Dinah said, “I think she’s more upset at the thought of Tuna Peach Surprise for her birthday dinner.”
Zeke turned and said, “It’s not her birthday till tomorrow. Maybe we’ll locate some more supplies by then. Maybe Gage’ll let me go scavenging.” He left to open the cans.
Rebecca Ruth wailed louder. The clouds hunched and thundered. Rain hit the corrugated roof like a spilling of metal spikes.
“This is a good storm,” said Gage.
“I hate to disagree,” said Dinah, “but I’m beginning to think this is not a good storm. This is a bad storm.”
“Well, maybe we should light the candles now?”
“Candle,” Dinah corrected him. “There’s only one candle left. I mean, not counting the birthday candle. Is it dark enough?”
“By the time it gets darker, we’ll be ready to sleep. We won’t need it then.” So Dinah took down from the mantelpiece the empty mayonnaise jar with the last emergency taper inside. The jar was partly lined with aluminum foil to double the flame’s light.
“Have you ever seen anything that produced a mudslide like the one over near Cardiff Canyon Road?” she said. “You know what’s there, don’t you? The county cemetery. Can you imagine the coffins all popping up, their lids splintering from the pressure —”
“Dinah.” Gage’s voice was sharp.
“I can,” she retorted, honestly and defiantly. “I can imagine it just fine.”
“You’re being wicked, Dinah,” Zeke called from the kitchen. “Since Gage won’t say it, I must. It’s my duty. You’ll call wrath upon this house if you don’t watch your tongue. Govern yourself!”
“Stop talking like you-know-who, just because they’re gone,” said Dinah. “You think you’re in charge. You’re not. Gage is.”
“Here, Dinah,” said Gage, “you hold Rebecca Ruth. I’ll do the match.” With fiddly fingers, he tried to light the wick. His hands shook, so it took a few tries. Finally he put the jar on the floor so they could sit around it, campers at an inside fire.
Zeke came in with a tray. Lumps of food in unmatched dishes. No one was hungry enough yet to eat the plain, ugly fare, so Zeke set the tuna and baby food and cling peaches aside on a table for later, or never.
He sat down near Dinah: the candle gave a kind of permission.
They sat so close, and so still, that they might have been carved out of one block of shadow-flickered granite. Young Man and Three Children in Trouble.
“Have you ever known a worse time?” asked Zeke. The question was meant to be calm, but the way his chin ducked into the collar of his shirt was revealing. He shook as if he was cold, though the house wasn’t at all chilly.
Gage took such a long time to answer that all three children looked up at him. Dinah thought that his face, in the flickering candlelight, looked even less adult than usual. This wasn’t consoling.
“Don’t lie to make us feel better,” she said. “You can’t remember a worse time than this, ever. Can you.”
“I can,” he protested. “I can remember. But it’s a complicated memory. I’m trying to think of how to say it.”
Rebecca Ruth had stopped crying and was beginning to chew on the nose of her favorite stuffed animal, a little white woolly lamb that she called Tiger. “Say,” she murmured, though it was unclear whether she was speaking to Gage or to Tiger.
There was a sound like that of a demolition truck in the valley below, only there could be no trucks on the interstate because the overpass had collapsed.
More tricks of thunder. Dinah gripped Gage’s forearm.
“All right, I’ll ‘say,’” said Gage. “Gather round.”
They already were gathered round, their expressions reminded him. Dinah ringed her knees with her arms. Rebecca Ruth had her thumb back in her mouth. Zeke, eager for diversion but wary by nature, said, “I hope this is a true story.”
“I rarely trust myself to make statements about truth,” said Gage, “but it’s a real story anyway.”
“Well, is it a story about you?”
Gage waited for a break in the wind before he answered. “Not at first.”
To start with, he wasn’t much to look at — literally.
I mean he was slight and small. I also mean he blended in. His arm webs were filmy, nearly transparent, and his skin was suggestible, like water. I suppose his circulation worked on a capillary system; his coloring could shift from pale to dark, and many shades in between. A limited talent for camouflage. Not enough to make himself invisible — nothing like that.
