Why Peacocks?

by Sean Flynn

  Twelve hundred people got onto that train, and twelve hundred got on one earlier that day, and another later, and another after that. Hundreds of thousands of migrants were straggling into Europe in the summer of 2015, which had not been unexpected; the war in Syria had exacerbated ongoing crises of refugees from Afghanistan and Iraq. I had gone to Hungary to write about seventy-one of those people, four of whom were children. Smugglers they had paid for safe passage to Austria locked them in a refrigerated truck that used to haul processed chicken. The refrigeration unit no longer worked, but the truck was still airtight. Most likely, everyone in the back suffocated before they got north of Budapest. The smugglers abandoned the truck, and the migrants’ bodies had started to decompose by the time an Austrian highway worker found them baking on the side of the A4 a day and a half later.

  Millions of people fleeing war and famine can be seen either as a humanitarian crisis or, if you’re a sociopath, as an opportunity for grotesque political theater. Viktor Orbán, the autocrat who commandeered the prime minister’s office in 2010, chose the latter. He made a grand show of erecting a barbed-wire fence on the Serbian border to, in his telling, protect “Christian Europe” from an unchecked horde of Muslim invaders; and for a time, he corralled several thousand refugees inside Budapest’s main train station, through which they had traveled unimpeded for months. Not coincidentally, trapping people in the station provided a stark visual of a large crowd of exhausted brown faces that a nationalist goon could use to justify his purported defense of a continent. None of those refugees wanted to remain in Hungary—it’s a relatively poor country officially hostile to outsiders, and they were all waiting on outbound trains—but that was beside the point. Orbán claimed to be protecting the whole of Western Europe.

  Except he wasn’t. Aside from Europe not needing to be protected from exhausted and impoverished people whose immediate objective was simply not dying, Orbán wasn’t stopping anyone from migrating westward. That’s why I was in Zákány: The Hungarian authorities had merely diverted the refugees through Croatia and into a lonely, invisible border town. It was an illusion that made the lives of desperate people marginally more desperate while accomplishing nothing of substance.

  I would not have remembered that day, or thought of refugees, if my phone hadn’t reminded me. There is only so much unpleasantness one can comfortably hold in the easily accessible reaches of the brain. It’s not willful amnesia. I remember the stories, most of them, in broad strokes because each in its time consumed an unreasonable proportion of my mental and emotional attention. They’re macabre markers throwing shade on more significant memories. Calvin, for example, was born between sex traffickers in Moldova and prostitutes in Costa Rica, and he was a frog in the preschool play right after eleven men were killed on an exploding oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, which I know because I flew home during the ensuing environmental catastrophe to watch him. Emmett was hard into his minerals-and-gems phase when he asked me to bring him some rocks from Arizona, where nineteen firefighters had burned to death, and he was still in it when I brought him an opal from Australia, from where the search for a missing airliner was being run. Louise is tethered to all of them, a through line. She is the one to whom I repeat the terrible stories, who patiently watches each project spiral into an obsession until, suddenly and abruptly, it no longer is. It must be exhausting.

  I wondered if it was lonely, too.

  Swiping through photos, I remembered a thread of humor, black as tar, that made me smile grimly and shake my head. Orbán once bragged that he had been able to transform Hungary into a one-party fascist-curious state by fobbing off critics with superficial gestures, feints toward democracy. “The dance of the peacock,” he called it.

  The squeak of brakes interrupted, the school bus sliding to a stop. The birds ignored the sound, but in the spring, at the beginning of breeding season, the noise set off Carl and Mr. Pickle something awful. That’s how Calvin’s friends discovered we had peacocks, from the noise; until the pecans leafed out they could see straight up the driveway, see flashes of blue breast in the distance. Some of them told Calvin we must be rich, having peacocks and all.

  I don’t think he ever tried to dissuade them, and I’m certain he never mentioned that the coop was built with garbage.

