Hoot

Each day on the bus, Roy looks for the running boy. On Friday, he sees him and gets up to chase after him, but Dana grabs Roy from behind. Roy squirms but cannot escape Dana’s grip on his neck. Frantic, Roy flails and hits Dana in the face; Dana lets go and Roy hurries off the bus. He chases after the running boy. Sweating and huffing, Roy manages to keep up, and soon they are both running across a golf course. A golf ball bounces and hits Roy in the head; dazed, he collapses.

When he gets back to school, Roy is interrogated by the vice principal, Viola Hennepin, who reports that Dana has a broken nose and demands to know why Roy hit him unprovoked and then ran away. Roy insists that Dana was choking him; Hennepin says none of the other children agree with him; Roy points out that they are all scared of Dana. She suspends Roy from the bus for two weeks and orders him to write an apology to Dana.

Roy visits the bathroom and checks his neck in the mirror: several bruises show that Dana did choke him. At lunch, he is accosted by a tall, blond girl wearing red-frame glasses. Roy remembers he nearly knocked her over that morning as he ran from the bus. She’s big, athletic, and mad at him; she shoves him against a wall, calls him “cowgirl,” tells him she knows who he was chasing after, and warns him to mind his own business. She stalks off.

Delinko is called to the empty lot, where vandals once again have pulled up the survey stakes. This time, a truck’s tires are flat. Strapped to the truck’s bed are three portable toilets. Delinko checks them for damage and hears splashing inside one of them. With his flashlight, he peers down into the toilet, yells in alarm, and jumps off the truck. To Curly, he says, “Alligators.”

At home that evening, Roy explains the Dana incident to his parents, who do not quite understand why he ran all the way to the golf course. They examine his head—the nurse at school determined he did not have a concussion—and Roy’s dad seems proud that his son broke the bully’s nose. When they see his neck, they realize Roy really was assaulted. They decide to contact the school to learn what punishment Dana will get. Roy groans, knowing this will cause him more trouble.

Roy misses Montana. On his bedroom wall is a poster of a bull ridden by a rodeo contestant, and, next to it, a poster from Yellowstone National Park warning visitors not to approach the park’s buffalo. As he writes his apology letter, he imagines Dana getting gored by a buffalo. The letter says he’s sorry he broke Dana’s nose, and he promises not to do it again as long as Dana does not bother him. His mom thinks it is too “forceful,” but his dad says the tone is “exactly right” (33).

Delinko reports to his sergeant and captain on the toilet alligators—they are each three to four feet long. The sergeant assures the captain that a wrangler has removed them. The police chief is being pressured by the city council over the vandalism; the captain asks for the officers’ views. The sergeant thinks it is a juvenile prank, but Delinko believes the perpetrator’s persistence, plus the danger of managing alligators, points to involvement by an older person. The captain orders the sergeant to maintain hourly patrols around the construction site. Delinko asks to be assigned to the duty; he wants to “solve the mystery” (36).

On Monday, Roy learns from Garrett that Dana is absent and that the students are talking about how Roy “pounded him so hard, his nose got knocked up to his forehead” (37). Apparently, Dana has three older brothers; Garrett suggests Roy beg for mercy.

Roy asks Garrett what he knows about the tall girl with red glasses. Garrett says her name is Beatrice Leep, a “soccer jock” with a bad attitude who once broke a high school footballer’s collarbone by tossing him into a public fountain for slapping her butt. Garrett advises that with Beatrice and Dana after him he should convert and go to Catholic school.

Delinko chafes at his job handing out traffic tickets; he wants to advance to detective so he can solve real crimes. The Mother Paula’s guard duty gives him a chance to figure out what the vandals are up to and, in the process, maybe win a promotion.

Before dawn on Monday, Delinko sits in his squad car, scanning the lot. He notices movement, flicks on his car lights, and sees a pair of burrowing owls. They are less than a foot tall, dark brown and spotted, their eyes “piercing amber.” They fly off. Delinko dozes. He wakes in darkness to Curly pounding on his car. He gets out into broad daylight. Vandals have spray-painted his windows black. They also again pulled up all the survey stakes.

At lunch Roy abruptly sits at Beatrice’s table, interrupting her chat with soccer chums. He apologizes for pushing her when he escaped from Dana. He then suggests that, in the future, if she has a problem with him, she can simply talk to him about it instead of pushing him around. Smiling politely, he gets up and leaves. Beatrice is speechless.

Garrett’s mother is a school counselor. Roy pays him a dollar to get Dana’s address from the counseling files. On the way home, Roy convinces his mother to drop him at the address. Dana’s mother answers the door and calls for her boy. He appears, wearing pajamas, a pile of gauze taped to his face. Roy gives him the letter of apology and explains to Dana’s mother that he’s the one who punched Dana when he tried to strangle him. Dana’s mother attempts to take the letter, but Dana crumples it and holds it away, and they fight over it. Roy returns to his mother’s car while she watches the porch fight, perplexed.

