What-the-Dickens smelled the big smell of big cat. McCavity? Is this her home? Will she take me on as her pet? I’ll apologize for the mama grisset’s behavior. I’ll make amends. I’ll find her a present. She likes presents. That human said so.
Climbing over the stone enclosure and slipping through the double rows of iron paling, What-the-Dickens readied himself to make a formal apology. He walked beneath a sign saying MAHARAJAH: BENGAL TIGER without seeing what it said.
He noticed Maharajah: a snoring mountain in the tiger keep.
Hmmm, thought What-the-Dickens, getting a closer look. McCavity, as I recall, is more white and less orange.
He inched forward. Now, as it happened, Maharajah suffered from a bad toothache, and the animal surgeons were going to operate the next day. To prepare, they had fed the tiger some nice raw ribs marinated in morphine. So the tiger was having a heavier snooze than usual. Otherwise Maharajah might have felt What-the-Dickens climb up on his mighty orange-and-black foreleg, or mount the slope of his nose between his eyes.
“You’re awfully big,” said the skibberee. “Would you wake up and tell me where I might find a distant cousin of yours known as McCavity? You must be related: you share a common shape. She, perhaps, has let herself go, but maybe she’s got big bones. I mean big bones for a small cat. Hello?”
He tugged at Maharajah’s eyelid. The eye twitched open.
“Oh,” said What-the-Dickens. It was a large eye, and he suddenly remembered the owl and the field mouse. A skibberee is small in any instance, and very small when set next to a Bengal tiger.
The tiger purred, in a kind of pain. Pain — or a persuasive lulling? You never can tell with cats. Still, What-the-Dickens thought, Maybe I can help out a little here, in exchange for some advice.
But how to proceed? “Is something the matter?”
Maharajah thought he was having a dream. He opened his mouth.
“Oooh.” The skibberee wrinkled his nose. (Tiger breath is no joke, and there was a reek of infection.) Yet what an impressive set of choppers! “May I look in? Do you mind?” he asked politely. His eyes adjusting to the gloom, he peered. “Is that a bit of swelling on the right, there? I think it is. Shall I just nip in and see? Won’t take but a moment.”
For McCavity, and for her kin, he thought bravely. Long may they smile. Then What-the-Dickens stepped onto the tiger’s tongue, which gave way spongily under his feet. He knelt down to take a better look.
The skibberee rocked the tooth in its footing. “This doesn’t seem right,” he said. “My gut instinct says it should come out. Shall I take care of it for you?”
Since the tiger didn’t say no, What-the-Dickens assumed that meant yes. So he went to work. First he threw himself at the tooth from every direction, pushing it this way and that. Then he slid his forearm along the base of the tooth to widen the gap between the gum and the root. “Messy work, and I’ll need a good cleanup when I’m done,” wheezed the skibberee, “but someone’s got to do it. And if you’ll put in a good word for me when you next meet up with McCavity, I’d be obliged.”
The jaws began to close.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” said the skibberee. He flexed his extended shoulder blades and he thumped the tiger in the roof of the mouth. “Open wide. Got that? We’re at a delicate stage here.”
A little to one side, then the other, then a little more forward. Then: Presto. The tooth was out.
A tiger tooth. It was nearly as tall as What-the-Dickens. And I am sorry to have to say it was not without blood; that’s the reality of dentistry for you.
“That is a beauty,” said the skibberee. By now, however, the pain of the extraction was getting through to the tiger. He was beginning to wake up. He began to murmur. It sounded like distant thunder at first, and then like nearer thunder. Very near. What-the-Dickens and the tooth tumbled out through the tiger’s open mouth.
“Now, about McCavity —” began What-the-Dickens.
Maharajah growled, producing a gust of hot, meaty breath. What-the-Dickens was tossed aloft. He felt his shoulder limbs flail clumsily, the way the baby grissets’ wings had. He was hovering three inches from the tiger’s nose.
