Evertaster

by Adam Glendon Sidwell

  Mom stood up to go.

  “Your boy, he knows what I’m talking about, doesn’t he?” said Felicity desperately.

  Mom nodded. Guster blushed. How was it that everyone knew about his tastes? He was only doing what was normal — tasting the good and avoiding the bad. He didn’t see how that was any different from everybody else.

  “Your boy is an Evertaster! Otherwise, Renoir wouldn’t have given the eggbeater to him! That is not a gift to be treated lightly! If not taken care of, it can turn into a curse!” said Felicity.

  “You must be mistaken, Ms. Casa,” said Mom. “Guster is no Ever — whatever you call it. He’s just a bit particular.”

  “No, I can tell. He is an Evertaster — you’ve seen it in him. Someone who tastes every flavor that ever touched every ingredient in his food. They taste time. They taste history. You know how it is. Nothing satisfies him. Maybe a morsel of the finest cuisine here, or a bite there, but it never lasts. He has more taste buds in one square inch of his tongue than in all of Iowa! He is hungry, always hungry.”

  Everyone gets hungry, thought Guster. She was only guessing. It was strange though because, for the first time ever, someone understood a part of him that no one else had.

  “We’ve managed so far,” said Mom. She grabbed Guster’s hand and dragged him toward the exit, leaving the eggbeater on the counter in front of Felicity. He turned, reaching back to grab it; Mom pulled against him. They couldn’t leave the eggbeater behind. He had to think of something fast.

  “It gets worse with age!” cried Felicity.

  Mom stopped. She was silent. She looked down at Guster with the same sympathetic look she made when he’d fallen off his bike or skinned his palms. He looked away. She squeezed his hand.

  Felicity spoke, “There is a cure,” she said, both hands pressed up against the glass. “You know what it is!”

  Mom bowed her head and sighed. She stood there for a long time, her eyes closed. I don’t need a cure, thought Guster, I just need something to eat. He searched Mom’s face for a sign that she would not abandon their search. He needed that recipe. He needed her to do her duty as his mom.

  Finally she reached over, picked up the eggbeater, and tucked it in her apron pocket. “Goodbye, Felicity,” Mom said. Guster followed her as she made her way out the prison doors.

  Chapter 10 — On the Road Again

  Mom cradled the eggbeater in her lap as she stared out the window of the cab on the way back to the airport.

  Finally, thought Guster. She was on board. He wouldn’t have to hide things from her anymore. She could tell Braxton to fly them where they needed to go and he would listen because she was an adult. It was times like this that he loved her most.

  He felt lighter too, knowing that their search for the Gastronomy of Peace was not just for him, it was for all mankind. We’re doing this to stop wars, he thought, though he’d never seen a real war for himself. They were doing it for everybody. For all the people in America, and in China, and Africa. For people everywhere. For peace. He could only imagine what it would have been like to live in Paris long ago, to taste Archedentus’ work.

  “Guster, I need you to start taking responsibility for this recipe,” said Mom as they drove back to the airport in the cab. She looked very, very tired; that meant he had to be careful not to set her off. She slid the eggbeater across the seat toward him.

  I’m the one who kept the eggbeater in the first place, thought Guster. She was the one who told him to get rid of it. He was eleven. She was the adult. What did she want him to do, fly the plane himself? Responsibility was one of those words she liked to use all too frequently. As usual, it was easier to nod his head than to disagree out loud.

  “Good,” said Mom. “Because you’re the Evertaster, and you’re the reason we’re doing all this.”

  He was the reason? He felt himself flush with anger. That was like a punch in the stomach. Evertaster. For as long as he could remember, Mom had called him picky, and now a celebrity chef thought she was right. Evertaster. He wasn’t as bad as that. He couldn’t let Mom blame all this on him.

  He turned away from her. He was not in the mood for her scolding right now.

  When they got back to the airport, Guster told Mariah everything Felicity had said about the Gastronimatii, Archedentus, and the cuisine that would bring peace to all mankind. He left out the part about her calling him an Evertaster.

