Fowl Weather (14 page)

After breakfast, Linda went through the entire exercise by herself: climbing the ladder, setting the cage upon the milk house, shooing Gimpy out the door, and providing a blue-plate special for him to peck at throughout the day. By the time I returned from work in the early afternoon, his food already needed replenishing. It didn't take me a moment to spot him on his perch seven feet above the roof, though I marveled at how readily his brown-green coloration blended into his environment. Beyond the issue of camouflage, however, he wasn't exactly evaporating into the natural
world. By the evening of his second day at large, he had expanded his wanderings only as far as a slightly higher tree limb.

“Gimpy!” I called over and over. “Gimpy, come down to your cage.”

“What's the matter?” asked Linda from the basement door.

“Gimpy won't come in.”

“That's good. We want him to stay outside.”

“He's not ready. He's a sitting duck for an owl or something.”

“He looks just fine to me.”

“You try,” I suggested. “He likes your voice.”

“Gimpy, do you want to come in?” Linda asked the oriole. If the small smudge against the darkening sky considered the question, he didn't show any sign of answering.

Compared to the problems we were having with my mom, my initial mild concern over a Baltimore oriole shouldn't have worsened into worry. But the miserable phone call of a few days earlier had activated the iron gong of anxiety. Any tiny tremor that ordinarily would have quickly faded into silence set the huge gong rumbling again. Every nerve ending in my body seemed to tingle, especially in my stomach and head. I couldn't sleep. I felt myself sitting on a branch surrounded by cold black space that predators knifed through with ease.

What if we found Gimpy dead on the ground? What if we discovered nothing but a patch of feathers? What was happening to my mother? Had my dad seen the early signs and checked out early? And why I had stopped taking my antianxiety medication? Things had seemed even and straightforward when I'd weaned myself from my daily pill, but I began to wonder if I was physically capable of leading a normal life without brain-altering biochemistry. A real shock might send me completely up a tree.

The next morning, we watched as Gimpy dove down to the milk-house roof, supped on grapes, grabbed a mealworm in his beak, and zoomed far up into the tree. That was the last we saw of him. Linda took his disappearance as proof that he had finally adapted to the wild outdoors. I wanted to agree. But I had trouble interpreting absence as anything other than absence.

Trudging into the dining room after a nap, I was shocked to discover a far worse spectacle than a nest of baby mice. Our animals should have been safe while I snoozed. Through hard experience we had learned to stagger out-of-the-cage shifts so that an unarmed Howard couldn't foolishly attack the slash-billed Stanley Sue, hedgehog-size bunny Bertie and lumbering Walter couldn't pull out gobs of each other's fur, and the formidable Dusty couldn't cut a swath through the defenseless minions, whose numbers included me. The complex scheduling did a good job of protecting our critters, but bizarre disasters trumped planning every time.

I stopped dead a few steps into the room. Stanley Sue was perched on top of Bertie's cage, near the windowsill that she had long ago chewed into pulp. She cocked her head when she saw me and flashed her eyes “hello.” Bertie stood inside his cage grooming his ears with his front paws. Everything seemed hunky-dory, until I mentally processed the severed rabbit tail that rested at a jaunty angle on the linoleum. I guessed immediately what must
have happened. Bertie had been sleeping with his rear pressed against the front of the cage as usual, and the sight of the cotton-ball tail thrust through the wire had apparently proved too tempting for a parrot to ignore, even though Stanley Sue had ignored it for over a decade.

The dismal scene turned my limbs into windowsill pulp, and I nearly ended up on the linoleum alongside the tail. Linda usually handled the medical emergencies with our animals, while I performed the vital task of hovering in the background and moaning, “What are we going to do?” But her escalating back problems meant two visits to the chiropractor per week. So while Linda got a backbone manipulation from Dr. Potente, I got a reality adjustment from Stanley Sue, who stared at me while vigorously nodding her head in excitement, displeasure, or both. Bertie continued bathing his ears with such nonchalance that I picked up his tail to assure myself that the amputation had actually occurred. The pom-pom was vaguely cone-shaped on the end that had once connected to his body. A tiny dot of blood flecked a muscle no larger than the diameter of a toothpick. The rest of the tail consisted of fur.

