by Will Hobbs
On the bottom of the carrier, plopped on its belly on a layer of shredded newspaper, was the fledgling eagle that had fallen out of the nest in the park. Jackie was still in shock at seeing Neal there. Neal was all serious as he looked up at Jackie. “She’s not doing so well, is she?”
“Both wings had to be pinned,” Jackie said measuredly. “That’s quite an operation for a very delicate, very young, very wild creature. Eagles can fly with pins in their wing bones. It all depends on how much movement the injury will allow. For now, she’s on antibiotics. Time will tell. I’m even more worried that there’s so little fight in her.”
“She’s been fed?”
“We tube-fed her last night after the operation and we will again as soon as Rosie comes in. Her medicine is mixed in with the food. Neal, I’m heading back to make breakfast. Would you take the kids to see the outdoor pens and bring them right back so they can get dressed and down for breakfast?”
6
DON’T WORRY, YOU CAN TRUST ME
Uncle Neal pulled himself away from the pathetic-looking eagle and took us outside. We raced through the center’s rehab environments: there were pens, runs, various ramshackle plywood buildings, big flying enclosures. We missed quite a few of the distinguished guests in the outdoor area, but we saw raccoons, possums, cottontail rabbits, baby skunks, river otters, and birds of prey, including eleven bald eagles, five kinds of hawks, and a trio of great horned owls. We were about to run down a path that led into the farthest corner of the rehab area when Neal called after us, “I don’t think Jackie wants us down there. The coyotes and deer are supposed to see people as little as possible.”
We looked in on a water theme park for geese, ducks, herons, cranes, and a trumpeter swan. We stared at a full-grown mountain lion named Sasha—a permanent resident—pacing inside her well-padlocked chain-link enclosure. Her pen had three big sections for her to roam around in. The cougar stopped pacing, bared her fangs, and hissed at us. I mean, she was six or seven feet from head to tail. I shrank back, and Cody about jumped out of his skin.
Through a peephole in a large corral of solid plywood, we spotted a bear cub, a living teddy bear. A black bear, Neal said it was. The cub lived in a chain-link enclosure with multiple rooms like the cougar’s. On account of the plywood blind, it couldn’t see any other animals, or people coming and going. It had a den of sorts inside a stack of hay bales, wooden platforms to play on, and a tree to climb, but it couldn’t see out except for the sky above a ceiling of metal mesh. “Poor bear,” I said. “It’s in solitary confinement.”
“This is making me sad,” Cody told his uncle.
“I know how you feel,” Neal said, “but if it’s ever going to be wild, it can’t get comfortable around humans. Otherwise it would be a dead bear soon after it was released.”
The cub was batting around a stick, running after it, tumbling over a log, sitting on its haunches. “Watch,” Neal said. “See that door swinging open, the one attached to the clinic? Here comes Big Bear.”
It was hard to get a good look through the peepholes. A full-grown bear on the path between the plywood fence and the chain-link pen was walking along with a bowl in its hands. “Wait a second,” Cody said indignantly. “That’s somebody in a bear suit. Look at the gloves.”
“Forgot to mention,” Uncle Neal said with a smile. “That’s Rosie, the clinic manager.”
Big Bear got down on her hands and knees, entered a section of the pen closed off to the cub. She set out the food, left, then pulled on a rope that hoisted a door like a guillotine. The cub hesitated at the opening, stood up sniffing, then came on through for its food.
We passed back through the clinic and were going out the front door when we ran smack into the wild-haired boy I’d spotted the night before, the one about my age. He was on his way inside.
I don’t know who was the most surprised. I’m sure I was the most embarrassed, in my nightshirt.
Neal snapped, “What are you doing here, Tyler?”
“I thought somebody would be here,” he said, looking at Uncle Neal, then at me in my nightshirt, then away. He was really embarrassed too.
“It’s early,” Neal said. “Real early.” My uncle was very unhappy.
“I thought someone was always here.”
Jackie must have seen this boy, this Tyler, from the kitchen window. She joined us, looking all concerned.
