Fowl Weather (10 page)

The cloth items smelled of fabric softener, and the mirror was spotless except for my sweaty fingerprints. I was on the verge of telling Kate that if we put Lulu's possessions inside the pen, they would be soaked with wading-pool water and streaked with mud within the hour. But giving us custody of her house duck was as serious to her as it was incidental to the mysterious Eileen. I kept my mouth shut long enough for Linda to ask, “How did you ever end up with such a darling duck?”

“My daughter Geri and I were touring a farm in Indiana where you can bottle-feed baby pigs and goats. There were ducks and chickens wandering all over. As we were leaving, she found an egg sitting all by itself in the grass near the parking lot. She ended up taking it home, and it was her idea to try to hatch it.”

“Did you know it was a duck egg?” Eileen asked. “I wouldn't know a duck egg if you broke one on my head.”

I made a quick scan of the yard to see if one was handy.

“We had no idea. I certainly didn't expect it to hatch, but I borrowed an incubator from Geri's school, because she was so into the whole thing, and before we knew it or were in any way prepared to be duck parents, Louie hatched.”

“Aw,” said Linda. “She sure thinks a lot of you.”

“I think he wants his mirror. That usually calms him down.”

“I think she wants you,” Linda said.

Kate's body language told me that she was an animal person. It wasn't just that she crouched down to duck level to talk to Lulu and introduce herself to the curious geese. You could see that she had handed herself over to the birds. Her pupils dilated, she smiled, and everything about her manner expressed openness. I
saw nothing of this in Eileen, who clearly loved drama more than people or animals.

I opened the pen door just wide enough for Kate to dart inside. Even though Lulu had been frantic for a reunion, Kate had to chase her through a flurry of complaining geese and ducks, who were sure that she was after them. But Lulu relaxed as soon as Kate picked her up and started stroking her orange beak. I leaned the mirror up against one of the posts while Linda arranged the blanket and the bear around the mirror. The items struck me as a sad tableau of a classic “odd duck” story.

“Geri has been quite adult about all of this, and she's only ten,” said Kate. “She was the one who told me, ‘Mom, Louie shouldn't have to live his whole life in the bathtub.' I think I'm having a harder time with this than she is. Eileen told me what wonderful people both of you were. She said she's known Bob for years and years.”

“With one or two small gaps,” I pointed out.

T
HAT SAME EVENING,
a different sort of duck problem reared its head when Victor bit me on the leg. He had been shadowing me ever since I'd shooed the ducks and hens into the barn and made my rounds doling out fresh food and water. I had positioned the push broom between us, fending him off in the same manner in which a lion tamer wields a chair. But Victor sidled up behind me while I was preoccupied with Linda's discovery of a broken reflector post on the shoulder of the road.

I was thinking about the accident from the previous night, hypothesizing that a cousin of Eileen's named Elmo was driving home after an exhausting evening guzzling beers and bragging about a dove-hunting trip. He'd managed to keep from nodding off until his cell phone rang and Eileen began excitedly relating
an anecdote about a friend of an old kindergarten friend. The road took a turn, but Elmo's car did not. He awoke when his tires hit the gravel, just in time to drop the phone, slam on the brakes, snap a reflector post, and holler, “Jeepers!” as the headlight of his SUV disappeared in a mist of shattered glass. “I know, I couldn't believe it either,” Eileen's voice replied from the floor. Veering sharply back onto the asphalt, he braked again to avoid repeating the mishap on the opposite shoulder, and then in a state of heightened wakefulness continued on his way as the chattering Eileen continued on hers.

I decided that this was how the accident must have happened, even if I couldn't prove that one of Eileen's relatives was actually involved. But my reconstruction failed to impress Victor, who seized the opportunity to indiscreetly seize my calf.

