The Boys Return (10 page)

“We didn't ask them to,” said Eddie. “But anyway, if we catch the cougar, it will be at
this
house, and
we'll
get our names in the paper.”

“Sure: GIRLS MAULED BY COUGAR,” said Caroline.

“Oh, hush,” said Eddie. “Let's go to the store.”

With Mrs. Malloy at the dining room table writing letters, Eddie, Beth, and Caroline put on their yellow waterproof jackets and sloshed to the store where their mother usually shopped.

“What can I get for you girls?” the butcher asked.

“How much is a chicken?” asked Eddie.

“Whole, or cut up?” said the butcher.

The girls looked at each other.

“Which do you think the cougar would prefer?” Beth whispered. “I'd think he'd like it in pieces. Easier to eat.”

“But a whole chicken would seem more like nature in the raw,” said Caroline.

“Whole,” Eddie told the butcher.

The man named his price. “It's a nice, plump chicken,” he said.

“We don't have that much,” said Eddie. “How about a scrawny one?”

The butcher frowned. “I don't think your mother
would be very happy with that. I know the kind she likes.”

“Well, this is sort of an unusual case. Scrawny will be fine,” Eddie said.

As the girls left the store with their purchase, Beth said, “Suppose the cougar doesn't come tonight. Should we keep the chicken up in my room and try again tomorrow?”

“We'll have to,” said Eddie. “We can't buy a fresh one every day. This is our only chance.”

“Maybe the riper it gets, the more it will smell and attract the cougar,” Beth suggested.

“And we'll have every animal in the neighborhood in our garage,” said Eddie. “
That's
when the cougar will strike, I'll bet. It may not be interested in a dead chicken at all. Maybe what it really wants is live meat—a cat or dog or even a precocious nine-year-old girl. But we'll have to take that chance.”

The boys came back later that day and they all played cards in the loft while Doug and Peter took turns tying parachutes to their G.I. Joe dolls and dropping them out the loft window.

Eddie had rigged up a light in the loft, and Mrs. Malloy let them take out a pile of old corduroy cushions to sit on, so the loft had become a more inviting place.

As a surprise, Mrs. Hatford ordered some Kentucky Fried Chicken to be delivered to them in the garage,
and the twelve had a boisterous picnic, trading pieces of chicken for extra biscuits, or bartering for an extra can of pop.

“Boys,” Coach Malloy called out, around seven. “The Hatfords want you home now, so pack it up.”

Up in the loft, Eddie crawled around gathering up all the leftover chicken bones and put them in a sack for the garbage. One by one the Malloys and Hatfords and Bensons climbed down the ladder into the garage below.

“You'd better come on home, Wally, and sneak back later,” said Josh. “If Mom sees you around for a while, she probably won't discover you're missing later.”

“Yeah,” said Jake. “If Josh or I were gone, she'd know right away we were up to something. And if Peter wasn't there, she'd notice. But if Bill and Danny are in your room and your bed has a couple pillows in it, she won't think to ask. When you're the middle child, you can get away with murder.”

The boys went off down the hill toward the swinging bridge, and the girls went back inside.

“I've got that roasting chicken in my closet,” said Beth. “When do we put it in the garage?”

“Not until Wally gets back, that's for sure,” said Eddie.

Around ten o'clock, just after her father had locked up for the night, Caroline saw the beam of a flashlight bobbing about in the loft and knew that Wally had come back and was waiting for their signal.

“Good grief,” said Eddie. “If Mom or Dad look out and see that light, they're going to go out there and send Wally home. Caroline, go tell him to turn off the flashlight, will you?”

“What about the chicken?” Caroline asked.

“It's under the sink now. As soon as the folks go upstairs, I'll sneak out and wire it to a pole at the back of the garage,” Eddie said.

Caroline heard her parents' footsteps going upstairs. She took her jacket off a peg by the back door, silently pulled the door open, and stepped out into the cold night air. The light from Beth's window made a large square of yellow light in the space between house and garage. It wasn't so cold out; Wally shouldn't complain about having to do guard duty on the back porch. If
her
name had been picked out of the hat, she would have done it without any grumbling at all.

She had just started down the porch steps when something caught her eye. She stopped, one foot in the air, motionless, staring hard through the darkness just to the left of the garage. And then she saw what it was and her heart almost stopped: the cougar.

The animal came stealthily out from the evergreens, sniffed at the air, and looked about, its tail twitching. Then, hugging the side of the garage, staying in the shadows, it moved silently to the open door and stopped again, eyes and ears alert. And suddenly it darted inside.

The KFC! That must be what the big cat was after,
Caroline thought wildly, thinking of the chicken bones in the sack at the back of the garage.

She didn't even stop to think. Noiselessly she leaped off the steps, her heart pounding in her ears, rushed to the garage, flung the door closed, and latched it.

Thirteen
In the Loft

W
ally followed his brothers into the house. It was probably true what Jake had said, that his mom wouldn't miss Wally at all. She'd miss Peter, being the youngest, and Jake and Josh, being the oldest, and twins at that, but Wally usually got lost in the shuffle. He imagined that if he never came home at all, she might look at Dad someday and say, “Didn't we used to have a son in fourth grade? I wonder whatever happened to him?” and Dad would say, “His name was Wally, wasn't it? Or was it Winston, or Warren?”

“I've run the bathwater, Peter,” Mrs. Hatford called. “Do you and Doug want to take a bath together? The rest of you boys can bathe tonight, or you can shower in the morning, if you'd rather.”

“We'll shower in the morning,” said Jake.

Wally went up to his room with Bill and Danny, but Jake and Steve came crowding in after them.

“You have to go talk to her, Wally.
Say
something so she'll remember you were here,” Jake insisted.

With a sigh, Wally went back downstairs. Mother was busy making a grocery list in the kitchen.

