Raising Cubby

by John Elder Robison

  I knew about poodles because I had had one of my own as a toddler. My feelings about them were mixed. I’d liked mine well enough, but he’d bitten me more than once, and he’d once chewed a hole through my bedroom door. I knew poodles had sharp teeth, and I hoped whatever Little Bear brought back would be nicer than the dog I remembered.

  After a two-day, four-state odyssey, Little Bear arrived home in time for Cubby’s birthday. Our newest family member revealed himself to be a nasty cur that growled for no reason at all and bit at the slightest provocation. I would have demanded my money back, but Cubby was instantly delighted. Since he’d never had any experience with pets, he thought the pup was great. He named him Shenzi, after a character in The Lion King. Shenzi was white, with thick curly hair, a short straight tail, and a bad temper. He was occasionally friendly, but if you grabbed him too quickly or teased him, he bit hard. God help you if you approached too close with a stick or a vacuum cleaner.

  Still, he became part of the family. Shenzi was like a bad-tempered uncle who snarled and spit when he was drunk, and tore up the place every now and then. We figured he was with us to stay, and we made the best of the situation. We kept at a safe distance when he was eating and learned to avoid the other things that set him off. He began accompanying us on walks and even traveling in the car at times. In fact, with the passage of time, he proved downright companionable, at least now and then. Cubby relished those moments, and we came to love him as one of our own.

  One day, as Cubby was watching Shenzi wag his tail, I said, “You had a fine tail too, but we cut it off when you were little.”

  Cubby looked at me, unsure as to whether I was serious. He was often skeptical of what I said.

  “I did not have a tail!” He usually responded to unappealing news with denial.

  I decided to tell him the story. When he was born, I began, he had sported a very fine tail, half the length of his leg, covered in fine blond hair. He wagged it almost immediately. Cute as it was, I knew the tail would be trouble. Some kids have small tails, which they hide in their pants. A tail like his, though, was too big to be hidden. In olden days a great big tail had been a badge of honor, but in modern America kids with long tails ended up exiled to the safety of their parents’ basements. If he appeared at school swishing a tail it would lead to teasing, and I didn’t want that to happen.

  So we had it taken off, I told him. It’s a common operation; doctors do it all the time. The only problem was, his tail grew back. We had to take it off three times before it stopped regenerating.

  With some kids, you can cut stuff off and it stays off. With other kids, it doesn’t. I was glad it was just a tail and not a third ear. I didn’t want Cubby to end up as a freak, or the subject of some B-grade documentary. When I was growing up, there had been a boy down the street with three eyes, and he’d spent his whole life in his uncle’s attic, sorting old coins and making incredibly detailed drawings of the termites and carpenter ants that lived with him in the rafters. I’ll bet he’s still up there now, I told Cubby.

  Cubby looked a little alarmed at that, but I continued my story because every child needs lessons on diversity. I didn’t have a tail, and neither did Cubby’s mom, I informed him, but his Grandpa Ed did. Tails were like that. Red hair was the same. They skipped generations. Cubby’s grandpa had grown up during the Depression, so his parents didn’t have much money. When his tail had grown back they’d just left it on, and he’d tucked it in his pants leg his whole life.

  I explained to Cubby that there were other grown-ups with tails around us even at that moment. They were the people who never wore shorts, even in summer. Having a tail was embarrassing—a sign of poor upbringing. After all, even very poor people could take a sharp knife and trim their newborn babies’ tails. So what kind of parent left a kid to grow up with a tail and get teased and harassed?

  Most people never knew Cubby’s grandpa had a tail. But we’d sometime stop by his house at night, and he’d be sitting there in his underwear, and the tail was plain to see. It stuck out just above the waistband of his underwear—thick, leathery, and covered with black tarry spots at the end because of his work as a paving contractor. Even when it was tucked into his pants, the tail would get tarry whenever he walked on fresh blacktop and his boots sank in. And you couldn’t miss the tail when he’d been drinking, because he’d swish it from side to side when he got tipsy. If he got really drunk, he could even break furniture with the thing. Luckily, that didn’t happen too often.

