"You didn't have to do that either," he said. "I'm here, aren't I?"

Mrs. Dunwiddy came into the room. She was holding a small brown glass bottle triumphantly. "Smelling salts," she announced. "I know I got some somewhere. I buy these in, oh, sixty-seven, sixty-eight. I don't know if they still any good." She peered at Fat Charlie, then scowled. "He wake up. Who did wake him up?"

"He wasn't breathing," said Mrs. Bustamonte. "So I give him a slap."

"And I pour water on him," said Miss Noles, "which help bring him around the rest of the way."

"I don't need smelling salts," said Fat Charlie. "I'm already wet and in pain." But, with elderly hands, Mrs. Dunwiddy had removed the cap from the bottle, and she was pushing it under his nose. He breathed in as he moved back, and inhaled a wave of ammonia. His eyes watered, and he felt as if he had been punched in the nose. Water dripped down his face.

"There," said Mrs. Dunwiddy. "Feeling better now?"

"What time is it?" asked Fat Charlie.

"It's almost five in the morning," said Mrs. Higgler. She took a swig of coffee from her gigantic mug. "We all worried about you. You better tell us what happened."

Fat Charlie tried to remember. It was not that it had evaporated, as dreams do, more as if the experience of the last few hours had happened to somebody else, someone who was not him, and he had to contact that person by some hitherto unpracticed form of telepathy. It was all a jumble in his mind, the technicolor Ozness of the other place dissolving back into the sepia tones of reality. "There were caves. I asked for help. There were lots of animals there. Animals who were people. None of them wanted to help. They were all scared of my daddy. Then one of them said she would help me."

"She?" said Mrs. Bustamonte.

"Some of them were men, and some of them were women," said Fat Charlie. "This one was a woman."

"Do you know what she was? Crocodile? Hyena? Mouse?"

He shrugged. "I might have remembered before people started hitting me and pouring water on me. And putting things in my nose. It drives stuff out of your head."

Mrs. Dunwiddy said, "Do you remember what I tell you? Not giving anything away? Only trade?"

"Yes," he said, vaguely proud of himself. "Yes. There was a monkey who wanted me to give him things, and I said no. Look, I think I need a drink."

Mrs. Bustamonte took a glass of something from the table. "We thought maybe you need a drink. So we put the sherry through the strainer. There may be a few mixed herbs in there, but nothin' big."

His hands were fists in his lap. He opened his right hand to take the glass from the old woman. Then he stopped, and he stared.

"What?" asked Mrs. Dunwiddy. "What is it?"

In the palm of his hand, black and crushed out of shape, and wet with sweat, Fat Charlie was holding a feather. He remembered, then. He remembered all of it.

"It was the Bird Woman," he said.

GRAY DAWN WASBREAKING AS FAT CHARLIE CLIMBED INTOthe passenger seat of Mrs. Higgler's station wagon.

"You sleepy?" she asked him.

"Not really. I just feel weird."

"Where do you want me to take you? My place? Your dad's house? A motel?"

"I don't know."

She put the car into gear and lurched out into the road.

"Where are we going?"

She did not answer. She slurped some coffee from her megamug. Then she said, "Maybe what we do tonight is for the best and maybe it ain't. Sometimes family things, they best left for families to fix. You and your brother. You're too similar. I guess that is why you fight."

"I take it this is some obscure West Indian usage of the word 'similar' which means 'nothing at all alike'?"

"Don't you start going all British on me. I know what I'm sayin'. You and him, you both cut from the same cloth. I remember your father sayin' to me, Callyanne, my boys, they stupider than-you know, it don't matter what he actually said, but the point is, he said it about both of you." A thought struck her. "Hey. When you go to the place where the old gods are, you see your father in that place?"

"I don't think so. I'd remember."

She nodded, and said nothing as she drove.

She parked the car, and they got out.

It was chilly in the Florida dawn. The Garden of Rest looked like something from a movie: there was a low ground mist which threw everything into soft focus. Mrs. Higgler opened the small gate, and they walked through the cemetery.

Where there had been only fresh earth filling his father's grave, now there was turf, and at the head of the grave was a metal plaque with a metal vase built into it, and in the vase a single yellow silk rose.

"Lord have mercy on the sinner in this grave," said Mrs Higgler, with feeling. "Amen, amen, amen."

They had an audience: the two red-headed cranes which Fat Charlie had observed on his previous visit strutted toward them, heads bobbing, like two aristocratic prison visitors.

