Love and Ordinary Creatures

by Gwyn Hyman Rubio

  But you are my captive, he tells himself. When you had not yet come down from the trees of the ancient forests, I was a companion to you.

  She holds out her arm, and he dutifully goes to her.

  The instant his feet touch her silky skin, he realizes how self-deceptive he is, for there is no way he can own her when she wields so much power over him. A gift from Warramurrungundji, the Goddess of Creation, she is. But don’t all pleasures come as gifts from the Great Mother? Wasn’t the water that washed the powder dust off his feathers a gift, as well as his view of their backyard through the glass top of the kitchen door as she bathed him? The lacy foliage of the crape myrtles dancing like green-feathered hummingbirds in the breeze is a gift, along with the deep, fertile smell of the ocean and the shells scattered like strands of broken pearls upon the shore. Isn’t the wheep-wheep whistling of the oystercatcher—winging low over the foamy waves—a gift also?

  She retrieves the cobalt-blue bowl, and he rides her shoulder to the worktable. She puts the bowl on the rough wooden top, lowers herself onto a bench—positioned between the table legs—and with sturdy fingers pinches off a grape and offers it to him. He champs it noisily. She takes one for herself and sucks it into her mouth. She chews it luxuriously, every so often licking the juice off her bottom lip. She offers him another. He cradles it in his beak. Extending her long swan neck, she eases her head back and parts her lips in anticipation. He tilts forward, drops the white grape into the dark well, and follows the sensuous movement of her mouth and throat as she swallows. What he wouldn’t give to be that grape inside her mouth!

  “One for you and one for me,” she says, now feeding him every other grape until she is snipping the last one off. It is the plumpest one of all, he notices.

  He takes it from her fingertips, his heart exploding, his eyes hypnotized by her face, while he sups and swallows. Oh, how he yearns for the uncomplicated days with Theodore Pinter—when he was learning about love from afar and not caught in its throes—up close! Suddenly, he wants to go back to his life before the pet store, the old man, the net thrown over him, when he was but a young bird, nesting carefree in the hole of a gum tree, waiting for his parents to feed him. Both had reared him, but what he remembers most is his mother’s touch. How gentle her beak was! How tenderly she had fed him! Everything she did spoke of love. Oh, yes, to be that lighthearted fledgling once more!

  He trills to himself the beginning of “Summertime” and wonders where he first heard those words. Was Billie Holiday the one who had sung them, or was it Nina Simone?

  No, they had danced off Clarissa’s lips, he remembers, the day she brought him home from the pet store. The ride on the ferry from Swan Quarter, he recalls, had been long and hot, and she had rolled down the car windows to cool them off. He was crouched on his perch—nervously swaying from side to side, threatening her with hisses—but she had displayed no fear. Rather, she had unlatched the cage door, filled the empty space with her handsome face, and calmed him with the music of those words.

  Three

  Wary of the sun, she never goes to the beach until late afternoon. Her grandmother, she once confided to him, who loved her more than anyone, had died from too much gardening and too much sun. The cancer began as an inconspicuous spot on her shoulder, and before we knew it she was gone. She always reminds him that she rescued him from a country scorched by the sun’s harsh rays. “Thanks to me, your plumage is wrinkle-free,” she likes to tease him. “Yes, Caruso, I rescued you from that horrid pet store,” she then adds in a serious voice.

  Whenever she says this to him, he wants to set her straight. It was the old man, not her, who saved him from the worst of fates—a long, miserable life in a parrot breeding mill. “But what bird, you silly girl, would not choose to fly free?” he’d like to say but never would, even if he could, because he loves her, because Theodore Pinter told him that words could cut as deeply as bites inflicted by a parrot’s beak.

  Caruso remembers how hot it was that August day when the old man taught him about the harshness of words. The Shasta daisies—as Theodore Pinter called them—were hanging their heavy heads in the heat. Blue jays, their voices toolooling, were diving down to cool themselves off in the birdbath, and Caruso was envious as he watched them bathe. “Words can be as sharp as daggers,” the old man had said out of nowhere as they sat in his backyard, surrounded by a high brick wall splashed with English ivy. After retiring early at sixty-two, Theodore Pinter had moved back into his childhood home, then immediately hired a brick mason to construct the privacy wall. When it was finished, he removed a brick toward the rear near the hydrangea shrub, another up front beside the gate, and a third from the center. “This way, I could see her drinking her Scotch and soda at twilight,” he explained.

