Tapping the Dream Tree (36 page)

People mistake me. They think ‘cause I'm so skinny, got this big head, that I can't move fast. But it ain't like that at all.

It's over and done afore anybody can make a move. Then he's falling, blood spurting outta his neck. Jenny's screaming—oh what she thinks of me hurts something fierce. There's other people on the sidewalk screaming and rushing around.

I try to tell Jenny what he was thinking, how I can read what's in people's heads, but she won't listen. She can't hear me. And I realize it don't make a whole lot of difference anywise.

I just drop the knife on the pavement and stand there, watching the real freak die while I wait for the cops to come and take me away.

“Do you have any last words?”

I look through the plate glass window to where the witnesses are sitting, staring back at me, all strapped down and waiting to die. There's a lot of dark thoughts coming my way, but I can pick out Jenny's real easy. I just follow the scent of apple blossoms and lilacs. She's sad, but there's a hardness in her, too. She's looking at me, thinking there's the man who killed the fella I loved. He deserves to die for what he done. But she's not easy about this business of a death penalty. It feels too much like revenge to her. And though there's a part of her wants revenge, she knows it's not right. Trouble is, she's not strong enough to stand up and say it's wrong neither.

Do I have any last words?

I could tell back what Jenny's thinking right now so that she'd know I was telling the truth. I could go right into her head and pull the thoughts out, word for word. But then she'd have to live with her part in putting to death the man who up and saved her and I can't let that happen.

She's safe now. That's all that matters.

“Yes sir,” I say. “I ain't sorry for what I done. Best you give me that injection now.”

And they do.

The Fates seem to take a
perverse pleasure out of complicating our lives. I'm not sure why. We do such a good job of it all on our own that their divine interference only seems to be overkill.

It's not that we deliberately set out to screw things up. We'd all like to be healthy and happy, not to mention independently wealthy—or at least able to make our living doing something we care about, something we can take pride in. But even when we know better, we invariably make a mess of everything, in both our private and our public lives.

Take my sister. She knows that boyfriends are only an option, not an answer, but that's never stopped her from bouncing from one sorry relationship to another, barely stopping to catch her breath between one bad boy and the next. Though I should talk. It's all well and fine to be comfortable in your own skin, to make a life for yourself if there's no one on the scene to share it with you. But too often I still feel like the original spinster, doomed to end her days forever alone in some garret.

I guess for all the strides we've made with the women's movement, there are some things we can still only accept on an intellectual level. We never really believe them in our hearts.

The little man sitting on Sheri Piper's pillow when she opened her eyes was a good candidate for the last thing she would have expected to have woken up to this morning. He wasn't really much bigger than the length from the tip of her middle finger to the heel of her palm, a small hamster-sized man, dressed in raggedy clothes with the look of a bird about him. His eyes were wideset, his nose had a definite hook to it, his body was plump, but his limbs were thin as twigs. His hair was an unruly tangle of short brown curls and he wore a pair of rectangular, wire-framed eyeglasses not much different than those Sheri wore for anything but close work.

She tried to guess his age. Older than herself, certainly. In his mid-forties, she decided. Unless tiny people aged in something equivalent to dog years.

If this were happening to one of the characters in the children's books she wrote and illustrated, now would be the time for astonishment and wonder, perhaps even a mild touch of alarm, since after all, tiny though he was, he was still a strange man and she
had
woken up to find him in her bedroom. Instead, she felt oddly calm.

“I don't suppose I could be dreaming,” she said.

The little man started the way a pedestrian might when an unexpected bus suddenly roars by the corner where they're standing. Jumping up, he lost his balance and would have gone sliding down the long slope of her pillow if she hadn't slipped a hand out from under the bedclothes and caught him.

He squeaked when she picked him up, but she meant him no harm and only deposited him carefully on her night table. Backing away until he was up against the lamp, his tiny gaze darted from side to side as though searching for escape, which seemed odd considering how, only moments ago, he'd been creeping around on her pillow mere inches from her face.

