Wild Things: Four Tales (3 page)

The bird flew off.

Just as it got up into the air, clearing an overgrown azalea bush, another bird came down and began attacking it mid-air. I felt panic, and genuine terror.

I worried about the little guy, trying his wings out for the first time. Fledge continued flying toward a crab-apple tree in the front yard. Fledge turned, almost as if he were looking at me. His mouth opened wide as he squawked like a baby. In that moment, I didn’t see the bird -- I saw my boys.

I had a premonition of a moment of terror in life when I would let go of my sons’ hands and they would go off and the world would do its own version of attack on them. My imagination went haywire as I imagined Rufus in his early twenties in a foreign land, felled by bullets in a war; and William, injecting heroin into his arms, surrounded by lowlife friends in some crack house.

As I watched Fledge, he fluffed up his feathers and spread his wings wide and flew over the rooftop. I raced to the bathroom window, and saw Fledge flying over other houses, off through the neighborhood.

Fledge had made it past the attacking bird. Past the trees. We had done it, I thought. We helped Fledge get strong and healthy and become an adult, and he was going to live his life the way he was meant to live it. My brief insanity, those split-second visions of my boys, the dreadful futures I imagined for them – all of it dissipated and I laughed at myself and the way my mind worked.

Later, I told the boys that Fledge had flown off, and that he was fine. They moped a bit, but the more we talked about Fledge and Fledge’s life, the better my children seemed to understand why Fledge had to go.

That first night, I went and sat in front of Fledge's empty cage. Beyond the cage, a window looked out on trees. I opened the window and lifted the screen. Part of me felt that Fledge might come back, or if he was hurt, he might show up for food again.

I kept the window open for three days, and then shut it.

2

I missed the bird. We had kept the little guy for five days, but it was enough for me to begin to think about life and nature and to wake up each day hoping Fledge had not died in the night. Out the window, other starlings and robins and mockingbirds flew around, but I kept watch for Fledge. I brought out the old binoculars from the cabinet in the garage, and, early in the morning

-- before even my wife awoke -- I went to the window and looked out. I whistled sometimes when I was in the yard, thinking Fledge might hear my voice.

Then, at twilight, I spoke to my wife, Jeanette, about the bird.

“It’s a starling,” she said. “They’re nuisances. I bet the state would’ve paid you to kill it.”

“Stop that,” I said. “It needed help.”

“I know. I’m kidding. Really. I’m kidding. But the bird’s fine. Believe me. You protected it. You got the boys to think about nature a little. And now that bird’s off doing what birds do.”

“I never really noticed starlings before,” I said. “I mean, I knew they were out there.”

“God, in the fall they just swarm. Freaks me out sometimes. Like the Hitchcock movie.”

“I was out in the yard this morning,” I said. “I couldn’t stop looking in the trees. And on the roof. I just figured he’d stick around.”

She gave me a funny look, as if she were trying to figure out if I were joking or not. “Honey? It’s a bird. You really want a bird, we’ll get a cockatiel. But I don’t really want a bird,” she said.

“I don’t want a bird, either,” I said. Then, I laughed at myself, and she giggled, too. We had some coffee and went out on the patio. We sat in the old deck chairs that were gray from years of neglect. “But it’s funny.”

“What’s that?”

“Loss. All of life is about loss.”

“No, it’s not!” She laughed and told me I had better not get depressed on her. “Life has loss in it,” she said, when she saw that I was a little hurt by her laughter. “But look, we both have great jobs, the kids are great. We’re building to something. We have love. There’s a lot in life besides loss.”

“Someday, we’ll lose everything. I mean it. I’m not sad about it. I guess I’m wistful.”

“Wistful is sad.”

“No it’s not. Someday, the boys will go out into the world. Not everyone survives it. God, maybe I’ll get heart disease. Or some…some accident will happen.”

“You’re getting morbid,” she said. “I hate this kind of stuff. You shouldn’t say it. It’s too dark.”

“I’m trying to grasp this thing. I’m nearly forty, and I want to be prepared. I want a good mindset.”

“That bird,” she said. “It got you thinking like this.”

“It’s nuts, I guess,” I said.

