He sat on the bench and unfolded his drawing of the tiger, and his fingers itched to start making it in wood. He was sitting like that, swinging his legs, studying the drawing, when he heard shouting and the high-pitched buzz of excitement, like crickets, that the kids made when something was happening.
He stayed where he was. In a minute, the faded red double doors of the lunchroom swung open and Sistine Bailey came marching through them, her head held high. Behind her was a whole group of kids, and just when Sistine noticed Rob sitting there on the bench, one of the kids threw something at her; Rob couldn’t tell what. But it hit her, whatever it was.
“Run!” he wanted to yell at her. “Hurry up and run!”
But he didn’t say anything. He knew better than to say anything. He just sat and stared at Sistine with his mouth open, and she stared back at him. Then she turned and walked back into the group of kids, like somebody walking into deep water.
And suddenly, she began swinging with her fists. She was kicking. She was twirling. Then the group of kids closed in around her and she seemed to disappear. Rob stood up so that he could see her better. He caught sight of her pink dress; it looked all crumpled, like a wadded-up tissue. He saw her arms still going like mad.
“Hey!” he shouted, not meaning to.
“Hey!” he shouted again louder. He moved closer, the drawing of the tiger still in his hand.
“Leave her alone!” he shouted, not believing that the words were coming from him.
They heard him then and turned to him. It was quiet for a minute.
“Who you talking to?” a big girl with black hair asked.
“Yeah,” another girl said. “Who do you think you’re talking to?”
“Go away,” Sistine muttered in her gravelly voice. But she didn’t look at him. Her yellow hair was stuck to her forehead with sweat.
The girl with the black hair pushed up close to him. She shoved him.
“Leave her alone,” Rob said again.
“You going to make me?” the black-haired girl said.
They were all looking at him. Waiting. Sistine was waiting, too; waiting for him to do something. He looked down at the ground and saw what they had thrown at her. It was an apple. He stared at it for what seemed like a long time, and when he looked back up, they were all still waiting to see what he would do.
And so he ran. And after a minute, he could tell that they were running after him; he didn’t need to look back to see if they were there. He knew it. He knew the feeling of being chased. He dropped the picture of the tiger and ran full out, pumping his legs and arms hard. They were still behind him. A sudden thrill went through him when he realized that what he was doing was saving Sistine Bailey.
Why he would try to save Sistine Bailey, why he would want to save somebody who hated him, he couldn’t say. He just ran, and the bell rang before they caught him. He was late for his English class because he had to walk from the gym all the way to the front of the school. And he did not know where his drawing of the tiger was, but he still had Mr. Phelmer’s note in his back pocket and that was all that truly mattered to him, the note that proved that he would never have to come back.
It turned out to be an extraordinary day in almost every possible way. It started with finding the tiger, and it ended with Sistine Bailey sitting down next to him on the bus on the way home from school. Her dress was torn and muddied. There was a scrape down her right arm, and her hair stuck out in a hundred different directions. She sat down in the empty seat beside him and stared at him with her black eyes.
“There isn’t anyplace else to sit,” she said to him. “This is the last empty seat.”
Rob shrugged.
“It’s not like I want to sit here,” she said.
“Okay,” said Rob. He shrugged his shoulders again. He hoped that she wasn’t going to thank him for saving her.
“What’s your name?” she demanded.
“Rob Horton,” he told her.
“Well, let me tell you something, Rob Horton. You shouldn’t run. That’s what they want you to do. Run.”
Rob stared at her with his mouth open. She stared back.
“I hate it here,” she said, looking away from him, her voice even deeper than before. “This is a stupid hick town with stupid hick teachers. Nobody in the whole school even knows what the Sistine Chapel is.”
“I know,” said Rob. “I know what the Sistine Chapel is.” Immediately, he regretted saying it. It was his policy not to say things, but it was a policy he was having a hard time maintaining around Sistine.
