Odds Are Good (7 page)

Jamie looked at him in astonishment. “I didn't ask you to come here!” she exploded. “And I certainly didn't ask you to be messing around with my stuff all the time!”

“I am not messing,” said the brownie primly. “I am
un
messing.”

“I don't care!” she screamed. “I want you to go away. I don't like having you here all the time. I don't like knowing you're in my closet. I don't like having my room look the way you and my grandmother think it should look instead of the way I think it should look.”

“Messy Carruthers,” muttered the brownie.

“Nosey Parker!” snapped Jamie, accidentally using one of her grandmother's favorite phrases.

She stomped to her desk. The brownie disappeared into the closet. A heavy silence descended on the room, broken only when Jamie crumpled a sketch she didn't like and tossed it on the floor.

“You pick that up right now!” called the brownie.

Not only did she not pick up the paper, she crumpled another and threw it on the floor just to spite the creature.

 

That was the beginning of what Jamie later thought of as “The Great Slob War.”

Immediately the brownie came dashing from the closet, snatched up the offending papers, and tossed them into the wastebasket. Muttering angrily, he stomped back to the closet (not very effective for someone only a foot and a half tall) and slammed the door behind him.

Jamie immediately wadded up another paper and threw it on the floor. The brownie dashed out to pick it up. Seized by inspiration, Jamie overturned her wastebasket and shook it out. As the brownie began scurrying around to pick up the papers, she plunked the wastebasket down and sat on it. “Now where will you put the papers?” she asked triumphantly.

Her sense of victory dissolved when the brownie gathered the trash in a pile and began to race around it. With a sudden snap, the pile vanished into nothingness. Wiping his hands, the brownie gave her the smuggest look yet. Then he returned to the closet, slamming the door behind him.

“How did you do that?” cried Jamie. He didn't answer. She threw the wastebasket at the door and began to plan her next attack.

She smeared clay on the wall.

She emptied the contents of her dresser onto her floor, tossing out socks, underwear, blouses, and jeans with wild abandon. She tracked all over them with muddy boots and crushed cracker crumbs on top. The brownie simply waited until she left for school. By the time she got home everything had been cleaned, folded, and replaced, neater than before.

Furious, she opened her pencil sharpener and sprinkled its contents all over her bed, topped them off with pancake syrup, a tangled mass of string, and the collection of paper-punch holes she had been saving all year.

The brownie, equally furious, managed to lick and pluck every one of the shavings from the thick weave of the spread with his tiny fingers. The entire time that he was doing this he muttered and cursed, telling Jamie in no uncertain terms what he thought of her, what a disgrace she was to her family, and to what a bad end she was likely to come.

Jamie tipped back her chair on two legs, lounging unrepentantly. “You missed one,” she said when the brownie had finished and was heading back to the closet. He raced back to the bed, but after an intense examination discovered that she had been lying.

“What a wicked girl!” he cried. “Trying to fool a poor brownie that way.”

“You're not a poor brownie!” she screamed. “You're a menace!” Suddenly days of frustration began to bubble within her. “I can't stand it!” she cried. “I can't take any more of this. I want you to leave me alone!”

“I can't leave you alone!” shouted the brownie, jumping up and down and waving his tiny fists in the air. “We are bound to each other by ancient ties, by words and deeds, by promises written in blood spilled on your family's land.”

“Get out!” cried Jamie. In a frenzy she snatched up an old pillow that had come from her grandmother's house and began smacking it against her bed. The pillow burst open, exploding into a cloud of feathers. “Get out, get out, get out!”

Shrieking with rage, the brownie began trying to pick up the feathers. But the faster he moved the more he sent them drifting away from him. When Jamie saw what was happening she began waving her arms to keep the feathers afloat. The brownie leaped and turned, trying to pluck them from the air. He moved faster and faster, wild, frenzied. Finally he began racing in a circle. He went faster still, until he was little more than a blur to Jamie's eyes. Then, with a sudden
snap!
he vanished, just as the papers had the day before.