“Not nuts, honey. But it’s…it’s useless. We have a good life. Bad things don’t always happen. That bird. That bird is probably off flying around, happy as hell to be out of the cage and back in its natural environment. It’s probably flocking with other starlings, devouring someone’s grass seed or chasing off squirrels from a nest that it’s building with a mate. It’s an adult by now. It’s fine. That’s how life goes.”

“Did you hear that?” I asked, startled as I glanced over at her.

She held her coffee mug near her lips, watching me. “What?”

“That sound. Was that Fledge?”

I heard it again. The bickering squawk of a starling. Somewhere among the trees.

“No. Wait,” she said. “No.”

Then, I heard a chirp at the rooftop. I looked up – it was a sparrow.

“Come here,” Jeanette said.

I glanced over at her. She had raised her eyebrows ever so slightly, her version of close-up seduction.

“What for?”

“Just come here.” She set her mug down on the little table, and scootched back in her chair. “Sit with me.”

“We’ll break the chair.”

“Throw caution to the wind.”

I went over, and she put her arms around me. Kissed me on the forehead. “My big baby who loves birds.”

Deftly, she slipped her fingers to the buttons of my shirt, and opened them, her hands going to my chest, combing through the patch of hair. I kissed her, and she whispered, “The boys won’t be back from the Nelson’s ‘til nine. Nobody can see us.”

We made love in that uncomfortable deck chair, in that desperate way that old-marrieds do, trying to recapture the wildness of pre-marital sex. Somewhere in the rapture of it all, I heard the chattering of starlings in the trees, and glanced up.

“What is it?” she asked. “Why did you stop?”

“I thought…” I didn’t want her to know what I was thinking, so I kissed her on the lips. “Maybe we should do this later.”

“Why?”

“I feel funny. What if someone sees us?”

“Nobody can see us.”

“I feel like someone can,” I said.

“So, we give ‘em a show. Greatest show on earth.”

“Naw,” I said, trying to sound warm and cuddly and friendly, but I drew my underwear and pants back up, and buttoned my shirt. She left hers open, but drew her knees together.

“Since when do you turn down outdoors sex?” she asked.

“We’ve never had outdoors sex ‘til now.”

“I remember a certain hot August night on a lake in a little boat with life preservers as pillows,” she said. “August 18
^th
.”

“You remember the date?”

“Sure. We were out at the lake. It was when we…”

She didn’t have to finish the thought. It was the year before we conceived Rufus. It was to be our first child, the one who came from sex in the boat out on the lake at midnight. But she had lost the baby within four months. Eight months later, she was pregnant with Rufus.

I didn’t like to be reminded of the first child.

3

That night, after my wife fell asleep, I went out to the patio for a cigarette. My first in three years. I kept the pack of Gitanes in an old backpack I’d had since college. It hung on a nail in the garage. Inside the pack, besides the French cigarettes I’d learned to smoke on a post-graduate trip to Paris, there was a bottle of Grand Marnier that had never been opened, a t-shirt with various obscenities written on it, and a pair of swimming trunks I had not been able to fit into since my twenties.

The cigarette tasted great, and I followed the first with a second. I thought of Fledge, up in one of the trees, his little leg hidden under his feathers, with the other leg down, small claws clutching a tree branch.

4

The next Saturday, I took the boys for a hike. First, to a drug store to get some candy, and then up to the unincorporated area of town where there was a bike trail by the old railroad tracks. The boys seemed to have fun, running ahead of me, climbing rocks, finding a penny or quarter, balancing on the railroad ties. But I had begun hearing the birds. I heard more and more of them as we got deeper into the woods. Starlings, certainly, but also the caws of crows; the songbirds, too, with their chirps and whistles. I felt like I would hear Fledge’s distinct squawk, but did not, and even while I told the kids to watch out for broken glass on the trail, or not to touch the poison ivy, part of me had blocked even my own children out.

I had never noticed so many birds before. Most of them were unseen, but their voices seemed loud, even annoying. Bickering in the skies, chattering in treetops, their language must have meant something to them. They must be communicating with each other. Mating. Attacking. Flocking.

Twilight came, and back at home, Jeanette made it bath time for the boys because of the dirt all over their faces.

I went to the second-floor bedroom window, and climbed out onto the ledge, and sat on the roof. Smoked a cigarette. Leaned back, and looked up at the veiled sky and the darkening clouds in the distance.