  “If the Gastronomy of Peace will stop wars, then why did Archedentus want to keep his recipe a secret?” Mariah asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Guster. He hadn’t thought about that. It did seem strange to him that Archedentus wouldn’t share it with the whole world. It also seemed strange that Felicity wouldn’t either.

  “In those days, an ocean voyage from Peru to France could take months. If Archedentus needed the egg-fruit of Machu Picchu in order to make his recipe, he would never be able to get it back to France before it spoiled,” said Mariah.

  “Good point,” Guster said. He wished he would’ve thought of that, too. Mariah was always one step ahead.

  “Hey, guys, look over here!” cried Zeke from a newspaper vending machine outside the hangar. Guster and Mariah trotted over to him. “Check out this headline!” he said.

  The front page of the paper read in bold letters: “Canned Soup Factory Tainted with Raw Sewage.”

  “Isn’t that weird?” said Zeke. “It’s so totally slobulous, it makes me want to vomit!”

  Mariah slid some quarters into the slot, pulled out the paper, and started reading the article. “’Cambini’s Soup Factory in Pennsylvania was shut down yesterday when a pipe containing raw sewage was found spliced into their main line. Thousands of gallons of soup were filled with human waste from the city sewers, making the soup completely inedible.’”

  “Duh!” said Zeke.

  “There’s more,” said Mariah, ignoring him. “’A note written in spicy hot mustard was scrawled across the floor of the factory in huge letters, “Because your soup is already poop, here’s a little more of it.” The saboteurs still remain unknown and at large.’”

  “Woah, that’s totally cool!” said Zeke.

  Mariah finished reading the article before she gave Zeke a glare. “Zeke, the factory is going to be shut down for months. According to this, Cambini’s produces over half the soup consumed in the United States. No one will be able to buy Cambini’s soup!”

  “So what? It’s just one factory!” said Zeke.

  Guster felt his stomach turn. It wasn’t just one factory. There were more. They’d seen that factory on the news go up in smoke right before they’d left home. “The Foodco Factory!” he cried. Two food plants destroyed in only one week, as well as Mac Murray’s butchery back in Louisiana. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Someone had to be behind this. Someone to whom food meant everything.

  He opened his mouth, just as Mariah said it. “The Gastronimatii!” she gasped. Guster nodded. It had to be. The Gastronimatii were advancing. There was no way to tell how many factories or restaurants or supermarkets they’d destroyed. The same innocence they’d burnt and mangled in Guster’s little town was dying all around them. It was spreading. And then where would they go? Where could Mom take them? They needed peace more now than ever.

  Mariah started for the plane.

  “Gastro-who?” Zeke asked.

  “We have to tell Mom!” Mariah called back.

  Guster hesitated. He didn’t want to talk to Mom right now, especially after her lecture in the taxi. Zeke shoved past Guster from behind. “Can’t you stop talking crazy for just once!” Zeke shouted after her.

  “Mom!” Mariah called as she pounded up the plane’s steps. Guster couldn’t miss anything either, so he followed, reluctant. They found Mom lying on the bed in the back, resting.

  “Gastronimatii!” Mariah gasped holding up the article for Mom to see as she jabbered an explanation.

  Mom listened without saying a word. She read through the entire artic
le quietly. When she was finished, she folded the paper and set it down. “Mariah, please get me the eggbeater. We need to find out where that second ingredient is.”

  Guster followed Mariah to the main cabin where the eggbeater rested on a seat cushion. At least Mom was going to try and help them a little.

  “Haven’t you looked at that second ingredient a million times?” Zeke said.

  “Yes Zeke, I have. It says, ‘seventy-four degrees, thirty-one minutes’ and ‘nineteen degrees, one minute’. Those are the baking instructions; now we just have to discover the location,” said Mariah, pinching her chin in thought.

  “Why don’t you discover your own brain?” Zeke asked. As much as Guster didn’t like his tone, Zeke was right. Temperature and baking time were useless without knowing where to find the ingredients to bake. “Don’t know if even Christopher Columbus could find that,” Zeke whispered to Guster.

  Mariah’s eyes suddenly lit up. “You mean like a sailor?” She nearly dove for the eggbeater, plucked it up and scanned it with her eyes.

  “Yeah, a sailor without a map.”