“I was just going to do my four hours early today,” Tyler explained. “I walked here, if you’re wondering. I’ll start cleaning cages. Don’t worry, you can trust me.”
I sneaked a good look at him. He looked like he’d slept in his clothes, or maybe not slept at all.
“I can’t trust you to do a good job on an empty stomach,” Jackie said, and that’s how Tyler joined us for breakfast.
At breakfast he didn’t say much. In, fact he didn’t say anything at all. Neither did I. I was fully dressed by then, but still embarrassed.
Tyler kept his eyes down on his omelet. It was a strange breakfast, everybody off-balance, maybe not such a good idea. In the silences you heard everybody chewing and swallowing. The kitchen faucet had a slow drip. Cody was in agony, wanting out, but wasn’t saying a thing. Finally he distracted himself by dangling a piece of sausage at the side of his chair. Other than me, only Sage noticed. It wasn’t the first time Cody had tried to win her over with food, but Sage didn’t budge from the corner of the room.
Tyler ate ravenously even though he’d protested that he’d eaten at home. His cheeks were ruddy, maybe from feeling self-conscious. He’d visited the bathroom and washed up, arranged his thick dark hair somehow, but he still looked like a wild creature who’d just come in from the woods. I couldn’t help but wonder what his home life must be like and why he was at Jackie’s in the first place. Something told me I didn’t really want the answers.
7
LATE-BREAKING NEWS
I was folding and sorting my clothes. I had a lot of them to put away. It felt good to take a little time, settle in, and enjoy the scents that the breeze brought through the open window. Jackie had flower beds everywhere, and blooming rhododendrons lined her long driveway.
I already liked it out here in the woods. I loved my room, not fancy but clean and airy and fresh with the fragrance of the nearby cedars. I liked Jackie’s house, I liked her home-baked bread, I liked her.
So far, so good. We’d landed safely and so had my parents. First thing after breakfast Jackie had let me check my e-mail from her office computer. “The adventure begins,” my mother reported. They’d made it to Karachi, Pakistan.
On the spot, I got on the keys. They had said they would check their e-mail before leaving for Islamabad and Peshawar. I filled them in on our adventures so far. Were they ever going to be surprised.
Uncle Neal was away, dropping the van at a repair place. Cody was in the clinic with Chuckie and some other new friends. Jackie had said he could pull some carrots from the garden, clean and dice them for the baby skunks, and he might like to help Rosie make a fruit dish for the baby porcupine.
It was good to have a chance to catch my breath and gather my thoughts. I found myself thinking about Tyler, the hurt in his voice when he said, “Don’t worry, you can trust me.” Why wouldn’t they trust him?
Tyler had acted distant after breakfast when I’d run into him in the clinic. He was cleaning cages. The nightshirt episode and the awkwardness at breakfast were fresh, and he looked away. I was about to do the same when I realized how strange it was going to be if we couldn’t even be around each other, talk, and generally act normal. I said something about how great it was that there were so many volunteers at Jackie’s. It was meant as an offhanded compliment. He looked at me and said in a wounded sort of way, “Well, yeah, but I’m not exactly volunteering.”
I decided not to ask what he meant.
I was almost finished hanging my clothes in the closet when Cody came flying upstairs with late-breaking news:
1) Uncle Neal
had a bumper sticker on the back of his old truck that said VERY FUNNY, SCOTTY, NOW BEAM DOWN MY CLOTHES.
2) Another one said FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS EAT FARMED SALMON.
3) Uncle Neal said it was hard to drive and keep an eye out for new bumper stickers, so Cody could help out with that.
4) Rosie said Sage didn’t like kids under a certain size because a little kid had been really mean to her when she was a puppy.
5) Rosie has a son named Robbie who is seven, too. Jackie is a “midgewife” and delivered Robbie when he was born.
6) Jackie was going to show Cody how to collect the eggs from the henhouse. You had to stand up to the rooster but you couldn’t hit him with anything or kick him because you might break his leg.
7) The baby porcupine and the baby skunks are almost as cool as Chuckie. He got to help with bottle feeding—it was major the way Chuckie tugged on the bottle. The baby skunks don’t even stink.
