang of rough boys the summer before.

  In another second, it seemed—because we were moving at 400 miles an hour—we were over our town.

  Dragonfly, as he nearly always does, saw something that wasn’t what he thought it was. “See there!” he exclaimed.

  I guess we nearly all forgot there were other passengers in the plane, even though we were being very quiet for a bunch of ordinarily noisy boys.

  “What?” Poetry said.

  “There’s my mother down there waving one of Dad’s big colored handkerchiefs at me.”

  “You’re crazy,” Poetry said. “That’s the American flag on the top of the flagpole,” which most of us agreed it was.

  And then Sugar Creek was gone, and we were on our way to Chicago.

  Each one of us, I noticed, had an empty sort of pint-size ice cream container right beside his seat. Dragonfly hadn’t noticed his yet, and when he did, he asked what it was for.

  Poetry explained by saying, “That’s where you put your breakfast in case for any reason you decide you don’t want it any longer.”

  You should have seen Dragonfly’s face. Looking at him made me feel like he looked, and I could tell that he was beginning to be tired of his breakfast already.

  Maybe everything would have been all right if Poetry hadn’t been reminded of a story about a little boy who went to a Sunday school picnic and ate too much ice cream. Anyway, Poetry told the story.

  A boy looked very sad after eating maybe seven double-dip ice cream cones.

  “What’s the matter?” his teacher asked him. “Didn’t you get all you wanted?”

  And the little fellow looked sadder still, held his stomach, and said, “I-I-I don’t w-want all I g-got.”

  I could see that didn’t help Dragonfly any. He began to look just a little pale, and I knew pretty soon he might have what is sometimes called “altitude sickness,” which people on trains or in cars can get—and once in a while in an airplane—that being the reason they have empty ice cream containers beside everybody.

  Even at that, Dragonfly might not have had any trouble if the plane hadn’t had to make a quick climb to a higher altitude. I remembered afterward that there had been a lot of static in the control room back at the airport, which meant that not too far away there was probably an electrical storm.

  You remember there had been only scattered clouds in the sky when we started. They were what is called cumulus clouds, the kind that look like the big white bundles of wool my dad gets from our sheep when we shear them in the spring. Some of them were below us and some above us, which meant we were flying about four thousand feet high. Barry Boyland had told us that, having studied clouds and knowing them the way our gang knew different kinds of shells.

  No sooner had Poetry finished his story about the Sunday school boy who didn’t want all the ice cream he’d had, than the pretty stewardess in the brown suit came walking up the green-rugged aisle to tell us to fasten our safety belts again, or to help us, whichever we needed.

  Very quietly she announced in her very businesslike but kind voice, “We’re going to climb several thousand feet to get above the storm.”

  What storm? I thought. I couldn’t see anything but the bluest blue sky and the whitest white clouds. Of course, I couldn’t see straight ahead of us as the pilots could, who had windows in front of them and all around them except for straight behind.

  Barry explained it to us, while we were getting our belts fastened again and most of us were beginning to hold onto our chair arms.

  He said, “The cold air of a storm is probably coming right straight toward us in a head-on collision against the warm air we’ve been flying in. That’ll form what is called a ‘storm collar,’ and there will be a fierce updraft that will force those beautiful cumulus clouds upward and pack them together as tight as sardines in a can. They’ll be forced into what is called a ‘thunderhead.’ The pilots have probably been warned from a ground station somewhere, and they are going to climb over the thunderhead.”

  I wasn’t scared, for Barry explained it quietly and acted as if it wouldn’t be any more than climbing one of the hills of Sugar Creek in a car. Then he yawned and stretched and started to read a magazine he had with him, which was a Christian magazine. Nearly all our parents were subscribers to it—except Dragonfly’s—being good readers especially of that kind of literature.

  Already I could tell we were beginning to climb rather fast, for my ears began to pound and to feel crazy. I chewed my gum faster and swallowed and swallowed and swallowed. But my ears kept on feeling as if there was a dwarf in each one, pounding with a rubber mallet and trying to get the doors open so he could get out—or else trying to get in. I couldn’t tell which.

  Then I looked at Dragonfly. He was very pale and was leaning over, looking pitifully at the still-empty ice cream container, which he already held in his right hand.

  5

  There isn’t any reason I should take time to tell what happened to Dragonfly after that, and if I don’t hurry up, I won’t get to tell you what happened in Chicago. There was a storm, though, right after Dragonfly lost his breakfast.

