by Kathi Appelt
That was a good question. What was up there? Bingo felt the tuft between his ears pop up. But he also felt the tingling in his paws.
“We won’t know until the mission is complete,” Bingo said.
J’miah scratched his left ear. Bingo had a point. Then a shiver ran up his back. He hoped that Bingo didn’t notice, because if there was one thing J’miah was not proud of, it was the fact that he hated to climb.
Okay, let’s just be honest here. J’miah was terrified of heights. He knew it was deeper than the knowledge of Great-Uncle Banjo. And it scared him even more to think about his brother climbing all the way to the top of the longleaf pine, the tallest tree in the forest. It made him queasy . . . like he-might-throw-up queasy . . . that kind of queasy.
He glared at Bingo with his hardest squint. Sometimes, he knew, squinting worked in his favor. But tonight, their first night on duty without Little Mama and Daddy-O, Bingo seemed determined to climb that tree.
7
KINT KINT KINT KAPOW.
If you ever did hear an ivory-billed woodpecker, that is the sound it would make.
Chichichichi.
If you hear that sound, turn around and run.
Canebrake rattlesnakes.
Chichichichi.
8
EVERYONE KNOWS THAT RACCOONS ARE fair climbers. It’s not unusual to see them perched on a branch some twenty or thirty feet up or more, but higher than that, and Houston, we’ve got a problem. Unlike squirrels, who are compact and have flaps underneath their armpits that help them glide, raccoons are a bit on the bottom-heavy side, so if they get too high up in a tree, well, the tree tends to bend in a downward motion. So let’s just say that they usually don’t get too high up in a tree.
Most raccoons don’t, at any rate.
But Bingo was not most raccoons. He could feel it in his paws. When he held them in front of his masked face, they started to itch. Itching. To. Climb. Which was what he planned to do. Straightaway.
“It’s my mission,” he said.
Mission Longleaf.
J’miah could stay in the DeSoto and continue cleaning the backseat, but not Bingo. He had a tree to climb.
Go, Bingo!
“I’m leaving,” he said. J’miah did not respond. Bingo waited. It only seemed fair to give his brother a chance to come along.
J’miah pulled his invisible thinking hat down hard. He didn’t say anything. Not one single thing.
“Yep,” Bingo said. “I’m really going.”
Squint.
Then Bingo eased his way toward the exit on the passenger side of the car. He looked back over his shoulder.
Squint.
“Bye.” He waved.
Squint. Squint. Squint.
J’miah squinted so hard, his eyes were just tiny slits. He and Bingo were a pair. A duet. Brothers. The order was to be true and faithful to each other. Could J’miah let Bingo go on a mission alone?
Arrrggghhhh! he wanted to scream.
But just as Bingo slid into the exit hole, they both heard these unmistakable sounds: split splat sploot . . . RAIN!
And before they could even blink, here it came, pouring down. Then . . .
ZZZTTTTT! . . . . A bright bolt of lightning zipped out of the sky and struck so close to the old car that the electricity made their fur stand straight up.
“That was close!” said Bingo.
“Do you think it was close enough?” asked J’miah.
“If we’re lucky!”
They didn’t have to wait. Sure enough, the big bolt of lightning hit so close to the DeSoto that the old battery got a big, fat charge, which in turn shot through the rusted wires and switches and tubes and zzzttt! A pale purple light lit up the dashboard.
“Information!” the Scouts said together.
J’miah abandoned his clean-up mission, scrambled into the front seat, and sat next to Bingo. “Get ready,” he said.
Bingo grabbed the steering wheel with both paws. The numbers on the dash glowed in the darkness. And then . . . sssssttt . . . blip blip bloop . . . oooowwwwweeee . . . a voice, a deep, loud, clear voice, the Voice of Intelligence, floated atop the airwaves. “. . . it might be raining now, but be prepared for clear skies, with a few clouds . . .” And then, as quickly as it came, it faded away, along with the purple numbers.
“Roger,” said Bingo.
“Roger,” echoed J’miah.
They both saluted. As brand-new Information Officers, they had just followed Special Order Number One: Always heed the Voice of Intelligence. The Voice hung in the air. It wasn’t a scary voice. It was simply the one that occasionally slipped out of the dashboard, always after a bolt of lightning struck nearby.
