“Are you comfortable?” he asked.
Skibbereen aren’t supposed to talk to their humans. Skibbereen in captivity are supposed to pretend to be bugs and pass away as briskly as possible.
But I feel — disobedient, thought Pepper. Worried enough to feel — is it called — chatty?
“You just don’t look comfortable,” he said. “What if I folded up a washcloth and set it inside for a kind of little mattress? If we had marshmallows in the house I could creep downstairs and get one for your pillow. It’d be just perfect.”
He looked sad at the thought that he lived in a house lacking in marshmallows.
I’ll resist the urge to talk to him. I’ll force myself to sit up and fold my legs and swivel around so my back is to him.
Though the labor of the gesture exhausted her, she managed. She felt no pride in her stubbornness, but she liked noticing her feelings. You could keep changing, even on your deathbed.
“Don’t be like that!” he said. “I’m just trying to keep you safe. You should have seen what McCavity did to Charlotte, Orville, and Wilbur. It was disgusting. Feathers and blood everywhere.”
“Why don’t you get rid of her?” she snapped over her shoulder; suddenly she couldn’t help herself. “What kind of a person harbors a known murderess like that?”
“Who would want her? Who could put up with her?” he replied. “I can’t send McCavity to the cat pound. They might put her down — kill her — and then I’d be just as guilty as she is.”
“You’ll be as guilty as she is if you don’t let me go.”
“Oh, are you worried? Don’t worry. I like you, you know. I’ll take care of you. You can be my pet. Nothing good ever happened to me before this.”
“Enjoy it while it lasts,” she said aloud, before she could stop herself. I’ll die before you can show me off to your friends, kid. I’ll be a browning leaf stem, no more than that.
It was almost as if he could read her mind. “I won’t give you away to anyone. I don’t have any friends anyway. I can just enjoy it being the two of us. But now I know: I’m a person that something can happen to. I never guessed. I always thought I was going to be the kind of person nothing ever happened to. I’d have to stand in the background of all the class photos, being blurred to everyone, and blurred to myself.”
It sounded familiar: like being a skibberee who failed at her exams and had her license suspended. “You don’t get out enough,” she said.
“I’m a child: what are my options?” he replied.
“I ain’t here to do career counseling for a ten-year-old,” she snapped, and added to herself, I’m trying to collect my thoughts before I die. “Why don’t you go, oh, play a board game?”
“Board games are boring. After the first time, you know how they have to end. It’s only a question of how you get there.”
“Then read a book. Books can end any number of ways.”
“I don’t have any books. We can’t afford them. We’re not what you’d call prosperous.”
“That’s what libraries are for.”
“The community library is only open on Saturday mornings, and on Saturdays we always go to tailgate fairs and sell my mom’s pot holders and my dad’s hand-painted wooden duck decoys.”
Pepper gave up. She began to shudder with an unfamiliar chill.
“Are you cold?” said Gage. “Can I get you a blanket of some sort? I have a little pencil case with a sliding door. I could line it with tufts of cotton pulled off the ends of ear swabs. You could stretch out in it.”
“That sounds like a coffin. That’s human practice. No thanks.” But Pepper was oddly pleased at the attention.
“What if I bring the desk light closer to warm you up?” he said, and pulled the gooseneck of his lamp over the cage.
She shrieked. What was he trying to do, bake her dry as a skeleton?
Gage swung the lamp back. “Well, are you hungry, then?” he asked.
“For freedom, for flight, for privacy,” she replied, “Yes. For food, forget it.”
“Am I supposed to let you go?” he said. “Is it that sort of a thing? Don’t you have to give me a wish then, for my charity?”
“I don’t got to give you anything,” said her words, but she felt her eyes steam up, in anger or confusion. Couldn’t this human being do a kind thing without being paid? True, tooth fairies were in the business of trade, but weren’t humans rumored to be capable of kindness? Sometimes?
