He hovered by the cage.
“What are you waiting for?” she said, hearing the sound of a toilet flushing in the room next door. “If, like most boys, he don’t wash his hands, he’s almost here again! Leave!”
“I want a kiss,” he said.
“I’m not your girlfriend!” she screamed. “What, you want to kill me just a little bit faster?”
“I’m not your boyfriend,” he answered. “I just want a kiss for luck. And to remember. This is my first kiss, you know.”
She softened. “And it’s my last,” she replied. She kissed him through the bamboo bars: sweetly, quickly, memorably. “Now get outta here before you get caught. Take my pouch, it still has the coin we didn’t give Gage. Use that for the trade.”
“I thought skibbereen never stole teeth —”
“All the rules break when you’re at the end,” she replied. “At least I’ve just decided that. Now go, What-the-Dickens: please go. It will cheer me up in my last moments to think that you might have made it. But don’t linger at the colony. Evacuate. They’ll take action against you sooner or later. You’re an alien, and they’ll have no truck with aliens.”
“What’ll I do?” he said. “I mean, then? Without you?”
“Ask no questions,” she said decisively, and closed her eyes. “Use your imagination. You’ll make out all right.”
He flew to the doorway and hovered above the lintel. When Gage returned, What-the-Dickens slipped out up high just as McCavity slipped in down low.
“Don’t forget to floss!” cried Pepper madly, uttering the traditional farewell commonly used only by the old biddie skibbereen to their sewing society members.
“Stop there,” said Zeke. “Now I have to go to the bathroom.”
When Zeke had left the room, Dinah said, “He’s listening, you know.”
“He’s a brave, brave kid,” said Gage. “Braver than I was at his age. You’re lucky to have him as a brother. I admire him.”
Since Dinah couldn’t honestly reply, And he admires you, she changed the subject. “I think it is getting lighter. Don’t you?”
“You’re mixing up the story with the true night,” said Gage. “That’s the trouble with stories. It’s still as dark as ever out there, Dinah. But morning will come. Very few things in the world are certain, but morning is one of them.”
“It’s always morning at some place in the world,” said Dinah, looking out the window at the blackness. “Even when you’re sad — when you’re missing someone so much you can’t say it — there’s some place else in the world where the light is coming out again, as if for the first time.”
“That’s a bit soupy,” said Gage, “though I’m not one to talk. You’ve been reading some of those books that Granny Menace despises so much?”
“We don’t do a whole lot of reading except for Bible stories. But they’re a lot about light coming in, too. Sort of.”
Gage was chastened somewhat. “You’re right about mornings. You know, in the middle of your own midnight swamp, there’s always some other dawn story happening somewhere else that is just swell. Some baby being born to ecstatic parents, some unexpected happiness tripping up a tired commuter, some act of kindness interrupting a day of plodding. The notion that there are other good stories you’ll never know is in itself kind of consoling. Don’t you think?”
“That’s the grown-up you talking now,” said Dinah, as politely as she could. “I don’t want that part, all the shiny meaning polished up all obvious and sound-bitey, just so I can get it. Save that for Zeke. Me, I just want to find out what happened to the two skibbereen.”
She got up stiffy to use the bathroom when Zeke got back. “And to you,” she added politely, “though I guess I know what happened to you, don’t I?”
“So far,” Gage said. He didn’t seem offended.
Perhaps What-the-Dickens was learning something. An hour had gone by since he and Pepper had landed at Gage Tavenner’s house. Now the air had a different character; a thicker, more spoiled breath, as if the world waited till the most private part of the night to exhale its less flowery perfumes. Or maybe there was just a plumbing problem over at the zoo.
He recited the directions over and over again, scared he would forget them. His attention was interrupted though by his temper: he was angry at himself. Why can’t I interpret the amber twitches and vinegary sizzles I feel coursing up and down my wings? I can fly now, more or less, so I’m not beyond learning something new . . . but my instincts for communication with headquarters are missing. Or broken. Maybe a result of being born without a colony, without a clan, without a mother.
I just can’t interpret the lingo. I just don’t get it.
