“Who are you?” she asked.
Well, that was the question, wasn’t it? He hardly knew. “What-the-Dickens,” he reminded her.
She put a finger to her lips, signifying Hush, and she beckoned him to follow her.
They flew into the small bathroom adjacent to the bedroom. It smelled of disobedient drains. A fluorescent light flickered bluely across a sink set in a Formica countertop. A spill of baby powder, a bottle of aspirin, two old splayed-bristle toothbrushes. Pepper screeched in for a landing on the baby powder, which afforded her some increased friction and drag. What-the-Dickens, less schooled in such maneuvers, tried the same move, but he smacked his new associate into one of the toothbrushes.
“Ow!” She righted herself. “Fly often, do we? Clumsy oaf.”
“Sorry.”
“Now listen up, you. I’m giving you a chance to back off and disappear. No questions asked. Maybe you’re some extra-dim lowlife element horning in on my route. Or maybe you’re an advance party scout from some other dumb tribe. Either way, if you don’t vamoose, you can prepare to meet your maker. I didn’t come this far just to lose my license because of some two-bit tooth thief.” She grabbed one of the toothbrushes and held it before her horizontally, like a pike staff. “Get in my way, silly boy, and you’re going to have the proverbial Brush with Death.”
“Put that down — you’ll hurt someone,” he said. “What are you snapping at me about?”
She eyed the other toothbrush. Is she expecting me to grab it and fight with her? I won’t.
Perhaps his just standing there, neither aggressive nor defensive, persuaded her to relax a little.
“Teeth,” she said. “My information says Claire Dahl. Mandibular central incisor. This is our territory, and this is my beat. You forgotten we don’t work in pairs? Get your wings checked, why don’t you? Or I’ll report to headquarters —”
“My wings are fine,” he said, shivering them in emphasis. “And I’m not spying for anyone. I’ve got no one to spy for.”
“Right,” she replied sourly. “So what are you doing here, then? Have you botched up your own assignment? Your wings are giving off nutso readings, buster.”
His shoulders drooped. He said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. The wings are tingling somewhat. Are they malfunctioning?”
“Don’t you know how they work?”
He shook his head.
“You’re that new on the job?” She peered a little closer. “Are you one of us, and I just never met you? What, they sent me a trainee without telling me? That’s rich, even for them. No, I don’t believe it. I’m a solo operator. I don’t do teamwork.”
“I don’t know where I am. I don’t know what the job is. I don’t know why my wings are tingling.” But he was excited: he was about to find out.
Pepper dropped the toothbrush. “Oooh, is the little fellow dim, or what? Stupid boys are the cutest. Look,” she continued. She arched her back and her wings rose and opened. Small beads of light ran frantically from stem to stern. “The wings of skibbereen ain’t just fashion accessories, you know.”
“Skibbereen?” It was the first time he’d heard the term.
“And they’re not just for flying,” she continued. “Wings are part of the colony’s central communication system. Through your wings you pick up your assignments, your updates. The daily buzz. That sort of thing. The tingling you’re talking about? Unless you’ve got some sort of bug, you’re just raking in the data from headquarters. Didn’t no one clue you in?”
He said, “I’m an orphan, I think. I never met anyone else before you.” He didn’t know about shaking hands, but he held out both his hands in a rush of enthusiasm, as if to grab her own hands and — twist them, or kiss them, or something. He couldn’t tell what he was supposed to do, but he could feel he was supposed to do something.
She shoved her hands in her pockets. “Well, that beats all,” she said. “It really does. But I got no time to conduct a private seminar for you. I got a tooth to retrieve. Duty calls. Neither snow nor rain nor sleet nor gloom of night, they say, though the wind slowed me down some, and morning will be here shortly. You want to watch, learn the ropes — I can’t like it, but I can’t stop you. But a skibberee can’t be seen. It’s not allowed.”
“Be seen by what?” He was spastic with curiosity.
She put her fingers to her lips. “Sweet tooth! Will you hush? Sometimes I wonder why I ever went into this line of work. Then I remember. The other options stink.”
“I can help,” said What-the-Dickens. “Can’t I?”