“Come on, let’s be fair. I saved your life. McCavity would’ve torn you to shreds. If you don’t give me a wish, can’t you give me something I don’t have? Why don’t you tell me about yourself?”
“I’m hardly here anymore. I don’t count.”
“I know so little about anything,” he said, “but you count to me.”
If I start thinking about counting, I’ll confuse myself. “You don’t read enough,” she said. “That’s how to learn something about something.”
“We covered that already. Tell me a story about yourself.”
“Once upon a time,” she said, “there was a little tiny fairy named Bluebell Berrybush. Every day she flitted from flower to flower minding her own business. One day she was trapped by a grotesque child, and she died a hideous miserable death, but still minding her own business, which was a comfort to her in her final moments. The end.”
“Your name is not Bluebell Berrybush,” he said. “I may be only ten, but give me a break. I’m not a nincompoop.”
“What’s the least amount I can tell you before you grant my freedom?” she asked. “I don’t got long, you know.”
“I’m not sure,” he said. His eyes looked large, as if he were surprised that his gambit showed signs of paying off. “Start, and keep on, and we’ll know when you get there.”
“You drive a hard bargain,” she said, but the sparkles in her wings were beginning to fade, and her toes curled downward a little.
“You got my tooth,” he said. “Are you really the Tooth Fairy?”
She hid her face in her hands. “You could say so.”
“I thought there wasn’t any such thing as the Tooth Fairy. That’s what all the big kids say.”
“Big kids know everything, don’t they.” She was surprised she had the strength to sound sarcastic. “Does that prove I don’t exist, just because big kids grow out of believing in me?”
Gage wasn’t a quick thinker. He couldn’t answer the question. “The Tooth Fairy. Wow!” he said. “There really is one. I didn’t think those old stories and legends had any truth to them. Can you shed any light on Santa Claus?”
“Not my department.”
“Easter Bunny? Four-leaf clovers? Leprechauns and rainbows and pots of gold?”
“Pots of bunk if you ask me, but I’m not an expert witness.”
“Wishing on a star? Wishing on a coin thrown in a fountain?”
Pepper didn’t want to talk about wishes, because a wish was just exactly what she wished to have the use of right now. She drew her arms around her small legs and huddled into a tighter bundle. “No comment.”
Gage could tell the subject of wishing was a hot one. “If you won’t give me a wish,” he said in a low voice, “maybe I could give you one. What do you wish for now?”
“You know perfectly well. I’d rather die as a free agent than as a captive.”
“But you’d die alone,” he replied. “I know what it’s like to be alone myself — I’m an only child. It’s no good.”
Pepper hesitated.
Then she broke another rule.
“I wouldn’t die alone,” she whispered. “I’m not the only one. There are others of us.”
“No!” he whispered back.
“Yes,” she said, “but if I tell you all about it, I’ll jeopardize their safety. We live by — what was that nursery motto they hammered into us? — ‘camouflage and subterfuge.’ The most basic rule is not to draw attention to ourselves. Still, I give it to you straight: Let me go, and I try to ma
ke it to the colony. At least I’ll die within sight of my home.”
“You’re nearby? Here in Fern Hill?” He was almost breathless with excitement. “Right near here?”
“Use your head. How else could we do our work unless we had local chapters?” she said.
“Can I see it? Can I take you there?”
“Huh. I can just imagine the things those jokesters would say if I brought a human boy home for breakfast.”
“But — if it’s near enough for you to reach by flying, surely I could walk there. . . .”
Her hunger for home — as strict and uncompromising as her home was — raked through her. She convulsed with longing, her chin touching her toes. “Don’t tempt me,” she begged. “We’re supposed to die alone, and if you talk to me about returning home, I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“Let me help,” he said. “I didn’t ask for you to come here. I didn’t set McCavity on you. All I ever wanted was some news of the outside world — the world outside this safe, safe, safe house. You’ve given me some news. Come on. Why not? I won’t have to get too near. I won’t make you introduce me to anyone. I can set you down somewhere nearby, and then just stand back and watch.”