Of course, in this early summertime of the year, thunderstorms in the swamp were frequent, practically nightly. And while our Scouts probably didn’t know it, the metal from the DeSoto seemed to attract more than its fair share of proximal lightning strikes. After all, aside from the aluminum cans that floated down the bayou from irresponsible campers, what other metal structures were there in the Sugar Man Swamp?
It took a while for the storm to abate, but as the raindrops died down and stopped their relentless beating on the roof of the car, Bingo peered at the now-dark dashboard with its dials and buttons. He rested his paws on the old steering wheel and then scratched his right ear. There was nothing of note in the Intelligence Report that they had just received. It was pretty standard stuff, a little rain, a few clouds. It hardly seemed worth broadcasting. Be prepared for clear skies, with a few clouds. Easy peasy. Clear skies were easy to prepare for.
But first, Bingo had a tree to climb. And despite his invisible thinking cap, J’miah said, “I’m coming too.”
Bingo’s tuft stood straight up. He grinned.
“Well,” said J’miah, wishing that someone had caught Great-Uncle Banjo. “Someone has to catch you if you fall.”
Bingo had no intentions of falling. There was something in the top of that tree that he had to see. He was certain of it. He was a Scout on a mission. Mission Longleaf.
9
THE DESOTO ACTUALLY WASN’T THE only metal structure in the swamp. Aside from the aforementioned soda and beer cans, there was a small building a mile or so north, a wooden building with a wide front porch that faced the road, a road known as the Beaten Track. The building had a screened-in back porch that faced the bayou, and a tin roof, a roof that might have attracted the occasional bolt of lightning but for the lightning rods that thwarted their strikes.
On the front side of the building was Paradise Pies Café. The backside of the building was the home of the newly deceased Audie Brayburn, proprietor of Paradise Pies Café, along with his daughter and his grandson, Chap.
As Chap sat there in his bedroom, he looked up at the ceiling fan as it slowly spun in circles over his bed, and tried to remember everything his grandfather had told him about the ivory-billed woodpecker. He knew the bird was the reason Audie had come to the swamp in the first place. It was also the reason Audie had stayed. Why was Audie so sure that the bird might be there?
“I took a photo of it,” he had told Chap.
If only, thought Chap, I had that one-of-a-kind photo.
“It’s in the DeSoto,” Audie had told him, which was no help at all. Every time they went on one of their ramblings through the swamp, which was almost every day, they kept a lookout for the old car. Sometimes they went by foot. Sometimes they took the pirogue and pushed their way back and forth along the Bayou Tourterelle.
It was on one of those ramblings that Audie told Chap that he had met the Sugar Man, right on the banks of the Bayou Tourterelle.
“Grandpa,” Chap had said. Chap knew that it was one thing to believe his grandfather about the woodpecker. It was another to believe him about the Sugar Man.
Nevertheless, Audie had talked about both the woodpecker and the Sugar Man with such certainty that Chap couldn’t help but believe him. After all, Audie had never lied to him. Or at lea
st Chap didn’t think he had.
The thing is, even though Audie told others about the woodpecker, he never spoke to anyone but Chap about the Sugar Man. Chap knew why.
“If the outside world thought they could find the Sugar Man, why, they’d swarm all over this place, trying to hunt him down,” Audie had told Chap. “They’d be tramping and stamping and shooting at every shadow they saw. Heck, they’d probably shoot each other.”
Which raised the question, “Wouldn’t they also swarm this place looking for the woodpecker?” Chap wanted to know.
Audie paused, then said, “Yep, but it would be different. . . . Instead of a swarm of honeybees, it’d be a swarm of hornets.”
For example, according to Audie, there was one time, way back when, that a posse of folks got all riled up and determined to capture the Sugar Man.
Seems that someone from the East Coast had told them all about the Wendigo, and it rattled that posse. The Wendigo is mean and nasty, so they just assumed that the Sugar Man was mean and nasty too, even though there was no connection at all between the Wendigo and the Sugar Man. All they knew was that the Sugar Man should be exterminated.
