Kate DiCamillo: The Tiger Rising

His father read the note from the principal slowly, putting his big finger under the words as if they were bugs he was trying to keep still. When he was finally done, he laid the letter on the table and rubbed his eyes with his fingers and sighed. The rain beat a sad rhythm on the roof of the motel.

“That stuff ain’t nothing anybody else can catch,” his father said.

“I know it,” Rob told him.

“I already told that to that principal once before. I called up there and told him that.”

“Yes, sir,” said Rob.

His father sighed. He stopped rubbing his eyes and looked up at Rob. “You want to stay home?” he asked.

Rob nodded.

His father sighed again. “Maybe I’ll make an appointment, get one of them doctors to write down that what you got ain’t catching. All right?”

“Yes, sir,” said Rob.

“But I won’t do it for a few days. I’ll give you some time off.”

“That would be all right,” said Rob.

“You got to fight them, you know. Them boys. I know you don’t want to. But you got to fight them, else they won’t ever leave you alone.”

Rob nodded. He saw Sistine twirling and punching and kicking, and the vision made him smile.

“In the meantime, you can help me out around here,” his father said. “Do some of the maintenance-man work at the motel, do some sweeping and cleaning for me. Beauchamp’s running me ragged. There ain’t enough hours in the day to do everything that man wants done. Now go on and hand me that medicine.”

His father slathered and slapped the fishy-smelling ointment on Rob’s legs, and Rob concentrated on holding still.

“Do you think Beauchamp is the richest man in the world?” he asked his father.

“Naw,” his father said. “He don’t own but this one itty-bitty motel now. And the woods. He just likes to pretend he’s rich is all. Why?”

“I was just wondering,” said Rob. He was thinking about the tiger pacing back and forth in the cage. He was certain that the tiger belonged to Beauchamp, and wouldn’t you have to be the richest man in the world to own a tiger? Rob wanted, desperately, to go see the tiger again. But he was afraid that he had imagined the whole thing; he was afraid that the tiger might have disappeared with the morning mist.

“Can I go outside?” Rob asked when his father was done.

“Naw,” his father said. “I don’t want that medicine rained off you. It cost too much.”

Rob was relieved, almost, that he had to stay inside. What if he went looking for the tiger and he was not there?

Rob’s father cooked them macaroni and cheese for supper on the two-burner hot plate they kept on the table next to the TV. He boiled the macaroni too long and a lot of it stuck to the pan, so there weren’t many noodles to go with the powdery cheese.

“Someday,” he told Rob, “you and me will have a house with a real stove, and I’ll do some good cooking then.”

“This is good,” Rob lied.

“You eat all you want. I ain’t that hungry,” his father told him.

After supper, his father fell asleep in the recliner, with his head thrown back and his mouth open. He snored, and his feet — big, with crooked toes — jerked and trembled. In between the snores, his stomach growled long and loud, as if he was the hungriest man in the world.

Rob sat on his bed and started to work on carving the tiger. He had a good piece of maple, and his knife was sharp, and in his mind he could see the tiger clearly. But something different came out of the wood. It wasn’t a tiger at all. It was a person, with a sharp nose and small eyes and skinny legs. It wasn’t until he started working on the dress that Rob realized he was carving Sistine.

He stopped for a minute and held the wood out in front of him and shook his head in wonder. It was just like his mother had always said: You could never tell what would come out of the wood. It did what it wanted and you just followed.

He stayed up late working on the carving, and when he finally fell asleep, he dreamed about the tiger, only it wasn’t in a cage. It was free and running through the woods, and there was something on its back, but Rob couldn’t tell what it was. As the tiger got closer and closer, Rob saw that the thing was Sistine in her pink party dress. She was riding the tiger. In his dream, Rob waved to her and she waved back at him. But she didn’t stop. She and the tiger kept going, past Rob, deeper and deeper into the woods.

His father woke him up at five-thirty the next morning.

“Come on, son,” he said, shaking Rob’s shoulder. “Come on; you’re a working man now. You got to get up.” He took his hand away and stood over Rob for a minute more, and then he left.

Rob heard the door to the motel room squeak open. He opened his eyes. The world was dark. The only light came from the falling Kentucky Star. Rob turned over in bed and pulled back the curtain and looked out the window at the sign. It was like having his own personal shooting star, but he didn’t ever make a wish on it. He was afraid that if he started wishing, he might not be able to stop. In his suitcase of not-thoughts, there were also not-wishes. He kept the lid closed on them, too.

Rob leaned on his elbow and stared at the star and listened to the rain gently drumming its fingers on the roof. There was a warm glowing kind of feeling in his stomach, a feeling that he wasn’t used to. It took him a minute to name it. The tiger. The tiger was out there. He got out of bed and put on shorts and a T-shirt.

“Still hot,” his father said, when Rob stepped out the door. “And still raining.”

“Uh-huh,” said Rob, rubbing his eyes, “yes, sir.”

“If it don’t stop soon, the whole state ain’t going to be nothing but one big swamp.”

“The rain don’t bother me,” Rob muttered.

On the day of his mother’s funeral, it had been so sunshiny that it hurt his eyes. And after the funeral, he and his father had to stand outside in the hot, bright light and shake everybody’s hand. Some of the ladies hugged Rob, pulling him to them in jerky, desperate movements, smashing his head into their pillowy chests.

“If you don’t look just like her,” they told him, rocking him back and forth and holding on to him tight.

Or they said, “You got your mama’s hair — that cobwebby blond,” and they ran their fingers through his hair and patted his head like he was a dog.

And every time Rob’s father extended his hand to somebody else, Rob saw the ripped place in his suit, where it had split open when he slapped Rob to make him stop crying. And it reminded Rob again: Do not cry. Do not cry.

That was what the sun made him think of. The funeral. And so he didn’t care if he ever saw the sun again. He didn’t care if the whole state did turn into a swamp.

His father stood up and went back into the motel room and got himself a cup of coffee and brought it back outside. The steam rose off of it and curled into the air.

“Now that I’m a working man,” Rob said shyly, “could I drink some coffee?”

His father smiled at him. “Well,” he said, “I guess that’d be all right.”

Rob went inside and poured himself a mug of coffee and brought it back outside and sat down next to his father and sipped it slowly. It tasted hot and dark and bitter. He liked it.

“All right,” his father said after about ten minutes, “it’s time to get to work.” He stood up. It wasn’t even six o’clock.

As they walked together alongside the back of the motel to the maintenance shed, his father started to whistle “Mining for Gold.” It was a sad song he used to sing with Rob’s mother. Her high sweet voice had gone swooping over his father’s deep one, like a small bird flying over the solid world.