  A smile spread across Mariah’s cheeks. She didn’t seem to be listening. “You may not be as useless as you try to be, brother.”

  Guster stifled a laugh. Mariah must’ve been on to something.

  “Braxton?” said Mariah, switching directions. She knocked on the cockpit door and he opened. “Do you have a world map with geographic coordinates?” she asked.

  “Sure thing, little lady,” he said. He rustled through a pouch of charts and maps on the wall until he found one and handed it to Mariah.

  “See, ‘seventy-four degrees, thirty-one minutes’ and ‘nineteen degrees, one minute’ aren’t baking instructions at all,” she said, spreading the map out on a table. “They’re coordinates!”

  “Well of course,” said Braxton, looking at the map over her shoulder. “That’s latitude and longitude.”

  “Which is always written in degrees and minutes,” said Mariah. “Each degree is broken up into 60 minutes. Seventy-four degrees is the latitude, plus 31 minutes,” said Mariah. “And 19 degrees, one minute is the longitude.”

  Braxton looked over her shoulder. “I wish you would have said something ‘bout that earlier,” said Braxton.

  “Which means that the next ingredient is right there,” said Mariah. She pointed to a tiny little island way up in the Arctic Sea north of Norway. Mom stood at the back of the main cabin, smiling. She had heard the whole thing.

  “Look,” Braxton said, reading the name of the island in fine print below it. “It’s called Bjørnøya.”

  “Braxton, how soon can you have this jet off the ground?” Mom asked.

  “Two shakes of a lamb’s tail,” said Braxton.

  “How about one?” Mom said.

  Braxton smiled. “Now you’re talkin’,” he said.

  ***

  Hours later, they were flying over the Atlantic Ocean, far away from home. Leaving the country again was scary, but there was no way around it if they wanted to make the One Recipe.

  Then there was the matter of the chickens. Five-foot chickens and egg-trees that grew from chicken seeds. It sounded like one of Zeke’s crazy stories, but it had been real, and they’d almost been killed. The bloody wounds on Zeke’s leg proved it.

  And now they were going to some tiny Norwegian island in the middle of the sea.

  Mariah stirred on the bench across the cabin. She rubbed her eyes and went up to the cockpit to sit next to Braxton. “Oh, good. You’re awake,” he said, “There’s something I wanted to show you.” Guster craned his neck to see. Braxton pulled out a laptop computer. “We’ve got a satellite linkup here, so you can get the internet.” They muttered back and forth to each other, Braxton showing Mariah how to log on and use it. Eventually, Guster grew tired of trying to listen and drifted off to sleep.

  When he awoke, the sun had risen. Mariah sat across the aisle from him, the computer on her lap, the eggbeater on one side, a pencil on the other. She was typing on the keyboard furiously. Occasionally she wrote something down on a piece of paper.

  They stopped off in London to refuel. As soon as they were back in air, Mariah switched the computer back on and started working again.

  “What is she doing?” Zeke asked when he woke up.

  “I don’t know,” said Guster.

  “Looks like homework to me,” grumbled Zeke and went back to sleep.

  “I’ve got it!” said Mariah. She smiled at Guster. Her eyes were bright.

  “What?” asked Guster.

  “I know what the next ingredient is!” she shouted. Mom came from the back room. “I found a website that translates whatever you type in from French to English. It took me awhile to get a translation I was sure of, but I got it working. Here’s what I’ve translated so far.” She held the eggbeater up and pointed to the lettering with one hand while she read her notes off the paper.

  “The Fruit of the Fowl, sixteen shekels sunshine, sixty-three cloud,” she said.

  “The eggs!” said Guster. “But what is the sunshine and cloud?”

  “Egg yolks and egg whites, of course,” said Mariah. It made sense.

  “And a shekel?”

  “It’s some kind of measurement they used in the old days.” She pointed to the text below the symbol of the bear and the barrel with the stick. “This means twenty-one shekels of the Buttersmith’s gold.”

  “Buttersmith’s gold?” asked Zeke. “What the hecknacious is that?”