So, they came riding through the swamp on their tall horses, with their ropes and axes and shotguns. For days, they roped and hacked and shot at things. After a while they got tired of riding around in the swamp all day on sweaty horses, especially with all those mosquitoes and pricker vines. So they finally gave up, but not before they tramped over rabbit warrens, sliced down old vines, stomped on quails’ nests, and generally made a big mess of things.
They never saw a single trace of the Sugar Man. “But what if they had?” Audie had asked. Chap considered their ropes and axes and shotguns. It didn’t take him long to see the picture. Hornets. A whole swarm of them.
How, wondered Chap, could the Sugar Man Swamp be the Sugar Man Swamp without the Sugar Man?
Chap sucked in a deep breath. He looked at the tall trees all around him, their branches draped with lacy moss. He took in the baby teals riding behind their mama on the slow current of the bayou. He gazed at the deep, deep green of the wispy willow branches as they dipped their fingers into the water.
“This is paradise, old Chap,” Grandpa Audie had said, spreading his arms out wide.
“And we come from the same soil,” Chap had added. Then he held his own arms out. He stretched them as wide as he could, as if he could hold the entire swamp in between them.
Now, outside Chap’s window, the rain eased up. The same soil. His grandfather’s voice slipped through his head, Nosotros somos paisanos.
He rubbed the edges of the old sketchbook between his fingers again. The cloud of lonesome puffed up. The swamp was called the Sugar Man Swamp, but it could have been named for his grandfather—the Audie Brayburn Swamp. That’s how much Grandpa Audie had loved it.
Chap loved it too.
The same soil.
Home.
10
THE TROUBLE WAS, HOME OFFICIALLY belonged to Sonny Boy Beaucoup, who wanted a whole boatload of cash, or else.
Or-else-or-else-or-else. Such small, mean, nasty words. Two little words. Chap knew exactly what they meant: paradise lost.
“No,” he said. It was true what all those folks at the funeral had told him. Without his grandpa, it was Chap’s turn to be the man of the household. Yep. He’d figure out a way to load that boat with cash. He would. With that, the heat in his throat cooled down a bit and he managed to swallow the last of it in one big gulp. A clean, cool breeze pushed its way through his open window.
As he drifted off to sleep, he didn’t notice the odd rumble-rumble-rumble-rumble in the distance.
Sweetums did, however. The big ginger cat curled his tail as tightly around his face as he could and closed his eyes. That was no ordinary rumble. Tomorrow he would have to warn his people, a task that would be made more difficult by their persistent unwillingness to learn Catalian.
11
AS SOON AS THE RAIN stopped, our two Scouts squeezed out the entryway on the passenger side of the DeSoto and took a big, deep breath of the midnight air. It was still humid, but the rain had passed and the sky was clear . . . except for the occasional cloud that drifted by. It was just like the Voice of Intelligence had said: Be prepared for clear skies, with a few clouds. That’s exactly what Bingo and J’miah saw through the branches of the thick trees. It was what they were prepared for, so they were not surprised.
In that bright new moment of the night, Bingo had one thing on his mind, one singular sensation: climb.
J’miah had one thing on his mind too: prevent Bingo from meeting the same fate as Great-Uncle Banjo. It was an unsettling thought, one that made him imagine two different options. The first option was to climb up after Bingo. With a shiver, he quickly erased that thought out of his mind.
But the second option was almost as bad: to stand at the bottom of the tree and catch Bingo if he fell. That gave J’miah a vision of two flattened raccoons. Rather like a stack of stripy pancakes, without the butter and syrup.
Then it occurred to him that he had a third option. He would just pull his invisible thinking cap so far over his eyes that he would not be able to see Bingo’s death-defying climb at all. That way, if his brother fell, J’miah would be spared the horror of witnessing it, and also would not be forced to try to save him. Although he had to admit that it was a somewhat cowardly option, it seemed like the most reasonable course of action.
Sadly, none of J’miah’s thoughts slowed Bingo down.
When they reached the longleaf pine tree, Bingo gave J’miah a pat on the head. “Wait here and watch,” he said, and without even hesitating, up he went. Just like that. Ten feet. Twenty feet. Thirty feet. His stripy backside was on the up and up.
