Fowl Weather (3 page)

Aware of my presence, Stanley Sue flapped her wings inside her covered cage. In another moment she would ring her bell, annoyed that my worried lurking was disrupting her sleep; then Howard would awake and start to coo, Dusty would whistle and imitate
the ringing of the phone, and the curtain would crash down on my brush with nonordinary reality. Taking one last dispirited look, I shuffled back toward the bedroom, only to collide with a colossal white shape in the hall. It turned out to be Moobie, the overweight cat that was straining our feed bills and floorboards until we could find her a home.

“W
HAT SOUNDS
?” L
INDA
asked the next morning as we sat on the edge of the bed drinking cups of acid-free coffee. “Did that raccoon come by again?”

In the full light of day it was difficult to convey the mystery and fear I had felt while cringing under the covers in the wee hours. My description of the unsettling howl piqued her interest only slightly.

“Are you sure it wasn't an owl?”

I knew the voices of the common Michigan owls—barred, great horned, and screech—and they didn't in the least resemble this piercing clarinet wail from hell. “I think it was a howler monkey,” I told her. “Or maybe some sort of gibbon.”

“Funny you're the only one who seems to hear these things.”

“That's because you don't fascinate the space people the way I do.”

“It was probably an owl. Owls make all sorts of sounds.”

I protested this ridiculous suggestion with dignified silence.

After breakfast I hopped onto the Internet and began downloading sound files of owls, along with those of other birds that might have ventured out into the Michigan night no matter the time of year, from goatsucker to nightjar to long-eared owl. I listened to hoots, groans, croaks, whinnies, barks, gasps, and whistles, along with a
whip-poor-will,
a
chee-chee-chee,
and even a
pee-ant.
But nothing with wings filled the bill.

If a Bigfoot-size creature had paid us a visit, it would have plowed a hard-to-miss path through the snow. A multitentacled extraterrestrial might have left sucker prints behind for a sucker like me to find. I felt almost intrepid as I suited up for a tracking expedition, donning a pair of barn boots fitted with ice cleats in case the terrain got rough, and pulling rubber work gloves over cotton gloves to keep my hands dry should I need to rummage in the wet for clues. As a finishing touch, I slung my binoculars over my shoulder, in case, I suppose, I wanted to spy on suspicious squirrels on the bank of the Grand River.

I never made it as far as the river. The soft ground cover of a few days earlier was truly a thing of the past. Thawing and refreezing had created a crunchy surface that collapsed and threw me off balance with each lurching step. The cleats were useless under these conditions, though they saved me from falling once I'd crawled over the backyard fence and rapidly descended the hill on a sheet of ice courtesy of nine wild turkeys and my wife. The turkeys' daily visits for scratch feed scattered by Linda had packed down the snow and polished it into a toboggan run.

Turkey prints were only the beginning. As I trudged through the hollow I discovered a complex freeway system of animal routes. I crisscrossed deer, squirrel, rabbit, house-cat, and possum paths along with prints from critters I couldn't identify. Several tracks looked promisingly weird until I got on top of them and found familiar hoofprints at the bottom. Faced with so many prints to investigate and no obvious primate or cephalopod shapes, I called it a day after less than twenty minutes. The amount of traffic was mind-numbing. The animals were clearly the property owners. Linda and I were just squatters huddled inside a box.

Back indoors, I kept replaying the howl through my head until the idea that I had heard it before paid off. I rooted through
my CDs and found a collection of Malagasy music called
A World Out of Time, Volume 2.
Linda was cleaning birdcages in the dining room when I triumphantly slid the disc into the boom box and hit the play button. Overlapping primate whoops burst forth over a drumbeat.

“What is that?” she asked as she filled Howard's seed dish.

“Lemurs,” I announced with a note of triumph in my voice. “Indri lemurs. Native to Madagascar and found nowhere else on the planet.”

“That's a sound Dusty would love to copy. We'll have to start playing it for him.”

“That's more or less what I heard in the yard both times,” I said. “Not
exactly
what I heard, but closer than anything else I've found.”