“I bet,” Sistine sneered at him. “I bet you know.”
“It’s a picture of God making the world,” he said.
Sistine stared at him hard. She narrowed her small eyes until they almost disappeared.
“It’s in Italy,” said Rob. “The pictures are painted on the ceiling. They’re frescoes.” It was as if a magician had cast a spell over him. He opened his mouth and the words fell out, one on top of the other, like gold coins. He couldn’t stop talking. “I don’t got to go to school on account of my legs. I got a note that says so. Mr. Phelmer — he’s the principal — he says the parents are worried that what I got is contagious. That means that the other kids could catch it.”
“I know what contagious means,” Sistine said. She looked at his legs. And then she did something truly astounding: she closed her eyes and reached out her left hand and placed it on top of Rob’s right leg.
“Please let me catch it,” she whispered.
“You won’t,” said Rob, surprised at her hand, how small it was and how warm. It made him think, for a minute, of his mother’s hand, tiny and soft. He stopped that thought. “It ain’t contagious,” he told her.
“Please let me catch it,” Sistine whispered again, ignoring him, keeping her hand on his leg. “Please let me catch it so I won’t have to go to school.”
“It ain’t a disease,” said Rob. “It’s just me.”
“Shut up,” Sistine said. She sat up very straight. Her lips moved. The other kids shouted and screamed and laughed and called to each other, but the two of them sat apart from it all, as if their seat was an island in the sea of sweat and exhaust.
Sistine opened her eyes. She took her hand away and rubbed it up and down both of her own legs.
“You’re crazy,” Rob told her.
“Where do you live?” Sistine asked, still rubbing her hand over her legs.
“In the motel. In the Kentucky Star.”
“You live in a motel?” she said, looking up at him.
“It ain’t permanent,” he told her. “It’s just until we get back on our feet.”
Sistine stared at him. “I’ll bring you your homework,” she said. “I’ll bring it to you at the motel.”
“I don’t want my homework,” he told her.
“So?” said Sistine.
By then, Norton and Billy Threemonger had spotted them sitting together and they were moving in. Rob was relieved when the first thump came to the back of his head, because it meant that he wouldn’t have to talk to Sistine anymore. It meant that he wouldn’t end up saying too much, telling her about important things, like his mother or the tiger. He was glad, almost, that Norton and Billy were there to beat him into silence.
His father read the note from the principal slowly, putting his big finger under the words as if they were bugs he was trying to keep still. When he was finally done, he laid the letter on the table and rubbed his eyes with his fingers and sighed. The rain beat a sad rhythm on the roof of the motel.
“That stuff ain’t nothing anybody else can catch,” his father said.
“I know it,” Rob told him.
“I already told that to that principal once before. I called up there and told him that.”
“Yes, sir,” said Rob.
His father sighed. He stopped rubbing his eyes and looked up at Rob. “You want to stay home?” he asked.
Rob nodded.
His father
sighed again. “Maybe I’ll make an appointment, get one of them doctors to write down that what you got ain’t catching. All right?”
“Yes, sir,” said Rob.
“But I won’t do it for a few days. I’ll give you some time off.”
“That would be all right,” said Rob.
“You got to fight them, you know. Them boys. I know you don’t want to. But you got to fight them, else they won’t ever leave you alone.”
Rob nodded. He saw Sistine twirling and punching and kicking, and the vision made him smile.
“In the meantime, you can help me out around here,” his father said. “Do some of the maintenance-man work at the motel, do some sweeping and cleaning for me. Beauchamp’s running me ragged. There ain’t enough hours in the day to do everything that man wants done. Now go on and hand me that medicine.”
His father slathered and slapped the fishy-smelling ointment on Rob’s legs, and Rob concentrated on holding still.
“Do you think Beauchamp is the richest man in the world?” he asked his father.
“Naw,” his father said. “He don’t own but this one itty-bitty motel now. And the woods. He just likes to pretend he’s rich is all. Why?”
