The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp (3 page)

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 least 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.

T
HE 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.

A
S 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 called 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.

C
LEVER 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?

Her point exactly.

So really, if you thought about it, maybe there wasn't so much decency in Jaeger Stitch. “Clever” might be the wrong word too.

Let's use “driven.” That seems more apt.

B
UT HOW, YOU MIGHT ASK,
could Jaeger Stitch get her greedy little hands on an entire swath of prime swamp? Answer: by getting her greedy little hands on Sonny Boy Beaucoup.

The Beaucoup Corporation had owned the swamp for, like, three hundred and fifty years, even before the French government sold it to the U.S. government back in Thomas Jefferson's day in a little transaction called the Louisiana Purchase. As part of the deal, a crafty pirate named Alouicious Beaucoup bought the swampland for a song. The confusing waterways and the massive cypress groves of the Bayou Tourterelle provided the ideal hideout for his enterprising gang of buccaneers.

Of course, the Sugar Man was completely aware of Alouicious. After all, he received regular reports about the pirates from his trusty Scouts. To the Sugar Man, the pirates didn't seem to be doing any harm to his beloved swamp. Plus, they seemed to keep the alligator population
in check with their frequent alligator roasts, a point that his pet rattlesnake, Gertrude, CHG, appreciated on behalf of her fellow rattlers, which alligators have been known to eat from time to time. Moreover, the pirates weren't trying to hunt the Sugar Man down with their pesky cannons and muskets, or poke him with their little swords.

But then came the chantey. Pirates were all about chanteys. They had a chantey for raising the mast. They had one for lowering the mast. They had one for swabbing the deck, several about drinking grog, and more than a few about lost loves.

But one day they began to sing a new chantey that absolutely grated on the Sugar Man's nerves. You know how it is when a song gets played over and over and over until you can't get it out of your head? And no matter what you do, the song just keeps repeating itself until you think you're going to go bonkers?

Yep. The song, which we won't repeat here because we don't want anyone going bonkers, made the Sugar Man crazy. He couldn't sleep, he couldn't concentrate, he couldn't get the darned thing out of his head. And it didn't help that just when he thought he might get some peace from it, the pirates cranked it back up again. They even added accompaniment on the concertina, an instrument that annoys even in the best of circumstances.

Finally, the Sugar Man couldn't stand it any longer. He stomped through the swamp until he reached the pirate hangout, and grabbed several Chanteymen at once, swung them over his head, and flung them far and wide. Some landed in the tops of trees, some landed on the backs of alligators, and some landed in the Gulf of Mexico.

The rest of the crew abandoned ship, so terrified were they of the creature as tall as a tree, with hands as wide as palmettos. Alouicious was left alone, his heart pounding faster than the flapping fins of flying fishes.