Pepper looked at him with half-lowered eyelids. “I told you. Your help is exactly what I don’t need. So thanks in advance for nothing, and I really mean that.”
“Oh, look!” he said. In the bathroom mirror that was mounted above a backsplash panel over the sink and counter, What-the-Dickens had caught sight of a forehead. He recognized the familiar high-arched eyebrows (his friend from the tin can had appeared permanently astonished) and the ill-kept weedy hair. “He’s back,” he said. “There he is. I knew he wouldn’t abandon me forever.”
“Lower your voice and keep your eyes down,” snapped Pepper. “Where have you been? We don’t do mirrors. Skibbereen are never seen, not even by ourselves.”
“Mirrors?” he said.
“Oooh, so we start from scratch. The baby pool. Look, What-the-Chicken, that fellow is a reflection,” she said, “not a twin. We all have them if we stumble accidentally in front of a mirror. I have one too.” She waved at hers and it waved back, but What-the-Dickens noticed they kept their eyes closed — both Pepper and her identical twin. “It’s not real. You can’t believe in it as a sidekick. See?”
He saw, but he didn’t quite see, yet.
From her shoulder she loosened a coil of slender white filament. “A skibberee’s best friend,” she said. She tied a wide noose into the cord and began to twirl it. In a moment it was going over her head, and she was leaping back and forth through it.
“Amazing,” said What-the-Dickens, entranced. She could do all this with her eyes shut. Was there no end to her talent?
“Look at the mirror,” she panted. He saw that her reflection was doing the same thing that she was — exactly, exactly. And it stopped when she stopped.
“It’s a picture of something, of us,” she said. “That’s all. It isn’t real.”
He’d have felt more devastated if he’d been alone, but at least he had Pepper to explain it to him. “You’re good,” he said.
“Made the quarterly finals in my division last season,” she said, winding up the cord again and slinging it back over her shoulder. “And now it’s to work. If you’re not a spy and you’re not a last-minute apprentice, I’ll leave you to your business, and I’ll take care of mine.” She lowered her brow and her wing spangles dimmed, and before he knew it, she had launched herself from the bathroom counter.
He had no other plans for the rest of his life. He followed her.
She zipped to the doorway, but she paused in midair and waited for him to catch up. In a voice as faint as dust, she mouthed, “Now remember. No butting in. I need this one for my record, bad.”
He looked again at the beds. The small human was a girl, sweet in her sleep — smelling like warm gingersnaps. Her head had fallen down the slope of pillow, rucking up one corner of it.
On the flowery sheet beneath the corner of the pillow, a single pearly tooth lay exposed.
“It’s all in the timing,” whispered Pepper. “Hang back, kiddo, and watch a pro at work.”
She arose an inch or two higher to launch into a dive, and What-the-Dickens twiddled his fingers in curiosity.
If his flying was like that of an airborne toad, Pepper’s was more like the dance of a hummingbird. In the glowing blue of the predawn room, Pepper glowed a complementary mauve. She looked no more substantial than the exhalation of breath from a sleeping child.
She made landfall on the cresting seam of the pillow and lightly ran along its
ridgetop. Then, using her wings as baffes to slow her descent, she slid down the steep cotton cliffside and approached the tooth.
What-the-Dickens remembered his risky encounter with Maharajah and thought, Is Pepper going to perform dental surgery on that poor sleeping creature? She oughtn’t — so many dreadful things could happen.
The child snuffed and rolled over a little. The pillow lowered upon the tooth, covering it.
Pepper wasn’t fussed. From her shoulder she unhitched the coil of white thread. Once she got it twirling, she sent the looped end sailing toward the top corner of the pillow. She lassoed the peak of the pillow and pulled tightly on the cord. Then, when the knot was secure, she flew backward so she could sling the cord around the bedpost.
He was slack-jawed with admiration. She was able to use the cord and the bedpost as a pivot and hoist. Hand over little hand she pulled on the cord, and the pillow slowly lifted in the air, revealing the hidden tooth.
