The Boys Return (11 page)

The chicken hadn't even been put out yet! The cougar must have smelled the leftover KFC. It would be angry that there was nothing much left to eat. Angry that it had been trapped. And if there was no whole chicken to eat… maybe a boy would do.

It didn't have to see Wally, didn't have to hear him. All it had to do was get a whiff of Wally Hatford and it would be climbing those rungs to the loft in an instant.

Wally's mouth was open in terror. This was not what he wanted to do for Miss Applebaum. This is not the way he wanted to die! He had always thought death might come by avalanche on a mountain climbing trek, or in a fighter plane downed in battle or that he'd be a sailor sunk at sea. He'd thought he'd be given a hero's funeral, with drums and bagpipes and long rows of mourners following his casket.

He did not want to be found torn limb from limb in the loft of an old garage, with all his fingers and toes nibbled off. He did not want his parents saying, “Didn't we have a boy who looked something like that—before the cougar ate his chin?”

Caroline had to know he was up here! Wally stared desperately out the window, but all he could see was the back door of the house after Caroline had run inside and closed it. Was she going to wait till morning to tell anybody?

Whump, went the sound from below.

Huff, huff, huff.

Whump… whump… whump.

Wally closed his eyes. We who are about to die salute you.

Fourteen
911

C
aroline banged the door shut behind her, her heart exploding in her chest, her eyes huge. Should she get Eddie? Tell her father? Call 911?
What?

She didn't do any of those. She screamed. She just opened her mouth and let loose with the most piercing, ear-splitting scream she could manage. Then she took a deep breath and waited.

She didn't have to wait long. There was a two- or three-second pause, and then the house was filled with the sound of running feet.

“Caroline?” came her father's voice from upstairs. “Where are you? What's happened?”

In panic, Caroline screamed again.

“Caroline!” cried her mother.

“Hey, Caroline, what's the matter?” yelled Eddie, and then they were all flocking into the kitchen.

“The cougar!” Caroline gasped. “It's in the garage.”

“What?” cried Coach Malloy.

“Where's Wally?” asked Beth.

“He's in the garage too,” said Caroline.

“What?”
yelled their father. He ran to the back door and peered out the window. The garage door was closed. The night was still. He turned around and stared at Caroline. “How do you know?”

“I saw it go in, and shut the door behind it, and
Wally's
in there! Up in the loft!”

Coach Malloy grabbed his jacket, and then Eddie's baseball bat lying next to the door. “Jean, call 911,” he instructed, and opened the back door.

“Wally?” he yelled. “Wally?”

No answer.

Coach Malloy whirled around and faced Caroline again. “What is he doing in the garage at this time of night?”

“W-waiting for the cougar,” explained Eddie excitedly. “We were trying to catch it, and we did!”

“Girls!” cried their mother, but then she was speaking into the phone. “Yes. Six-eleven Island Avenue. We have a boy trapped in a garage with a cougar…. Yes, a
cougar
! Oh, please hurry!” She hung up.

“Wally?” Mr. Malloy yelled again, standing in the clearing between the house and the garage.

And then a face appeared at the loft's open window.

“Wally!” everyone cried at once.

Whump
came from inside the garage, as the cougar threw its weight against the door.
Whump!

“D-Dad!” cried Beth. “What if it gets out?”

“What if it gets me?” croaked Wally in a stage whisper. “Can you get me down?”

“Don't jump!” Mr. Malloy warned. “It's too far. Eddie, get the tall stepladder.”

“It's in the garage,” said Eddie. “The
folding
ladder?”

She nodded.

There was the distant sound of a siren.

“The police are on the way,” Mrs. Malloy said.

“Can cougars climb ladders?” Wally asked plaintively. “Because if they can, it's going to come up here.”

“Do you have anything you could put over the opening to the loft, Wally?” Mr. Malloy said.

“I already put a window screen over the hole, but it doesn't fit,” Wally said, and leaned even farther out the window.

“Don't jump!” Coach Malloy called again. “Here they are now!”

A patrol car, lights flashing, came speeding across the road bridge at the end of Island Avenue, followed by a fire truck and the rescue vehicle. As they rolled into the driveway, lights came on in neighboring houses.

Two policemen got out and came over.

“You sure you've got the cougar in there?” one asked.

“I'm not sure of anything, but my daughter says we do. And there's a kid up there who needs to come down,” Coach Malloy said, pointing toward Wally, who was now sitting on the window ledge, one leg dangling over the side.

Whump, thump,
came from inside the garage, followed by loud huffing.

“Pleeeease?” came Wally's plaintive cry.

“Get that kid down,” the policeman said to the firemen. They removed a ladder from their truck and braced it against the side of the garage. Another car pulled up and Tom Hatford got out.

“Hey, Tom, you the sheriff's deputy tonight?” one of the policemen called.

“Yeah, I'm on duty,” Mr. Hatford said. “What have we got here? What's this about a cougar?”

“Girl says she's got a cougar trapped in the garage, and there's a boy in there with him. We're getting him out right now,” the second officer said.

Mr. Hatford looked over to where the firemen were putting up the ladder. His mouth dropped. “Wally?” he said.

“Dad?” said Wally.

Mr. Hatford ran over to the barn and stood staring up at his son.