  Cubby nodded in quiet agreement. The whole thing made a strange kind of sense. He wondered who else he knew with a tail. He liked the Old Boy, but he was never quite sure what to make of him.

  When Cubby was little he would crawl over and try to pick tar off the tail the way you’d pick a scab. I reminded him of that, but he claimed he didn’t remember. Usually the Old Boy didn’t even notice, but sometimes he’d feel something and slap his tail on the floor, shaking the house and rattling the furniture. He seemed to do it unconsciously. He’d be talking and all of a sudden the tail would smack the floor. At first I thought the tail had a mind of its own, but then I realized it was like a fellow swatting a mosquito on his arm while he was talking to you. Whatever the reason, it scared Cubby, and he learned to snatch his fingers away fast if the Old Boy swished the tail.

  The Old Boy never let his tail out in public, but sometimes at home he’d do things like hold the door with his tail, and if he tripped he’d quickly swish the tail to regain his balance. It was useful enough that I never understood why kids teased each other over such a useful appendage. It seemed kind of sad and wasteful that the rest of us had to have our tails cut off. I guess it was just one of the things grown-ups do. They cut the tails off Doberman pinschers too. Stuff like that sounded nutty to me as a kid, and some still doesn’t make sense today.

  Unfortunately, our good times with the Old Boy came to a sad end when Cubby was six. Grandpa Ed got sick while he was at his cabin in the Maine woods, miles from anywhere. Something started hurting inside him, he became weak, and he developed a scary 105-degree fever. When his wife finally got him to a hospital, his body was dangerously overheated and his heart was erratic. The doctors discovered he had a burst appendix, and they had to operate right away.

  It’s shocking how suddenly something like that can come on. The last time we’d seen him, he’d been in fine fettle, but in the space of only two days, he moved from fishing in his backyard to fighting for his life in intensive care. Alice couldn’t even bring him home, because he was too sick to move. Little Bear raced to visit him in the hospital as we stayed home, waiting for news. The operation might have saved his intestines, but we’ll never know, because his heart stopped for a few fateful minutes. They got the heart going again, but his brain wave was a flat line. He never awoke.

  He died a few hours after Little Bear arrived. She didn’t think he even recognized her. His eyes were wide open, but there was not even a flicker of recognition. “It was like gazing into the eyes of a cow; there was no sign of my father in there,” she told me afterward.

  The funeral was a few days later, in Granby. It was the first time someone close to Cubby had died. I don’t know if he fully understood what had happened, but he knew his grandpa wasn’t there anymore, and it made him sad. His mom was even sadder, though we tried our best to comfort her.

  With the Old Boy gone, Little Bear did not have any close relatives in the area. Her mom lived in Florida, so we saw her once a year at most. She had divorced the Old Boy when we were teenagers and married a retired Canadian Mountie. They had moved south long before Cubby was born, so he never had the chance to know her the way he did her dad. She came to visit every summer, but she didn’t really play a starring role in the raising of Cubby. And my brother had moved to San Francisco.

  It was just Little Bear, me, and my mom and dad.

  One Sunday morning as we drove through Amherst, Cubby made an unexpected and disturbing discovery. “Look, Dad, a stone
kid!” He was bouncing up and down and pointing. I looked at the object across the road. There was indeed a stone kid standing at the end of a driveway, right there on Red Gate Lane. He was light gray, frozen in position, with a lantern in his outstretched hand.

  I slowed down so we could get a good look at him as we passed. Like many kids his age, Cubby was familiar with Transformer toys. He knew superhero action figures could change into rocket cars or even bizarre animals, so the idea that a kid could turn into something else was not totally alien to him. Even so, it was unsettling. How had such a thing happened? To my adult eye, the answer was obvious.

  “There must be wizards in that house,” I said. “And I’m sure the kid did something very bad.”