But he wasn’t much to look at even when you could see him right in front of you, or when measured up against others of his kind. His head was flat in back and his nose was more beaky than perky. His hair flew everywhere, as if eager to get off his scalp. His neck was a toothpick, his arms toothpicks, his legs toothpicks with big flattened feet. Most skibbereen have slender feet that come to a point, like sharpened pencils, like ballet folk on their ballet toes. But our hero’s feet were made for walking.
I met him when I was ten. That’s the story, really. But first I should tell you about where he came from.
He was hatched at the twilight of a day that had been marked by high winds. Yes, worse than tonight’s — no kidding — the aftermath of a hurricane. But the gales, by now, were worn out. The humid air settled against the earth and didn’t budge.
It’s hard to say what he knew at first. Not many of us humans can report much about the day we were born unless we’re told about it. But he wasn’t human.
Bright? Well, bright enough. But he was — well — disadvantaged. The accident of his birth. He was a scrap apart.
He opened his eyes, would you believe it, alone, in an empty tin can that someone had tossed by the side of a stream. How he got there, he didn’t know, and nor do I.
No, he wasn’t dressed. Who would dress him? But skibbereen are born with filmy webbing that falls from their shoulders and waists. It clings to their slender forms, like a nightshirt made out of cobwebs. Provides the bare minimum for the sake of modesty.
He felt sick, but maybe he was only reacting to the smell lingering in the can — tuna fish packed in oil. Still, he wobbled to his knees and he tried to stand up.
He was small, even for a skibberee. Perhaps he was the runt of the litter he couldn’t yet imagine.
He didn’t speak. This was unusual: Most skibbereen can talk almost at birth. They infer a whole language system from the first welcoming phrases with which their loving mother greets them. But since our hero couldn’t verbalize yet, his thoughts came in gleams of insight and clouds of emotion.
The can was standing on its side, like a wheel, and the lid had been opened with a can opener but was still attached by a small tab of tin. Enough light bled in around the hatch’s jagged edges that he could see someone else in his world with him. It was only his reflection, but he didn’t know that.
Instantly he felt less alone, and — isn’t instinct a grand thing? — he grinned at the apparition, which grinned back at him in a good-natured way.
They both smiled back and forth. Back and forth.
Just as this was beginning to feel old, the skibberee’s birthplace started to roll sideways and back again. Terrified and thrilled at the same time, the orphan pushed against the lid of the can, smacking in the nose a curious cat that had come waddling along.
The cat, a fierce and elegant creature though unlovely in her morals, had stepped out to inspect the world after the storm. She smelled an agreeably fishy smell, noticed the old tin can, and so she had stopped to investigate.
“Meow!” said the cat, outraged.
Meow? thought the skibberee, and tried out the language. “Meow! Meeee-ow!”
The cat backed up in astonishment, the better to regard what she understood to be a noisy scrap of tuna. She was surprised, and she believed she’d been made a fool of, which irritated her. But like most cats, she kept her opinions to herself. The skibberee had no idea she felt vexed.
&nb
sp; He studied her as she settled on her capacious bottom to think things over. He admired how neatly she encircled her white fur boots with her white fur tail.
She seemed to pay him no attention. Instead, she set to licking her white fur coat. The evening light struck her polished identity tag.
The tag spelled out McCavity. Had the skibberee been introduced to spoken language by his mother, he’d have been able to read the word at once — for reading comes as naturally to these creatures as chatter does. But the letters only looked like scratches, and the cat’s single comment of meow hadn’t been enough to jump-start an entire language operation. As it was, McCavity lowered her chin against her collar, and the nametag disappeared into folds of fur. (Not to be rude, but this cat was a healthy eater.)
The skibberee had no words yet for family or love or home. His heart swelled, though, as the gorgeous white cat pinned him in her sights. He twisted his fingers, wishing there were someone who could introduce him to the cat.
I don’t know what McCavity was thinking — if anything. But by long-standing family custom, she was a hunter.
