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

by McSweeney's

  Crawcrustle was eating the head of the bird, crunching its bones and beak in his mouth. As he ate, the bones sparked small lightnings against his teeth. He just grinned and chewed the more.

  The bones of the Sunbird’s carcass burned orange on the barbeque, and then they began to burn white. There was a thick heat-haze in the courtyard at the back of Mustapha Stroheim’s coffeehouse, and in it everything shimmered, as if the people around the table were seeing the world through water or a dream.

  “It is so good!” said Virginia Boote as she ate. “It is the best thing I have ever eaten. It tastes like my youth. It tastes like forever.” She licked her fingers, then picked up the last slice of meat from her plate. “The Sunbird of Suntown,” she said. “Does it have another name?”

  “It is the Phoenix of Heliopolis,” said Zebediah T. Craw-crustle. “It is the bird that dies in ashes and flame and is reborn, generation after generation. It is the Bennu bird, which flew across the waters when all was dark. When its time is come, it is burned on the fire of rare woods and spices and herbs, and in the ashes it is reborn, time after time, world without end.”

  “Fire!” exclaimed Professor Mandalay. “It feels as if my insides are burning up!” He sipped his water, but seemed no happier.

  “My fingers,” said Virginia Boote. “Look at my fingers.” She held them up. They were glowing inside, as if lit with inner flames.

  Now the air was so hot you could have baked an egg in it.

  There was a spark and a sputter. The two yellow feathers in Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy’s hair went up like sparklers. “Crawcrustle,” said Jackie Newhouse, aflame, “answer me truly. How long have you been eating the Phoenix?”

  “A little over ten thousand years,” said Zebediah. “Give or take a few thousand. It’s not hard, once you master the trick of it; it’s just mastering the trick of it that’s hard. But this is the best Phoenix I’ve ever prepared. Or do I mean, ‘This is the best I’ve ever cooked this Phoenix’?”

  “The years!” said Virginia Boote. “They are burning off you!”

  “They do that,” admitted Zebediah. “You’ve got to get used to the heat, though, before you eat it. Otherwise you can just burn away.”

  “Why did I not remember this?” said Augustus TwoFeathers McCoy, through the bright flames that surrounded him. “Why did I not remember that this was how my father went, and his father before him, that each of them went to Heliopolis to eat the Phoenix? And why do I only remember it now?”

  “Because the years are burning off you,” said Professor Mandalay. He had closed the leather-bound book as soon as the page he had been writing on caught fire. The edges of the book were charred, but the rest of the book would be fine. “When the years burn, the memories of those years come back.” He looked more solid now, through the wavering burning air, and he was smiling. None of them had ever seen Professor Mandalay smile before.

  “Shall we burn away to nothing?” asked Virginia, now incandescent. “Or shall we burn back to childhood and burn back to ghosts and angels and then come forward again? It does not matter. Oh Crusty, this is all such fun!”

  “Perhaps,” said Jackie Newhouse through the fire, “there might have been a little more vinegar in the sauce. I feel a meat like this could have dealt with something more robust.” And then he was gone, leaving only an after-image.

  “Chacun à son gout,” said Zebediah T. Crawcrustle, which is French for “each to his own taste” and he licked his fingers and he shook his head. “Best it’s ever been,” he said, with enormous satisfaction.

  “Goodbye, Crusty,” said Virginia. She put her flame-white hand out, and held his dark hand tightly, for one moment, or perhaps for two.

  And then there was nothing in the courtyard of Mustapha Stroheim’s kahwa (or coffeehouse) in Heliopolis (which was once the city of the Sun, and is now a suburb of Cairo) but white ash, which blew up in the momentary breeze, and settled like powdered sugar or like snow; and nobody there but a young man with dark, dark hair, and even, ivory-coloured teeth, wearing an apron that said KISS THE COOK.