Laying her head back down, she studied him. He weighed no more than a mouse, but he was definitely real. He had substance the way dreams didn't. Unless she hadn't woken up yet and was still dreaming, which was a more likely explanation.

“Don't talk so loud!” he cried as she opened her mouth to speak again.

His voice was high-pitched and sounded like the whine of a bug in her ear.

“What are you?” she whispered.

He appeared to be recovering from his earlier nervousness. Brushing something from the sleeve of his jacket, he said, “I'm not a what. I'm a who.”

“Who then?”

He stood up straighter. “My name is Jenky Wood, at your service, and I come to you as an emissary.”

“From where? Lilliput?”

Tiny eyes blinked in confusion. “No, from my people. The Kaldewen Tribe.”

“Who live … where? In my sock drawer? Behind the baseboards?”

Why couldn't this have happened
after
her first coffee of the morning when at least her brain would be slightly functional.

He gave her a troubled look. “You're not like we expected.”

“What were you expecting?”

“Someone … kinder.”

Sheri sighed. “I'm sorry. I'm not a morning person.”

“That's apparent.”

“Mind you, I do feel justified in being a little cranky. After all, you're the one who's come barging into my bedroom.”

“I didn't barge. I crept in under the door, ever so quietly.”

“Okay, snuck into my bedroom then—which, by the way, doesn't give you points on any gentlemanly scale that I know of.”

“It seemed the best time to get your attention without being accidentally stepped on, or swatted like a bug.”

Sheri stopped herself from telling him that implying that her apartment might be overrun with bugs his size also wasn't particularly endearing.

“Would it be too much to ask
what
you're doing in my bedroom?” she asked. “Not to mention in my bed.”

“I might as well ask what you're doing in bed.”

“Now who's being cranky?”

“The sun rose hours ago.”

“Yes, and I was writing until three o'clock this morning so I think I'm entitled to sleep in.” She paused to frown at him. “Not that it's any of your business. And,” she added as he began to reply, “you haven't answered my question.”

“It's about your book,” he said.
“The Travéling Littles.”

As soon as he said the title, she wondered how she could have missed the connection. Jenky Woods, at her service, looked exactly like she'd painted the Littles in her book. Except…

“Littles aren't real,” she said, knowing how dumb
that
sounded with an all too obvious example standing on her night table.

“But … you … you told our history …”

“I told a story,” Sheri said, feeling sorry for the little man now. “One that was told to me when I was a girl.”

“So you can't help us?”

“It depends,” she said, “on what you need my help for.”

But she already knew. She didn't have to go into her office to take down a copy of the book from her brag shelf. She might have written and illustrated it almost twenty years ago. She might not have recognized the little man for what he was until he'd told her himself. But she remembered the story.

It had been her first book and its modest, not to mention continuing, success was what had persuaded her to try to make a living at writing and drawing children's books. She'd just never considered that the story might be true, never mind what she'd said in the pages of the book.

The Traveling Littles

There are many sorts of little people—tiny folk, no bigger than a minute. And I don't just mean fairies and brownies, or even pen-nymen and their like. There are the Lilliputians that Gulliver met on his travels. Mary Norton's Borrowers. The Smalls of William Dunthorn's Cornwall. All sorts. But today I want to tell you about the Traveling Littles who live like Gypsies, spending their lives always on the move.

This is how I heard the story when I was a small girl. My grandpa told it to me, just like this, so I know it's true.

The Littles were once birds. They had wings and flew high above the trees and hills to gather their food. When the leaves began to turn yellow and red and frost was in the air, they flew to warmer countries, for they weren't toads to burrow in the mud, or bears to hibernate away the cold months, or crows who don't allow the weather to tell them where to live or when to move.