“Hold on there, now,” said the fireman who was climbing the ladder. “You're one brave kid, and you're doing just fine.”

When he reached the top, he guided Wally's foot off the sill and onto the second rung. Then the fireman backed down, with Wally in front of him.

Tom Hatford walked over to George Malloy. “If I live to be a hundred, I will never understand our kids,” he said.

“We won't even
live
to be a hundred, Tom, with
them
around! I lost a year of my life tonight just
thinking
about Wally in there with that animal,” said Coach Malloy. “‘ Trying to catch a cougar,'” they said. But both men gave Wally a hug when he reached the ground.

Whump! Whump!
The sounds from inside the garage were getting louder, and everyone could hear the cougar's breathing.

“Anybody got a tranquilizer gun?” one of the policemen asked. He looked over at the men from the rescue squad.

“ 'Fraid not,” one of them said.

A gaggle of boys appeared, running up the hill from the river. Jake and Josh and Danny and Bill, Steve and Tony and Doug—and Peter, still wearing his bunny slippers. Mrs. Hatford, with an overcoat thrown on top of her nightgown, was not far behind. They got there just in time to see Wally descend the ladder.

“Wow! What happened?” asked Steve.

“We got the cougar!” yelled Caroline. “I locked him in the garage.” And then she lost control. “Oh, it was so awful! He almost had me by the throat, but—”

“Caroline! Can it!” warned Eddie.

The policeman spoke into his radio, asking the dispatcher to send the animal control truck with a tranquilizer gun. Then a car pulled up with a photographer and a reporter from the newspaper, and they came right over to where Wally and Caroline were standing.

“Who actually captured the cougar?” the reporter asked as the photographer adjusted his camera.

“We all did,” said Eddie. “We all planned it, even though Caroline was the one who locked the garage door. So we all get the credit.”

“Who's
we
?” the reporter asked, and everyone took turns telling the story.

The photographer arranged the twelve kids in two rows outside the door of the garage and took a picture, then another and another, and asked the Hatfords and Malloys for permission to print them.

“I guess I can speak for the Bensons, since we've got their boys for the night,” Mrs. Hatford told them.

Whump! Thump!

The photographer suddenly backed away and stared at the closed doors of the garage.

The animal control truck pulled up.

“Okay, now, I want everybody up on the porch,” said one of the men from the truck after talking with the officer. “I'm going to go up the ladder into the loft and see if I can fire a tranquilizer dart from up there. I
need you officers to cover for me in case, when we open the door later, the cat's not down.”

Up went the man with the tranquilizer gun, and for some time nothing happened.

“Can't get him in my sights,” he called out to a fireman who stood on the ladder outside the loft window. “Keeps pacing. He's nervous, all right.”

Finally there was a pop as the gun went off.

“Got his thigh,” the man called. And then, a few minutes later, “Okay. He's down. You can open the door.”

Caroline and her sisters stood behind the railing of the small back porch with the nine boys from across the river. When the garage doors were opened at last, out came the cougar, carried in a sling by four sturdy men, who placed it in the back of the panel truck.

Everyone streamed off the porch to see the cougar, and the Hatford and Benson boys went down the line giving high fives to all the Malloy girls. The Malloy girls went down the line giving high fives to all the guys.

“Do you think we know even one tenth of what these kids are up to half the time?” Mrs. Hatford asked Mrs. Malloy.

“I doubt it, and I don't think I want to know,” Caroline's mother replied. “How do they
think
of these things? How can they possibly get into so much trouble without our knowing?”

“That wasn't trouble at all!” Caroline crowed. “We caught the cougar and saved Buckman!” She dramatically raised her arms to the sky.

“And next thing we know, you'll say you saved Western civilization,” said her mother. “Come down from whatever planet you're on, Caroline Lenore, and go to bed. It's been quite a day.”

Fifteen
The Great Hullabaloo

C
OUGAR CAPTURED BY KIDS, ran the banner headline in the newspaper the next morning. The boys had the pages spread out across the breakfast table.

Oh, how Wally wished they were in school right now so that he could tell all about it! There under the headline was a photo of twelve kids, including Peter in his bunny slippers. The Benson boys were back, and together (well, the girls did help a little) they had captured the beast that had stalked Buckman since last November.

He imagined standing up before Miss Applebaum and the whole class and recounting the terrifying ordeal in the garage. He had done something he had never done before—something no one else would ever do again, probably. Then he thought of Caroline, who would stand up next and tell how she—Caroline
Lenore Malloy—had captured the beast single-hand-edly, and his own part didn't seem quite so wonderful.

“Man oh man oh man!” said Steve. “I wish this story would make the paper down in Georgia! Wouldn't we be something then!”

“Hey, look at the grin on your face!” Danny said, ribbing Bill as they studied the photo. “And you weren't even there when the cougar was caught.”

“Well, neither were you!” Bill shot back.

“But we were all in on the planning, so we all get the credit,” said Tony.

“It was my idea in the first place,” said Steve.

They had all read the story, but Mr. Hatford read it again, this time aloud:

“Police, firemen, rescue squad, and animal control officials were called to the residence of George Malloy, 611 Island Avenue, last night when one of his daughters trapped a cougar in their garage.