What-the-Dickens was more surprised at this than Maharajah was himself. But the skibberee pressed on. “Perhaps you can arrange for an introduction to your cousin, the white cat? And suggest a suitable present —”
The tiger roared. Still clutching the tooth, What-the-Dickens was blown backward into a trough used for tiger runoff. The skibberee sailed off down a pungent stream, through caverns measureless to man, since man can’t fit in anything that small. At a clip, he bobbed along under the tiger’s cage, plopping into a channel that ran out the back of the Cat House.
“Well, maybe he’ll feel better in the morning,” said What-the-Dickens, “though that was a lot of dirty work for no payoff. You can never be sure with cats. I guess I’m going to have to find McCavity on my own. But this thing is too heavy to carry around with me. What was I thinking? A tiger tooth is nice, but it’s unwieldy as a souvenir. I suppose I could give this as a present to McCavity when I find her — but I have to find her, first. And I don’t dare go back and interview that big cat.”
What-the-Dickens had to act quickly. He could hear noises: the night cleaners were arriving with their broad brooms and their hoses.
He darted back to the refreshment stand, and then he saw a solution: a mousehole in the bottom of the kiosk. The field mice living inside almost had heart attacks when they noticed a tiger’s tooth shoving itself in their front door.
“Sorry,” said What-the-Dickens. “Do you mind terribly?”
They refused to touch it, so he guessed it would stay safe until he was ready to come back and reclaim it.
There was a sound overhead.
“Thunder?” wondered Zeke. So he was still awake.
“It could be a jetliner flying low under the cloud,” said Dinah, though since she hadn’t heard a jetliner for some days, she wasn’t as confident as she tried to sound. The noise seemed ominous and even brutal. But maybe it was a plane; and maybe it carried emergency supplies like . . . like . . . insulin, and birthday cake, and a present worthy of Rebecca Ruth, and equipment to patch up the transformer on Pilot’s Knob. And maybe there were enough emergency lights to signal the plane to a safe landing.
Maybe. Maybe. Maybe there were miracles. “Is this story going to have a happy ending?” she demanded of Gage.
“Oh, who knows,” he said. “I’m not there yet.”
“Don’t freak out, Dinah,” said Zeke. “It’s just a stupid fairy story. No offense, Gage. But you want to give us a story with meat, go get The Totally Excellent Adventures of Saint Paul. It’s in my room.”
“There’s not enough light to read by,” said Dinah huffily. “There’s not nearly enough light at all. Go on, Gage. Tell us what happens next. And it better end happily.”
“No promises,” said Gage, as they all snuggled closer.
But how to locate McCavity? How could such a magnificence remain hidden? She seemed so mysterious a force — larger than life, though not larger than Maharajah.
What-the-Dickens longed to give her Maharajah’s tooth. He could picture how it would happen. She would accept it, shyly tucking her furry chin into her breast. All at once, she would understand how devoted he was. She would let him be her pet, and their life together would begin. Perhaps she would wear the tooth on a string around her neck as a sign of his devotion.
Company. An end to loneliness. Bliss.
But where was she?
While he waited for inspiration — something like the shooting star, but this time something he could decipher — he might as well locate a string, too. So he could string the tiger tooth on it. Where did they keep string around here?
He thought back on his adventures since birth: the tin cabin in which he’d started his life. The appearance of McCavity and her human. The family of rust-throated grissets. The old woman in her bed —
/> — and then he remembered the pile of books on the floor. It had been tied with cord.
I can go back there and take a length of that, he thought.
So the skibberee made his way across the road. Luckily, there was little nighttime traffic, so he avoided becoming roadkill.
He picked out a path through a meadow. Then he clumped up the slope of an old apple orchard let lapse into gnarly uselessness. In time — but still in the middle of the night, not the daytime yet — he got back to the ramshackle house from where he’d set out.
He stood at the base of the chimneystack and looked up all the way to the top. He felt exhausted even before he started.
Then he remembered the hovering. Could he launch himself? Could he use these flimsy attachments as wings? Could he slip the surly bonds of earth and leap tall buildings in a single bound?
He said, “Here goes nothing,” really hoping it would turn out to be something.