  A tiny golden-purple bird stirred in the thick bed of ashes on top of the clay bricks, as if it were waking for the first time. It made a high-pitched “peep!” and it looked directly into the sun, as an infant looks at a parent. It stretched its wings as if to dry them, and, eventually, when it was quite ready, it flew upward, toward the sun, and nobody watched it leave but the young man in the courtyard.

  There were two long golden feathers at the young man’s feet, beneath the ash that had once been a wooden table, and he gathered them up and brushed the white ash from them and placed them, reverently, inside his jacket. Then he removed his apron, and he went upon his way.

  Hollyberry TwoFeathers McCoy is a grown woman, with children of her own. There are silver hairs on her head, in there with the black, beneath the golden feathers in the bun at the back. You can see that once the feathers must have looked pretty special, but that would have been a long time ago. She is the President of the Epicurean Club—a rich and rowdy bunch—having inherited the position, long ago, from her father.

  I hear that the Epicureans are beginning to grumble once again. They are saying that they have eaten everything.

  For HMG—a belated birthday present

  THE ACES PHONE

  BY JEANNE DUPRAU

  Illustrated by Rachell Sumpter

  On a gray, windy Tuesday afternoon, Martin Alonzo found a cell phone under the swings at the 14th Street playground. It was silver and shiny, like a little mirror, lying there half covered with tanbark. He picked it up.

  No one was in the park that day—it was too cold. Martin himself was only passing through on his way home to get his skates. Skating was what he did after school. He didn’t like hanging around at home, in the apartment that was way too small for his big family. It was crowded and noisy, with his four little sisters and brothers always yelling and crying and crawling all over the place, and his mother always getting after them. He didn’t like hanging out with the kids from school, either, because all they wanted to do was play video games at the arcade. Video games made Martin feel like he was trapped in a box.

  So he skated, almost every day, speeding through the city past the delis and bakeries, the discount shoe stores, the taco stands and flower stalls and hot-dog wagons. He knew how to weave among the cars and buses and bikes. He could leap up curbs, ride down stairs, glide along ledges, and veer around old ladies. He loved skating—but sometimes he felt a bit lonely and pointless roaming through the city with no special place to go. He felt like he was just filling up time.

  Finding this cell phone was the first really interesting thing that had happened to him in ages. He sat down on a park bench to inspect it. A few pigeons flocked around his feet, hoping for crumbs. When he turned the phone on, a little screen lit up, and he figured out how to move through the different displays by pressing the buttons. His father, who drove a delivery truck, had showed him once how his cell phone worked. He had programmed it so he could call the people he talked to most often just by pressing one button. Whoever owned this phone had probably done that, too. He decided to try it out. It might give him a clue about who’d lost the phone.

  He pushed the CALL button, and when he heard the dial tone, he held down the number 1. It worked. In a second, he heard the phone at the other end ringing. Then a voice said, “Pizzolo’s Market.”

  Martin hung up. He knew Pizzolo’s Market—a little grocery store a few blocks away. So probably the phone’s owner lived nearby .

  He tried the number 2. Five times the phone rang, and then an answering machine came on. It was the scratchy voice of an old woman. “I’m not home,” it said. “Put a message on this machine.” Again, Martin hung up. That one was no help at all.

  The next call connected him to a doctor’s office, and the one after that was answered by a woman who said, “Yeah?” in an impatient way. Martin heard a baby crying in the background before he hung up.
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  He wasn’t getting anywhere. Still, just for fun, he decided to try one more call.

  The phone rang only once. Then there was a click and a brief silence. And then came a sound unlike anything he’d heard before. It seemed to come from both far away and near, a clamor made up of a thousand thread-like voices—and along with the noise came a blast of feeling so strong it nearly knocked him off the bench. He pitched forward, as if he’d gotten a sudden terrible cramp. The feeling poured into his ear and flooded down through his chest and into his blood and raced like fire all through his body. It wasn’t rage or fear or joy or love but a mixture of all of them, so strong that he cried out and dropped the phone on the ground.