  “Yeah,” Cubby said, with a worried edge in his voice. What other explanation could there be? I remember wondering the very same thing myself. When I was his age, I saw the dinosaur skeletons in Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, and heard how they had once been alive, millions of years in the past. Then they had died and turned into stone. They were scary, because you could see right through them and they looked fierce and unnatural. I had bad dreams about dinosaurs for a long time.

  Then I saw stone people, and stone animals guarding the entrances to the museum. I wondered how long it had been since they were alive too. I wondered why they still looked like kids and animals, while the dinosaurs inside were just skeletons. I concluded they must be newer, and possibly friendlier too. I never had bad dreams about stone kids. But I sure did wonder about how they came to be the way they were. It wasn’t until years later, when I read about magic, that I learned the answer.

  “I wonder what that kid did to aggravate the wizards? Do you think they will turn him back into a kid or just leave him stone forever?” Cubby looked concerned, but I was quick to reassure him. “We’re in a car, and there are no stone cars in sight. So I’m sure we’re safe as long as we don’t go any closer to the house.”

  I could see that the idea of being turned to stone was troubling to Cubby, so I comforted him with a story from my own life. “When I was your age a wizard turned me into a dog for two weeks. I ate a squirrel and it was tasty, but mouse made me gag. Being a dog was kind of fun because I could run really fast and even bite strangers!” Cubby grinned at that, even though the idea of eating raw squirrel was sort of repugnant.

  “If I was a dog, I’d bite you!” he exclaimed. Cubby was nothing if not spunky. He asked why the wizard had turned me into a dog, and I admitted I’d thrown rocks at his house. Cubby was glad he had not done anything to provoke the wizards on Red Gate Lane.

  The idea of Dad as a dog lasted until we got home. Cubby trotted over to his mom and asked, “Did my dad really turn into a dog when he was a kid?” Little Bear was used to Cubby’s strange questions. She knew that our reality sometimes differed from hers.

  “I don’t think your dad was ever a dog,” she said slowly.

  That was the problem with Little Bear. I would tell Cubby something, and she would contradict me. For some reason, Cubby would believe her. That really bothered me. Cubby had no way to know which of us was right. I told him a nice story about my life as a dog. I filled it with fun tidbits like eating the squirrel, playing outside, and chasing children. My story was well thought through and eminently believable. In contrast, all his mother said was, “Your dad was never a dog,” and he chose her over me. Just like that, my careful creation went up in smoke.

  But no matter what his mother said about me as a dog, the stone kid remained. You could say what you wanted about me, but the stone kid stood there, mute testament to the power of sorcery. Cubby believed in the stone kid because he was tangible and real, and he had to have come from somewhere. An older kid might have assumed that an object like the stone kid had emerged from a concrete mold, but to a five-year-old, sorcery is an easier explanation to grasp than the operation of a factory.

  “It’s a shame we live in a different school district. If that kid had been in your school, we’d probably know who he was. I wonder why his parents don’t try and change him back. Maybe he’s a stray, without any parents. Or maybe the wizard made them into frogs.”

  “Yeah,” Cubby said slowly. He always watched that house closely whenever we passed by. I could see he was thinking about the Stone Kid and what he might have been and done.

  A few months later, Cubby changed schools and we didn’t pass the stone kid too often anymore. With time, he faded from both of our memories, but the idea never really left us. After all, the world was a big place. There must have been other sorcerers out there, turning kids into rock. And what about pets? Dogs and cats could be even more annoying than children. Surely there were fields full of solidified animals out there somewhere. Cubby and I talked about the possibility whenever we saw evidence of sorcery in someone else’s yard. We decided it was one of those mysteries best left unsolved.

  I found some of the stone kid’s cousins when Cubby was eight. They were just two hours from our home, in Rhode Island.

  Every Father’s Day, I go to the Newport Car Show. It’s a very pretty event, set on the grounds of Portsmouth Abbey, with a few hundred classic cars parked on the grass overlooking Narragansett Bay. Most years, Cubby went with me. But every now and then, he was disagreeable and objected, and I ended up in Newport without him, free to graze and explore. It was one of those years.