  As Caruso listened, he tried to understand why the old man had erected a wall with peepholes in the first place. Why didn’t he simply open his garden gate and visit with his love whenever she came out?

  “You might be wondering why I built this barrier between us,” Theodore Pinter said, as though reading Caruso’s thoughts. “But just think about it, Caruso. What’s a man to do when the love of his life chooses not to see that he still adores her? What’s he to do when her husband watches her every move as if she, not he, is the one who has lovers?”

  Caruso shook his head and fluffed out his feathers.

  “I’ll tell you what that man must do, my friend—wait. He must remain patient and love her from afar, though he lives next door to her. Sure, he steals the occasional glance and searches for any sign from her that it’s time to make his move. Meanwhile, he hides his true feelings, waves nonchalantly if they should spot each other on the sidewalk out front, nods agreeably if they happen to run into each other in the post office or at the bakery around the corner. Sometimes, he speaks to her, but the words from his mouth are dull and nondescript, conveying nothing of real substance, as if he is hiding his true feelings behind a mask. They are words about the weather or simply mundane phrases like How are you?—for the man is biding his time, playing a role, until he can take his mask off. The woman never asks him over, and he never asks her. And whenever he goes out, it’s with his colleagues from school, not with anyone who knew the two of them years ago. For there is something unspoken between them. Something he is afraid to hear should it not be what he hopes for. Something she might, at last, confirm—that she cannot love him the way he wants because no one could love him the way he loves her. Or it could be something more—the something he dreams of. The something she doesn’t say, he thinks, because she’s afraid of the truth—that he’s the one she should have chosen all along. So, my friend, I exist in a solitary world, hoping that one day the something I’ve always wished for will come true.”

  Theodore Pinter rocked his glass of Scotch and soda, clacking the ice cubes against one another. “Still, there are some connections between us,” he asserted softly. “I drink Scotch and soda now.” He smiled wistfully as he brought the rim to his lips and downed a little. “I don’t really like hard liquor,” he confessed, taking another sip, the muscles in his face tightening as he swallowed. “I only drink it to feel closer to her. I’ve adored Olivia Greenaway my whole life,” he went on. “We spent our childhood together. Whatever she asked me to do, I did. If she wanted me to pull taffy with her in the kitchen, I did it. We hopscotched on the sidewalk in front of her house. Skipped rope in the driveway. Threw jackstones and played Monopoly in her parlor. Everyone thought I was delicate. I wasn’t. I was a boy and liked doing boy things. I was skilled at marbles. Many a classmate lost their prized cat’s-eyes in a shooting match with me. Many admired my dexterity on a soccer field. Flexible and fast, I always was, but I gave those things up because I wanted to spend every waking second with her. You see, I had to be near her. I was obsessed. She was my heart—my heart,” he repeated loftily, pressing his open hand against his chest. “In the end, all that I did, none of it mattered because she didn’t see me as the boy next door who
adored her but only as another friend.”

  He finished off his drink, teased out the twist of lemon with his fingers, and tossed it into his mouth. He chewed the rind thoughtfully and gulped it down. Removing his glasses, he leaned forward with his elbows on the wrought iron table. “One day when we were in her kitchen, snacking on pimento cheese sandwiches and drinking glasses of sweet iced tea, she cupped her hand against my chest and said, ‘Oh, Teddy, you’re as soft as a girl.’ Soft, that seemingly benign word, was a dagger to my heart. What do you think, Caruso? Am I not hard enough to be a man?”

  Caruso had survived hard. Hard was the hand of man that chopped down the gum trees in which the cockatoo chicks were nesting. It was the hand of greed that kidnapped the fledglings and sold them into captivity for life. Hard was the narcissism clouding man’s vision, making him believe he was the only important species on the planet, while also pitting him against his own kind. Hard was the Englishman slaughtering the Aborigines for dog food, then countenancing their genocide.