Distinct voices of the birds. Not just the usual cacophony. I felt as if my ears had begun to notice precisely how one sparrow chirped, how the swallows spoke to each other, and those starlings – their nastiness, their territorial voices that spoke of battle and ownership. I began to hear something in the world I’d never really heard before.

5

“Are you all right?” Jeanette asked that night. We lay in bed. Lights on. She had just put down the book she’d been reading.

“Of course.”

“You’re staring at the ceiling.”

“I’m thinking. You know, there must be something weird about life. We took that little guy in for five days, and now I just notice birds. I’ve never noticed them before.”

“What’s that called?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s called something. When you didn’t notice something. Then you do. Then you notice it’s all around you all the time.”

“Crazy?”

She grinned. “No. No. And it’s not about something being ubiquitous, either. It’s something else. Like when you’ve never heard a word before, and suddenly, once you’ve heard it, it’s everywhere you look.”

“I keep listening for him.”

“For who?”

“Fledge.”

“Honey,” she said. “Aw. Poor baby. I miss the little guy too. You should be proud of yourself. You rehabbed a bird and set it free. That’s what life should be about.”

“I read about starlings. Online. They’re non-native. They were brought here by a guy who released a hundred of them in Central Park in 1890. He wanted to introduce birds that were in Shakespeare’s plays. So he brought starlings, among others. I read that in the wild they don’t live all that long. In captivity, they can live up to twenty years.”

She lay down and turned to me, her eyes like warm muddy pools. “I would rather have a few years among my own kind, with a life of mating and birth and, yes, even death, than twenty years alone in a cage.”

“He wouldn’t have been alone,” I said. And then, “Aw, this is silly. I’m silly.”

“Yes, you are. It’s not about the bird, is it?”

“I told you before. It’s about loss.”

“I know. Life does have a lot of loss in it. You’re almost forty. You’ll probably start buying sports cars and chasing blondes.”

“No. I’m not that guy,” I said. “I just hate how life takes everything away.”

“That’s ridiculous. Think of all the people in the world and what they don’t have. Now, think of all that you have. And tell me how life takes everything away from you.”

“Not from me, personally. From everyone. Nobody really tells you that when you’re Rufus’ age. We protect our kids from it. But it’s there.”

“God. That fucking bird,” she said.

She turned away from me, and reached over to flick the light off.

6

That was ordinary life, but the extraordinary had entered my life through the voices of birds. Whenever I went outside, or opened a window, I heard them. Too many of them. The voices all going on about food and shelter and war and children and work and flight and anger and joy. I could tell that much from the tones of their voices. I noticed that when a storm came, the gulls from the bay -- a good hour from us -- suddenly were on our rooftop. But then, I began to hear the voices of the birds change when a storm was predicted, as if they knew, many hours before a thunderstorm reached us, that it was going to descend. Any changes in their voices, or the amount of bickering, heralded nestlings. I began to hate crows, for I saw them dive for the babies, and heard the awful wailing of the mother birds at the death of a child.

Then, one evening we watched a TV show on a Wednesday night; it was still light out; I began to hear the birds squawking and thought I heard Fledge, so I went to the window, opening it.

“What’s up?” Jeanette asked.

“I heard something.”

She turned the television’s volume down, and listened. “I don’t hear anything. What was it?”

“Nothing,” I said. I had begun to lie to her about hearing the birds outside. Listening for Fledge, trying to see if there was a message I should be hearing. That’s what I had begun thinking: there was a message that might be delivered to me. Delivered unto me – it had begun to seem religious to me. Birds brought omens. God might speak through birds. I knew that was just my imagination, but something spiritual had entered my life through the sounds of the birds.

I took a day off from work, but didn’t tell my family. Instead, I took some binoculars and spent the day up in my sons’ tree fort, which nearly went into the thick woods behind our house.

I took water and sandwiches and soda; when I had to pee, I just peed off the tree. I listened all day to the birds, and I began to feel a change within me – toward nature. It made me sad in some way, because I began to see my wife as someone who would never truly understand me, and with whom I might never genuinely communicate what was within me. I loved my boys, but I knew they had other lives to live.