His father read the note from the principal slowly, putting his big finger under the words as if theywere 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 cancatch,” 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.