And it did. Not something exactly elegant. It wasn’t ballet in the air. But it was flying.
Luckily, his sense of direction was better than the mama grisset’s. He achieved the old woman’s windowsill and peered in. The window was open a few inches, so he stooped low and entered.
The feisty battle-ax was snoring softly. A half bottle of gin stood on the bedside table. Beside the gin bottle was a drinking glass, and in the glass a set of dentures hung suspended in water.
What-the-Dickens forgot about his hope for a piece of string. What a treasure to behold! Rank upon rank of gorgeous, full-grown pearly-browns! They were hooked and latched together somehow, a dental fringe hinged in the back and hovering slightly opened, like the smile of the Cheshire Cat without the Cat.
“I want those teeth,” said What-the-Dickens.
“Eh? Whazzat?” mumbled the old woman, waking.
“The teeth,” said What-the-Dickens, in transports. “May I have them?”
“I give nuzzing for nuzzing,” said the old woman. Her words came out mushy and mumbly at first. “Who’s speaking? Is that the voice of God? What do you want my false choppers for, God? You’ve already taken my real ones home to your bosom. Can’t you leave me the spares?”
“I want the teeth,” said What-the-Dickens.
“Give me a sign that it’s God, and we’ll talk,” said the old woman. “I wasn’t born yesterday, you know. Darn, my glasses are still on the mantelpiece. Where’s that family of mine?” She took her cane and stamped it on the floor. “Hey! God is chatting me up, or some agent of heaven, but how can I tell without my specs? Someone! Yoo-hoo! Darlings! Layabouts and slugabeds! Rise and shine!”
“Shh,” he said. “You’ll wake them up.”
“So they should sleep when I’m having a vision?” she snapped. “Where are you, anyway?”
What-the-Dickens hovered behind her headboard, where he could be heard but not seen. “May I have your teeth, since you’ve abandoned them?”
“I use them in the morning to worry my oatmeal mush to death,” she replied. “Then I take them out of my mouth and scare my grandson. I’m not giving them up for love nor money. How much are you offering?”
“Money?” The skibberee didn’t know about money yet, and he wasn’t that sure about love, either.
“Cold hard cash. What’s your best offer? Look, angel visitor, make yourself seen, or at least hand me my glasses, will you?”
What-the-Dickens fell silent. If he stayed quiet, maybe she’d fall asleep again. Then he could snatch the dentures. A far better present for McCavity than a tiger molar. No?
“Where’d you go?” she said suddenly. “Invisible guest, where are you?”
He stayed as still as he could.
“You’ve gone,” she concluded, sinking back against her pillow. “Gone, gone. It was all my imagination. I was dreaming of companionship, like in the old days before I began to terrify my relatives with the force of my character. But they insist on sleeping all night long, every single night of the year, and what do they bring me for company? Nothing but books!”
She waved her cane in the air. The skibberee remembered his original goal. Looking about, he saw that the room was crowded with books. Books on the floor, books fallen under the bed, books on the mantelpiece, books on the dresser and on the seat of the rocker.
“They bring me presents. Fat comfort! Books! What good are books? Look at this tripe!” She lunged for a paperback volume and whipped it open, and stabbed a page with a bony finger. “‘At ninety-six I had lived enough, that is all.’ This is supposed to cheer up an old sinner? I don’t think so. It’s all rubbish tied with a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor, for crying out loud.”
She tossed the book aside. What-the-Dickens had to duck to avoid a concussion. “All alone, with nothing to do but read, read, read till the cows come home. And we haven’t even had any cows around here for years, not since we sold the back acres so the feds could put up that blasted highway cloverleaf.” She honked into a handkerchief. Her weeping was silly but her sorrow was real.
What-the-Dickens took advantage of her distress. Could he could get those dentures yet?
He trilled his wings and settled on the night table. While her shoulders were turned, he grabbed at the mighty teeth by their sticky artificial gums.
He was enthralled. Oh, what a jackpot!
“Gotcha,” she said, and snatched the teeth away from him with one hand, while she upended the glass of stinky water right over him with the other. “Oh, what a jackpot!”