Should I grab it? he wondered. But Pepper had told him to stay well out of it, and in deference to his new friend, he decided to obey her.
She worried the tooth forward with her foot, and then she gripped the cord in her mouth. Both hands now free, she opened the flap of the knapsack she wore on her back. She extracted something, a silvery disc of some sort, worked over with symbols and numbers and letters. Pepper slid this under the pillow where the tooth had been. Hand under hand, she returned the pillow to its supine position.
A magnificent showing. A triumph, he thought.
Then he stuffed his fist in his mouth to keep from crying out. The alarm clock on the bedside table had started to hop and jangle like a box full of killer bees.
Pepper did not hesitate. She deposited the tooth in her satchel and flew up to loosen the noose of the white cord.
The child flumped over, undisturbed, but the adult opened her eyes and groaned. “Shoot me now. It can’t be morning already,” she mumbled. “What time is it anyway?”
She felt for the alarm clock, which was shrilling away. “Where are you, you blasted nuisance.”
What-the-Dickens thought, All is lost!
He dove forward, barreling against the alarm clock, knocking it right off the tabletop. A crash on the floor. The girl sat up suddenly. “I’ll get up!” she barked. “You don’t have to throw things around the room!”
“Sorry, Claire,” said the grown-up. “Did I do that? Are you all right?”
Pepper had alighted on the headboard of the little girl’s bed. She jerked her head toward the window, meaning, Outta here, fellow, while we still can. She zipped across the room just as the grown-up finally got her fingers on the light switch. What-the-Dickens followed Pepper through the hole in the screen.
“That was close,” he panted. “You could’ve been killed in there.”
“Piece of cake,” she said smugly, though he thought she was a bit rattled. “However, if I hadn’t wasted so much time giving you the lowdown, I’d have been in and out of there like nobody’s business. The alarm clock would not have been an issue.”
“I saved your life,” he said. “Did I, do you think?”
“You endangered it. You were stupider even than you look,” she replied. “You shoulda stayed out of it like I said. Skibbereen are never seen. That’s the first thing you learn in nursery camp.”
“I see you,” he said.
“Skibbereen are never seen by humans. Didn’t your mother ever teach you anything?”
He didn’t answer.
“Come on, it’s getting light. It’ll be dawn in a jiffy. We better get undercover before anyone sees us. Follow me,” she said.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Second star to the right, and straight on till morning coffee,” she snapped.
“It looks like morning already.”
“Better not be, or I’m fried. Come on, we’re going to go home, clock off, and get some breakfast. Shut up and fly.”
Home, thought What-the-Dickens. Home?
He could guess at what the word meant, but not to whom it belonged. Pepper, probably. Not him. How could it belong to him?
Pepper had a head start on him. What-the-Dickens struggled to keep from losing sight of her. He could summon no extra breath for screeching out questions.
Still, he managed to look and see how Pepper could move so fast. She used her wings in a cunning way. First she flapped furiously to activate liftoff and reach her desired elevation. Then she settled the ball of her leading foot upon the ankle of the following foot, so that the knee of the forward leg broke the air. This gave her the look of an old-fashioned hood ornament on a car, or a figurehead on a sailing ship.
What-the-Dickens tried to imitate the form. Ha! With his clodhopper feet like lima beans, he flattened and slowed his progress rather than speeding it up. Still, it was good to experiment. He tried kneeling in the air, resting his feet against his little bum. He improved a little.
He paid so much attention to his athletic form that he didn’t think to mark his progress above the landscape. He was largely unaware of the gentle swells of hill, the nubble of shadowy forest, and the raked lines of plowed fields. Nor of the buildup of traffic on the roads as the sun came close to breaking over the horizon.
Pepper angled her wings for a descent, and she changed the stance of her legs. She made a sudden drop toward a stand of scrub grass and overgrown junk trees choking a patch of land encircled by a highway cloverleaf ramp. The orphan skibberee followed her lead and did the same.
He had to work not to close his eyes while plummeting through the fringed flats of green leaves. Leveling, he saw beneath him a neatly sawed-off tree trunk. Lightning bugs of some sort, trained for the job no doubt, stood all around the edge of the trunk in parallel lines, beaconing the travelers safely in.
