|
>>
|
No. 4710
(I re-read Rikki Tikki Tavi this morning while in the waiting room, and was reminded of Scout. I wrote this down the minute I got home; I hope you all enjoy it.)
When Scout was seven years old, his grandmother read the story of Rikki Tikki Tavi to him. He had listened with wide eyes and rapt attention, and took it to heart. “Run and find out!” That was Rikki Tikki’s motto, and after that day, it became Scout’s as well. He ran through alleys and empty lots, pretending to chase Nag and Nagaina, though he’d never tell anyone that; to everyone else, he was practicing for baseball, or track, or whatever sport he had watched his older brothers play that summer.
Scout wasn’t much of a reader, when he finally got to High School, and didn’t do too well in any class that required reading; he hardly even knew who the Wright Brothers were, or how many tries it had taken them to make the light bulb. He never went to library, and handed in his homework only about half the time. The only thing he was truly good at was running.
Running wasn’t just his talent, though; it was his life. His entire existence revolved around and could be summed up by the burn and stretch of his legs as he flew across a field trying to outpace a thrown ball, or down the street as he outran the wail of sirens and angry shouts of cheated store owners.
Eventually, he found that as good as he was, he couldn’t outrun a police car. The person who came for him down at the jail wasn’t his mother, though, it was a man in a black suit with a blue tie who had sat down and said a whole lot of big words that Scout didn’t get, and then said that he was with a company that would pay off the store owner to keep him from pressing charges if Scout would come and work for them.
When he found out what he’d be doing, he jumped at the chance.
“Run and find out.” That was his motto again, now. He would run, and find out where the other side kept their info, and bring it back. He had a gun, now, in addition to his baseball bat, but that was okay because no one he shot ever stayed dead. It wasn’t really a war. It was just a game, one where he played Rikki Tikki and the men in red shirts were cobras and vipers to be vanquished.
And so he ran and taunted the enemy mercilessly, mocking their slow clumsiness as he darted in circles around them. And every night, when he went to bed, he paused to thumb through a battered, almost coverless book before replacing it under his pillow.
It might have been childish, but he figured that he more than made up for that moment of weakness during the day. And without his brothers here to tease him, he felt no shame in enjoying the one book he had ever read all the way through.
Unlike Rikki Tikki, though, Scout didn’t have a very good sense of smell. He never noticed the faint odor of cigarette smoke in his room one night, and couldn’t begin to fathom why the RED Spy hesitated to shoot him the next day.
He cheerfully bashed in the man’s head with his bat, and ran back to his base without a second thought.
|