“Sweetie, are you okay?” I asked with an unsteady voice as I interrupted Bertie's toilette to pull him out of his cage. He didn't act as if he had been emotionally attached to the snipped-off appendage, grunting indignantly as I carried him into the bathroom and examined him under the strong artificial light suitable for spotting defects in the floral wallpaper. The pinching action of the parrot's beak must have kept the injury from bleeding. I didn't detect any sign of trauma except for the dull throbbing inside me.

Plunking Stanley Sue back into her cage, I directed a few sharp words at her. I considered taking away her treasured bell as punishment, but I didn't figure it would make sense to her. Though
unfailingly gentle with Linda and me, she apparently regarded a rabbit or smaller bird as just another object to chew on.

Fighting the urge to return to bed, draw the covers over my head, and brood about what an irresponsible pet owner I'd turned out to be, I let gravity pull me down the basement stairs. Next to the unused wood furnace I found a few scraps of metal screening with a half-inch grid that neither bunny ear nor parrot beak could poke through. Scissoring the panels to proper proportions, I fitted shields to the front and sides of each rabbit cage to thwart future bird attacks. As I wired the pieces in place, I lamented the fact that I had shown more understanding with Stanley Sue than I had with my poor mother, who would never bite off a rabbit's tail. Somehow I understood the futility of losing my temper with a parrot, but I hadn't transferred that to human beings.

That evening I roiled with pangs of guilt while watching a tailless Bertie frolic in the living room. Though Linda calmed me down by pointing out that the loss didn't seem to bother the bunny, she couldn't resist wondering out loud, “Why would Stanley do something like that?”

“Why would my mom insist I stole her electric trimmer?” I asked, nudging the focus back to my suffering. “It's some mysterious force of nature at work.”

“We've got to make sure she can't hurt one of the bunnies again.”

“I put that screen around the cages. That will do the trick.”

“Because she could really injure Bertie or Walter,” Linda continued. “That's probably how Walter ended up with his abscesses. We can't let Stanley bite the bunnies.”

“They should be safe with the screen around their cages.”

“What if she pecked out one of their eyes?”

“She can't do that with the screens on their cages,” I observed with growing futility.

“I don't want any more abscesses,” she said. Then, before I could bring up the screens again, she asked, “Have you seen my reading glasses?”

That was my cue to walk out of the room. As a kind of pointless tribute to Bertie's hindquarters subtraction, I saved his tail in a sandwich bag, which I taped up and temporarily stashed inside the top drawer of my dresser.

“What are you going to do with that?” Linda asked.

“Dig a hole in the backyard and throw dirt on top of it. He'll be the only rabbit we've ever owned that we've had to bury twice.”

“I just don't get why these weird things keep happening to us,” she muttered a little later as she clicked off the lamp on the bed-stand. That, of course, was the question that kept me awake long after Linda had ceased her nightly routine of hopping out of bed to set the air purifier on low, opening the window, setting the air purifier back to high, knocking over ceramic figurines on the headboard as she searched for her lip balm in the dark, shutting the window, turning on the fan, putting on a warmer nightgown, and shifting the air purifier to low. Each time she leaned over the side of the bed or flung herself off the mattress, she yanked the covers from my body, and I didn't dare hold on to them for fear that a hearty tug from her would spin me like a top.

Different kinds of people tended to attract certain types of events into their lives. I came to this decision during a brief interval when the covers still covered me. Some folks stumbled over money every time they left the house, like a friend of Linda's who won the lottery so often, they considered replacing Jackson's face with hers on the twenty-dollar bill. Other folks specialized in tragedy, settling on major-appliance breakdowns, scofflaw relatives, or medical maladies with hyphenated names as their ongoing torment. For reasons I could never comprehend, I drew weirdness to
me like water into a straw. The granddaddy of all bizarre events, I reflected as I lay in bed waiting for the quilt to desert me again, was the telephone call I had once received from the space people.