The white creature gathered her strength. She growled low in the back of her throat. She swiveled her hindquarters as the muscles of her haunches tensed. The skibberee watched with interest.
Then McCavity pounced, startling the skibberee backward into the can. He felt graceless and stupid, but this stumble saved his tender life, at least for the time being.
McCavity leaped again, this time knocking the open lid back into place, trapping the skibberee inside. She hissed in fury. The skibberee heard the hiss but not the fury. He keened wordlessly, hummingly back to her.
This only seemed to stoke McCavity’s appetites. She worked a claw into the seam made by the lid, trying to pry open the can.
The skibberee was heartened, thinking that his new friend was trying to rescue him.
But before the orphan could be released from his prison, McCavity’s claw withdrew. The whole can lifted suddenly upwards. The skibberee fell against the floor of his home. The wind was knocked out of him, but he didn’t lose his lunch, for he’d never had a bite to eat yet.
The lid flipped up on its hinge of metal. A glaring light dazzled the silvery inside of the can. “What the dickens —?” said a voice. “Ugggh. Is that a mouse? McCavity! You beast. Up to your old tricks.”
The human hand shook the can, though on purpose or not, the orphan skibberee didn’t know. He was tossed in the air. Neither widened human eyes nor narrowing cat eyes could track the arc of his flight, or see where he landed in a clump of skunkweed.
Mostly unhurt, he righted himself, to watch what happened next.
“You’ll cut yourself on this lousy old tin can,” said the human. “No more scavenging for you, pretty McCavity. That doesn’t suit a pet of mine. Let’s go home.” Human hands scooped the cat up, and human hands imprisoned her. She couldn’t wriggle free to pursue her affairs.
“Meow,” said McCavity, and other words that sounded like meringue. Shebang. Harangue. Fisssssssssssss. As if she’d rather have a pet of her own than be one.
“You heard me. I know you have a thing for mice. You probably learned to sniff them out from your mother; you can’t help it. Still, that’s no reason to go scaring some poor baby mousekin lucky enough to survive yesterday’s storm. Come on, you rascal. I’ll give you a treat at home. A special present. You like presents.”
The skibberee was winded and disoriented. But the human voice had done the thing that his mother’s voice might have done, and that McCavity’s voice couldn’t: it had lit the fuse of language in him. And once lit, it began to burn.
“McCavity,” he murmured (very, very softly, practicing; he didn’t want to make a fool of himself). “McCavity. What a smart name. McCavity. Could be the name of a mother, though I don’t seem to take after her much, being shy of fur and whiskers and the like. Maybe I’ll grow them as I mature. Or maybe we’re not related at all. That’s okay. I can deal.”
After a while he crawled to his hands and knees and called after her. “McCavity! I’m here! Don’t go away!” But the cat’s companion — the human — kept clomping away through the bracken at the side of a stream swollen with storm runoff.
“Wait for me!” called the skibberee.
They didn’t hear, so they didn’t stop.
He followed as best he could, trying to keep them in his sight, but can an ant keep pace with an antelope? The human and his pet disappeared, and the silence they left behind seemed mocking and total.
So the skibberee made his way back to where the can had fallen to the ground. He wanted to find his twin, and to use this new trick of language on him. Maybe he could teach his partner to talk, and they could discuss what to do next.
The basics. How to live. How to behave. And why.
And what might make a really good present for a cat. To win her over. To win her affection.
He examined the picture on the outside of the can, a grinning cartoon tuna leaping from blue waves. The fish sported teeth that appeared to be in excellent condition.
“Hello! I’m back!” called the skibberee. “And I’ve a name now: it’s What-the-Dickens! And with a name, a personality, I hope. I have a question for you about presents. Hello?”
His companion, alas, was gone. (Probably the can had fallen on the ground at an angle that no longer allowed for a reflection, but What-the-Dickens couldn’t understand this.)
What-the-Dickens curled up on the floor of his humble lodgings and he tried to go to sleep. He was hungry without yet knowing that hunger could be slaked by food; he was lonely without yet knowing that loneliness could be slaked, too.