Caged in a glass cylinder, and his wings too drenched even to flap. How embarrassing. How wet.
“I knew you were still around somewhere,” she said. She fit the teeth into her mouth. They seemed too big for her face and they broadened her smile into a leer. “So. The Angel of Death comes in on little cat feet, eh? Well, I’m gunning for a hundred and I’ve got some months to go yet. So listen up. I’m not leaving this vale of tears till I’ve had my cake and my birthday wish. And a decent present would be a welcome bonus. Anything but books.”
He couldn’t breathe. He pounded against the glass.
“Frantic little busybody, ain’t you?” she observed. She came close and her eyes, through the glass, were damp and milky and smart. “Somehow I thought they’d send somebody a bit more senior to carry me off. Well, not my problem. What’re you buzzing about in there for, fellow?”
“Let me out,” he said. “You’ve made a mistake. Or I’ve made a mistake. This is a mistake.” But could she hear him? He was behind glass, and she seemed deaf to his pleas.
“I am so lonely up here with nothing but books. You can be my pet,” she said decisively. She tapped a crooked finger with a long ragged nail against the side of the tumbler.
“Please,” he said. “I thought I wanted to be a pet. But I don’t. I can’t breathe in here.” He lurched this way and that, his webwings smacking the glass, his feet kicking at it. “Let me out. I don’t want your teeth anymore. I’ll leave you your string. Let me go. Please, old lady — please!”
“Stop fluttering so — you’re making me seasick. Maybe you’re bored?” she asked. “Here’s a book. I’ll put it next to you. I’ll turn pages on this book once a day. It’s only 567 pages. You’ll be occupied, and I’ll reach a hundred and the president will write me a letter.”
Her fingers fumbled, grabbing the crinkly cellophane slipcover over a hardcover volume from the public library. “The little ones will like to see this gorgeous moth,” she said, more to herself than to the skibberee. For a moment her voice was less theatrical, more internal. “I’ll call them up to see my catch, and they’ll come to visit their granny at last. What a stroke of luck for me! I’m too old and dull for them, but now I have this huge lovely insect as bait. I’ll tell them it was a present from Mother Nature. Maybe they’ll stay a while and keep me company. A moth who reads! Little ones will believe anything.”
She opened the book to the title page. One Hundred Years of Solitude. She stood the book open, two angled walls of white pag
es kept from riffing shut by the water glass set between them.
He backed away in horror. Since there was water on the nightstand, the drinking glass slid a quarter inch on its slickness.
Aha.
In just a moment, What-the-Dickens managed to push the drinking glass more than an inch off the rim of the bedside table. Hidden from her prying eyes by the opened novel, What-the-Dickens popped out of the overturned glass like a rabbit sneaking out of the false bottom of a magician’s hat.
He left her there, still giddy with glee at having trapped either the Fairy of Death or an oversized moth. He left her teeth there. He left the twine there.
What-the-Dickens reached the fresh air. He had no present for McCavity, but at least he’d escaped becoming a present himself.
“Fairy of Death!” Zeke’s tone was withering. “This is getting seriously bizarre. I don’t think our parents would approve. We’re supposed to govern ourselves, not go to pieces. Do you really believe this nonsense?”
“I’m telling a story,” said Gage, taking no offense.
“In this household,” said Zeke, “we believe only in what is real.”
“The storm is real,” said Gage, “and comfort is real, too. The existence of stories is real. Your hero told parables all the time; you know that.”
Zeke reared up on one elbow, ready for battle. “The devil can quote scripture for his own purpose.”
“Any louder, you two, and you’ll wake the baby,” said Dinah. “And I have a headache. Could you both be charitable and, like, shut up?”
Kindly, they did.
It wasn’t a headache she had, though. It was a memory, a sudden one, of her mother and father talking about some of this same stuff a few weeks earlier.
“Dinah, your runaway imagination,” said her mother. “‘First star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might’? I don’t think so. Wishes are for play. Prayers are for real.”
“I know what’s real,” said Dinah.