Pepper landed in the center, gracefully enough. Then What-the-Dickens smacked her off balance as he thudded into her. “Whoops,” he said. “That’s twice in one day. Sorry.”
Several dozen wingless skibbereen came rushing forward to link arms and make a living guardrail, saving Pepper from plunging off the edge of the tree trunk like a fighter pilot overshooting on the deck of an aircraft carrier. But they laughed as they did it, without particular affection.
“Look who’s back,” they chortled. “She’s a stitch, she is. And look what the cat dragged in. He’s a bit of a rube, ain’t he? Your basic bran muffin without a full portion of raisins.”
“Mind your manners,” said Pepper, “or I’ll clock you.” She shucked off the shoulder bag holding the tooth and she began to swing it around. The welcoming committee backed off a little.
“Oooh, spitfire mama,” they said. They all seemed to say the same words more or less at the same time — they were like a second-grade class reciting a familiar poem: some too fast, some slow, but more or less on the same line. “Pepper’s here, Pepper’s here, someone kick her in the rear.” Then one began to call, and the others to echo, “Stump mistress! Stump mistress! We have a foreign body!”
An older skibberee, rather fuller in the waistline than the rest of them, rushed forward. What-the-Dickens straightened up and grinned at her. She was shaped more like a mouse than a grasshopper. “Lord love a duck,” she wheezed, “what you got for Old Flossie then?”
“A mandibular central incisor from a human, name of Claire Dahl. A visitor to these parts,” reported Pepper.
“I mean the skibberee flotsam,” said Old Flossie.
“I thought you’d know,” said Pepper. “Didn’t you send him to slow me down and complicate my exam?”
“Did not,” said Old Flossie. “He’s a spy.”
“He’s not a spy,” said Pepper. “He’s too stupid to be a spy.”
“That’s right,” said What-the-Dickens helpfully. “I wouldn’t even know what I was spying to find out.”
“Hmmm.” The older skibberee cast a sideways glance at the tooth Pepper was unpacking from her satchel. “Oooh, that’s a lovely specimen, that is. But P
epper, my chickadee, you’re late.”
Pepper shrugged as if she didn’t care, but Old Flossie puckered her brow. “Now don’t get above your station, young lady. None of this modern snippety-uppity stuff with me — I won’t have it. You know the rules. You’re to be in before sunrise with your cargo. You’re a few moments late. Aren’t you still on probation pending your license review? I think you are.”
“I told you. I was detained,” said Pepper. “I got waylaid by this bozo.”
There was a gasp. “You didn’t take him along on your campaign and . . . and . . . collaborate with him, whoever he is?” Old Flossie frowned harder. “That’s entirely forbidden. This could cost you merit marks, missy.”
“Of course I didn’t take him along. You think I’m a fool?”
Old Flossie glowered as if the jury was still out on that question, but made a motion with her finger: Go on.
“He intercepted me as I was about to start. He delayed me. He seems harmless, though he don’t know the rules. I couldn’t just abandon him there. Leave him behind to be discovered. Skibbereen are never seen, and so on? All that nursery school training? So I had no choice but to bring him back with me. That’s why I’m late. Frankly, I figured I’d get some extra credit for handling the situation well.” She seemed both peeved and a little worried.
“I am afraid Doctor Ill will not look kindly on any of this,” said Old Flossie, sniffng. She poked at the tooth with a blackened fingernail. What-the-Dickens thought, Did Pepper bring this as a present? Old Flossie doesn’t seem too grateful. Or impressed.
“Hmm,” said the stump mistress, frowning. “Some tartar buildup. Well, we’ll clean it up and see what happens. Come on, you thingy. You don’t fool me. Where’s your colony? What’s your name? Out with it.”
“What-the-Dickens,” he said. “Are you my mother?”
“Now isn’t that the stupidest old thing to say,” she groused. “Do I look like anyone’s mother?”
“I wouldn’t know. I never met a skibberee mother before.”
“Well, you haven’t now, either,” she said. “Where do you hail from, Dickens?”