  * * *

  I requisitioned two more hens from Valerie, one white, the other silver pied, which, as opposed to regular pied, means at least sixty percent of the feathers are white. She didn’t charge me. I’d given Valerie all of Carlotta’s eggs that summer, thirty of them, all fertile, and she knew I needed the hens. My friends at the UPA recommended a four-to-one ratio of boys to girls, but a total of ten birds was lunacy. Four girls and two boys, a total of six, was acceptable.

  Louise was in her office that evening, marking up a manuscript with scribbles only she could decode, turning the page sideways to make them all fit in the margins. I stood in the doorway, knowing I was interrupting, but it seemed important.

  “Valerie’s got those two girls ready for us.”

  She did not look up.

  “Did you hear me? They’re both white. They’ll even have white toodles.”

  “Okay,” she said, still scribbling, not looking up.

  I sat down. “So I guess I’ll start reframing the coop tomorrow.”

  She put her pen down. “You mean expanding the coop.”

  “Well, yes, obviously. They need more space.”

  Louise swiveled to face me. “Where will the boys’ bikes go? The firewood? The wheelbarrow? All those bags of topsoil? And our bikes—”

  “There’s room. I’ll push all that—”

  “All that? You mean the stuff we actually use?”

  “Yes. All that can fit in the front.”

  “Sounds like the birds are getting the whole barn,” she said. It sounded more like an accusation than a statement.

  “It’s not the whole barn. And what do you want me to do? We need two more hens—”

  “Need? We talk to the boys all the time about the difference between want and need.”

  She was making this sound like a choice, like I was being selfish. And I hated being compared to the boys, like I wanted Lucky Charms for dinner or something. “That’s cheap,” I told her. “I’m not a fucking child.”

  I knew that comment would sting. I stood up to walk away but stopped. I didn’t want to prove her point. When I turned back around, she was studying me.

  “Welp,” she said. I noticed the tiniest curl of a smile. “It’s cheaper than a sports car, I guess. And less obvious than dental implants…” She was choosing her words carefully. “Look, as long as you know this isn’t just about peacocks.” There was a gentleness to the way she said it that was unsettling, as though she saw something dangerously fragile in me that I could not.

  But now I had six of them. And a bigger coop to build.

  With the woodpile moved to one end, there was enough room to double the size of the pen. It was a straightforward expansion. The enclosure where Comet and Snowball had been locked up every night but not during the middle of the afternoon when foxes could stalk them in the yard would be removed, and I would frame wire walls across the front and on the new end. The roof sloped up steeply in that section, and the ceiling was almost twenty feet high at the back, which was excellent for the peacocks but required more wood and wire and time to seal up.

  A truck dumped another eight tons of sand near the coop. Calvin and Emmett helped move half of it, but there was no rush—the new hens wouldn’t be big enough to move in before January. I worked piecemeal on the enclosure for a couple of weeks, cutting a few boards here, tacking up a roll of chicken wire there, shoveling sand if I was feeling ambitious.

  Ethel was endlessly curious, following me around with her eyes, cocking her head at different sounds, the double click of a staple gun, the grumbly whine of a circular saw with a fading battery. Her gaze eventually would catch mine, and I’d squat down by the wire and talk to her. I’
d show her a tool and explain how it worked, or tell her what I was going to do with the rest of the afternoon, and then Carlotta would wander over and Carl and Mr. Pickle would follow because clearly something interesting was happening that might involve blueberries.

  It was possible that I enjoyed the peacocks more, collectively, in the weeks after the summer heat faded. There was no notable change in the girls from season to season; neither of them got broody in the summer, so they remained the same docile, pleasant company year-round. The boys, on the other hand, were at their most absurd. Their trains had fully molted, which reduced their overall length to less than half of their springtime prime. Instead of a bejeweled carpet flowing behind them, each had his tail feathers, gray as a midcentury chalkboard, cantilevering off his rump. Without the train for balance, the colors that remained—the cobalt breast and neck, the green-gold saddle between the wings, Mr. Pickle’s blue-black shoulders—were a preposterous mess. There was less to distract the eye from the legs and feet, which could at least be respectfully mistaken for the deadly appendages of a savage predator had they not been attached to a stubby, gaudy creature that appears less like an actual bird than a vandalized scrap of yard art. It was as if each had been demoted from peacock to a lesser, goofier species. A peacock without his train feathers has been stripped of the one thing that confirms he is, in fact, a peacock.