He gained some height over the Tavenner house. As he rose, he felt a growing sense of distress at leaving Pepper behind. Every added yard of distance between them deepened the ache. Still, what could he do for her but fulfill her mission — their mission? This was his chance to prove his mettle, to show both the colony and Pepper that he was a capable skibberee even if born solo and, by the accident of his origins, a rogue.
The world below settled more or less into the map that Pepper had described. There was the road by the Tavenner house, grey in the cloud-blurred moonlight. And there, was that the knoll of beech trees? He climbed to a higher altitude and confirmed his position. Yes, for sure. To the south of the knoll ran the highway, and you couldn’t mistake a highway for a river or a cart track, not with those red and white beads of light moving in coordination along it, northwest and southeast.
The headlights of trucks on overnight runs, or early-bird commuters? Dawn will be here soon, thought What-the-Dickens, and there’s so much to be done. Yes, indeed, and I see a lightening in the sky to the east. Not anything as obvious as orange or pink, just a softening of blackness into a kind of charcoal. As if the night over there is hesitating.
No time to lose. He had an idea — where had it come from? Ideas didn’t come from central command, did they? Was it a scrap of memory about how the baby grisset, tumbling from the nest, had managed to save itself?
With the nerve that is born of panic, he folded his wings suddenly and plunged earthward. The memory of Pepper will be all that is left of her in another twenty-four hours, he thought. I must do what I can to make sure the memory is heroic.
So, Geronimo, and good-bye to all that, and here’s looking at you, kid.
Toward the south-leading lane of the highway he dove like a bungee jumper without a bungee. If his instincts were wrong, he would be dead sooner than Pepper — and there’d be no one left to carry on her memory, or to care about his. But it was worth the risk, to buy a little time, when time was so short.
Thirty feet above the pavement he flexed his wings to cup the air and slow his descent. Readying, readying. If he dropped too quickly, he’d be smooshed on the fender of a truck like his cousin the moth. If he dropped too slowly, he’d miss his window of vacuum and end up drying in the morning sun, a tiny dot of skibberee moisture on the highway. . . .
An eighteen-wheeler threw up too much turbulence. A passenger car changed lanes too swiftly, too often. He had to find a midsize vehicle, neither racing nor swerving, but holding its speed judiciously.
Here it comes. Ready, steady . . .
He angled out like a bomber coming in around a target, describing in the air a curve such as might be made by an ant spiraling downward on the outside of a plump teapot.
He positioned himself, always moving, always gauging, correcting, readying, steadying, and: now: going.
It worked! Worked it! It worked! Worked it! His thoughts tumbled over and over as he tumbled, too, in the slipstream of a midsize truck. Red, with black and gold letters on the two back doors.
GOODNESS BAKERY: THE BEST BAKED GOODS.
And the exhaust smelled encouragingly of raspberry jam coffee cake and cinnamon rolls.
The baker drove the Goodness Bakery delivery van at a brave sixty-two miles an hour (brave because the speed limit was fifty-fiv
e). The countryside blurred in a smear of black-and-light. In less time than it takes to tell, the truck passed a highway sign announcing the upcoming exit. What-the-Dickens kick-swam himself to the edge of the slipstream, and then jackknifed himself out of it, again tumbling over and over again in the stiller air.
He was lucky. He might have smacked into a milk house or a tractor shed, or the billboard screaming out
BUY IN NOW — THREE NEW HOUSING ESTATES!
BUILD TO YOUR CHOICE OF PLANS!
DAIRYLAND COMMON
GRANITE HEIGHTS
APPLETREE ACRES
But he survived.
It took him a minute for his memory to catch up with his body, but soon it did. He headed east along the trunk road, passed a schlumpy sort of house that had seen better days, and came to a second one that looked no better. But it did look familiar.
It was the house into whose chimney the rust-throated grisset had deposited him. The old fiend upstairs, heading for a hundred — she was Lee Gangster? Oh, the accident necessary to fiction! It was hard to believe, but he didn’t have time to hang about in the air, gaping. To be alive at all was such a colossal coincidence that every other accidental luck paled by comparison.