“I was just wondering,” said Rob. He was thinking about the tiger pacing back and forth in the cage. He was certain that the tiger belonged to Beauchamp, and wouldn’t you have to be the richest man in the world to own a tiger? Rob wanted, desperately, to go see the tiger again. But he was afraid that he had imagined the whole thing; he was afraid that the tiger might have disappeared with the morning mist.
“Can I go outside?” Rob asked when his father was done.
“Naw,” his father said. “I don’t want that medicine rained off you. It cost too much.”
Rob was relieved, almost, that he had to stay inside. What if he went looking for the tiger and he was not there?
Rob’s father cooked them macaroni and cheese for supper on the two-burner hot plate they kept on the table next to the TV. He boiled the macaroni too long and a lot of it stuck to the pan, so there weren’t many noodles to go with the powdery cheese.
“Someday,” he told Rob, “you and me will have a house with a real stove, and I’ll do some good cooking then.”
“This is good,” Rob lied.
“You eat all you want. I ain’t that hungry,” his father told him.
After supper, his father fell asleep in the recliner, with his head thrown back and his mouth open. He snored, and his feet — big, with crooked toes — jerked and trembled. In between the snores, his stomach growled long and loud, as if he was the hungriest man in the world.
Rob sat on his bed and started to work on carving the tiger. He had a good piece of maple, and his knife was sharp, and in his mind he could see the tiger clearly. But something different came out of the wood. It wasn’t a tiger at all. It was a person, with a sharp nose and small eyes and skinny legs. It wasn’t until he started working on the dress that Rob realized he was carving Sistine.
He stopped for a minute and held the wood out in front of him and shook his head in wonder. It was just like his mother had always said: You could never tell what would come out of the wood. It did what it wanted and you just followed.
He stayed up late working on the carving, and when he finally fell asleep, he dreamed about the tiger, only it wasn’t in a cage. It was free and running through the woods, and there was something on its back, but Rob couldn’t tell what it was. As the tiger got closer and closer, Rob saw that the thing was Sistine in her pink party dress. She was riding the tiger. In his dream, Rob waved to her and she waved back at him. But she didn’t stop. She and the tiger kept going, past Rob, deeper and deeper into the woods.
His father woke him up at five-thirty the next morning.
“Come on, son,” he said, shaking Rob’s shoulder. “Come on; you’re a working man now. You got to get up.” He took his hand away and stood over Rob for a minute more, and then he left.
Rob heard the door to the motel room squeak open. He opened his eyes. The world was dark. The only light came from the falling Kentucky Star. Rob turned over in bed and pulled back the curtain and looked out the window at the sign. It was like having his own personal shooting star, but he didn’t ever make a wish on it. He was afraid that if he started wishing, he might not be able to stop. In his suitcase of not-thoughts, there were also not-wishes. He kept the lid closed on them, too.
Rob leaned on his elbow and stared at the star and listened to the rain gently drumming its fingers on the roof. There was a warm glowing kind of feeling in his stomach, a feeling that he wasn’t used to. It took him a minute to name it. The tiger. The tiger was out there. He got out of bed and put on shorts and a T-shirt.
“Still hot,” his father said, when Rob stepped out the door. “And still raining.”
“Uh-huh,” said Rob, rubbing his eyes, “yes, sir.”
“If it don’t stop soon, the whole state ain’t going to be nothing but one big swamp.”
“The rain don’t bother me,” Rob muttered.
On the day of his mother’s funeral, it had been so sunshiny that it hurt his eyes. And after the funeral, he and his father had to stand outside in the hot, bright light and shake everybody’s hand. Some of the ladies hugged Rob, pulling him to them in jerky, desperate movements, smashing his head into their pillowy chests.
“If you don’t look just like her,” they told him, rocking him back and forth and holding on to him tight.
Or they said, “You got your mama’s hair — that cobwebby blond,” and they ran their fingers through his hair and patted his head like he was a dog.