  Mariah smiled. She seemed proud of herself. “It’s butter, Zeke. It’s so obvious now, it was right under our noses. See the barrel? It’s a butter churn. That’s how they used to make milk into butter way back when.”

  “So we’re flying all the way to some island out in the middle of nowhere for butter?” asked Zeke. He made a face.

  “Think of the egg, Zeke,” Guster said. “There must be something special about it.” Something about it that would make it more scrumptious than any butter on the whole planet. If only he had a loaf of oven-fresh white bread he could use as a sponge to soak it up…

  “If it’s anything like the egg, then the butter probably comes from some crazy place, like a cow,” said Zeke.

  Mariah looked at him, as if she was waiting for Zeke to comprehend what he just said. “Are you sure that you live down the road from a dairy? Butter does come from cows, Zeke. It’s made out of their milk.”

  Zeke’s cheeks flushed red, hiding his pimples. “Are you sure you don’t live down the road from a mental institution?” he said.

  Mariah smirked. She knew she’d won. “Here’s another thing. I looked up Bjørnøya in Norwegian. It means bear island.”

  “We’re going to Bear Island!” said Zeke, the smile coming back to his cheeks. “This is totally awesome! I’m gonna wrestle one, and make a rug out of its fur, and —” Zeke acted out the entire scenario right there, growling at Henry Junior as his victim.

  “Rar!” laughed Henry Junior back at him.

  “So you think we have to find a bear and it will lead us to the butter?” asked Guster.

  “I don’t know,” said Mariah. She looked worried. She got so scared of bears every time they went camping.

  Mom smoothed Mariah’s dark brown hair. “You are a very clever girl,” said Mom. “And I am quite proud of you.”

  “There’s more,” said Mariah. “See the next set of symbols?”

  She pointed to a carving on the handle of a river with pyramids at one end, and a lake at the other. There was a gorilla with a group of gleaming diamonds next to the lake. “Fifteen and a half shekels of the Mighty Ape’s Diamonds,” read Mariah from her notes. She pointed to the symbols below that, “Twenty-six shekels Dark Milk Bricks from Arrivederci’s Bean,” she read. Then finally, “Seven Drops of Sweet, Black Tears. It looks like the rest is instructions for baking and mixing. I’ll see if I can get those done before we land,” said Mariah.

  “Hmm,” Mom said. She paced back and f
orth down the aisle. “Eggs and butter — that makes sense, but diamonds? Dark Milk Bricks? Sweet, Black Tears? In all my years of cooking, I’ve never heard of anything like it. What could an ape make that was like a diamond?” Mom continued to pace the floor.

  There was something strangely familiar about the phrase ‘Dark Milk Bricks from Arrivederci’s Bean.’ Guster was certain he’d heard that before, though he couldn’t remember where.

  In a few hours, Braxton called back from the cockpit, “I talked with the control tower back in Heathrow. They said that the island is used by meteorologists to study the weather from time to time. Other than that, hardly anybody ever sets foot there. There is supposed to be a landing strip on the southwest corner.”

  Hours later, the plane was circling over an island partially covered in snow and surrounded by dark gray seas. “There’s the airstrip,” said Braxton. “Hold on.”

  Guster felt his stomach leap into his throat as the plane dropped. A minute later, Braxton pulled up on the stick and it hit the runway, bumping furiously. Guster braced himself against the arm rests. The plane slowed, then skidded to a halt.

  “Gather your things, and you will all need to put your jackets on,” said Mom. Guster zipped his up.

  “I’ll stay behind with the plane and make sure everything’s in good working order,” said Braxton. He opened the plane’s door and Guster stood on the stairs. The runway was old and cracked, like no one had been there in a long time. Beyond that was a desolate, brown and gray landscape with snow covered mountains looming in the distance. There was no sign of any settlement, no hint of any place that butter could hide.

  “Guster, you are the Evertaster. Show us the way,” Mom said.

  He cringed. There she was, calling him that word again. How was he supposed to know where to go? It wasn’t like he had a built-in ingredient detector. And if he somehow did, wouldn’t that just prove he was an Evertaster? Wouldn’t that just prove to Mom how picky he was — that he was everything she’d always accused him of being? He couldn’t let her get away with that.