  We all thought he’d be all right after that, but he wasn’t. He kept staying pale, and he was so dizzy he couldn’t sit up, which is the same as having vertigo—a kind of swimming of the head—because we were so high.

  I guess we had actually climbed to more than 20,000 feet, and that’s pretty high, especially if you have to get there quick, which we did.

  I was so busy myself, chewing gum and swallowing, that I hardly noticed the stewardess coming to Dragonfly with a portable oxygen apparatus. It had something that could be put on over his nose like a gas mask they use in wars, and he could breathe in all the extra oxygen he needed. He actually acted as if he had asthma. I’d seen my city cousin have it once, and it isn’t fun to look at. He was actually blue in the face for a while.

  But it didn’t take us long to get over the
thunderhead and down lower again, and that, along with the oxygen Dragonfly was getting artificially, tided him over, and he was all right again.

  The funny thing was, though, after we got down lower and were cruising along, he looked around and said, “What you all looking at me so funny-like for?” which is the way people sometimes are when they’ve had to climb too high too fast—they can’t remember much of anything about what happened while they were up there.

  Barry explained it to him, and Dragonfly didn’t even believe it.

  “You lost your breakfast,” Poetry squawked to him.

  “I did not,” he said, half angry. He held up an empty ice cream container to prove it, which was a new one the stewardess had brought.

  Riding along in the clear blue sunlight, far above the clouds, had been a strange experience. I’d looked out the window during the storm, and there it was, away down below us, with big, black, billowing clouds, made sort of whitish too, because the sun was shining on them.

  You could see lightning flashes and even hear thunder roaring. You couldn’t see any of the earth at all, nothing but clouds and clouds and clouds, all moving and acting the way they do in any storm, except that I was looking down at them instead of up. They looked the way Sugar Creek does in the spring when it’s at high flood and is spread all over the countryside, waves boiling and churning and very angry.

  At last we were over Chicago, and the plane was coming down onto the big airfield there. It was a sight to see so many planes all around everywhere, with big mail trucks and things and a terminal ten times as big as the one we’d started from.

  Pretty soon we were all walking, one at a time, down the little portable stairway and through the gate and into the terminal, where there were a big waiting room and a restaurant.

  “I’m hungry,” Dragonfly said the very first thing.

  People were everywhere all around us, some sitting on the waiting benches, others standing and talking, and many of them in the restaurant eating.

  “I’m terribly hungry,” Dragonfly said.

  And I said, “Which proves that you lost your breakfast up there in the sky.”

  He glared at me and denied it again, and I knew there wasn’t any use to try to convince him.

  Then, all of a sudden, we saw Santa Claus coming toward us. He was a big, round man with a big, round face and a big smile and a laugh that made everybody else want to laugh too.

  Santa Claus, you know, is the name we’d given the jolly man we’d met up north on our camping trip, the one who’d invited Circus to come to Chicago to sing in his church and over a radio program that his church has.

  Of course, none of the gang believed there was a real Santa Claus, because our parents didn’t believe in telling us there was when there wasn’t, and isn’t, and never was. Christmas is the time to celebrate the time when the One who made the world came down to live here for thirty-three years, and He became a little baby to begin with.

  Soon some of us were in Santa’s big car, and the rest of us were in a yellow-and-black taxicab, and we were all whirling along very fast through the city. It seemed even faster than being in the plane, because we were meeting other cars that were going just as fast in the other direction—and in almost every other direction—at the same time.

  And then, for the first time in my life, I saw what is called an elevated train, which actually runs along on a track away up above the street. It didn’t seem to have any engine to pull it but was run by electricity, and it twisted its way around above the streets and cut across corners and in between buildings, some of which were four times as high as the tallest trees along Sugar Creek.

  The elevated, or El, which they called it for short, had sometimes seven or eight or even more long cars. It reminded me of my mom pushing a big needle in and out of a pair of Dad’s socks that needed darning at the heels. Except that the El was like a giant needle with joints, some of which were bent one way and some the other, and all at the same time, threading its way between the different-sized buildings and not bumping into any of them.

  Well, Dragonfly wasn’t the only one of us who was hungry. The first thing Santa and Barry did was to take us all to a place called The Southern Tea Shop, which is in a very old building that was built by a man named Julian Ramsey. He used to be mayor of Chicago but is dead now. He had built the house right after the famous Chicago fire burned down his other one.

  That big fire burned almost all the rest of the city at the same time. The fire had actually been started by a cow kicking over an old-fashioned lantern in a barn. When I heard that, I decided to be more careful not to let our old brindle cow do something like that to our lantern at home.