“I've never seen food disappear so fast in all my life,” she said to no one in particular. “You'd think we were feeding a pride of hungry lions.”

Trying not to think of lions, Wally cleared his throat.

“What is it?” his mother asked, scarcely looking up. She was checking how much bread was left in the bread drawer.

“I think maybe we need more blankets in my room,” Wally said, not knowing what else to say.

“Well, you know where they are. Help yourself,” his mother replied. And then, “If they're all taken, Wally, get the afghan off the couch. Come to think of it, we've used every pillow in the house too.”

“Well, good night,” Wally said. “I guess I'll go to bed.”

“Bread… eggs… orange juice… What?” Mrs. Hatford asked distractedly.

“Good night,” Wally repeated.

“Oh. Good night. Don't forget to open your window,” his mother said. She was a firm believer in fresh air, especially when nine boys with smelly sneakers were all residing under her roof.

Wally went slowly back upstairs.

“Okay,” Josh whispered, pulling him into the twins' bedroom, where the other boys were waiting, all but Peter and Doug. “You'd better take Dad's old parka with you, just in case you get cold. Flashlight… whistle…”

“Whistle? What's that for?” asked Wally.

“I don't know … just in case,” Josh said. Wally felt sick to his stomach, but with everyone watching, he dared not show it.

“Maybe one of us better go with him,” said Josh.

“No!” said Wally. “I can do this myself.”

He was ready at last, with flashlight, whistle, popcorn, water bottle, and two PayDay candy bars.

“If you trap him, come back
immediately
and tell us!” Steve insisted as Danny and Bill studied Wally admiringly. “We want to be there when the photographers show up.”

“Just throw sticks at our window or something, and we'll come right down,” said Josh.

They hustled Wally over to the window and helped him climb onto the branch of the tree. Wally felt like a fireman in protective gear sliding down a pole in the firehouse. Except that there was no truck to ride at the bottom. No buddies to go with him. He was wearing so many clothes to keep warm that even if the cougar did show up, Wally could hardly run with the two pairs of pants he had on, the three shirts, the heavy socks.

The clouds were streaking across the sky, blown by the March wind, and once in a while the moon shone through.

Wally crossed the bridge, his hiking boots making dull thuds on the boards, and a phrase kept ringing in his head:
We who are about to die salute you.
He wondered where that came from. Then he remembered: It was what Roman gladiators were supposed to have said to the emperor before they fought in the Colosseum. Or right before they faced the lions, he wasn't sure which.

Every snap of a twig, every swish of a branch overhead, sounded like a cougar to him, a sound a cougar might make if it were stalking him. He had no business in the world being out here at night alone, he knew. But how could he back out in front of the Bensons?

As he started up the hill toward the garage, he thought for a minute that he felt the breath of a cougar on his neck. He wheeled about, gasping, slapping at the air, only to discover that a piece of the lining of his dad's wool hunting cap was dangling down his neck.

The light from Beth's window illuminated the ground beyond the house, and he knew he was supposed to wait until the light went on and off three times before he left the loft and hunkered down on their back porch. One of the two garage doors had been propped open with a brick so that it wouldn't bang in the breeze. Mr. Malloy's car was parked outside under the sycamore.

Wally could still smell the KFC as he entered, and he wished he had a piece of it now. He thought for a minute of rummaging about in the sack there on the floor to see if he could salvage something, but decided against it. Laboriously he climbed the rungs to the loft and lowered himself in his bulky clothes onto one of the cushions. Lying on his back, he turned on the flashlight and directed the beam at the low ceiling. He made larger and larger circles, then reversed directions, and spiraling downward, made the circles smaller and smaller.

When he tired of that, he turned off the flashlight and rolled over on his stomach, watching the window of the Malloys' house. It seemed weird that only a year ago he had been hanging out with the Bensons up here, and now the Bensons were over in his house, in his room, and a bunch of girls were in the Bensons' bedrooms. And here he was at ten o'clock at night, waiting for a cougar to show up on Island Avenue. Was he nuts or was he nuts?

He thought again about school. The week was almost over and he hadn't come up with one idea of what he could try that he'd never done before. Well, at least now he was doing something that was half crazy. Even if the cougar didn't show, he was probably the only boy in his class who had spent spring vacation waiting for it. But how could he write about that?

One by one, the other lights began to go off in the house, until only the light from Beth's window remained. Wally expected one of the girls to come out
soon with the chicken, but when minutes passed and no one came, he turned on the flashlight again and began making zigzag lines along the wall.

He thought he heard a noise and paused. Was it a huff? A puff? A grunt? A growl?

He turned off the flashlight again and looked out the window. Caroline was standing perfectly still on the back steps, one hand on the railing, one foot in midair. She looked like a statue in a park, the way horses were often sculpted with one raised hoof.

Hey, Caroline, what are you? A horse?
Wally wanted to call out, but of course he didn't.

Suddenly, below him, he heard the sound of a paper sack rustling, and just as suddenly, Caroline came rushing down the steps and over to the garage.

Wally heard the bang of the garage door, and the click of the metal latch.

He stopped breathing, because the next thing he heard was a huffing sound from below—a soft, almost inaudible pacing, and every so often a
whump,
as though someone, or something, was throwing its body against the door of the garage, as though someone, or something, was trying to get out.

And then Wally knew: he was trapped in the garage with the cougar.

He started to yell out the window to Caroline, but his voice stuck in his throat. Was he
crazy
? Did he want the cougar to know he was up here?

Wally's heart pounded so violently, he thought it would beat right through his chest. As long as he was
quiet, he told himself, as long as he hardly even breathed, the big cat would let him be. Maybe. And then his heart almost stopped a second time:
cat.
A cougar was a lion, a cat. And cats could climb.