Jamie blinked, then began to laugh. She had done it. She had gotten rid of him!

And that should have been that.

But a strange thing happened. As the days went on she began to miss the little creature. Infuriating as he had been, he had also been rather cute. Moreover, the condition of her room began to irritate her.

A week after the brownie vanished she was rooting around in the disarray on her floor, trying to find her clay-working tools, which had been missing for three days. Forty-five minutes of searching had so far failed to turn them up.

“Sometimes I actually wish that brownie had stayed around,” she muttered.

From the closet a tiny voice said, “A-hoo.”

Jamie stood up. “Is that you, brownie?”

“A-hoo,” repeated the voice; it sounded pathetically weak.

Feeling slightly nervous—ever since this started she had not been entirely comfortable with her closet—Jamie went to the door and asked, “Are you in there?”

“A-hoo,” said the voice a third time. It seemed to come from the upper shelf.

“Brownie, is that you?”

No answer at all this time.

She ran to her desk. Kicking aside the intervening clutter, she dragged the chair back to the closet. By standing on it, she could reach the upper shelf.

“Brownie?” she called. “Are you there?”

“A-hoo.”

The voice was coming from a shoe box. She pulled it from the shelf and looked in. The brownie lay inside. He looked wan and thin, and after a moment she realized to her horror that she could see right through him.

“I thought you had left,” she said, her voice thick with guilt.

“I had no place to go.” His voice seemed to come from a far-off place. “I am bound to you, and to this house. All I could do was wait to fade away.”

An icy fear clenched her heart. “Are you going to die?”

“A-hoo,” said the brownie. Then he closed his eyes and turned his head away.

She scrambled from the chair and placed the shoe box on her bed.
I've killed him!
she thought in horror. Reaching into the box, she lifted his tiny form. It was no heavier than the feathers he had been chasing when he had disappeared. She could see her fingers right through his body.

“Don't die,” she pleaded. “Don't. Stay with me, brownie. We can work something out.”

The brownie's eyelids fluttered.

“I mean it!” said Jamie. “I was actually starting to miss you.”

“A-hoo,” said the brownie. Opening his eyes, he gazed at her uncomprehendingly. “Oh, it's you,” he said at last. Then he lifted his head and looked at her room. He moaned tragically at the disarray and closed his eyes again.

“I'll clean it up,” she said hastily. “Just don't die. Promise?”

The brownie coughed and seemed to flicker, as if he was going to vanish altogether. “A-hoo,” he said again.

“Watch!” said Jamie. Placing his tiny form gently on the bed, she began a whirlwind cleaning campaign, moving almost as fast as the brownie himself when he was in a cleaning frenzy. Along the way she found her clay-working tools, the pendant her nice grandmother had sent her, two dollars and forty-seven cents in change, and the missing homework that had cost her an F the day before. She kept glancing at the brownie while she worked and was encouraged to see that he seemed to be getting a little more solid. When she was entirely done she turned around and said, “There! See?”

To her enormous annoyance, the brownie had turned the shoe box over and was sitting on the end of it, looking as solid as a brick and smiling broadly. “Well done!” he said.

“I thought you were dying!” she said angrily.

“I wasn't dying, I was fading. And if you wanted me to live, why are you so angry that I'm alive?”

“Because you were faking!” she snarled.

“I never!” cried the brownie, sounding genuinely offended. “Another few minutes and I would have been gone for good, faded away like a summer breeze, like the last coals in the fire, like dew in the morning sun, like—”

“All right, all right,” said Jamie. “I get the picture.” She paused. Though she still wasn't sure she believed him, she asked, “What happens when you fade?”

The brownie shivered, and the look of terror on his face was so convincing that she began to suspect that he was telling the truth. “I'm just
gone
,” he said.

Jamie shivered too. “Do you really have nowhere else to go?” she asked.