"Shoo!" said Mrs. Higgler. The birds started at her, incuriously, and did not leave.

One of them ducked its head down into the grass, came up again with a lizard struggling in its beak. A gulp and a shake, and the lizard was a bulge in the bird's neck.

The dawn chorus was beginning: grackles and orioles and mockingbirds were singing in the day in the wilderness beyond the Garden of Rest. "It'll be good to be home again," said Fat Charlie. "With any luck she'll have made him leave by the time I get there. Then everything will be all right. I can sort everything out with Rosie." A mood of gentle optimism welled up within him. It was going to be a good day.

IN THE OLDSTORIES, ANANSI LIVES JUST LIKE YOU DO OR I DO,in his house. He is greedy, of course, and lustful, and tricky, and full of lies. And he is good-hearted, and lucky, and sometimes even honest. Sometimes he is good, sometimes he is bad. He is never evil. Mostly, you are on Anansi's side. This is because Anansi owns all the stories. Mawu gave him the stories, back in the dawn days, took them from Tiger and gave them to Anansi, and he spins the web of them so beautifully.

In the stories, Anansi is a spider, but he is also a man. It is not hard to keep two things in your head at the same time. Even a child could do it.

Anansi's stories are told by grandmothers and by aunts in the West Coast of Africa and across the Caribbean, and all over the world. The stories have made it into books for children: big old smiling Anansi playing his merry tricks upon the world. Trouble is, grandmothers and aunts and writers of books for children tend to leave things out. There are stories that aren't appropriate for little children anymore.

This is a story you won't find in the nursery tales. I call it, ANANSI and BIRD Anansi did not like Bird, because when Bird was hungry she ate many things, and one of the things that Bird ate was spiders, and Bird, she was always hungry.

They used to be friends, but they were friends no longer.

One day Anansi was walking, and he saw a hole in the ground, and that gave him an idea. He puts wood in the bottom of the hole, and he makes a fire, and he puts a cookpot in the hole and drops in roots and herbs. Then he starts running around the pot, running and dancing and calling and shouting, going, I feel good. I feelsoooo good. Oh boy, all my aches and pains be gone and I never felt so good in my whole damn life!

Bird hears the commotion. Bird flies down from the skies to see what all the fuss is about. She goes, What you singing about? Why you carrying on like a madman, Anansi?

Anansi sings, I had a pain in my neck, but now it's gone. I had a pain in my belly, but not any longer. I had creaks in my joints, but now I'm supple as a young palm tree, I'm smooth as Snake the morning after he sheds his skin. I'm powerful happy, and now I shall be perfect, for I know the secret, and nobody else does.

What secret? asks Bird.

My secret, says Anansi. Everyone going to give me their favorite things, their most precious things, just to learn my secret.Whoo! Whee! I do feel good!

Bird hops a little closer, and she puts her head on one side. Then she asks, Can I learn your secret?

Anansi looks at Bird with suspicion on his face, and he moves to stand in front of the pot in the hole, bubbling away.

I don't think so, Anansi says. May not be enough to go around. Don't bother yourself about it.

Bird says, Now Anansi, I know we haven't always been friends. But I'll tell you what. You share your secret with me, and I promise you no bird will never eat no spider ever again. We'll be friends until the end of time.

Anansi scratches his chin, and he shakes his head. It's a mighty big secret, he says, making people young and spry and lusty and free from all pain.

Bird, she preens. Bird she says, Oh, Anansi, I'm sure you know that I have always found you a particularly handsome figure of a man. Why don't we lie by the side of the road for a little while, and I'm sure I can make you forget all your reservations about telling me your secret.

So they lie by the side of the road, and they get to canoodling and laughing and getting all silly, and once Anansi has had what he wants Bird says, Now Anansi, what about your secret?

Anansi says, Well, I wasn't going to tell anyone. But I'll tell you. It's an herbal bath, in this hole in the ground. Watch, I'll drop in these leaves and these roots. Now, anyone who goes into the bath they going to live forever, feeling no pain. I had the bath, and now I'm frisky as a young goat. But I don't think I should let anyone else use the bath.

Bird, she looks down at the bubbling water, and quick as anything she slips down into the pot.

It's awful hot, Anansi, she says.

It's got to be hot for the herbs to do their good things, says Anansi. Then he takes the lid of the pot and he covers the pot with it. It's a heavy lid, and Anansi, he puts a rock on top of it, to weigh it down more.

Bam! Bem! Bom!comes the knocking from inside the cookpot.