“You could make that sound, couldn't you, Dusty?” Her parrot was not only adept at dead-on mimicry of our voices but also impersonated electronic appliances, hand claps, creaking doors, and ice cubes falling into a drinking glass. “Maybe you just heard Dusty,” she said.

“Dusty? How could it have been Dusty? He hasn't even heard the lemur calls until this very minute. I haven't played this CD in years.”

“But he could have made a sound like that. It could have been Dusty.”

I retreated upstairs.

S
HIFTING MY SHORT
attention span to our gnawed kitchen woodwork, I recalled reading about high-end robotic toys that moved and emitted sounds in response to motion or noise. They seemed tailor-made for discouraging Stanley Sue from venturing into the room. I found the budget version at a store just down
the road. The blue mechanical bird with transparent red crest, wings, and tail feathers resembled a cross between a baby blue jay and a tuna can. The two pairs of eyes hinted at the dual nature of what proved to be a troublesome toy. Red plastic domes the size of quarters bulged from either side of the head where a bird's eyes ought to be. But a black rectangle up front, just above the yellow beak, contained two more eyes. These were red LEDs that blinked and changed shape from hearts to X's, depending upon the robot's mood.

Waving a small magnetic corncob near the beak was equivalent to feeding the bird, and the automaton expressed its gratitude by chirping “Merrily We Roll Along” or another annoying ditty, accompanied by head swivels, wing flaps, beak snaps, and enthusiastic bowing. A sharp noise near the toy caused a happy twitter, as did waving a hand across the light-sensitive eyes, which I hoped could detect a close encounter with Stanley Sue.

More than anything else, though, the mechanical bird craved pressure on its crest. Pressing the plastic plume whenever I entered the kitchen kept the toy nattering joyously in response to the piercing chirps, squawks, and whistles from our parrots and parakeets. Failing to press the plume or forgetting to proffer the magnetic corn plunged the bipolar robot into a silent depression so unshakable that no crescendo of noise in the room could lift its spirit.

This insistence on attention proved to be the toy's downfall. For nearly two weeks, Stanley Sue stayed in the dining room, well away from the mechanical bird with its repertoire of random-interval song-and-dance routines. My heart soared with hope that her behavior had finally changed. But the robot bird's behavior had shifted, too. The sadists who had programmed its microchip had decided that every few days it would be fun to have the toy
cycle through a sullen phase that required intensive plume pressing and magnetic feeding. Otherwise the mechanical bird merely issued a brief grumble in response to stimuli. Frankly, I wasn't having it. It was one thing to coddle a flesh-and-blood pet; it was quite another to include a plastic bird in my daily schedule of chores and visits. For a while, I solved the sulking problem by turning the toy upside down, then removing and replacing its batteries. This reset it to a state of chirpy ecstasy. But I grew sick of the battery changing, and Stanley Sue soon decided that an intermittently active bird was no threat whatsoever. She retook her prized countertop and perched on top of the water jug.

“If you want to stay up there, you can't be near the bread box,” I informed her.

She took exception to the restriction. When I moved the water jug toward the center of the countertop, out of reach of things wooden, she startled me by springing off it and flying back to her cage. She didn't fly short distances gracefully. Her wingbeats were as loud as those of the robotic bird, and she bobbled slightly off balance when she landed.

I looked at her. You could almost hear the snap of a spark as our gazes locked. I drifted toward her, pulled across the room by the irresistible force that bound the two of us together.
Oh, that alien,
I thought.
That alien has got me again.
My two eyes focused on her one eye. I came closer. I smiled at her, and the black pupil changed size ever so minutely, pulsing in and out as it floated in a thick white yolk lit with a hint of gold.

Her eye was welcoming, but that's because I knew she welcomed me. In point of fact, I'd noted the same glint in the eye of a parrot that wanted nothing better than to chomp my hand. You couldn't see the affection in her face. Her upper beak curved backward in a frown from the wickedly pointed tip, then, at the last moment,
flowed upward in a smile. That mouth could mean anything. She was aggressive toward our other birds, having once sent Howard to the vet in terrible shape. Another time, she caught our canary in midair and threw him to the floor like a ceramic spoon rest. But she was tolerant toward my wife and the essence of gentleness with me. Leaning over the cage top, she lowered her head beneath her feet and raised it again, never taking her eye off me, in what I had learned was her silent approximation of a chuckle.