And every time Rob’s father extended his hand to somebody else, Rob saw the ripped place in his suit, where it had split open when he slapped Rob to make him stop crying. And it reminded Rob again: Do not cry. Do not cry.
That was what the sun made him think of. The funeral. And so he didn’t care if he ever saw the sun again. He didn’t care if the whole state did turn into a swamp.
His father stood up and went back into the motel room and got himself a cup of coffee and brought it back outside. The steam rose off of it and curled into the air.
“Now that I’m a working man,” Rob said shyly, “could I drink some coffee?”
His father smiled at him. “Well,” he said, “I guess that’d be all right.”
Rob went inside and poured himself a mug of coffee and brought it back outside and sat down next to his father and sipped it slowly. It tasted hot and dark and bitter. He liked it.
“All right,” his father said after about ten minutes, “it’s time to get to work.” He stood up. It wasn’t even six o’clock.
As they walked together alongside the back of the motel to the maintenance shed, his father started to whistle “Mining for Gold.” It was a sad song he used to sing with Rob’s mother. Her high sweet voice had gone swooping over his father’s deep one, like a small bird flying over the solid world.
His father must have remembered, too, because he stopped halfway through the song and shook his head and cursed softly under his breath.
Rob let his father walk ahead of him. He slowed down and stared into the woods, wanting to see some small part of the tiger, a flick of his tail or the glow from his eyes. But there was nothing to see except for rain and darkness.
“Come on, son,” his father said, his voice hard. And Rob hurried to catch up.
Rob was sweeping the laundry room when Willie May, the Kentucky Star’s housekeeper, came in and threw herself down in one of the metal chairs that were lined up against the cement-block wall.
“You know what?” she said to Rob.
“No, ma’am,” said Rob.
“I tell you what,” said Willie May. She reached up and adjusted the butterfly clip in her thick black hair. “I’d rather be sweeping up after some pigs in a barn than cleaning up after the people in this place. Pigs at least give you some respect.”
Rob leaned on his broom and stared
at Willie May. He liked looking at her. Her face was smooth and dark, like a beautiful piece of wood. And Rob liked to think that if he had been the one who carved Willie May, he would have made her just the way she was, with her long nose and high cheekbones and slanted eyes.
“What you staring at?” Willie May asked. Her eyes narrowed. “What you doing out of school?”
Rob shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.
“What you mean, you don’t know?”
Rob shrugged again.
“Don’t be moving your shoulders up and down in front of me, acting like some skinny old bird trying to fly away. You want to end up cleaning motel rooms for a living?”
Rob shook his head.
“That’s right. Ain’t nobody wants this job. I’m the only fool Beauchamp can pay to do it. You got to stay in school,” she said, “else you’ll end up like me.” She shook her head and reached into the pocket of her dress and pulled out a single cigarette and two sticks of Eight Ball licorice gum. She put one piece of gum in her mouth, handed the other one to Rob, lit her cigarette, leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes. “Now,” she said. The scent of smoke and licorice slowly filled the laundry room. “Go on and tell me why you ain’t in school.”
“On account of my legs being all broke out,” said Rob.
Willie May opened her eyes and looked over the top of her glasses at Rob’s legs.
“Mmmm,” she said after a minute. “How long you had that?”
“About six months,” said Rob.
“I can tell you how to cure that,” said Willie May, pointing with her cigarette at his legs. “I can tell you right now. Don’t need to go to no doctor.”
“Huh?” said Rob. He stopped chewing his gum and held his breath. What if Willie May healed him and then he had to go back to school?
“Sadness,” said Willie May, closing her eyes and nodding her head. “You keeping all that sadness down low, in your legs. You not letting it get up to your heart, where it belongs. You got to let that sadness rise on up.”
“Oh,” said Rob. He let his breath out. He was relieved. Willie May was wrong. She couldn’t cure him.