Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren't As Scary

by McSweeney's

  He looked in the book under T. There were seven pages about tapioca and then a chapter on trifles.

  This is a good thing to eat, said the book. My trifle is a mixture of fruit and cream and cake and jam and jelly and sugar and almonds and if you like custard, custard. It is eaten cold.

  Grimble leaned the cookery book against the flower vase on the table and decided that a large bag of chips does not make people very hungry for trifle. But Madame Beryl had obviously gone to such a lot of trouble to get him all the things that go into a trifle that he felt he really should make it. After all, it did not seem to be very difficult.

  He got some pieces of cake and poured on the juice from the peaches, and then put on some strawberries and a spoonful of jelly, and then a layer of custard, and then the cream, and then put some almonds into it. And then he thought, I could have put in the meringues and made it my own trifle … trifle à la Grimble … then I could write a cookery book and become rich and famous, and when I walked down the street people would point at me and say, “There goes the inventor of trifle à la Grimble,” And others would say, “Not the Grimble.” And the first lot of people would say, “Yes, the Grimble of trifle fame.”

  So he got a fish slice—it did not have any fish on it, it is just called a fish slice—and he lifted up some of the trifle, and put the meringue in the middle, and pressed it all into shape again, and put almonds into the holes his fingers had made, and it looked exceedingly handsome. As there were a lot of cake boxes about and the chips and vinegar were still doing their job in stopping him from being very hungry, he decided to take the trifle home. He might give it to his parents as a welcome-back present.

  When he arrived at his house, he opened the door and shouted, “I am back.” There was no answer but there were about five suitcases in the hall, which had not been there when he had gone out.

  “I am back,” he shouted. “Hello. Grimble calling parents, over.”

  No one answered.

  He went up into the bedroom and there was no sign of them, though the note had gone. He came down again and looked in the front garden and the back garden. No sign—and then he went into the kitchen. And there they were, the three of them: his father and his mother and his trifle. Sitting very quietly at the kitchen table, and his trifle had been unwrapped, and stuck into the top of the cream were ten whole candles and one or two bits of candle, all alight.

  “Peru’s a bad place for cakes,” said his father. “Never go there if you want cake. Really not.”

  Grimble looked at his father and mother, and thought, they are back and school is over and tomorrow I shall get ten-pence for breakfast and we’ll read the newspaper together, and if they get up in time for lunch I might actually cook them something.

  SUNBIRD

  BY NEIL GAIMAN

  Illustrated by Peter de Sève

  They were a rich and a rowdy bunch at the Epicurean Club in those days. They certainly knew how to party. There were five of them:

  There was Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy, big enough for three men, who ate enough for four men and who drank enough for five. His great-grandfather had founded the Epicurean Club with the proceeds of a tontine which he had taken great pains, in the traditional manner, to ensure that he had collected in full.

  There was Professor Mandalay, small and twitchy and gray as a ghost (and perhaps he was a ghost; stranger things have happened) who drank nothing but water and who ate doll-portions from plates the size of saucers. Still, you do not need the gusto for the gastronomy, and Mandalay always got to the heart of every dish placed in front of him.

  There was Virginia Boote, the food and restaurant critic, who had once been a great beauty but was now a grand and magnificent ruin, and who delighted in her ruination.

  There was Jackie Newhouse, the descendant (on the left-handed route) of the great lover, gourmand, violinist, and duelist Giacomo Casanova. Jackie Newhouse had, like his notorious ancestor, both broken his share of hearts and eaten his share of great dishes.

  And there was Zebediah T. Crawcrustle, who was the only one of the Epicureans who was flat-out broke: he shambled in unshaven from the street when they had their meetings, with half a bottle of rotgut in a brown paper bag, hatless and coat-less, and, too often, partly shirtless, but he ate with more of an appetite than any of them.

  Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy was talking—

  “We have eaten everything that can be eaten,” said Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy, and there was regret and glancing sorrow in his voice. “We have eaten vulture, mole, and fruitbat.”