And blow our cover for all time, thought Pepper. We’d have to abandon the colony by tomorrow night. We’d move out the bank, we’d hire woodworms and carpenter ants to chew our careful chambers into disrepair so thorough it could never be read as a built environment. The Undertree Common would be history, and who knows what the future would hold for Division B of the Northwest Sector?
But who knows what the future holds for me, either, except death if I say no, she thought tremblingly, with a rare, if desperate, courage. Courage, or dread. Or both.
“Holding a tooth fairy hostage — how could you do such a thing?” Dinah demanded to know this at once. “That doesn’t sound like you at all, Gage.”
“I was lonely. And bored. It’s hard to explain. And my parents were strict.”
“Why didn’t you surf the web?”
“Dinah. I don’t know how to break this to you —”
“Oh, right. I remember. You were in the rural backwater. The dark ages of dairyland. And your family wasn’t rich. You didn’t rely on the Internet and iPods and cell phones.”
Of course, I don’t have those things either, Dinah thought. Though what good would it do me now if I did?
She sat in the new dark ages and thought about that.
What-the-Dickens felt the dawn nearing. He sensed it by instinct, not by prior experience.
Something was coming of instinct, then. Maybe something more. He listened carefully.
Bugs. Grasses curling earthward with a billion papery sounds, as the ritual of condensation set small but heavy beads of moisture on every available blade. Things dripping from trees. Animals in burrows retiring their dreams till tomorrow night, if another tomorrow night would come for them. Other animals, the nocturnal brigade, waddling home, slithering home, sluicing home through the currents of freshening air.
The world belongs to the animals, thought What-the-Dickens, and no one knows it, not even them.
Other skibbereen, braver than What-the-Dickens, might have turned back to attempt a daredevil rescue of Pepper. But dawn was nearly here, and the orphan skibberee had no time to worry over his choice. He would keep his word to Pepper. He would deliver the tooth he had collected from young Lee Gangster. Toward Undertree Common he headed, as directly as his navigational instincts could lead him.
Instinct might be good for some things, but not for everything. What-the-Dickens flew for a few precious moments before realizing that he had headed in the wrong direction. He’d started toward the highway, and that was the direction — northwest — back toward the fussy antiseptic house of the Tavenners, where Pepper was caged. So he veered to go the other way, counterclockwise, over the zoo and up toward Undertree Common from the opposite direction. Completing a circular route.
Passing within range of the zoo — so near he could hear the rumble of elephant stomachs anticipating breakfast — What-the-Dickens had his brainstorm. Though he couldn’t rescue Pepper, he could do more than secure her reputation.
He could make her a legend.
It would mean lying. But he was a rogue and a rebel, so what did he care?
He swept down toward the zoo. Free the tooth! Free the tooth! Hah, he’d had some instinct he was a tooth fairy from early on, hadn’t he? Free the tooth was just what he’d done, first time out, without a single nursery lesson about it.
I’ll reclaim that tiger tooth I hid there, if it hasn’t been cleared away. When I get back — just before dawn, if my timing allows it — I’ll present Old Flossie and Doctor Ill with the tooth of Gage Tavenner, and the tooth of the young Lee Gangster, and then I’ll toss on the table my big kahuna, my winner-take-all bauble. I’ll say nonchalantly, “Oh, yes, and Pepper picked up this in her spare time, and sent it on as a memento. You can’t identify it? Tiger tooth. Come nearer — it won’t bite. Ha, ha! Plant this baby and see what comes up. Maybe not your garden-variety wishing candle. Maybe a wishing torch.”
He found the stand that sold cotton candy, ice creams, popcorn, soda pop, and beer. There was the tooth, right where he’d left it, just inside a mousehole where a respectable clan of mice huddled. (Could they be distant relatives of Muzzlemutt?)