  The pigeons, thinking it might be something to eat, flocked around it. He bent down to pick it up, shaking. Cautiously, he put the phone near his ear—not right against it this time—and listened. The strange, immense chorus of sound still poured out, and the feeling jolted him again. It was so strong that he couldn’t stay sitting on the bench. He had to get up and move.

  He paced furiously around the playground, under the swings, over to the slide, around the jungle gym. It was a good thing no one was there—he knew he looked very odd, as if the wind was blowing him this way and that. After a long time, he began to notice something.

  The feeling that shot through him changed slightly as he changed his direction. When he walked toward the baseball diamond, his heart beat harder, as if he were afraid. When he walked toward Avenue B, he grew calmer. When he went out of the park and down 14th Street, he felt weighed down by sadness.

  It was like that game where you’re looking for something and the other person says, “You’re hot! No, you’re getting colder! No, really cold! Now you’re hot again!” But what was he looking for? He had no idea.

  The next day he had a terrible time concentrating at school. He was wildly impatient to try out the phone again. It wasn’t quite as cold, so a few people were in the park when he got there—a mother pushing her toddler on a swing, a couple of kids going backward down the slide, and an old woman in a knit hat and a lumpy purplish coat trudging along the path by the baseball diamond.

  Martin stood within a clump of trees at the corner of the park, turned on the phone, and pressed 5. Once again, the torrent of sound-feeling rushed through him and forced him to start walking. He went toward Avenue B, since that had made the feeling calmer yesterday. But it didn’t work today. Everything was different. He felt a pang of fear as he went toward the jungle gym, and a jolt of joy as he neared the picnic tables. Finally, when he got back to the park bench, he just stopped. He turned off the phone and sat down, completely confused.

  That was when he felt a poke in his back, and a voice said, “That phone you got. That’s mine.”

  He whirled around. Behind him stood the old woman he’d seen before. She was glaring at him from under the rim of her knit hat, which looked like a purple pancake drooping just above her eyes. She pointed to the phone in his hand and said again, “That’s mine. I musta dropped it yesterday.”

  Martin held onto it tighter. “Prove it,” he said.

  The old woman laughed. “Easy. I bet you called my number 5. Right?”

  He just stared at her. All of a sudden he recognized her—Mrs. DeSalvio was her name, though she was usually called just Mrs. D. He’d seen her for years around the neighborhood, always tramping along with a phone held to her ear. People joked about her. They said she must have the most long-winded family in the world, because she always seemed to be listening, hardly ever talking.

  “Ever heard anything like that before?” she said.

  He shook his head. “What is it?”

  She came around to his side of the bench and sat down beside him with a thump, wafting out a smell that reminded Martin of a pastrami sandwich. “Why should I tell you?” she said.

  “Because you want your phone back,” said Martin, edging away and putting the phone in his pocket.

  She pinned him with her eyes. They were clear eyes, Martin saw, not dead-fish eyes, like so many old people’s. “First,” she said, “you tell me about you. Who are you? Talk to me.”

  He could just have stood up and walked away. Or run. She could never have caught him. But he thought the phone probably was hers, which meant she knew what was going on with it. And he wanted to know, too. So he talked.

  She listened. She said, “Good, good,” when he told her about skating. She frowned and bunched her lips up when he told her about where he lived, the too-small, too-crowded, too-noisy apartment that he didn’t want to go home to after school. “You should have a job after school,” she said.

  “Yeah,” said Martin. “But I don’t know how to do anything.”

  She leaned close to him and spoke in a low voice. “Do you like animals?”

  “Animals? Sure.”

  “What kind?”

  “All kinds, I guess.”

  “You like dogs?”

  “Yeah. Wish I had one.”

  “Why don’t you, then?”

  “No dogs allowed in the building.”

  “Awright,” said the old woman. She took some crumbs out of her pocket and tossed them to the pigeons who clustered around her feet. “Now. Can you handle the strange?”

  “What?”

  “The strange,” she said irritably. “You know, the strange, the unusual, the slightly weird. Can you handle that?”