  Caruso knew Theodore Pinter wasn’t hard, but he also knew he wasn’t soft either. Theodore Pinter had the right balance of soft and hard inside. Theodore Pinter was tender. “You think I’m too soft, too. Don’t you, Caruso?” Caruso ruffled his cheek feathers and squawked. He took three steps over the iron filigree top toward the old man, and they met crown-to-head, beak-to-nose. On the precipice of Dreamtime, they perched—intuitively understanding each other, yet unable to put this understanding into words. “Although her words hurt me,” the old man had murmured, tears filling his eyes, “mere words are impotent to describe how much I adore her. Even now, I can see the lovely whiteness of her fingers pushing gently against my dark-blue shirt.”

  The violet-blue straps of Clarissa’s bikini top look like petals of slender blue flag iris against her pale skin. Hugging a rolled-up beach towel under her arm, she presents her impeccable shoulder to him. He climbs up, and they head out the back door—never locked. She shuts it, then slams the screen door behind her. She is watchful of the harsh sun, but not of hard men who could be just as dangerous. As they descend the deck steps, Caruso makes note of the broom propped against the wall beside the door. His instincts of survival have crossed the Pacific Ocean with him, and if the broom has shifted even slightly upon their return, he’ll know it. Have no doubt—he will defend her if he has to, the way his parents often defended him. When he was a chick, he had looked on in horror as a marsupial, the size of a rat with a bushy tail, crawled along a branch toward the hole in which he nested, but with an alarming screech his father had swooped down to protect him. Ramming his wings against the predator’s back, he had pierced his furry body with his razor-sharp beak and sent him fleeing.

  Clarissa squats, and Caruso crosses from her shoulder to the handlebars. After depositing her towel in the wire basket, she straddles the bike, flips up the kickstand, and pedals off. “It’s a three-speed,” she has said. “Nothing fancy.” Caruso faces forward, trembling with pleasure as the ocean air whips over his feathers. Flinging back his head, he lets out a shriek, but this time she doesn’t tell him to be quiet. They ride down the dusty lane and onto the narrow paved road bordering the harbor. She pedals easily—her legs strong and muscular below her shorts. “This is a birdwatcher’s paradise,” she had boasted when he first came to live with her two years ago—as if he would derive joy from watching the little birdies, too. Yes, he is a warm-blooded vertebrate with wings and feathers, he must admit this, but he is more intelligent and beautiful than the simple birds who make this island their home. He is no common seagull, no diminutive piping plover, no silly sanderling, his black legs racing to and fro, chasing waves futilely as they break against the shore. He is a parrot. A virile Sulphur-crested Cockatoo. A Cacatua galerita galerita, a full twenty inches long. He would fully unfold his wings to let the breeze show off his snowy plumage, but he doesn’t, for then she—much too close to him for such a long ride—would see how much his wing feathers have grown.

  They pass a fishing boat docked in the harbor and spot a motorboat cutting through the smooth water of the sound. He glances back at Clarissa, and she smiles. They take Highway 12 north for miles and miles.

  Late in the day, the parking lot is empty. He hears only the rumble of the surf as it breaks against the shore and the lone cry of a seagull. Bike racks are to the left of the information board about riptides, but Clarissa never uses them. Instead, she stops at the bottom of the wooden steps, where she pushes down the kickstand and slides off the seat. Struggling out of her shorts, she places them in the basket and stands there—with her hands on her hips—before him, her hair flaming like ribbons of fire in the ocean breeze. He eyes her from top to bottom. In her vivid, violet-blue bikini, she is spectacular. His dazzling Eclectus Parrot!

  She leans over, and he passes to her shoulder. Grabbing the beach towel, she follows the walkway, built protectively over the dunes. He spots pennywort, surfing the mounds like dark green sand dollars. The seaside goldenrod is in bloom, and it makes her sneeze. “Bless you,” he says, and she answers, “Thank you.” There’s a Coke can lying next to a patch of wax myrtle, corralled by bunches of beach grass. The instant he spots it gleaming in the late afternoon sun, he screeches and flaps his wings to let her know it’s there. She turns toward it. “I see it, Caruso,” she says. “But we aren’t allowed on the dunes. The park rangers will have to get it later. Why do we act like the planet is ours alone?” she asks him, touching his toes tenderly. In this way, they are allies. “Defenders of the earth,” she calls them whenever they pick up plastic bottles along the beach.

