Fowl Weather (27 page)

Linda rigorously screened the applicants that made it past the answering machine by subjecting them to a concise series of questions over the course of an hour-long phone call. The first person to survive this trial by endurance seemed ideal when she showed up at our door with a well-behaved scarlet macaw balanced on her wrist. “Ozzie loves everybody,” she informed us with an accent that, using my vast knowledge of
The Crocodile Hunter
television show, I immediately placed within the northern Queensland region of Australia.

“Actually, I'm from New Zealand,” Doreen said with a toss of her hair.

I had never held a macaw before, and as Ozzie stepped onto my arm and affectionately rubbed a head the size of Tasmania on my sleeve, I wanted to hire her on the spot. Linda seemed reluctant to surrender the keys to our front door, however. After a few minutes of baby-talk with the bright red pterodactyl, I realized that Doreen's avian passion pretty much limited itself to her winged creature. While she politely glanced at our parrots, parakeets, dove, and canary, her attention always boomeranged backed to Ozzie.

“Dusty is a real talker,” Linda began.

“Say ‘Hello, there,' Ozzie,” Doreen told the bird.

“But he's not exactly what you'd call cuddly.”

“Watch this,” said Doreen, taking Ozzie from me. “Let's play rock-a-bye baby.” Flipping him upside down, she cradled his back in her palm while his legs stuck up straight in the air. She sang a short lullaby worthy of Ollie's night-night hat bedtime song. Then, upon announcing, “Upsy daisy,” she tossed the macaw in the air,
caught the still inverted bird in her opposite hand, and twisted him right side up without ruffling a single feather. None of our birds would ever have tolerated such acrobatics, though Dusty had once dangled headfirst from the top of my boot while trying to fillet my foot.

Once she had returned Ozzie to a spacious cage in her SUV and accompanied us to the barn, Doreen's powers of concentration improved. She commented favorably upon hens Tina and Buffy, recognized the aggressiveness lurking behind Victor's tail wagging. All of this boded well. But there was just one hitch. Shod in a pair of immaculate calf-high Italian leather boots, she planted each foot with obvious misgivings as she navigated the debris-strewn barn floor. When she lifted the water pail to fill it from the hydrant per Linda's instructions, she didn't engage the full length of her fingers in the task, as though she wished to limit her exposure to the phalanges while sparing the far more susceptible metacarpals.

“I think she'd be fine for looking in on the animals while we're visiting my mom for the day,” Linda told me after Doreen and Ozzie had taken flight. “But she wouldn't be good if we were gone overnight. She's a little too fastidious for working out in the barn, and she can barely tear herself away from that bird of hers for even a second.”

An older man named Harry who had once been a farmer squeaked through Linda's telephone interview on the basis of his charitable works. He liked ducks and rabbits, he told her, and used to keep them. He'd also owned a couple of parrots, though he seemed vague about the details. Although his voice suggested advanced age and thus frailty even greater than mine, he spoke of having recently returned from West Virginia, where he'd been repairing flood-damaged homes with other members of his church.
Linda suggested that he stop by to meet our animals. “He sounds like a nice Christian man,” she told me.

Two days later Harry phoned to say that he had just finished visiting a friend at the office of the lumber company two miles up the road from us and was on his way right over. Linda and I stood in the living room, peering out the window for his vehicle. Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. At the half-hour mark, Linda phoned the office.

“Harry?” laughed the woman on the other end. “He's still standing here talking.”

A few minutes later we met a grizzled soul sporting a red baseball cap and a glint in his eye that warned of an endless repository of stories. “I'll show you the pen behind the barn,” Linda told him. Before we had walked half the distance, his non-Italian leather boots sank roots into the ground as he paused beside our pine tree. “I used to have a bunch of rabbits when I was a kid,” he began, and as he licked his lips to prime the pump of reminiscence, I could hear the woody tendrils burrowing deeper. “One day I woke up, and ten of them were dead. I called the vet, and he said that they probably caught some disease from a rat, and a few more might die. I lost eight more of them that day.”

“That's terrible,” said Linda as she took a step toward the barn that did not earn reciprocation from Harry. “We're crazy about our Walter and Rudy. They live in the dining room if you want to see them later.”