There is work to be done. I’ll do it. I’ll manage. Coincidence arms me, but I do the work.
For Pepper, he told himself, and dove to the task.
What-the-Dickens remembered that the old lady liked to sleep with her window open, so access to the site was a cinch. There she was, sitting up in bed again, surrounded by volumes of poetry with poetic images printed on them: rows of daisies, bolts of lightning, streams of musical notes, parades of bugs, fences made out of bloody daggers, and a lot of books with appealing titles like Oblivion and Morosity and The Collected Poems of Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
“Is my family trying to tell me something?” she groused aloud, picking up a glass empty of all but the drowned remains of a segment of lime. She fished out the lime with gnarled fingers and sucked any remaining gin out of it. “I hardly think any of these are what you’d call a laugh riot. More like a farrago of gloom. Hardly restores my zest for living.”
She opened up her mouth in a yawn. What-the-Dickens remembered she liked to grumble all night and then snore herself to sleep in the morning. But he couldn’t wait for her to nod off. To save Pepper’s reputation, he was going to have to break some rules.
He dusted off his wings, straightened his tunic, and took a deep breath. Before she had finished yawning, he flew before her and hovered a foot from her face. (This gave him a good look at her gums. She had only one natural tooth left; all the false teeth, in their serried ranks, were suspended in another glass of water, as before.)
“Is that tooth about to come out?” he demanded.
“Oh, it’s you,” she replied, hardly surprised. “Didn’t I tell you I wasn’t ready to die yet? I might not like the reading material in this waiting room, but that doesn’t mean I want to see the Final Doctor.”
“I’m not the Fairy of Death,” he said patiently, “and I don’t have time to explain. I want your tooth.”
“This old thing?” She tapped it with a finger. “What, are you some kind of deranged tooth fairy with a fetish? Tooth fairies want milk teeth, buster; this is a gin prong. And I’m not surrendering it. At least one of my natural teeth is going to make it with me to one hundred, which is still a few months away. So buzz off, and take these books with you.”
“I can’t lift them,” he said. “I’m only big enough to lift a tooth. I’ll give you a quarter for it.”
“I can’t buy a new false tooth for a quarter.”
“Give it to me.” He ventured closer.
“Come any nearer and I’ll trap you in the pages of posterity,” she threatened. She picked up a tome and read from it. “‘Up the airy mountain, / Down the rushy glen, / We daren’t go a-hunting / For fear of little men.’ That sounds like a good page on which to be interred, little man.”
He tried again. “You read a lot, so you think you know everything. Well, guess what. I am the Fairy of Death, and I’m going to take your life from you if you don’t give me your tooth.”
She dabbed at her eyes with the edge of her sheet. “I talk a blue streak to keep myself amused, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to die,” she said. “I’m just lonely, that’s all. And now loneliness is playing tricks on me: I’m hallucinating a midget Angel of Death. Tell you what: Why don’t you stay here and be my friend, and we can play tricks on the grandchildren downstairs? I’d be so much nicer if I had some company.”
“Your tooth or your life,” he repeated, trying to sound like a bully.
“You can have my false teeth,” she offered grandly. “All of them. Go on. I mean it. I’ll tell the insurance people that my grandson flushed them down the toilet. It’ll take a month to get a new set, but what’s a month? Another month of life, that’s what, in all its joy and glory! Deal?”
What-the-Dickens paused. Tempting — had such riches ever been harvested by a single tooth fairy? Except for the space where Lee Gangster’s real-life gin prong fit in, it was a complete set of uppers and lowers. Imagine the celebration! Imagine the gratitude of Doctor Ill! Maybe Silviana would add another Act to the Duty Pageant, honoring the triumph of What-the-Dickens. . . .
But it’s the triumph of Pepper I’m committed to achieving, he remembered. Somewhat sadly, he said, “I can’t close that deal. My job is in trades, but I’m not authorized —”
“Don’t you have a superior you can speak to?” she interrupted. “Surely there’s a Great Tooth Fairy in the sky or something who watches every little sparrow that falls senseless to the ground, and so on?”
