by Kathi Appelt
Sugarcane, it turns out, is the only thing aside from a rattlesnake bite that will wake up the Sugar Man. She’d have to order some, she thought. But that was no great consolation, because she’d have to wait for a courier to take her order.
You might be surprised to learn about the Snapping Turtle Courier Service. Turtles? Couriers? Turtles? Couriers?
We know!
It just so happens that in the water, turtles are fairly zippy. They could swim up and down the Bayou Tourterelle in the blink of an eye. Moreover, snapping turtles weren’t at all concerned about Gertrude. So she used their services from time to time, especially when she needed to restock the sugarcane.
But at that moment, Gertrude realized that she had not seen a courier in a while. Turns out they were keeping their heads down. As they should.
Rumble-rumble-rumble-rumble.
Gertrude would have to wait.
43
MEANWHILE, SEVENTEEN HOGS WERE NOT waiting. A little rain was no deterrent. They were now within a couple of nights’ hog-trot to the Sugar Man Swamp. Clydine lifted her piggy snout in the air. “I want me some wild sugarcane,” she said with a snort.
“Me too.” Buzzie grunted.
The fifteen younger Farrows snorted and grunted in agreement. The sounder had been marauding through the countryside all night long, and the first rays of sunlight were peering through the clouds. Like we said, hogs are nocturnal, so it was time to take a nap.
Soon enough, they found a shallow creek bottom. Of course, Buzzie and Clydine charged at the unsuspecting deer who made the grave mistake of strolling by.
Next, the terrible twosome frightened a pair of squirrels with a whole array of snorts and squeals. And let’s not forget the loud hoorahs toward a pack of surprised coyotes. Those coyotes didn’t even whine. They just tucked tail and ran.
The hogs were having a big ol’ laugh at all the scaredy-cats. “Ha-ha, hoo-hoo!” As the stars lay down, however, so did the hogs. But just as they settled in for their daylong snoozefest, an immense cloud of mosquitoes landed on the hogs’ bristly backs and dug in.
There are only a few critters on this whole blessed planet that aren’t afraid of wild hogs. Mosquitoes are one of them.
Buuuuzzzzzz! They whined and whined, and then they dined and dined.
Clydine squealed like a baby, “Wheeeee . . . aaaahhhhhh . . . wwwwaaahhhhh!”
Buzzie squealed too. “Whheeeeee . . . aaaahhhhh . . . wwwwaaahhhhhh!”
The Farrow Gang squealed and squealed and squealed.
Mosquitoes couldn’t care less about all that squealing. They were enjoying their ham and bacon breakfast.
“Mud!” Buzzie squealed. “We need mud.” And with that, they tore into that creek bottom. They splashed and rolled and smashed and crashed until there was no water at all, just muck, muck, muck. Whatever small drops were left turned around and ran uphill. “Losers,” called the hogs. Then they wallowed and wallowed and wallowed. Ooohhheeee, that muck felt great. The seventeen Farrows snortled and gruntled in glee. In glee, I tell you. Finally, they were coated in so much mud, the mosquitoes could not bite through it. You could say that it soothed the savage beasts.
For the time being, that is.
The Second Day
44
AT PARADISE PIES CAFÉ, THE first round of customers had already come and gone; a couple of regular fishermen and a young guy named Steve, who showed up because he made a wrong turn. Even though Steve only stopped by to ask for directions, Chap talked him into ordering a sugar pie. As soon as Steve tried it, he ordered another one.
“Dang,” Steve said. “These are delicious.” He smacked his lips. It made Chap feel good. Not at all the way he felt after Sonny Boy and Jaeger’s visit the morning before.
Then Steve said, “Too bad you’re so far off the beaten track.” Considering he had lived on Beaten Track Road his whole life, Chap was used to the old joke.
“No, really,” Steve said. “Y’all are hard to find.” He added, “I’m not sure I can even figure out how to get out of here, much less come back. Even my GPS is flaky out here.” To prove it Steve held up his shiny phone with the blank screen.
So Chap drew him a map on one of the paper napkins, and told him that the state highway wasn’t that far away. It just seemed like it because the road was so narrow. Steve thanked him. Then he ordered one more pie to take with him, and waved good-bye.