  They didn’t seem to have any barns in Chicago, though, and certainly not any cows. People there got their milk out of bottles, which grew on their front porch steps every morning. Of course they didn’t actually, but anybody who could believe in Santa Claus could believe that too.

  Well, there we were in the tea shop, all sitting around neat little tables. Over in a corner near a big window, standing on a radiator, I think it was, was a bright, funny-looking brass thing that I knew my mom would like to see, because she was always interested in what is called “antiques.” We found out it was an old Russian teakettle, which had a place for burning charcoal to get the water hot. Of course, nobody used it anymore.

  After waiting far too long for Dragonfly to wait any longer, our dinner was carried in. Mmmm! Southern fried chicken and hot biscuits, all we could eat! A waitress wearing a white apron and white cap kept going from table to table, bringing more biscuits or water or whatever people wanted.

  You can believe me that I was glad my parents had made me read a book on etiquette, which tells how to eat with good manners. Even though I didn’t always remember to have 100 percent good manners at our table at home, I would have been terribly embarrassed not to know how to eat in a fancy place like that.

  I felt very sorry for Tom Till. He didn’t know which spoon to take first, the one on the right or the left of the three or four we had. But he was a smart little guy. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, and whenever he didn’t know how to do something, he looked out of the corner of his eye to see how the rest of us were doing it, and then he’d do it the same way. And do you know what? Tom was watching me more than he was any of the rest of us, and I felt proud to think I could set a good example for him.

  All the time, though, he was using another corner of his eye to look at the people who walked past the window outside. There was a sad expression on his face, which meant maybe he was thinking of his brother, Bob, who might be in Chicago somewhere. Whenever he saw a policeman or saw a patrol car go past, he looked bothered.

  After dinner, we all went to a YMCA. After resting a while, we went swimming in water that was clean all the way to the bottom. After that, we sat around in a sort of club room and made plans for doing different things. There would be time to do only a dozen or more important things—not nearly all we’d planned when we were at home.

  For Little Jim’s sake, we decided to let him ride on an escalator. Besides that, we’d have time to visit the famous Field Museum, and the Planetarium, and the stockyards, and Chinatown, and we could ride to different places on the El.

  When Sunday came, we were going to visit a jail where there would be boys who hadn’t been trained up in the way they ought to go. We’d all give our testimonies there, and Circus would sing. When Santa mentioned “jail,” I looked sideways at Tom.

  He swallowed, and his freckled face turned red, but he didn’t say a word.

  Later on that first day, we would go to a rescue mission where we’d see a lot of men who had grown up not having been trained in the way they should have gone.

  We decided on Little Jim’s escalator first and got that over with. (Wow, there were more people in that one store than lived in all Sugar Creek.) It was fun to walk up to a stairway, right out in the middle of a big store, and see the stairway slowly going up�
�all the steps moving at once—and right beside it another stairway, coming down, each step disappearing the minute it got to the bottom. People would come down on it not even walking but just getting on a step and standing there!

  Just for fun, most of us rode up and down either behind or directly in front of Little Jim. It was while Little Jim and I were alone once that he showed what kinds of thoughts were riding up and down in his curly head most of the time. I was on the step right behind him, and my red head was just as high as his brown one was. In fact, my hand was on his shoulder.

  “Know what this reminds me of?” he asked in my ear.

  “What?” I said.

  “Of the story in the Bible about Jacob’s dream.”

  I remembered the story. My parents had it in a Bible storybook, which they saw to it that I read regularly instead of a lot of murder stories in comic books. But that doesn’t belong to this story.

  I kept on riding up the escalator with Little Jim, and then at the top we got on the one going down and went down for the last time. Barry wouldn’t let us ride more than a few times, since escalators were not made to be played on.

  Little Jim knew I was interested in things about the Bible, so he was always waiting for a chance to tell me his thoughts. In that short minute on the way down, he said, “It reminds me of the story of the ladder Jacob saw in his dream. It reached up to heaven, and there were angels going up and down on it.”

  Well, I looked over Little Jim’s shoulder to the gang waiting for us at the bottom of the escalator—red-haired, freckle-faced Tom Till; Circus with his messed-up hair and monkey face; Poetry, as round as a barrel and mischievous; Dragonfly, with a nose that turned south at the end and eyes too big for his little face; and Big Jim, who had shaved off his mustache especially for the Chicago trip and would probably have to shave again before Christmas.