“Stanley,” I told her. “Stanley Sue.”

She opened and closed her beak, making a quiet clucking that was probably her attempt to mock my speech. Unlike Dusty, she didn't talk, but she spoke volumes nonetheless. I leaned down, touching my nose to her beak. I laughed, and she clucked. Demonstrating her extreme satisfaction, she began to preen the feathers on her chest, ignoring me as I finally walked away. Before leaving the kitchen, I picked up the mechanical bird and placed it on top of the refrigerator, where it could keep the cardboard wrapping-paper tubes company.

T
HAT NIGHT
, I
ASSUMED
my post at the bathroom window, hoping to hear the primates whooping it up again. It wasn't a pleasant vigil. Linda had replaced the heating grate next to the sink, because it had started to rust. But she'd had trouble fitting the new grate in place until a stroke of inspiration had convinced her to rip out the metal vanes that limited the heat flow. A shower became a visit to the sauna. While the water faucets glowed red-hot, and toothbrushes melted into sticky puddles, a cup of steaming tea anywhere else in the house froze solid in a matter of seconds.

I slept lightly most of the week, keeping one ear cocked for teeth-jarring cries. One night, a disturbance out in the duck pen woke Dusty, and he responded with a descending whistle, which
I tried to pin on a geographically challenged lemur. But the harmonic complexity was missing. Dusty hadn't made my mysterious nocturnal noises, if there had been any noises after all. I started to convince myself that I had dreamed the entire thing.

I sat up in bed an hour or so later to find a grey-skinned extraterrestrial skulking near the bed and bent on the usual kidnapping. I played along with the abduction, but once we reached the front door, I grabbed the little fellow by the scruff of the neck, ushered him off the porch into the hard-packed snow, and turned to close the door. His baseball-size eyes bore a wounded look.

“Nothing personal,” I said as I watched him pad away. “You're welcome back when you can tell me what all of this means.”

I didn't waste my days pondering whether paranormal creatures inhabited our woods; I was too busy battling the hose demon. Linda had snapped the handle off the push broom while using the brush end to bludgeon the ice in the girl ducks' wading pool. That gave me the brainstorm—which should have come six years earlier—of emptying the pools in the pens before we went to bed, so that they wouldn't freeze overnight. But our ice was like a disgruntled rat. Rousted out of one hole, it took up quarters somewhere else. As I yanked the handle of the duck-pen door, the door deflected several inches at the top but refused to budge at the bottom. Freeing it meant spraying the ground with hot water, then sloshing away the water with our mended broom so that it didn't freeze again within minutes.

Leaving snow prints across the basement floor, I grabbed the loose end of the hose that was attached to the laundry sink and began walking it down toward the clamoring ducks and geese. It stretched taut prematurely, a victim of the hose demon. I snapped the hose like a whip. An inverted U sped across the yard, then another
and another, as I continued thrashing my arm without effect. Groaning, I threw down the hose and cut a fresh path through the snow back to the basement.

The coupling between the two fifty-foot-long hoses had somehow managed to snag on a chip in the concrete floor no larger than a Susan B. Anthony dollar and no deeper than a mosquito's wing. Dislodging the connectors, I trudged back downhill, yanked the hose toward the agitated waterfowl, and was caught short a mere yard from my goal. This time, the narrow lip of the coupling hugged the edge of the open basement door, an obstacle so circumspect and unobtrusive I never could have purposely snared it there if I'd tried a hundred times. Flailing the hose vertically and horizontally, then whirling it around and around in jump-rope fashion failed to convince the dozen or so molecules of the coupling that held hands with a few atoms of the door edge to abide by normal physical laws. Instead I was forced to troop uphill again into an arctic blast of air and liberate the hose by hand.

Linda met me just inside the basement door. “Who are you talking to?”

“What do you mean?” I asked. But I knew what she meant. I had been shouting, “Let go! Let go! Let go!”