The Littles liked to travel. They liked the wind in their wings and to look out on a new horizon every morning. So they were always leaving one region for another, traveling more to the south in the winter, coming back north when the lilacs and honeysuckle bloom. No matter how far they traveled, they always returned to these very hills where the sprucey-pine grow tall and the grass can seem blue in a certain light, because even traveling people need a place they can call home.

But one year when the Littles returned, they could find nothing to eat. They flew in every direction looking for food. They flew for days with a gnawing hunger in their bellies.

Finally they came upon a field of ripe grain—the seeds so fat and sweet, they'd never seen the like, before or since. They swooped down in a chorusing flock and gorged in that field until they were too heavy to fly away again. So they had to stay the night on the ground, sleeping among the grain-straw and grass.

You'd think they would have learned their lesson, but in the morning, instead of flying away, they decided to eat a little more and rest in that field of grain for one more night.

Every morning they decided the same thing, to eat a little more and sleep another night, until they got to be so heavy that they couldn't fly anymore. They could only hop, and not quickly either.

Then the trees began to turn yellow and red again. Frost was on the ground and the winter winds came blowing. The toad burrowed in his mud. The bear returned to his den. The crows watched from the bare-limbed trees and laughed.

Because the Littles couldn't fly away. They couldn't fly at all. They were too fat.

The grain-straw was getting dry. The tall grass browned, grew thin and died. After watching the mice and squirrels store away their own harvests, the Littles began to shake the grain from the blades of grass and gather it in heaps with their wings, storing it in hidey-holes and hollow logs. The downy feathers of their wings became all gluey, sticking to each other. Their wings took the shape of arms and hands and even if they could manage to lose weight, they were no longer able to fly at all now for they'd become people—tiny people, six inches tall.

That winter they had to dig holes in the sides of the mountains and along the shores of the rivers, making places to live.

And it's been like that ever since.

In the years to follow, they've come to live among us, sharing our bounty the way mice do, only they are so secret we never see them at all. And they still travel, from town to town, from borough to borough, from city block to the next one over, and then the next one over from that. That's why we call them the Traveling Littles.

But the Traveling Littles are still birds, even if their arms are no longer wings. They can never see a tall building or a mountain without wanting to get to the top. But they can't fly anymore. They have to walk up there, just like you or me.

Still the old folks, those who know this story and told it to me, say that one day the Traveling Littles will get their wings back. They will be birds again.

Only no one knows when.

“You want to know how to become a bird again,” she said.

Jenky Wood nodded. “We thought you would know. Yula Gry came across a copy of your book in a child's library last year and told us about it at our year's end celebration. Palko John—”

“Who are these people?”

“Yula is the sister of my brother's cousin Sammy, and Palko John is our Big Man. He's the chief of our clan, but he's also the big chief of all the tribe. He decided that we should look for you. When we found out where you lived, I was sent to talk to you.”

“Why were you chosen?”

He had the decency to blush.

“Because they all say I'm too good-natured to offend anyone, or take offense.”

Sheri stifled a laugh. “Well,” she said. “I'm usually much less cranky when I've been awake for a little longer and have had at least one cup of coffee. Speaking of which, I need one now. I also have to have a pee.”

At that he went beet-red.

“What, you people don't? Never mind,” she added. “That was just more crankiness. Can I pick you up?”

When he gave her a nervous nod, she lowered her hand so that he could step onto her palm, keeping her thumb upright so he'd have something to hang on to. She took him into the kitchen, deposited him on the table, plugged in the kettle, then went back down the hall to the washroom.

Ten minutes later she was sitting at the table with a coffee in front of her. Jenky sat on a paperback book, holding the thimbleful of coffee she'd given him. She broke off a little piece of a bran cookie and offered it to him before dipping the rest into her coffee.

“So why would you want to become birds again, anyway?” she asked.

“Look at the size of us. Can you imagine how hard it is for us to get around while still keeping our secret?”

“Point taken.”

Neither spoke while they ate their cookies. Sheri sipped at her coffee.

“Did your grandfather really tell you our story?” Jenky asked after a moment.