You might think that a duck bite is an inoffensive nip. Certainly a Muscovy's beak doesn't compare with the jaws of a crocodile, pit bull, or African grey parrot. But there's a lot going on behind it. Other domesticated ducks—from the practically goose-size White Pekin to the diminutive Call Duck—are shy offshoots of the familiar wild mallard. But except for a few changes in coloration, the Muscovy barrels into the barnyard with his primal wild Muscovy roots intact. He's a nightmare version of a duck, a Frankenstein's fowl with a lurching, menacing walk, heavily clawed feet, muscular wings, and a thuggish demeanor that fits his fleshy red face mask. He hisses like a snake, pants like an obscene phone caller, thrashes his thick tail like an alligator, throws back his head and grins like a horror movie villain, and likes nothing better than to sneak up on you and inflict a painful hematoma. And we had three Muscovies: Victor and Hamilton, who traded places as top dog, and Ramone, who showed surprising reserve with us despite his bluster.

When Victor bit me, I whirled around with the broom, pressing it against his chest and shoving him away. Instead of retreating, he came straight at me and grabbed a beakful of my pantleg. “What's wrong with you?” I demanded, pushing him harder with the broom. He reeled backward, flapping his wings, flashing his yellow eyes, and charging with outstretched neck. I didn't strike him with the broom. I used it to slow his momentum as he came at me; then I pushed back, intending to show him who was boss and discourage him from ever attacking again. But he fluttered in the shadows, set his toenails against the cement floor, and launched himself again. Each push from me stoked the fires of his increasing rage, and his emotion ignited mine.

The light from a single overhead bulb gave the barn a theatrical ambience. While the other birds probably didn't as much as glance up from their food dishes, I imagined that a gallery of hens perched on the stanchions and ducks settled in the straw watched us like the patrons of a cockfight. Both of our standings were at stake. Victor kept coming at me, and I kept pushing him back. Our conflict had begun as a struggle for dominance, more ritual than reality; but from the escalating intensity of Victor's lunges, I saw that he was now protecting himself from a perceived threat to his safety. And he had read my anger correctly. I would just as soon have grabbed him by the throat if I thought that it would stop him.

The whole time our fight was taking place, a tiny voice in the background clamored against the clatter. At first, I easily blocked it out. My reptile brain generated red noise as I focused on avoiding getting bitten. But finally the words came through with moral clarity. The voice asked,
Do you realize you're having a shoving match with a duck?

I'm not thinking right,
I answered.
Since my father died, I've gotten as nutty as Eileen. And, by the way, have we been introduced?

Interrupting my internal dialogue, Victor came at me from across the floor. I lowered the broom and backed away. He surprised me by breaking off the charge, contenting himself with panting to the air, wagging his tail, and opening and closing his beak. I couldn't tell if Victor was dancing a victory dance, but somehow I didn't think so. To my left, Hamilton started hissing, but he bypassed me, waddling up to my opponent and joining him in an elevation of snaking necks.

I loved these ducks. That's what bothered me so much. For ten years, I had lived closely with animals. I didn't expect them to act like people and was frequently happy that they couldn't if they tried. I was patient with them. Guilty about the whole idea of confinement and control, I did my best never to flaunt my advantages of holding the keys to the larder and the cage. Despite my oodles of empathy for them, it had taken precious little to turn me into Elaine's cousin Elmo.

“Sorry,” I told Victor, who held his spot in the middle of the floor. “Sorry,” I said to the hens and ducks who had witnessed my equivalent of a panting-and-hissing display.

On my way back to the house, I found Linda inside the backyard duck pen. She had set up a plastic chair next to the door and was feeding Lulu dandelion leaves at the end of an outstretched arm. The other ducks stayed away. Goose sisters Liza and Hailey were too shy to accept the food from her hand but bold enough to nibble the belt loops of her jumper. Above the murmur of goose voices I heard Linda singing, “Oh, Dear, What Could the Matter Be.” Everyone seemed happy, and I suspected that the barn birds had already dismissed the kind of squabble that probably occurred among the Muscovies every day. But I was so keyed up, I half wished Eileen would call and sap my nervous energy with a few
peewee
s.

A
FOUR-YEAR-OLD
Chinese girl met us in the foyer of the Chinese buffet in Ionia and asked us with grave formality, “Would you like smoking or nonsmoking?”