After Steve left, the café was completely empty, and it was barely six a.m. They’d only been open an hour. Chap hoped against hope that Steve wouldn’t be their last customer for the day. He went to clean off Steve’s table, when he saw it: the cell phone. Oh no! Chap grabbed it and rushed out the door, but it was too late. Steve was gone.
“Oh well,” said Chap. He carried the phone into the café and set it on the windowsill next to the radio. That was the official spot for lost and found. Usually the items that were lost were things like baseball caps or maybe a cigarette lighter. Things that weren’t valuable. A cell phone was valuable. At least this one was.
“He’ll be back,” said his mom, pulling out a chair and sitting down. In her hand was her bottomless cup of coffee.
Not for the first time, Chap noticed that her lips were almost the same color as the pale pink lips on the side of her mug; the mug had been a gift from his father before he died in a motorcycle accident. Chap had never known his dad. The accident was before he was born. After it happened, his mom moved back in with Audie, and they had been there ever since. Ever since Chap’s whole life. Once in a while someone would ask him if he missed his father, but how could he miss someone he had never even met?
Nevertheless, even though she never said so, Chap knew his mother missed him, especially when she said, “You look so much like your father.” Then she would pat him on the cheek, or worse, dab his face with flour. He rubbed his face to make sure there wasn’t a dab on there that he was unaware of. His mom could be tricky like that.
In front of her was a stack of dollar bills and a few coins. He watched as she re-counted them. Then she folded the bills in half and stuck them into her apron pocket.
“It’s not a boatload,” she told him, “but it’s a start.” To Chap, the small stack looked measly. And the café looked way too empty. They needed a yacht full of customers, he thought. As if it agreed, the coffee urn gurgled. Hearing it made him think about being a man again.
Coffee.
Chest hairs.
Coffee.
Chest hairs.
Yesterday Chap had managed to drink roughly one quarter of the cup. He decided to try again. He reached for Grandpa Audie’s Twitcher’s Catalog mug and filled it to the top. Once again it was hot hot hot. Bitter bitter bitter. To Chap, it tasted like acid going down his gullet. There had to be a less painful way to become a man, especially now when everyone told him that’s what he was supposed to be.
But for the moment, staring at the empty café, he felt completely helpless. Man up, he told himself. He took a big gulp of Community Coffee. That was a mistake. It burned on the way down. He decided from then on he would only take sips. Tiny sips. He looked in the cup. There was still two-thirds of the blacker ’n dirt liquid left, but he couldn’t bear to drink any more. Nevertheless, progress had been made. Yesterday, he drank a quarter of a cup. Today, he drank a third. Maybe tomorrow, he’d drink a half. He carried his grandpa’s cup to the kitchen and set it on the counter. The GBH seemed to stare out at him, its wide wings spread as it flew in a circle around the cup.
Seeing the bird made Chap want to compare it to the one in Grandpa Audie’s sketchbook, which was still stashed away under his bed. Since there was nothing for him to do in the quiet café, he walked to the back of the house, careful not to let Sweetums through the door into the café. He plopped across his bed on his stomach and pulled the book out. Sweetums curled up next to him on the bed and started to purr.
“Person, can you not see that I’m trying to sleep?” asked Sweetums.
Chap ignored the cat and opened the book.
Sweetums tucked his head under his paws.
As Chap turned the pages, his grandpa’s scent wrapped itself around him. He felt the familiar heat rise up in his throat. He swallowed it down. Page by page, he gazed at his grandpa’s renditions of the fauna of the swamp. Not only were there birds, but there were minks and muskrats and lizards too, every one of which Audie had seen at least once, probably more. As the years had passed, he had added pages to the book. It was heavy and thick, filled with swamp critters. There they were, in Audie’s funny style, the pencil lines distinct in their thickness. There was no subtlety in Audie’s drawing. It was more like cartoons than art.
Chap flipped through the pages, looking for the GBH. Where was it? He wished that the book was alphabetical, but instead it was what Audie called “incidental.” As in, “Incidentally, I saw a Canadian goose today,” or “Incidentally, I almost stepped on a green anole,” or “Incidentally, have you seen the baby teals?” After each incident, he got out his pencil and drew the incidental subjects.