  Mandalay consulted his notebook. “Vulture tasted like rotten pheasant. Mole tasted like carrion slug. Fruitbat tasted remarkably like sweet guinea pig.”

  “We have eaten kakopo, aye-aye, and giant panda—”

  “Oh, that broiled panda steak,” sighed Virginia Boote, her mouth watering at the memory.

  “We have eaten several long-extinct species,” said Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy. “We have eaten flash-frozen mammoth and Patagonian giant sloth.”

  “If we had but gotten the mammoth a little faster,” sighed Jackie Newhouse. “I could tell why the hairy elephants went so fast, though, once people got a taste of them. I am a man of elegant pleasures, but after but one bite, I found myself thinking only of Kansas City barbecue sauce, and what the ribs on those things would be like, if they were fresh.”

  “Nothing wrong with being on ice for a millennium or two,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. He grinned. His teeth may have been crooked, but they were sharp and strong. “But for real taste, you had to go for honest-to-goodness mastodon every time. Mammoth was always what people settled for, when they couldn’t get mastodon.”

  “We’ve eaten squid, and giant squid, and humongous squid,” said Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy. “We’ve eaten lemmings and Tasmanian tigers. We’ve eaten bower bird and ortolan and peacock. We’ve eaten the dolphin fish (which is not the mammal dolphin) and the giant sea turtle and the Sumatran Rhino. We’ve eaten everything there is to eat.”

  “Nonsense. There are many hundreds of things we have not yet tasted,” said Professor Mandalay. “Thousands, perhaps. Think of all the species of beetle there are, still untasted.”

  “Oh Mandy,” sighed Virginia Boote. “When you’ve tasted one beetle, you’ve tasted them all. And we’ve all tasted several hundred species. At least the dung-beetles had a real kick to them.”

  “No,” said Jackie Newhouse, “that was the dung-beetle balls. The beetles themselves were singularly unexceptional. Still, I take your point. We have scaled the heights of gastronomy, we have plunged down into the depths of gustation. We have become cosmonauts exploring undreamed-of worlds of delectation and gourmanderie.”

  “True, true, true,” said Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy. “There has been a meeting of the Epicureans every month for over a hundred and fifty years, in my father’s time, and my grandfather’s time, and my great-grandfather’s time, and now I fear that I must hang it up for there is nothing left that we, or our predecessors in the club, have not eaten.”

  “I wish I had been here in the twenties,” said Virginia Boote, “when they legally had Man on the menu.”

  “Only after it had been electrocuted,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. “Half-fried already it was, all char and crackling. It left none of us with a taste for long pig, save for one who was already that way inclined, and he went out pretty soon after that anyway.”

  “Oh, Crusty, why must you pretend that you were there?” asked Virginia Boote, with a yawn. “Anyone can see you aren’t that old. You can’t be more than sixty, even allowing for the ravages of time and the gutter.”

  “Oh, they ravage pretty good,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. “But not as good as you’d imagine. Anyway, there’s a host of things we’ve not eaten yet.”

  “Name one,’ said Mandalay, his pencil poised precisely above his notebook.

  “Well, there’s Suntown Sunbird,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. And he grinned his crookedy g
rin at them, with his teeth ragged but sharp.

  “I’ve never heard of it,” said Jackie Newhouse. “You’re making it up.”

  “I’ve heard of it,” said Professor Mandalay, “but in another context. And besides, it is imaginary.”

  “Unicorns are imaginary,” said Virginia Boote, “but gosh, that unicorn flank tartare was tasty. A little bit horsy, a little bit goatish, and all the better for the capers and raw quail eggs.”

  “There’s something about Sunbirds in one of the minutes of the Epicurean Club from bygone years,” said Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy. “But what it was, I can no longer remember.”

  “Did they say how it tasted?” asked Virginia.

  “I do not believe that they did,” said Augustus, with a frown. “I would need to inspect the bound proceedings, of course.”

  “Nah,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. “That’s only in the charred volumes. You’ll never find out about it from there.”

  Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy scratched his head. He really did have two feathers, which went through the knot of black-hair-shot-with-silver at the back of his head, and the feathers had once been golden although by now they were looking kind of ordinary and yellow and ragged. He had been given them when he was a boy.

  “Beetles,” said Professor Mandalay. “I once calculated that, if a man such as myself were to eat six different species of beetle each day, it would take him more than twenty years to eat every beetle that has been identified. And over that twenty years enough new species of beetle might have been discovered to keep him eating for another five years. And in those five years enough beetles might have been discovered to keep him eating for another two and a half years, and so on, and so on. It is a paradox of inexhaustibility. I call it Mandalay’s Beetle. You would have to enjoy eating beetles, though,” he added, “or it would be a very bad thing indeed.”

  “Nothing wrong with eating beetles if they’re the right kind of beetle,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. “Right now, I’ve got a hankering on me for lightning bugs. There’s a kick from the glow of a lightning bug that might be just what I need.”

  “While the lightning bug or firefly (Photinus pyralis) is more of a beetle than it is a glow-worm,” said Mandalay, “they are by no stretch of the imagination edible.”

  “They may not be edible,” said Crawcrustle. “But they’ll get you into shape for the stuff that is. “

  Virginia Boote was an eminently practical woman. She said, “Suppose we did want to eat Suntown Sunbird. Where should we start looking for it?”

  Zebediah T. Crawcrustle scratched the bristling seventh-day beard that was sprouting on his chin (it never grew any longer than that; seventh-day beards never do). “If it was me,” he told them, “I’d head down to Suntown of a noon in midsummer, and I’d find somewhere comfortable to sit—Mustapha Stroheim’s coffeehouse, for example, and I’d wait for the Sunbird to come by. Then I’d catch him in the traditional manner, and cook him in the traditional manner as well.”

  “And what would the traditional manner of catching him be?” asked Jackie Newhouse.

  “Why, the same way your famous ancestor poached quails and wood-grouse,” said Crawcrustle.

  “Dried corn and dried blueberries, soaked in whisky,” said Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy. “That’s how my folk always did it.”

  “And that was how Casanova did it,” said Crawcrustle, “although he used barley grains mixed with raisins, and he soaked the raisins in brandy. He taught me himself.”

  Jackie Newhouse ignored this statement. It was easy to ignore much that Zebediah T. Crawcrustle said. Instead, Jackie Newhouse asked, “And where is Mustapha Stroheim’s coffeehouse in Suntown?”

  “Why, where it always is, third lane after the old market in the Suntown district, just before you reach the old drainage ditch that was once an irrigation canal, and if you find yourself in One-Eye Khayam’s carpet shop you have gone too far,” began Crawcrustle. “But I see by the expressions of irritation upon your faces that you were expecting a less succinct, less accurate description. Very well. It is in Suntown, and Suntown is in Cairo, in Egypt, where it always is, or almost always.”

  “And who will pay for an expedition to Suntown?” asked Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy. “And who will be on this expedition? I ask the question although I already know the answer, and I do not like it.”

  “Why, you will pay for it, Augustus, and we will all come,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. “You can deduct it from our Epicurean membership dues. And I shall bring my chef’s apron and my cooking utensils.”

  Augustus knew that Crawcrustle had not paid his Epicurean Club membership in much too long a time, but the Epicurean Club would cover him; Crawcrustle had been a member of the Club in Augustus’s father’s day. He simply said, “And when shall we leave?”

  Crawcrustle fixed him with a mad old eye and shook his head in disappointment. “Why, Augustus,” he said. “We’re going to Suntown, to catch the Sunbird. When else should we leave?”

  “Sunday!” sang Virginia Boote. “Darlings, we’ll leave on a Sunday!”

  “There’s hope for you yet, young lady,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. “We shall leave Sunday indeed. Three Sundays from now. And we shall travel to Egypt. We shall spend several days hunting and trapping the elusive Sunbird of Suntown, and, finally, we shall deal with it in the traditional way.”