One night during my junior college days I'd found myself unable to concentrate on the poetic prose of my political science textbook. Instead I dug into a science fiction story about a man who could mentally tune in to a kind of galactic two-way radio. At the drop of a thinking cap, he could intercept telepathic communications between advanced civilizations located in distant Milky Way zip codes. A mind meld with aliens appealed to me, especially when compared to trying to divine the logic behind political processes in Washington. So after finishing the story and pulling the sheet up to my neck at a time in my life when nobody but me would whisk it away again, I attempted to contact whatever extraterrestrials might be tuned to earthling brain-wave frequencies.

I hypnotized myself into a state of relaxation that I had learned from reading, of all things, a 1950s issue of
Popular Science
magazine plucked from a flea market. I marshaled my puny thought energy, waited for my inner
ON THE AIR
light to blink on, and transmitted a plea for the space people to contact me. “I'm ready to join you off-planet in a life that doesn't involve memorizing members of Congress or being humiliated by the girl who sits next to me in biology class. Please reply. Over.” I lay still, palpitating as I concentrated on my thoughts for a response from Regulus or an answer from Antares. Nothing came, and I finally drifted off to sleep awaiting a vaguely Rod Serling – esque voice inside my head.

A few hours later, the jangling telephone woke me up. A woman asked, “Is Richard there?” as electronic tones burbled in the background. Her question scared me silly. That same day I'd received a Unitron telescope catalog in the mail, which I'd whimsically sent for under the name Richard Plantagenet. Nobody knew this fact
other than the mailman and a Unitron employee, and I figured that postal and telescope personnel had better things to do at two
A.M.
than bother me. I wanted to ask, “Richard who?” But if I did and the voice supplied the appropriate last name, I would be alien food. So I chickened out by replying, “There's no Richard here. Who are you calling?”

“I'm calling you, Bob Tarte,” she told me.

I couldn't have been more frightened had I actually believed in the saucer people. “You've got the wrong number,” I told her and hung up.

The experience taught me several lessons. Never poke my nose into the cosmic equivalent of citizen-band radio. Never request catalogs under the name of a deceased British regent. And, of course, never assume that my mother was any more askew than a son who lived with one foot in a fantasy world. The memory of alien telephony reminded me that I needed to do something special for my mom to make amends for that
other
annoying phone call, the one where I had shouted at her, and I needed to do it soon.

T
HE FOLLOWING
S
ATURDAY,
I mulled over potential restaurants for lunch with my mother as I ambled down the hill toward the duck pens. Judging her taste in food wasn't easy once I'd factored in the oddball meals she'd treated us to over the years, such as ham balls in orange-flavored gravy and chicken casserole with a crust of saltines that expanded to take on the characteristics of ceiling tiles. Fortunately, my mom was so easy to please, I could take her to the Kmart snack bar for a corn dog and she would say, “This is nice.” I wanted to do a notch better than that, but I didn't want to spend much money. Maybe she'd be so thrilled that I was treating her to a meal that she would actually insist on paying. This thought buoyed me as I started to unlock the girls' pen and
noticed that the atmosphere wasn't right. Instead of honking and quacking at the sight of me and the prospect of an insect safari in our yard, the ducks and geese were eerily silent at my approach.

A glance into Stewart and Trevor's pen sobered my mood. I went back into the house, exchanged a few quiet words with Linda, then went out again and gently lifted the latch on their gate. Linda had no peer when it came to treating sick and injured animals, but I didn't want her to have to face what had happened to our handsome Khaki Campbell boys. For once I was grateful for a life spent avoiding reality, as a psychological black hole mercifully slipped between my eyes and the bodies of our ducks while I wrapped each in a towel, then buried them under a shade tree.

When I had finished, Linda joined me at the graveside. Holding my hand she told Stewart and Trevor how sorry she was for what had happened. I reminded her how they would sometimes waddle up to me when I stretched out on my back in the soft summer grass and nibble at my shoelaces. Linda mentioned how much they had enjoyed spending time in the yard with the female ducks. Their offshoots, Carla, Marla, and Darla, testified to that fact. We also talked about the day a few years earlier when we had brought them home from a woman who had lost her job and couldn't afford to keep her pets. Then we let go of each other's hands and wiped our eyes.