“What’s a skibberee?” asked Dinah.
“Ah,” said Gage. “You’ll have to wait and find out.”
“A creature in a tin can,” said Zeke matter-of-factly. “Very pretty, very silly.”
“You don’t like it, you don’t have to listen,” said Dinah. “But, Gage, tell me. What-the-Dickens? What kind of name is that?”
“Hyphenated,” said Gage. “Like, um, Winnie-the-Pooh. Or Sam-I-Am.”
“Sam-I-Am sounds like a big, loud hello,” said Dinah. “What-the-Dickens sounds like a question.”
“Yes,” said Gage.
What-the-Dickens, perhaps, sounds like a question of a name — and why not? Maybe most names should be questions, at least at first, for how do we know if our names fit us until we live a little?
The lonely skibberee slept with his hinging capewings pulled around himself for warmth. He was cozy, but not cozy enough. He didn’t know that most newborn skibbereen sleep in a heap with sixty or seventy or eighty friendly siblings, an arrangement that makes them all feel safe and warm.
He’d heard that McCavity accepted presents, too, so he dreamed of looking for a perfect present to give the cat. Before he could dream what the present might be, though, he woke with a start. Something was jabbing at him.
He rubbed his eyes and thought blearily, It’s McCavity’s claw. She’s come back to release me from my loneliness, even if I haven’t thought up a good present yet.
Then he woke up some more at the snap of a pair of bright yellow pincers that caught him by the leg.
It was the beak of a rust-throated grisset. She gripped What-the-Dickens and dragged him forward through the opening hatch.
“Let go!” said What-the-Dickens. “I have other plans for this morning. I need to find McCavity. I want to apply to be her pet.” The grisset paid no attention. Hauling the skibberee by one leg, she managed a lopsided ascent to her nest in a nearby bog maple.
When she got there, she dangled What-the-Dickens above her four nestlings.
The nestlings cheeped something that may have meant “Breakfast!” if it meant anything at all.
Yikes, I’m their present, he thought.
Now, you should know that the female rust-throated grisset is a small bird that doesn’t blend in. She can’t fly quickly or in a straight line. Her small claws are use
less for anything other than perching. Her only defense is her lack of musicality. She is tone-deaf. (Eventually, a mama grisset’s song stylings drive her nestlings out of the nest. This is how they learn to fly.)
For all her deficiencies, however, the female rust-throated grisset is a plucky sort. Sure, she dips when she should dive, she swoops when she might more profitably swerve. But she is loyal to her own. She feeds them breakfast.
The mama grisset lowered What-the-Dickens headfirst toward the oldest and hungriest among her baby grissets. Luckily, the baby grissets didn’t like their breakfast present. They preferred raw worms.
Still, they were too young to be rude. They wiggled around in their nest and made room for him while the mama grisset supplied an aria. When it finally trailed off, What-the-Dickens politely murmured, “Bravo.”
The mama grisset got as tender a look on her face as was possible given the predatory lunge of her beak and the gleam of her bulging, lidless eye. At once she forgot that What-the-Dickens wasn’t born of her own egg, and so she flew off to find some other breakfast choices for her babies, including, now, him.
As soon as the mama grisset had disappeared, What-the-Dickens stood up and leaned over the side of the nest. “Look!” he said to his nestling friends. “A rescue committee of one!”
The baby grissets craned their scrawny little necks as far as they could. A patch of white fur slithered behind the green slats of fern.
The baby birds shrank back, trying to be invisible.
“Did you see that creature?” asked the skibberee. “She’s looking for me, I bet. Isn’t she a fine specimen of a friend, waddling along like that? McCavity! Up here!”
McCavity heard the voice. Perhaps she understood English and perhaps not. You can never be sure with cats. In any case, McCavity’s nose had picked up the trace amounts of rancid tuna, for a fading stink still clung to the webbing of the skibberee. Now her ears confirmed the suspicion: she had found him.
The white cat put her paws onto the trunk of the tree and stretched. Her eyes, from this angle, were like oxidizing bronze: emerald sparks in warm, loyal gold.