The higher Bingo went, the better he felt. Ahh, he thought, this is what I was meant to do—climb! He put his nose in the air. Gone was the smell of mud and decaying leaves, the common smell of the forest floor. Instead, here was a new smell, the smell of fresh pine, clean and crisp and cool. He took a deep breath. Oh, happy night! This was not at all like the dark, stuffy interior of Information Headquarters. Not. At. All. He kept going.
But just as he began his final ascent, the breeze bleeeewwww . . . the tree swwwwaaaayyyed . . . the branches creeeeeeaaaakkked.
“Whoa,” he cried. He wrapped all four paws around the trunk.
“Bingo?” J’miah’s voice climbed up after Bingo.
Bingo could hear his brother’s worry. He gripped a little harder. He refused to look down, and instead looked up. There was the beckoning top. He was so close, only a dozen more feet. He reckoned he could scurry up there for a quick look and then hurry down.
He heard J’miah call again, “Bingo!” J’miah’s voice was worrieder than ever. Up? Down? Up? Down?
“Bingo?”
Before he could make a choice, Bingo put his stripy bottom in gear and went for it . . . up . . . Up . . . UP. . . . He went right to the very tip-top!
Victory! It was glory hallelujah, get out the biscuits, my-oh-my-oh-my. Bingo reveled at the grandeur all around him. He had never looked down at the tops of trees before. He had only ever looked up through their branches. Now he could see miles and miles of treetops, dark gray shadows in the deep blue night. What a glorious sight.
In the starlight he could also see the sparkly water of the Bayou Tourterelle beneath him. It had never looked more beautiful, like a silver ribbon running in curves.
He leaned back, his face turned up. Just above his head were stars galore. So many stars! They streamed across the sky, just like the bayou streamed below. And every single one of those stars was white . . . except for the one that blinked, which was red.
Hmmm, he thought. No one had ever told him about a red star. Then it occurred to him that maybe, just maybe, that was what he was supposed to find. Of course!
“I’ve made a discovery!” he shouted down to J’miah. “A red star! A blinking red star!”
J’miah c
alled up, “What does it look like?”
“A blinking red star?” said Bingo. He thought about saying “Duh,” but he was too dazzled by the sight of it to be grumpy. Instead, he thought of two words: wowie zowie!
This was major. Nobody in the history of the Sugar Man Swamp Scouts had ever reported the discovery of a blinking red star. Then he thought, Hey, explorers get to name their discoveries, don’t they?
But what does one name a red star that blinks?
He stared at the star, blinking on and off. When he looked up at the other stars, they were all so far away, but his red star seemed so close, as if it had been waiting for him, Bingo, to discover it.
It was, he decided, his special star, and it deserved a special name. The only star name he had ever heard was Twinkle. Back when he was just a kit, Daddy-O had sung a song to him about a little star named Twinkle.
No.
This was a red star and it blinked.
All at once, he knew the perfect name. “I’m going to name you Blinkle,” he announced. Rhymes with “twinkle.” Nobody ever said raccoons weren’t clever.
12
CLEVER COULD APPLY TO SOMEONE else, too, namely the World Champion Gator Wrestler of the Northern Hemisphere. Jaeger Stitch knew exactly what she wanted. Fame and fortune. She wanted it in spades.
And she knew exactly how to get it: by turning the Sugar Man Swamp into the Gator World Wrestling Arena and Theme Park. It would require taking down several hundred old trees to clear the space for the stadium. She would also need to fill in at least two thousand acres of marsh to make a parking lot for the millions of people who she knew were clamoring to see her mighty-mighty self.
Shoot, she was already in negotiations for a reality television show and everything.
Was there even one tiny shred of decency in Jaeger Stitch? Well, she did appreciate the swamp for being a nursery for baby gators. Then again, why would she need a natural nursery when she could just raise the little hatchlings herself in the swimming pool that she planned to install? She could charge extra for letting people swim with the baby gators. Heck, she could charge even more for letting them swim with their mamas. Besides, what were old dead trees and mucky marsh worth to anyone?