  Professor Mandalay blinked a small gray blink. “But,” he said, “I am teaching a class on Monday. On Mondays I teach mythology, on Tuesdays I teach tapdancing, and on Wednesdays, woodwork.”

  “Get a teaching assistant to take your course, Mandalay O Mandalay. On Monday you’ll be hunting the Sunbird,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle. “And how many other professors can say that?”

  They went, one by one, to see Crawcrustle, in order to discuss the journey ahead of them, and to announce their misgivings.

  Zebediah T. Crawcrustle was a man of no fixed abode. Still, there were places he could be found, if you were of a mind to find him. In the early mornings he slept in the bus terminal, where the benches were comfortable and the transport police were inclined to let him lie; in the heat of the afternoons he hung in the park by the statues of long-forgotten generals, with the dipsos and the winos and the hopheads, sharing their company and the contents of their bottles, and offering his opinion, which was, as that of an Epicurean, always considered and always respected, if not always welcomed.

  Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy sought Crawcrustle out in the park; he had with him his daughter, Hollyberry NoFeathers McCoy. She was small, but she was sharp as a shark’s tooth.

  “You know,” said Augustus, “there is something very familiar about this.”

  “About what?” asked Zebediah.

  “All of this. The expedition to Egypt. The Sunbird. It seemed to me like I heard about it before.”

  Crawcrustle merely nodded. He was crunching something from a brown paper bag.

  Augustus said, “I went to the bound annals of the Epicurean Club, and I looked it up. And there was what I took to be a reference to the Sunbird in the index for forty years ago, but I was unable to learn anything more than that.”

  “And why was that?” asked Zebediah T. Crawcrustle, swallowing noisily.

  Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy sighed. “I found the relevant page in the annals,” he said, “but it was burned away, and afterward there was some great confusion in the administration of the Epicurean Club.”

  “You’re eating lightning bugs from a paper bag,” said Hollyberry NoFeathers McCoy. “I seen you doing it.”

  “I am indeed, little lady,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle.

  “Do you remember the days of great confusion, Crawcrustle?” asked Augustus.

  “I do indeed,” said Crawcrustle. “And I remember you. You were only the age that young Hollyberry is now. But there is always confusion, Augustus, and then there is no confusion. It is like the rising and the setting of the sun.”

  Jackie Newhouse and P
rofessor Mandalay found Crawcrustle that evening, behind the railroad tracks. He was roasting something in a tin can, over a small charcoal fire.

  “What are you roasting, Crawcrustle?” asked Jackie Newhouse.

  “More charcoal,” said Crawcrustle. “Cleans the blood, purifies the spirit.”

  There was basswood and hickory, cut up into little chunks at the bottom of the can, all black and smoking.

  “And will you actually eat this charcoal, Crawcrustle?” asked Professor Mandalay.

  In response, Crawcrustle licked his fingers and picked out a lump of charcoal from the can. It hissed and fizzed in his grip.

  “A fine trick,” said Professor Mandalay. “That’s how fire-eaters do it, I believe.”

  Crawcrustle popped the charcoal into his mouth and crunched it between his ragged old teeth. “It is indeed,” he said. “It is indeed.”

  Jackie Newhouse cleared his throat. “The truth of the matter is,” he said, “Professor Mandalay and I have deep misgivings about the journey that lies ahead.”

  Zebediah merely crunched his charcoal. “Not hot enough,” he said. He took a stick from the fire, and nibbled off the orange-hot tip of it. “That’s good,” he said.

  “It’s all an illusion,” said Jackie Newhouse.

  “Nothing of the sort,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle primly. “It’s prickly elm.”

  “I have extreme misgivings about all this,” said Jackie Newhouse. “My ancestors and I have a finely tuned sense of personal preservation, one that has often left us shivering on roofs and hiding in rivers—one step away from the law, or from gentlemen with guns and legitimate grievances—and that sense of self-preservation is telling me not to go to Suntown with you.”