  Three weeks ago, they had noticed the most egregious filth. Perched on her shoulder, he was the lookout, same as always, when his eyes landed on a white plastic blob in the sand dunes to the right of them. Immediately, he swiveled toward it, unleashing a shrill shriek and flapping his wings, until she came to a standstill. “Dammit,” she said, through clenched teeth. “Why didn’t she toss that dirty diaper in the trash can? Don’t you just hate people sometimes, Caruso?” He had thought about that for a second. He loved Clarissa. Yet wasn’t she people, too? Still, he understood what she was saying. Birds did things differently. A blue tit, for instance, after feeding her chick, would nudge its rear, prompting it to lift up its rump and release its white sac of waste. Which she would then eat, thus keeping her chick safe from predators by eliminating any trace of her nest. The lyrebird of Australia would gather together her chick’s excretions and release them into a nearby stream.

  “Ocracoke is a fragile, thirty-foot lens of moving sand, as flowing as the sea,” she quotes for the umpteenth time to him as she traipses over the weathered planks. “Don’t take my word for it, Caruso. That’s what the experts say.” He makes a trilling noise to signal he’s listening. “The barrier islands can’t be stabilized, and shouldn’t be civilized,” she says, peeking back at the Coke can. “They shift freely and, like hurricanes, go wherever they want.” She laughs, and he makes a laughing sound with her.

  At the end of the walkway, she hangs her towel over the railing and tells him to wait for her on the post. “Don’t fret. I’ll be right back,” she says, slipping off her orange flip-flops, her feet sinking into the white sand, her heels bobbing, as she sprints toward the water. A wave licks her toes, and she squeals. Twisting around, she waves gingerly at him and plows forward, the breakers crashing against her thighs. Lifting up her arms, she transforms her body into an arrow and vanishes into a blue-gray swell.

  Anxious, he keeps his eyes on her. Though she’s a strong swimmer, the riptides here are deadly—like saltwater crocodiles lurking beneath the surface—and he doesn’t blink until he spots her white arms digging through the billows, her legs kicking up plumes of froth. Within seconds, she disappears again. He scans the waves on the purple-red horizon, a tight knot of fear in his crop. Soon, it will be too dark to see her. She resurfaces. Relieved, he slings back his head, flaps his wings frenetically, and screams, but she doesn’t turn back to s
hore. At the first sign of trouble, he’ll soar out to her. Swooping down, he’ll snatch her hair in his claws and lift her head above the water. It will be then she’ll know what he has kept hidden from her. She failed to clip his wing feathers short enough to keep his flight to a brief flutter.

  He shrieks some more—so vehemently he feels his throat aching. Why won’t she look his way? he thinks. He is leaning forward, his wings outstretched for takeoff, when he notices a dark figure riding over the swells. She waves, signaling she’s all right, but the figure on the surfboard keeps rolling. Moments later, the two of them are paddling through the choppy surf toward the beach.

  Together, they trudge through the deep sand. She is laughing, her white skin glowing like the inside of a conch shell in the fading light. “I wasn’t in any trouble,” she says, nearing the walkway, “but thank you for paddling all the way out to get me.”

  “My pleasure,” the man says, stopping abruptly in front of the post. “What on earth is that?” he asks, pointing at Caruso.

  That, Caruso thinks indignantly. He’s not a that. He’s a psittacid of importance.

  The man takes another step, staring wide-eyed at him. Alarmed, Caruso sits upright, slicks his feathers down, and lifts a threatening foot.

  “I wouldn’t get too close, if I were you,” Clarissa warns.

  The man halts.

  “Don’t look at him directly,” she says. “That’s what predators do.”

  “Will it bite?” he asks, looking away.

  It, Caruso thinks, no longer fearful. He’s not an it, either. He and his kind have been written about and painted for centuries. As far back as 1250, the Saracen Sultan sent him to the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of German States as a gift. Insulted all over again, Caruso glares at the man.