“Enough of them survived to butcher,” he answered brightly. “They fetched two dollars apiece, dressed, which was pretty good money back then. Last week I went to see a friend, and he charged me twenty dollars for a butchered and dressed rabbit. Twenty dollars! But it sure tasted good.”

Having purged himself of this tale of death, he managed to free
his feet for a few steps before his inner pedometer activated a set of steel brakes. Linda and I forged on optimistically, but instead of following our lead, he waited patiently in the sunshine until we slunk back to his side. “You got some ducks there,” he remarked, though they were barely visible from where he stood.

“Come see Victor,” Linda urged. “He's the troublemaker of the flock.”

“You know what works best with troublemakers?” He dipped his head, smiling as his chin rested against his neck. “You throw them in the stewpot.”

“He's not that bad,” exclaimed Linda. “We don't eat meat. We love animals too much.”

“My son lives down in Arizona, and a bobcat kept getting his ducks. One night he waited outside with his shotgun and killed it. ‘That was one big bobcat,' he told me. ‘How big was it?' I asked him. He said, ‘Dad, I could barely get it into two garbage bags.' “

The image proved too much for me. “We've lost a few ducks to raccoons, but we don't shoot the raccoons. We don't believe in anything like that. I catch them in a live trap and release them on the other side of the river.”

“I'll tell you how to solve your raccoon problem.”

“How's that?” I asked, fearing that another garbage bag loomed.

“Get yourself a bottle of fly bait, then mix it together with cherry cola.”

“What does that make, some sort of repellent?” I envisioned sprinkling the concoction around the perimeter of our duck pen and a raccoon bounding away after catching a whiff of it.

“You put it in a dish, the raccoons eat it, and it kills them. They can't burp like we can,” he told us with a knowing lift of one eyebrow.

Inch by inch, stopping and restarting for one gory anecdote
after another, we lurched toward the duck pen behind the barn—occasioning a market-value assessment of our white Pekin duck Richie, butchered and dressed, of course. Then we reversed course, following the trail of fondly recalled carcasses back to Harry's pickup truck. He never once mentioned the pet-sitting job, acting as if the sole purpose of his visit had been to share treasured moments with us. With the hint of a grin crooking one side of his mouth, he touched the visor of his cap good-bye and rolled off in a haze of memories.

L
INDA'S AD FOR
a pet sitter also prompted a pair of unexpected calls. The first was sorely welcome. The second made me sore. Our ex-sitter Teresa graciously offered to come out of retirement long enough to give us a weekend away from animal drudgery. Even Linda's full account of the various pets that had come and gone since Teresa's last stint with us—along with the added chores, out-of-cage schedules, and esoteric rituals like the midday pink-cookie treat for the indoor birds—failed to discourage her.

“You guys deserve to take a break,” she told us.

“Thank you, thank you,” said Linda. “We didn't think we'd ever find anyone.”

“It's no problem at all,” said Teresa. But she hadn't banked on interference from Eileen, and neither had I.

“I saw your classified ad,” reported my old schoolmate, who had defeated our caller ID by harassing us from an unfamiliar cell-phone number.

“You subscribe to the
Lowell Ledger
?” I asked. “Do you read the
Ionia Sentinel-Standard,
too?”

“Marcie Merczenski lives just outside Lowell.”

“From Mrs. Edkins's eighth-grade class—“

“She's Marcie Merczenski-Cummiskey now. She has a large and luxurious house in that new development up on the ridge.”

“We've already got a pet sitter,” I told her as I tilted my head toward the wall clock, whose second hand seemed to be spinning backward. “Thanks so much for offering your services. And give my best to my good friend Marcie.”

She treated me to a sputter of exasperation. “I'm calling because I'm just a little concerned that you would entrust my beautiful geese to a stranger.”

“Teresa isn't a stranger. She's looked after our animals several times, and I would trust her with any of them.”

“When are you going out of town?”

Despite my better judgment, I couldn't resist bragging that on the last Friday of the month Linda and I would be embarking on a dream weekend in the Toledo area.