If I let you out now, calls Anansi, all the good work of the bubbling bath will be undone. You just relax in there and feel yourself getting healthier.

But maybe Bird did not hear him or believe him, because the knocking and the pushing kept on coming from inside the pot for a while longer. And then it stopped.

That evening Anansi and his family had the most delicious Bird soup, with boiled Bird. They did not go hungry again for many days.

Since that time, birds eat spiders every chance they get, and spiders and birds aren't never going to be friends.

There's another version of the story where they talk Anansi into the cookpot, too. The stories are all Anansi's, but he doesn't always come out ahead.

CHAPTER EIGHT

IN WHICH A POT OF COFFEE COMES IN PARTICULARLY USEFUL

IF ANYTHINGWAS MAKING SPIDER GO AWAY, SPIDER DIDN'T know about it. On the contrary, Spider was having an excellent time being Fat Charlie. He was having such a good time being Fat Charlie he began to wonder why he hadn't been Fat Charlie before. It was more fun than a barrelful of monkeys.*

The bit of being Fat Charlie that Spider liked best was Rosie.

Until now Spider had regarded women as more or less interchangeable. You didn't give them a real name, or an address that would work for longer than a week, of course, or anything more than a disposable cell-phone number. Women were fun, and decorative, and terrific accessories, but there would always be more of them; like bowls of goulash coming along a conveyor belt, when you were done with one, you simply picked up the next, and spooned in your sour cream.

But Rosie....

Rosie was different.

He couldn't have told you how she was different. He had tried and failed. Partly it was how he felt when he was with her: as if, seeing himself in her eyes, he became a wholly better person. That was part of it.

Spider liked knowing that Rosie knew where to find him. It made him feel comfortable. He delighted in the pillowy curves of her, the way she meant nothing but good to the world, the way she smiled. There was really nothing at all wrong with Rosie, apart from having to spend time away from her, and, of course, he was beginning to discover, the little matter of Rosie's mother. On this particular evening, while Fat Charlie was in an airport four thousand miles away in the process of being bumped up to first class, Spider was in Rosie's mother's flat in Wimpole Street, and he was learning about her the hard way.

Spider was used to being able to push reality around a little, just a little but that was always enough. You just had to show reality who was boss, that was all. Having said that, he had never met anyone who inhabited her own reality quite so firmly as Rosie's mother.

"Who's this?" she asked, suspiciously, as they walked in.

"I'm Fat Charlie Nancy," said Spider.

"Why is he saying that?" asked Rosie's mother. "Who is he?"

"I'm Fat Charlie Nancy, your future son-in-law, and you really like me," said Spider, with utter conviction.

Rosie's mother swayed and blinked and stared at him. "You may be Fat Charlie," she said, uncertainly, "but I don't like you."

"Well," said Spider, "you should. I am remarkably likeable. Few people have ever been as likeable as I am. There is, frankly, no end to my likeability. People gather together in public assemblies to discuss how much they like me. I have several awards, and a medal from a small country in South America which pays tribute both to how much I am liked and my general all-around wonderfulness. I don't have it on me, of course. I keep my medals in my sock drawer."

Rosie's mother sniffed. She did not know what was going on, but whatever it was, she did not like it. Until now, she felt that she had got the measure of Fat Charlie. She might, she admitted to herself, have mishandled things a little in the beginning: it was quite possible that Rosie would not have attached herself to Fat Charlie with such enthusiasm if, following the first meeting of her mother and Fat Charlie, her mother had not expressed her opinion quite so vociferously. He was a loser, Rosie's mother had said, for she could smell fear like a shark scenting blood across the bay. But she had failed to persuade Rosie to dump him, and now her main strategy involved assuming control of the wedding plans, making Fat Charlie as miserable as possible, and contemplating the national divorce statistics with a certain grim satisfaction.

Something different was now happening, and she did not like it. Fat Charlie was no longer a large vulnerable person. This new, sharp creature confused her.

Spider, for his part, was having to work.

Most people do not notice other people. Rosie's mother did. She noticed everything. Now she sipped her hot water from a bone china cup. She knew that she had just lost a skirmish, even if she could not have told you how or what the battle was about. So she moved her next assault to higher ground.

"Charles, dear," she said, "tell me about your cousin Daisy. I worry that your family is underrepresented. Would you like her to be given a larger role in the wedding party?"

"Who?"

"Daisy," said Rosie's mother, sweetly. "The young lady I met at your house the other morning, wandering around in her scanties. If shewas your cousin, of course."

"Mother! If Charlie says she was his cousin...."