8) When he asked a couple of people about Tyler, they acted like they were busy.
After that last item, my little brother looked at me funny. I said, “How come you were asking people about Tyler?”
“I thought you’d want to know,” he replied sheepishly.
“Cody, all kinds of people help out here. Close to a hundred every week this time of year, Jackie said. They come and go all day.”
“Half of the animals die,” Cody blurted out, hurt in his voice, on his face.
“Who told you that?”
“Tyler did. He said some of them get put to sleep. The bodies get taken away and cremated.”
Before I could say a thing, my little brother turned and ran. Cody bounded down the stairs yelling, “Jackie’s going to take us to see some low-flying fish!”
8
UNDERGROUND WITH A TOUGH CUSTOMER
Cody was right, Jackie had plans for us. She drove us straight into downtown Seattle. We parked under a viaduct across from where people drove on and off the ferries. Next thing I knew we were strolling along Alaskan Way, the street closest to the water. A pier full of tourist traps caught my eye, and we started browsing.
In the very first shop, Cody found himself a color poster of Mount Saint Helens erupting. A conch shell, a candy bar, and a plastic tarantula later, he had maxed his weekly allowance. I was the treasurer and warned him there wouldn’t be any advances. “I’m a grasshopper, not an ant,” he declared. Cody suffered through another hour of browsing until we climbed the steps to Seattle’s famous Pike Place Market. He was in search of the low-flying fish Jackie had advertised, whatever they were.
Pike Place was spilling over with tourists. The first section we entered was an open-air flower market, a riot of exotic fragrances. I would have bought an arrangement of dahlias for Jackie if she wasn’t up to her ears in flowers at home and I hadn’t spent $14 on a Seattle photo calendar. A woman speaking an Asian language was weeding seconds from the bulk flowers and tossing them under the table. She saw me standing there sort of blissfully, sort of wishfully. She smiled and presented me with a beautiful orchid. I said thanks, turned around, and slipped its stem through a buttonhole in Jackie’s blouse.
The appeal of the flower section escaped Cody. Our grasshopper dragged us through the vegetable section and ever closer to the strong smell of seafood. We were soon surrounded by crab, squid, and octopus. The fish came next, iced down and on display. “Where are the low-flying fish?” Cody fretted, craning his neck. “That’s the whole reason I came.”
Jackie didn’t look hopeful. “Maybe they aren’t flying today.”
Up ahead, foot traffic had come to a standstill. One particular stall was mobbed. We heard cheers, shouts, and laughing. I caught Cody’s attention and pointed to a sign suspended above the crowd: CAUTION—LOW-FLYING FISH. Just then Cody saw one, an airborne salmon longer than his arm. I hoisted him up so he could see better. As soon as a customer bought a fish, one of the workers grabbed it and tossed it across the stall to others who did the wrapping. They never dropped one.
“This is major,” Cody said.
As they were wrapping a sockeye salmon for Jackie, the cell phone in her purse rang. I fished it out and answered for her. It was Neal, and he wanted to know if his assistants were available for a rescue. He said it was Cody’s chance to see Pioneer Square, where the bricks had fallen off the buildings during the earthquake.
I asked Neal where he was calling from and he said, “From the Filipino eats place.”
I said, “Where’s that?”
“Right across from you,” he said, “about fifty feet away.”
I looked across the street, and there was Neal’s shiny head and smiling face amid the crowd.
A few minutes later Jackie was on her way home with dinner and we were on our way to Pioneer Square in Neal’s rusty old Toyota pickup. It was challenging fitting the three of us and Sage into the cab of the toy-sized truck. With Cody in the middle and Sage propping her front feet on the dash, we managed.
We were barely under way when Cody grinned and said, “Very funny Scotty, now beam down my clothes. Friends don’t let friends eat farmed salmon.”
Neal winked and said, “Friends don’t let friends drive naked.”
Cody chortled like a pig in deep mud. I gave Uncle Neal a glance to the effect of, Don’t go there.
Pioneer Square was ringed by five- and six-story buildings with a small leafy park in the middle. A carrier in one hand and big fishing net in the other, flak-jacketed partner at his side, Neal was quite a camera magnet. “My uncle, the tourist attraction,” I kidded him.