Chap turned the last page. He must have skipped over the heron—not surprising, since some of the pages tended to stick together, a result of the sugar. When you deal with sugar day in and day out, it tends to coat things, including sketchbook pages. Chap turned the pages again, this time from back to front, taking care to gently pull some of the stuck pages apart.
It was upon such a pulling that he noticed the drawing of the raccoon. Audie had featured the raccoon playing a harmonica. “Raccoons,” he said, “are multi-talented.” It was a funny picture. Chap had looked at it dozens of times. It was one of his favorites. He stared at it for a full minute; so long, in fact, that he could practically hear the notes of the harmonica slipping out of the drawing.
But then he remembered that it wasn’t the raccoon he was looking for, it was the heron. He turned another page, only to realize that it too was stuck.
The page felt almost crisp from age and sugar. At last, he managed to pull it apart. There, staring at him, a drawing he had seen dozens of times before but had forgotten: the Sugar Man!
Chap slammed the book shut and sat up. Sweetums, startled, jumped off the bed and scurried underneath it. Chap’s heart raced. Sonny Boy’s words echoed in his ears. If I see some proof of the Sugar Man, I’ll give you the whole darned swamp.
“Proof!” said Chap, right out loud.
Without apologizing to poor Sweetums, Chap grabbed the book and ran straight for the kitchen.
“Mom,” he called. “Look what I found.”
Chap held the familiar sugarcoated page up to her. His face beamed. But what Chap failed to see, and what his mother had to point out to him, was the date Audie had scratched at the bottom of the picture: 1949.
“Honey,” she said, “even if Grandpa really did see the Sugar Man, this was drawn more than sixty years ago. Nobody else has claimed to see him since even before then.”
Chap looked at the date. His face fell. He wanted to argue with his mother, but in his heart of hearts, he knew she was right. A drawing from 1949 wouldn’t prove anything.
45
THE 1949 DESOTO SPORTED A “rocket” body, with a beautiful waterfall grille, a grille that seemed to smile.
It also had a Simplimatic transmission, making for a smooth ride. It was so smooth that in one of their advertisements, a passenger asked the driver, “New road?” To which the driver replied, “No, new DeSoto!”
46
ADVERTISEMENT? DID SOMEONE SAY ADVERTISEMENT? Coyoteman Jim worked for hours, perfecting his radio commercial for Paradise Pies. As soon as he signed off with his customary, “This is Coyoteman Jim telling you to have a good day and a good idea,” followed by his signature howl, he slipped into the production room and made a recording.
He got it down on the first try. The only thing left to do was take it to Paradise Pies and let Chap and his mother give it their nods of approval. He slipped the copy of the recording into his jacket pocket and headed out the door.
Meanwhile, at the café, Chap needed to do something. Anything. The disappointment of the drawing, combined with his feelings of being outmanned by Sonny Boy and Jaeger, all on top of a small power surge from the one-third cup of coffee, made him feel like an unlit bottle rocket.
His mom, sensing his short fuse, gave him a chore. “We need some fresh cane,” she said.
Yes! Chap untied his apron, hung it on a hook by the back door, and reached for his muck boots. He turned them upside down and shook them first to be sure nothing was nesting inside them, like a brown recluse spider or a scorpion. Satisfied the boots were empty, he slid his feet into them. Then he grabbed his grandpa’s old machete and headed out. The heft of the machete felt solid in his hand.
Chopping cane was not for the faint of heart, not only because the machete was sharp enough to slice off a finger or a toe, but also because of the canebrake rattlers. So the first thing to be done, of course, was the lullaby. As Chap neared the canebrake, he started to hum, and as he got closer, he lifted his voice and sang his grandpa’s tune:
Rock-a-by, oh canebrake rattlers
Sleepy bayou, rock-a-by oh
Canebrake rattlers
Sssslleeeepp
Right there, underneath the boiling Texas sun, Chap stood up a little taller. Gripped the machete a little firmer. Sweated a lot more profusely. In fact, despite the fact that it was his mother who taught him how to do it, Chap realized just then that chopping cane was . . . oh, yes it was . . . wait for it . . . manly!