  And yet a peacock in autumn does not care. He does not even admit that it has happened.

  When his incoming coverts are barely more than nubs, a peacock will flex and rattle his tail feathers the same as he did in May or July, those glorious golden months when he was in full flower and his eyespots hovered in a swaying field of copper and turquoise and people gaped and convinced themselves, some of us, that this was a magnificent bird, majestic and mythic and quite possibly immortal. In the autumn, the presentation was ridiculous, gray feathers buzzing behind miniature eyespots and fishtails. But a peacock does not know that. He does not consult a mirror. He raises his embryonic train out of instinct and habit, but I prefer to consider it a defiant gesture, a bird quietly raging against the cruel caprice of nature.

  I took a picture of Carl displaying, as it were, for my friend Ted. We met decades ago at an alternative weekly that no longer exists; Ted was the receptionist before he got promoted to selling advertising space to escorts and porn shops, which was a way that newspapers made money before the Internet. He quit that, went to business school, got a good job at a bank and then better jobs at better banks until the last one laid him off. He was suffering an uncomfortably long period of middle-aged unemployment. A PEACOCK IN AUTUMN, I texted.

  He texted right back. YES, WE ARE.

  THE FEATHERS GROW BACK!

  UNTIL THEY DON’T, he replied.

  * * *

  One of the new hens was limping. That’s what we called them, The New Hens. Calvin and I had brought them home in January, but after the wrongheaded naming of Carlotta, none of us could commit, and we got frustrated trying to think of two perfect names, so we just called them the new hens as a placeholder.

  The pure white one might have had some Spalding in her, but I was only guessing by her crest, which seemed taller and tighter than even Carlotta’s. The silver pied, mostly white but smudged with charcoal, seemed to be all India blue. She was the one limping. On one of her feet was a dark lump that could have been bumblefoot, a staph infection that ground-dwelling birds are known to get. I couldn’t get close enough to confirm either way—the new hens were skittish—but I texted pictures and a short video to Burkett.

  He called me a little while later. “That’s a pretty serious limp,” he said. “But I can’t tell what’s on her foot. Can you get a better picture? You’re probably gonna have to catch her.”

  I did not want to catch her. I did not handle any of the peacocks. I liked sitting with them, and I was pleased that they were comfortable enough to line up for treats. But they are not cuddly animals. I had no desire to stroke their feathers and even less to agitate one. But what choice was there? Unchecked bumblefoot can kill a bird.

  Uncle John’s yellow net was folded on a shelf. I positioned Calvin in one corner in case I needed an extra set of hands, stretched the net out in front of me, and turned toward the pied girl. I hadn’t caught a peacock since Carl, and he’d been hobbled by poison. That was, what, eighteen months ago? Had these birds been here that long already?

  I herded the pied one into a corner, moving deliberately, convinced that I wouldn’t spook her if I took my time. It did not occur to me that a bird would consider a looming net a threat at any speed. Dragging it out just gave her time to plan. I’d forgotten how Valerie had grabbed Carl, the lightning snatch that didn’t give him time to resist.

  The bird was against the wall, two feet from me. And then she wasn’t. There was only an explosion of white and gray, head high and coming at me fast as an airbag. I ducked, twisted my face away. One of her feet caught me behind the ear, and three toes raked across my scalp.

  The pied girl was on the other side of the pen, standing calmly by herself. The other birds had all moved to the periphery, as if watching a street fight.