“I'm marking down those dates in my day planner,” she said. “I'll make sure to check up on this sitter, and I'll read her the riot act if she isn't doing right by my geese.”

“I forget where you kept your geese when they lived with you.”

“I'm just looking out for them. Somebody needs to.”

Not for the first time did I puzzle over Eileen's insistence on keeping in contact with us despite her weirdly escalating level of hostility. But I had decided long ago that trying to understand her motives would only increase my own mental turmoil. Though birds, rabbits, and cats weren't exactly what you might term rational beings, their straightforwardness had it all over the convoluted maze of human psychology, and Eileen's psyche seemed to suffer from an excess of dead ends. Even our excessively moody parrot Ollie was a creature of crystalline purity compared to her. Whenever he burbled messages of love on my shoulder only to clamp his beak into my neck muscles a moment later, he wasn't acting out deeply submerged and muddy impulses. He simply enjoyed burbling followed by biting—always had and always would. I never asked, “Why me?” when the vise grip ultimately
came, but I invariably posed that question to myself whenever Eileen phoned.

I tried insisting that the date of our trip remained in flux. “We might not actually get away until the coming fall, Eileen. Linda's back is particularly bad this time of the year. It gives her problems during rain and meteor showers.” But I didn't get anywhere with the lie.

I did warn Teresa before we left for Ohio that an annoying woman might stop by to offer unwelcome, unwarranted, and wholly inexperienced animal advice. The information didn't faze her. “If she gives me any trouble,” Teresa said, “I'll lock her in the pen with her buddies.”

I
N THE PAST,
our trips to exotic locales like Toledo necessitated that we lug along a cooler chocked with ice and cold compresses for Linda's back. But having discovered that heat packs were more effective against inflammation, Linda now shunned motel ice makers for convenience-store microwaves to charge up a hot compress of her own design—the one and only Stinky. Stinky had started life inoffensively enough. Linda's Thomas Edison – style search for a heat-retaining material had progressed through sand, aquarium gravel, and various rare earth elements before she'd ultimately settled on uncooked white rice, which she'd poured into a snake-shaped pillow. Frequent overheating had scorched the organic stuffing, resulting in a charred-popcorn smell each time Stinky left the radar range.

In service station after service station, I'd bide my time fueling the car while Linda recharged her heat pack; then I'd slip into the building to experience the overpowering odor of an electrical fire at a cereal plant. “Fifteen dollars of gas on pump number two,” I told a teenager at a truck stop just north of the Michigan-Ohio border.
He struggled to connect the seemingly innocuous redheaded woman who'd just left the building clutching a fabric hot dog with a possible industrial chemical spill whose fumes were seeping in from the parking lot. “Coffee smells good,” I chirped as I thrust a twenty-dollar bill under his nose. “Must be an exotic Indonesian blend, but you might be brewing it a bit too strong.”

My final glance through the car window found the stoop-shouldered attendant shuffling toward the coffeemaker carrying a plastic pail and giant brush. “This is even worse than your meat-colored gel pack,” I grumbled to Linda as we tore out of the parking lot. “That looked weird, but it didn't have a smell.”

“The rice holds the heat a whole lot longer than the gel.”

The important thing was that I had distracted the attendant long enough to forestall a phone call to the EPA or local law enforcement personnel. In fact, by the time it finally dawned on him to investigate the microwave, I figured, we would be safely across the state line. But I was nervous about our heating hit-and-runs anyway. If a cop pulled us over for a traffic infraction, I couldn't imagine what illegal substance he would suppose Linda was smoking while sprawled out in the back seat.

For my part, I tried combating the fumes by cranking open the window and drowning them in fresh air. But Stinky laughed at the inrush of wind and burrowed its odor molecules deep into the pores of the car upholstery. “What do your housecleaning customers say about that thing?”

“Nothing,” Linda said defensively. “They might ask me, ‘What's that smell?' “

The outgassing addled my senses, turning what should have been a three-hour trip to Toledo into an inexplicable five-hour marathon that brought us to the Toledo Museum of Art a mere forty-five minutes before the stingy four
P.M.
closing time.