In less than an hour, he chopped out a bushel of fresh sugar. He bundled it together with a length of twine and tied it with a knot, just like Audie had shown him. The fresh, sweet odor of sugar filled the air.
“There’s nothing like it,” Audie had told him. And there wasn’t.
But cane wasn’t the only thing that Chap knew how to chop. He had used this very same machete in his almost daily forays through the swamp with Grandpa Audie. Chap knew how to use the wide blade to clear a path through the stinging vines that covered the forest floor and crept up the trunks of the trees.
Thinking about chopping his way through the woods made Chap think of his grandpa’s long search for the DeSoto.
And for possibly the millionth time in his twelve years on Earth, Chap asked, “Where is it?” For a long moment he gazed at the banks of the Bayou Tourterelle, with the stalks of cane racing to the sky, and scanned the landscape for any sign of the old car.
Nothing. It was a ghost car. Just like the ivory-billed woodpecker was a ghost bird. The cloud of lonesome bunched up above his head.
And as if the rattlesnakes sensed his keening, they started to buzz. Chichichichi . . .
That was Chap’s signal to skedaddle. He tugged on the sugarcane and headed back to the café. As he pulled the bundle into the kitchen, for possibly the billionth time in his twelve long years, his mother greeted him with a dab of flour, this time on his cheek.
“Mom!” he said. Was that any way to treat a man?
As Chap wiped his cheek, Coyoteman Jim walked through the front door. Seeing him, Chap’s pulse quickened. Maybe, he thought, just maybe, the radio man had come up with a great commercial, one that would encourage customers from far and wide to drop in and try one of their delicious fried sugar pies, even if they had a hard time finding them along the Beaten Track Road.
And then Chap had another good idea—signs! He could make some signs. As if it agreed, the morning sun shot a beam of light against the front windowpane, and the air inside the café turned golden, like a fresh fried pie.
47
BINGO AND J’MIAH DIDN’T NEED a sign to know that there was trouble brewing. All night long there had been rumble-rumble-rumble-rumbling. The horrible, terrible, very bad, no good Farrow Gang was closing in.
It was time to launch Operation Rumble-Rumble-Rumble into action. With the sun filtering its way through the trees’ branches, with only their wits and their whiskers, Bingo and J’m
iah set out to find the Sugar Man. They scampered through the entryway of the DeSoto and stepped into the warm, wet air.
They were not at all used to such brightness. It took a moment for their eyes to adjust. They also felt very exposed, out in the open as they were. They had to pause for a moment to adjust to this idea that they could actually be observed by any of the daytime creatures, creatures they only vaguely knew about.
J’miah pulled his invisible thinking cap around to shield his eyes. It wasn’t very helpful, being invisible and all. They may have stood there all morning, in the unfamiliar light of day, but finally Bingo took a step forward, and that seemed to break the spell.
Tally ho, young Scouts.
And forward they went. Without any solid directions, they simply started walking. Whenever the trail reached a fork, they turned toward whichever lane seemed darkest. They walked and walked and walked, and sure enough, the forest grew thicker. It began to close in on them, blocking out the light above.
Hours passed, and the shadows grew longer and longer. As the trees and bushes became ever more dense, the forest grew quieter. Bingo strained his ears to hear crickets. Not a single chirp. J’miah listened hard for cicadas. Nary a buzz.
Dark.
Quiet.
Dark.
Quiet.
Bingo was extremely glad that he had J’miah with him. J’miah was over-the-moon happy that he was with Bingo. Suddenly in the dark and quiet, they heard, chichichichi.
Bingo looked at J’miah. J’miah looked at Bingo, and together they said, “Gertrude!”
And Gertrude said, “Sssscccouts! Just who I need.”
48
RACCOONS ARE ONE OF THE largest members of the Procyonidae family, a family that includes ringtails, kinkajous, olingos, coatis, and cacomistles. (Don’t you just love those names?) They are such a handsome group, with their thick fur and their stripy tails; but despite their relatively long claws, and their sharp teeth, their primary form of defense is to go into emergency poof mode, which makes them look five or six times larger than they actually are. The second that Bingo and J’miah came nose to nose with the world’s most itchy rattlesnake, their fur went POOF and POOF, respectively.