  “Sure,” said Martin. He liked the strange and unusual.

  “I wouldn’t tell you this if I thought you were going to laugh,” she said. “Or spread it around to your worthless friends.”

  “I wouldn’t,” said Martin, which was the truth.

  “I have this hunch you might be the one, that’s why I’m telling you,” she said.

  “The one?” said Martin. “What one?”

  But she didn’t answer. She just studied his face, as if his brown eyes, his wavy black hair, and his chipped front tooth were giving her some kind of clue about him. “Awright, then,” she said finally. “That number you called—” She paused. She squinched up her eyes. She lowered her voice to a hoarse whisper. “That number taps you into the dogs.”

  Martin stared at her. He didn’t get it. “What?” he said.

  A gust of wind blew some crumpled food wrappers across the playground. The pigeons rose into the air and settled again.

  “Let’s walk around,” the old woman said. “I’m freezing to death, sitting here like this.”

  So they walked around the path that circled the playground, around and around, and she explained. “You know, dogs,” she said, “they don’t talk. They don’t have the words, just the feelings. They got feelings so strong they fill up the air, like … like …” She waved her hands around. “Like a big network of radio waves. This phone taps into the network. If you’re not used to it, you call that number and the feelings come roaring through and knock you down.”

  “That’s what happened to me,” Martin said. “But what’s the point of a phone like that? And where did you get it?”

  “An old guy in my building gave it to me,” she said, “a long time ago. And the point of it is: ACES.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Assistance for Canines in Emergency Situations. ACES.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Martin.

  “Let’s sit down,” she said. “My feet hurt, walking around like this.”

  So they sat down again. “You figured out that the feeling changes when you change direction,” she said. “I saw you doing it.”

  “Yeah,” Martin said. “But I don’t know why.”

  “Let me have the phone,” she said, holding out her hand. Martin gave it to her. She punched in the number. She frowned, clenched her jaw, and put the phone to her ear. For a few seconds she listened; then she nodded and handed the phone to Martin. “Hold yourself strong,” she said, “and you can take it.”

  He tightened all his muscles and listened. Again the feelings rampaged through him, but
they didn’t strike him down.

  “Okay,” said Mrs. D. “That’s good.” She took the phone back and turned it off. “Now, here’s what you’re hearing. This network here covers about twenty blocks. There’s others, all over the city—you don’t have to worry about them. For this one, the park is the center. We’re getting the vibes of all the dogs in that twenty-block area, pets and strays both. What you’re hearing is like hundreds of little streams all running together in one huge river. You listen real hard and careful, and you can hear the different—well, not voices, exactly, more like transmissions.”

  “I figured that out,” said Martin. “If you keep trying, you can find the way that feels better.”

  “That,” said the old woman, “is exactly what you don’t want to do. You gotta go the way that feels worst, that’s the whole point.” She fastened the top button of her coat and turned the collar up. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

  She made the call again. She stood up, listening. She took a few steps, changed direction, took a few more steps, and kept doing this for a minute or so. Then she handed the phone to him. “Okay,” she said. “Listen hard, and you’ll hear a sort of wail, and you’ll feel something kind of heavy and sad. Walk this way”—she pointed toward Avenue B—“and the sadness will get worse. What you want is to find where it’s coming from. So you keep going toward it. It’s hard, but the more you do it, the stronger you get.”

  So Martin walked. He set out up Avenue B, gritting his teeth because the sad feeling was indeed getting worse. The wail was thin and far away, like a needle of sound, and the sadness was like a stone in his chest. Every time the stone grew lighter, he knew he was going the wrong way. He had to pick out the faint wail from the chorus and turn toward it, again and again.

  The whole time, Mrs. DeSalvio kept talking. “Last week, out near Anderson Avenue, I found a little mutt that got the worst of a dogfight. One side of him all bloody.” She stamped along beside him, shaking her head. “We got an arrangement with the animal shelter, by the way,” she said. “They fix up ACES dogs for free.”