The brownie shook his head. “'Tis you to whom I'm bound, and you with whom I must stay until the day I fade away—or the day you become the oldest female in the family and assign me to someone else of your line.”

Jamie sighed. She looked at the pendant, the tools, the change lying on her desk. “If I let you stay will you behave?”

The brownie wrapped his tail around his knees. “I am what I am,” he said.

“So am I,” she replied.

The brownie looked startled, as if this had not occurred to him before. “Can you help a little?” he asked plaintively.

“If I do, will you stop nagging me?”

The brownie considered this for a moment, “Will you let me keep the closet as neat as I want?”

“Can I have my desk as messy as I want?” replied Jamie.

The brownie glanced at the desk, shivered, then nodded.

“It's a deal,” said Jamie.

And so it was. They did not, it should be noted, exactly live happily ever after. The truth is, they annoyed each other a great deal over the years. However, they also learned to laugh together, and had enormous good times when they weren't fighting.

That's the way it goes with family things.

Greetings, young one. I understand it is your turn, and they have sent you to me to learn how it is. They want me to tell you how I, Banang, came to be the one who speaks the language of blood. They want me to tell you what it cost me, and why I did it.

All right, that's fair. If you are to take my place, these are things you need to know. Take a cushion—one only!—and sit here.

I will tell you the story.

 

I was born outside the Glorious City. However, my parents moved within its walls before I was a year old. My mother was the ambitious one, always looking for something better. My father was a scribe. From what the elders later told me, the village missed him greatly when he came here. There, he had been the only scribe; here, he was but one among many. But as I said, my mother was ambitious.

I grew up running through the streets of the Glorious City. The neighbors all knew me, and liked me. “There goes Banang,” they would say, laughing as I went racing by. “Always running! I'll wager he is the fastest boy in the city.” Perhaps I was. But as I found—as you will find, my young friend—you cannot run forever. Sooner or later the world catches up with you.

For me it happened shortly after I turned seven. It was at First Night Ceremony. Oh, how excited I was to be going. The food, the singing, the fireworks—especially the food. It never occurred to me that my world would shift beneath me, that my life . . . But then, you know all that, or else you would not be here. In fact, you know much more, my young friend, than I did when I was in your place. It has taken me most of my life to convince the Pyong Myar that there was no point in keeping you as ignorant as they kept me.

Still, it is sweet to remember, even now—sweet and terrible to think of how we put on our robes of yellow and crimson and made our way through the streets with all the others. My family went with our neighbors. Their daughter Shula was my best friend, and she held my hand as we wound through the streets.

We laughed together at the bloody clowns along the way.

We were that innocent.

I still remember standing with the crowd at the foot of the temple, looking up at each level. The first seemed so much higher to me then—twice man height, it was nearly four times my size. How I loved to see the guards standing on it all in a row, their weapons at the ready. Then, ten feet behind it and twelve feet higher, the second level with the costumed maidens in their robes and, scarlet feathers. Then the third level with the priests, the fourth with the watchers, the fifth where the Pyong Myar stood waiting.

The Pyong Myar. I see the cloud that passes over your face. He is frightening, is he not? Do the children still tell each other stories of what he will do to them in the night if they are bad? I feared him with that delicious fear of childhood that made me want to hide when his name was mentioned at the same time that I wanted,
hungered
, to hear more about him.

This was the first time I had ever seen him. I shivered happily at the sight, since I was clinging to my mother's skirts and therefore believed myself to be safe.

The Pyong Myar stood at the top of the temple, surrounded by a ring of fire and holding two huge knives above his head as if he planned to carve a hole in the sky. The trumpets blared, the people shouted, and to my utter horror, the Pyong Myar began to walk down the great line of steps that runs up the center of the temple.

What was he doing?

A silence fell over the crowd. The watchers, the priests, the maidens, the guards became motionless.

The Pyong Myar continued his slow progress down the steps, ritually crossing and uncrossing his knives as he walked.