They scurried over one another and rubbed their paws, fretting. How much it must have cost them, to guard this gargantuan tooth. He nodded at them as he grabbed hold of it but he didn’t bother to speak aloud. The languages of animals were kept secret from human and skibbereen alike. The silliness of him, trying to talk to McCavity. How young he’d been when he was first born. Dreadful, really.
But what a tooth this was. Still powerfully rank, notched as if by an awl, a monolith of dead bone designed to rend flesh from flesh.
Now that he knew skibbereen weren’t programmed to approach animals for their teeth, What-the-Dickens had the sense to be terrified of his earlier bravado with the tiger. He almost retched with the memory. What had he been thinking about?
Not much — clearly. He’d been looking for McCavity and he’d gotten distracted by an apparition.
He was going to have to fly more slowly this final leg, for the tiger tooth wouldn’t fit in his change pouch. He’d have to clutch it to his chest with his hands. So he wasn’t even able to wave at the family of mice who followed him to the door of the mousehole.
He launched awkwardly, bumblingly. He was halfway over the tiger house when something peculiar happened.
The intermittent spritzing and fritzing of his wings — the instructions from headquarters that he’d never been able to interpret, and so he’d learned to ignore — began to bite at him, from inside. It was as if the carbonated sizzle suddenly took on a meaning. It began to ebb and course with a pattern.
Complete with punctuations — pauses — periods. Only this wasn’t a written language, and it wasn’t messages from Central. Come here, it said. Come here.
“I’ll be late,” he said aloud. The mice below, more or less waiting to see him disappear, seemed to wave.
Come here, said the message in his wings. I want to see you.
“I haven’t come this far to be distracted now,” he said. “I mean, can’t this wait?”
COME HERE!
“Okay, okay,” he said, though he didn’t know to whom he spoke.
He dove in, following the call by assessing the strength of the impulses in his wings. The call took him through a window with iron slats in it. There, wise as wilderness and fierce as fire, sprawled the Bengal tiger known as Maharajah.
The tiger asked, Did you take my tooth out?
“Yes,” said What-the-Dickens. “Do you need it back?”
No, said Maharajah. I just wanted to know.
“Oh,” said the skibberee. “Well, you’re welcome. You don’t want to eat me or anything?”
You can go, now that I’ve said my part.
??
?But how can I understand you?” said What-the-Dickens. “Animals can’t talk, and I can’t talk animal.”
I don’t bother myself with questions like that, said Maharajah. He sniffed the air as if detecting the aroma of zookeeper making her predawn rounds with buckets of raw meat for breakfast.
I will say, continued the tiger, I am not talking, strictly speaking. I am growling rather low in the back of my throat. If you’re able to interpret the growl, that’s your talent at language, not mine.
“Oh, my,” said What-the-Dickens, and he realized the tiger was telling the truth. It was the pulses in his wings that were forming into impressions of thoughts, structures of meaning. The tiger hadn’t even opened his mouth.
One thing more, said the tiger.
“Yes?”
If I taught you one more thing, that would make —?
“Two?” said What-the-Dickens. “Two things?”
Exactly.
“Enjoy your breakfast,” said What-the-Dickens. “I gotta fly.”
And fly he did.
As he lifted up, he found himself wondering, Did I hear something no one else can hear? Or did I imagine it? Did that really happen? Did Maharajah summon me? And did I obey? Is it a talent at language, like he said? Was it a vision?
You never can be sure with cats, can you?
Who would ever believe me if I tell them I’ve talked to a tiger?
And what task or privilege does that put on me, if I did?
Now the eastern sky was less like grey and more like glass — colorless, ready to take an impression. Had there been clouds in the sky, they would have been stained with coral and gold. As it was, the last few stars winked out in the west as the horizon began to steam with the advent of the sun. In a little while, a stain of light would break over the hills. Then that first lancing beam of day would pin into place for all time the reputation of Pepper: as a loser, or as a qualified Agent of Change in absentia (absent due to her untimely death), or — what What-the-Dickens most devoutly hoped — as a tiger in her own right, worth memorializing in her own pageant. . . .