Linda's back trouble prevented her from sitting for any length of time, so we usually couldn't eat at a restaurant unless a waitress on roller skates whisked our orders to us as soon as we walked in the door. Buffets were a different matter, since we never had to wait for our food. Along with the expected Chinese dishes, the Peking Happiness surprised the diner with such Cantonese delights as squash, corn on the cob, pepperoni pizza, ham-and-cheese-stuffed mushroom caps, French-fried onion rings, and an inspired sushi roll that substituted a plug of hot dog or dill pickle for the anticipated shrimp or yellowfin tuna.

“We want to be up there,” said Linda, indicating a raised area. I settled in facing Linda and a pair of televisions above the waitress station, and Linda sat facing me and a pair of televisions above the windows. One TV in each pair had the sound turned on. The other used closed captioning, allowing me to read the text of an Aleve commercial while I picked at bamboo shoots.

When Linda returned to our table from the buffet, I noticed that she listed slightly to one side, and I didn't think it was simply the weight of her plate. Her back pain had flared up again, though she didn't complain. “Henry Murphy called with the soil test results this morning,” she told me as I marveled at the sheer amount of food on her dish.

“You know, they let you go back as many times as you want.”

“Everything looks so good,” she said, picking up her corn on the cob. “Anyway, he was quite proud of the results. He said that our soil contained zero amount of phosphorus, zero amount of nitrogen, and zero amount of potash.”

“That sounds pretty low.”

Problems with the closed-captioning software caused Tom Brokaw to spew a stream of asterisks, percentage signs, and exclamation points. The glitch matched the language of a heavy man in a tight fitting T-shirt one table away, who indelicately dressed down his grade school son for stuffing himself on desserts rather than entrées.

“He was quite triumphant about it. I said I didn't think it was possible to have zero phosphorus, zero nitrogen, and zero potash—my gardens wouldn't be so lush. But he was very insistent that his results were correct.”

“Did you ask him about the blood-alcohol test results?”

Reaching behind her back, Linda extracted an object resembling a serving of uncooked calf's liver. The gel pack hadn't come from the store in this distended condition, but it had earned its amorphous shape by being repeatedly plopped down upon, stepped on, and, from all appearances, run over by a school bus. Its original plastic envelope had burst long ago, and Linda had encased it in a series of sandwich bags. She squeezed it a couple of times and announced, “I've got to zap my heat pack.”

I was happy that the restaurant offered a self-serve microwave, or she might have had to explain to our four-year-old hostess that she wasn't smuggling in a bizarre food item that somehow hadn't made it into the buffet. Too many times I had witnessed Linda handing the visceral-looking pouch to a terrified teenager behind a fast-food restaurant counter and asking him or her to please warm it up.

“I got quite the phone call today while you were at the grocery store,” I said after she'd returned with the gel pack, knocked her lumbar cushion to the floor, dropped the gel pack while picking up the cushion, and finally managed to arrange them both behind her. “My mom called. She lost her purse.”

“Again?”

“She claimed that somebody had come into her house and taken it. When I told her I'd be right over to help her find it, she said, ‘Joan's here already. I was just wondering if you knew anything about it disappearing.' “

A large, white, inoffensive non-Muscovy duck appeared on a commercial. “That looks just like Lulu,” Linda pointed out. “She thinks you took her purse?”

“I'll bet she doesn't bite people,” I said. “I'm talking about the duck. Joan came on the phone and said she'd found the purse stuck under the couch cushion. Same place she found it the other week.” I gestured toward the thickset man whose sulking son refused to lift his fork. “How'd you like to have that for a family?”

“Did you tell her she needs to keep it in one place?”

“I told her, ‘I'll put a hook in the front vestibule for your purse, and you'll always know exactly where it is.' But she said, ‘I don't want my purse out in plain sight. Someone will come in and take it.' “

“Didn't one of your sisters say it sounded like she might have dementia?”

I'd heard that suggestion before, and I didn't care for it. “She's a little forgetful, and she's upset about my dad,” I muttered to my plate.

“I didn't tell you the rest of the Henry Murphy story. I called the DNR and asked them if it was even possible for soil to have zero phosphorus, zero nitrogen, and zero potash. They told me absolutely not. You wouldn't even get numbers like that with sand, so I called Henry back and told him that he must have done the test wrong, but he wouldn't listen. He said his test was right and our soil needed lots of work.”