  The car show had ended, so I headed for the waterfront. There were always interesting things to see down there, especially at the ship chandler’s and the nautical bookstore. I was walking the alleys off Thames Street when I turned a corner and stopped short. There in front of me, behind a low iron fence, stood a herd of alligators, bears, and other fierce creatures. Stone children stood among them, little herdsmen frozen in time.

  I approached slowly and encountered a sign. Aardvark Art, it said. I looked down, and as far as I could see, I was surrounded by reptiles and beasts with mouths agape, ready to devour me or at least tear off large chunks of me for their eating pleasure. I reached down to pet the nearest beast. Its skin was cool and a bit rough. Some were metal, others were stone. I looked for the wizard; I had to have one for Cubby and me.

  After a brief negotiation and a small scuffle with a merchant who was busy turning a large pot of frogs into bronze paperweights, a four-foot alligator was purchased and loaded into the back of my Range Rover. The snout was concealed beneath the load space cover, but the tail curled upward and was plainly visible just inside the rear window. I headed home, beast in back, to pick up Cubby. When I arrived, Cubby climbed into the Rover without noticing the tail sticking up in back.

  I quickly apprised him of the new situation. “Cubby, I got us a pet alligator. I found a wizard in Rhode Island who turns animals to metal. They said he will stay metalized, but you never know with these wizards and demons. He might come back to life, so don’t go grabbing him. And let me know if you see the tail moving, because that means he’s waking up.” Cubby turned around and caught sight of the tail. His eyes got a bit wider, but I was quick to reassure him. “As long as he’s metal, he’s no more likely to bite than any of your other metal toys.” That must not have been reassuring enough, because his gaze remained locked on the tail all the way to our house.

  When we got home, I opened the tailgate and prepared to lift out the alligator. Even in its metallic state, it was heavy. “He probably ate something big just before the wizards caught him.” Cubby seemed to accept my explanation, but he remained wary.

  “Dad! Watch the teeth!” Cubby warned me whenever I got close to the snout, which was frozen into what alligators probably think of as a welcoming toothy smile, ready to snap my arm off if he should wake unexpectedly. We got the gator settled in alongside the house. Cubby would not tolerate having it inside, but he gradually came to accept it among the rocks and bushes outdoors. The longer it stayed in one place, the more confident Cubby became about the metalization spell.

  Within a few months, he began taking friends out back to see th
e alligator. They developed a ritual. He called it Pet the Teeth. He was very proud of himself for being brave enough to stick his little paws right up by the metal beast’s mouth without getting them snapped off. Other children weren’t so sure, but he reassured them, just as I had.

  “It’s usually okay,” he told them. “He hardly ever eats kids.”

  I was glad to have taught Cubby a healthy respect for wizards, but it was equally important that he learn to respect heavy machinery. Either one had the power to squash him like a bug if he made a wrong move. One way to teach him that lesson was by going railroading. There is no mistaking the power and grandeur of a string of heavy diesel freight engines as they thunder ahead of a hundred loaded freight cars.

  My relationship with railroads began when I was four. That’s when my dad took me to see the giant Baldwin locomotive in the basement of the Franklin Museum. The sight of that huge black engine would have terrified many kids, but I was entranced. There it sat, dominating everything else in the room. Seven hundred thousand pounds of steel. Thirteen feet high and eighty-eight feet long. It was the most impressive sight I had ever seen.

  My dad lifted me up into the cab, where I grabbed hold of the controls and imagined the big steam engine moving under my command. I worked the levers and watched the boiler gauge as I rolled the engine out of the station, huffing and puffing and blowing the whistle at every crossing. It’s been fifty years, but I can still remember the feel of the big throttles and the sound of the engineer—really a museum worker—as he told me, “Watch the water gauge! If it drops too low, you’ll have a boiler explosion!” That was the beginning of a lifelong love of trains, and a wariness of high-pressure boilers and indeed anything under pressure in a big steel vessel.