  “Well, that was stupid,” I muttered. Calvin was staring at me, slack-jawed. “Am I bleeding?”

  “No.” He blinked. “Maybe.”

  I could feel blood dripping down my neck. I touched my ear, examined it. There was a warm wetness in my hair, but nothing was missing. A couple of deep scratches. I dragged my fingers across my shirt, wiped off the blood.

  “Uh, yeah,” Calvin said. “I think you’re bleeding.” He seemed to be deciding whether this was frightening or funny.

  “She’s just scared, buddy,” I said. “She wasn’t trying to hurt me, only trying to get away. I wasn’t fast enough.”

  “Oh, I know,” he said, rolling his eyes. Ah, good. Funny.

  I unfurled the net and went directly at her with a quick, unbroken stride. She dodged right, then left, but I had her corralled. She flew up and I tossed the net over her. She dropped like a stone. I got to my knees, pressed her against me with one hand, and seized her legs with the other. I flicked at the black spot on her foot with my thumb. It fell away, leaving a bare, clean, uninfected foot. Poop.

  Calvin helped me untangle the net, and the pied hen hopped away. She was still limping, but it wasn’t because of an infection. I let out a long breath. Just poop. I hadn’t realized until then how much I’d feared an infection: I wasn’t sure I could afford another extended stay at the Birdie Boutique. Two hens were supposed to make things better, not cause more trouble.

  That’s the problem with trying to create your own Eden. There’s always a serpent hiding nearby, waiting to slip in and wreck the place.

  * * *

  All the questions I’d never asked Danielle were gnawing at me. Not in a bad way, necessarily. I liked my peacocks. They, or one of them, had been more expensive than I’d expected, but they were still pretty to look at, still attentive listeners, still a distraction, a personal counterweight to the professional. They were comfortable with me, and I took some strange pride in that fact.

  I met Danielle for coffee in a shop not too far from her farm. She told me about her grandfather and how the family came to live on those acres with horses and peacocks. She was an ocularist, too, hand-painting artificial eyes. There are only three in North Carolina, she told me, and I remarked that I wouldn’t expect there to be even that much of a demand. “More than you know,” she said, between diseases and injuries. “You know that Christmas movie where the kid wants a BB gun and everyone tells him he’ll shoot his eye out? Yeah, that happens.” A battered woman tends to lose her left eye because most men are right-handed. Also, blue eyes are the most difficult to paint.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone with an artificial eye,” I said.

  “If I do my job right,” she said, “you won’t.”

  We talked for a while longer before I brought up Burkett. She knew him. Not well, but he lived
a few miles up the road from the farm, had bought some hay from her once or twice. I told her about Carl, how he’d had his blood chelated like Keith Richards. She smiled, somewhere between sympathetic and amused.

  “So here’s the thing,” I said. “It’s kind of funny, really, and it doesn’t really matter, but I have to ask. Remember how you told us about the owl?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay, so I told Burkett about that, told him the whole story.”

  She nodded again.

  “And, um, well, he said that didn’t happen. Probably didn’t happen. That an owl wouldn’t bite off the head and leave the rest.”

  “He said that?”

  “Yeah. Like, right after I got them, too. I mean, I looked it up and it does happen sometimes, owls do bite off heads. But I’ve learned a lot of other things about peacocks, too, since then. So there was this one thing Burkett said that I was wondering about. He said—wait, let me make sure I’ve got the words right—he said, ‘Danielle’s been trying to get rid of those goddamned birds for years.’ ”

  She looked at me, held a blank expression for a few seconds.

  Then she laughed. Out loud, in a coffee shop. Laughed and laughed.

  “He really said that?” She laughed some more. “Okay, I was finding some headless birds. But one of those little sons of bitches would sit in front of the truck, right in front of the silver bumper, and pick a fight with himself. There’d be all these bloody spots on the bumper where he’d been pecking. And then he’d get up on the hood, all triumphant and dominant, like he won.”