“That’s beyond my area of expertise,” he said. “I’m taking the tooth. I’m sorry, Mrs. Gangster. It’s my job.” As he spoke, he removed his knapsack with the quarter in it.
Maybe I can spin around in the air like a top and build up speed and power. Then I might whack out the tooth while her mouth is open in astonishment at my prowess.
It might work. Riding the slipstream of the bakery truck had worked.
Lee Gangster’s voice suddenly crumpled, and she sounded like the young girl she would have been nearly a century ago. “This is getting surreal. When you start imagining you’re being molested in your own bed by the Tooth Fairy of Death, you’ve been hitting the sauce too much. Or reading too much fiction. Too much alone. Where’s my mother? She always comes. Why doesn’t she come? Mama!” she cried. “Mama!”
Perhaps the new note of anxiety in her voice carried farther than her usual carping, for though her volume had hardly risen, a door opened downstairs. Feet pattered in the hallway. “Grandma?” said a voice. “Are you all right?”
“Who’s there?” called Lee Gangster. “Who’s that?”
What-the-Dickens paused. He couldn’t smack an old woman in the face who was calling for her mother. He just couldn’t. Sorry, Pepper, he thought. He lowered the satchel.
The door opened. What-the-Dickens had the presence of mind to spring to an ornately carved frame hanging on the wall. It surrounded a portrait of an early Gangster, now presumably deceased, though possessed of a magnificent overbite that any red-blooded skibberee would drool over.
“What’s the matter, Grandma?” asked the grandchild, a small boy in cowboy pajamas.
A small boy with a worried expression — a furrowed brow, an uneven buzz cut, dirty fingernails — and a gap in his dental lineup where his left front tooth should be.
“I’ve had an interview with the Angel of Death,” she gabbled, “and the visitor is still around here somewhere! Listen, Lee darling, do this for Granny. Find the cunning little creature and kill him for me, will you?”
“Grandma,” said her grandson patiently, “you’ve had a bad dream. . . .”
What-the-Dickens didn’t stay to hear the rest. He fled out the open door and spiraled down the stairs. He was looking for the bedroom of the grandson — the other Lee Gangster. He knew he would f
ind the appropriate tooth there, and the pillow under which he could leave the skibberee’s calling card — the coin of the realm.
Pepper quivered, like a drying seedpod rasping along the dirt in a stiff wind.
She had not experienced dying before, so she was curious. But she also hadn’t experienced such hearty emotion before, or not so she’d recognized at the time. True, she’d felt for the colony a distant sort of patriotism that had been romance and religion alike to her. Beyond this, she’d had ambitions — ambitions to a private name and a license to work abroad at night. But that was about it. She hadn’t had feelings. Heavens. They weighed so much —
— they weighed so much —
— she could hardly flap her wings to get her blood going and dispense those pesky feelings.
Nor can I name them, she thought. I got neither the skill nor the practice.
With some effort she turned her head to look at her captor. He was a human, and humans were known to be stuffed with feelings. It was their curse and their charm. How did he manage it?
Having grown up in a skibbereen colony, Pepper knew more about human beings than What-the-Dickens could. She knew enough to be scared out of her wits. She understood that humans could be vicious, stupid, corrupt, and insensitive.
They could lie with a talent that beggared belief.
Frequently they smelled awful, too.
In the plus column — as if she could ever add one and one! — Pepper conceded that Gage was only a child. And human children haven’t yet had time enough to grow crooked. Human children are often breezy of spirit, warm of heart, devout in their prayers, and hopeful to boot. They like stories, they run and shriek and kick balls across the grass for no apparent reason. They only occasionally stink, for nothing in them has begun to decay.
And this lad Gage, her client, seemed decent enough.
Except for the little business of his locking her in a cage until she died. That was in the minus column, and it was a big fat minus.
The boy had drawn up a chair to his desk. Perched there, he lowered his chin onto his folded hands on the desktop, so he could look through the narrow bamboo struts of the cage and watch Pepper in captivity.