“Let’s keep moving,” he said under his breath. We hustled past boutiques, coffeehouses, and bookstores. Pioneer Square felt familiar, a lot like Greenwich Village in New York, though the totem pole in the middle of the square reminded me I was a long way from home.
We stopped at the door of something called Seattle’s Famous Underground Tours, and were they ever happy to see us. They’d had to cancel two tours after a raccoon got into the underground, whatever that was.
A man led us to a spot where he opened a door fronting an alley, then shut it behind us as we descended into the late nineteenth century. “Tidnab,” Neal announced on the way down the stairs. Suddenly his dog was on high alert. Uncle Neal put on the heavy coat he’d been carrying over his arm and pulled on a pair of welding gloves.
We found ourselves looking into musty shops and stores as we walked along streets abandoned long ago. “We’re under Pioneer Square right now,” Uncle Neal whispered. “Keep your voices down so we don’t scare the raccoon into some deep corner.”
The main route that the tourists followed on their tours was lit dimly by electric light. I probed with Neal’s powerful flashlight beam into dark nooks and crannies. “We wouldn’t have a chance of finding that Bandit-spelled-backwards without Sage,” Cody whispered to Neal.
“You got that right. I can’t believe you figured out the raccoon code word so fast.”
“Beam me up, Scotty. Why did they have to stop the tours?”
“They were afraid of getting sued. Afraid the raccoon might get cornered and rip some tourist’s face off.”
A few steps farther and the flashlight beam lit up a strange sight: a toilet mounted on a platform about six feet off the ground, with a ladder leading up to it.
“Explain, Uncle Neal,” I whispered. Cody slapped his hand to his mouth to keep from laughing.
“Sure. When Seattle first got started, this part of town was built on the tidal flats. Whenever the tide came in, they had a problem. Everything backed up and the sewage flowed the wrong direction. When they got a strong high tide—whoosh—exploding toilets! Kind of like Old Faithful in Yellowstone Park. You didn’t want to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—you get the idea.”
Cody pumped his fist. “Got it!”
“That’s gross,” I protested. “Certifiably.”
“But Shan doesn’t mind,” Cody said. “Keep going, Uncle Neal.”
“Well, all the
y could do was build the toilets up in the air, like the one you’re looking at. Afterward, you came down the ladder and washed up. There’s the washbasin, on ground level. Isn’t history wonderful?”
“This is the ultimate,” Cody said.
“Cody, let me tell you why the great fire of 1889 wasn’t such a disaster after all. After the fire, the city fathers, in their wisdom, decided to rebuild this whole part of town twelve feet higher.”
Cody laughed through his fingers. “So the sewage would go downhill.”
“That’s right. Gravity isn’t just a good idea, it’s the law. They built on the old foundations, then raised the streets to match the top of the old first story. While they were rebuilding, you had to climb a ladder from the sidewalk to get onto the street. You crossed the street, then climbed down a ladder to get to the sidewalk on the other side. I kid you not.”
Uncle Neal suddenly put a forefinger to his lips, took the flashlight, and pointed it through a ragged break in one of the stone walls. Far down an ancient alley, a pair of eyes shone weirdly in the dark.
“How did you know?” I whispered. “Did Sage tell you?”
“Indeed she did. Adult raccoon. That tidnab is gonna be a tough customer.”
The border collie was twitching all over, yet when Uncle Neal gave the word, she didn’t bolt. Sage stalked slowly into the darkness, the hair along her spine standing on end.
Uncle Neal brandished his salmon net. “Give me lots of swinging room. Let’s stand well off to the side so we aren’t blocking the raccoon’s way out.”
Before long Sage was barking, the raccoon was growling and hissing, and there was a nasty scuffle going on. “Sage knows how to use her flak jacket,” Neal said. “I just hope she has enough light to see by.”
A couple minutes later the raccoon popped out, but not where we were expecting. Barking wildly, Sage flushed it out half a block behind us. Neal took off at a gallop with the flashlight and the net. I followed with the carrier.