Late that afternoon, Roy retraces the run to where he was hit by a golf ball; from here, he continues in the direction he saw the boy go. He pushes through a thicket and finds signs of a campfire. Nearby are three large plastic bags. One holds trash while another contains neatly folded shirts, pants, and underwear. The third bag feels strange; he dumps it out. Nine poisonous cottonmouth snakes writhe on the ground around his feet.

A voice orders him to stand perfectly still. Roy once met a Grizzly bear and her two cubs while on a school hike in Montana; he stood there, stock-still, until the bears left, but he continued to stand there for another two hours until the teacher found him. The voice now tells him to take a slow step back; Roy tries but totters. Hands grab him and pull him away. The stranger quickly ties Roy’s hands behind his back and puts a hood over his head.

Roy knows it is the running boy; he asks him questions, but the boy will not give answers except to say that some people call him “Mullet Fingers.” The boy leads Roy out of the thicket and tells him that, unless he wants a cottonmouth snake for a gift, to count to 50 before removing the hood. Roy obeys then pulls off the hood. He is on the golf course again. Roy hurries home on his bike. “He wasn’t frightened and he wasn’t discouraged. He was more excited than ever” (57). 

Roy asks his parents whether truants go to jail. His father says they usually just end up back in school. His mother worries that Roy is so scared of Dana that he is thinking of skipping school. Roy assures her that is not his plan, but he will not say more, concerned that his father, who is in law enforcement, might decide to search for Mullet Fingers.

His father reads from the paper that a police car was vandalized with spray paint. The story adds details about the recent vandalism at the Mother Paula’s construction site. Roy realizes the site’s address is at one end of the street where Beatrice boards the school bus. He wonders how big the alligators were; his father says, “I don’t think it’s important, son. I think it’s the thought that counts” (61).

Removing the paint from the police car costs $400. Delinko’s captain puts him on desk duty for a month, although he may still use the police car to drive directly to and from work. Delinko decides it is nobody’s business if he gets up early and stops at the construction site on the way to work.

At school, students are taking bets on how many times Dana will beat up Roy when he returns to classes. Roy shrugs and continues with his plans. After school, he grabs a shoebox and rides until he finds a vacant lot lined with construction equipment. He stops and looks around.

From a trailer on the lot, Curly bursts out and confronts Roy, accusing him of being a vandal and threatening him with guard dogs the next time he tries anything. Roy rides away and heads to the golf course, where he tries to locate Mullet Fingers again, but the boy’s camp is gone, all signs of it removed.

A thunderstorm breaks out, and Roy runs to his bike, but it is missing. In his hurry, he had not locked it. Lightning flashes, and Roy takes shelter in a wooden kiosk. The lightning moves off, but the rain continues to pour. Roy’s parents probably are getting worried about him, so he begins the soggy trek home. On the flat Florida terrain, rainwater forms puddles that he must slosh through. At an intersection, he hears a voice. It’s Beatrice, and she is riding his bike. She asks what is in the shoebox. 

Roy wants his bike back. Beatrice says maybe later but, for now, she wants him to sit on the handlebars for a ride. Roy relents, and she peddles them effortlessly through the rain puddles. They reach a junkyard where they sneak past wrecked cars to an old ice cream van on blocks. They climb in and sit in darkness. The van smells like peanut butter cookies.

Beatrice snatches the shoebox from Roy and discovers inside a pair of nearly new shoes. Roy explains that they are about the right size for Mullet. She wants to know why Roy cares about him; Roy just says he needs shoes. Beatrice offers to bring them to Mullet if Roy promises to stop spying on him. Roy asks how she knows him; she says, “He’s my brother” (76). Beatrice explains that he escaped from a “special” school in Alabama and hitchhiked back to Florida, where Beatrice hides him from their mother.

After finishing a pile of paperwork and waiting for the rainstorm to subside, Delinko hurries to the motor pool, where he retrieves his patrol car. He drives past the Mother Paula construction site, but it is quiet after the storm. The dispatch radio mentions a lost boy named Roy. As he continues toward home, he sees Roy and gives him a ride. When the police car arrives at the Eberhardt house, Delinko gives Roy his card and asks the boy to call him if he hears anything about the vandalism.

Roy’s parents are ecstatic to see him; they thank Delinko profusely. The officer quietly asks Roy if his father might write a note thanking the department for Delinko’s service. Roy says he’ll ask. His mother mentions the spray-painted patrol car, and Delinko looks embarrassed.