Buddy

by Brian McGrory

  So I did, and we did, and when I woke up on Saturday morning at dawn’s early light, it was to the sound of a surprisingly virulent chirping emanating from the living room of Pam’s house. “What the hell is that?” I asked, groggy.

  Pam, smiling in bed at this unholy hour, simply said, “Buddy.” Then she added, “Isn’t she hilarious? She’s so happy.”

  Later that morning, after I returned from the field with the dogs, I found Pam sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper with Buddy curled up on her lap, sound asleep. I fed the dogs—quietly, at Pam’s request, so as not to wake the bird—and sat down with her. I finally summoned the courage to ask the question that had been in the forefront of my thoughts for the last several weeks. “What are you going to do about Buddy?”

  I remained fairly confident—or maybe extremely hopeful—that she had to do something. I mean, people don’t keep chickens as pets—or at least that’s what I thought at the time, until I read up on the topic and realized that, actually, many people do keep chickens as pets. But at the time I could make the effective argument that to keep a chicken in a suburban home was unfair to none other than the chicken, who wouldn’t be allowed to explore her full chickenness living in a cage in a living room and waiting every night for another episode of SpongeBob SquarePants with her two little girls.

  Plus I didn’t think I’d have to make the argument for a busy mother with a demanding job owning a veterinary clinic at a point in her life when she was preparing to move into a new house with a somewhat pain in the ass but relentlessly charming guy that a chicken just didn’t fit. It was obvious.

  But I knew Pam. I knew her kids. I knew their bottomless capacity for animals and that it transcended species. They loved bunnies and had two, which I didn’t quite understand. They loved horses, which I definitely didn’t understand. They loved cats and guinea pigs and hamsters and rats. If it could walk or crawl, they basically loved it. They loved this chick, and their love scared the living bejesus out of me.

  Pam didn’t really look up at me while she answered, which was never a good sign. Staring straight at her newspaper, she replied, “I’m going to find her a home. I’ll get her on a farm around here, hopefully close enough where the kids can go visit her.”

  That washed over me like warm water in a whirlpool tub, that dose of common sense. She had thought about it, even calculated it, and agreed that the chicken would be better off living among her own breed. Not knowing when to let good things lie, I added, “You really need to let her be a chicken.”

  Pam didn’t really need to hear that and shot back, “She is being a chicken. I’ve been reading up on it”—okay, very bad sign—“and there are a lot of ways to be a chicken, all of them better than being crammed in some tiny henhouse forced to lay eggs for an unappreciative dairy farmer. I just need to find the right place for her.”

  I said, “What about your ex? It was his idea. His experiment. His chicken. What does he propose doing?”

  “He called Barn Babies. It’s that traveling petting zoo he hires for all the kids’ birthday parties. They said they’d take her. But I called the owner and asked what happens when Buddy’s not a chick anymore, and all she could tell me is that there were no guarantees about what would happen.”

  With her index finger she gently stroked Buddy’s head, the little creature waking up from a slumber to quietly coo at her mother hen.

  Pam added, “I’m not going to let some circus group kill Buddy just because she grows up. What’s fair about that?”

  Chickens die every day by the hundreds of thousands in the name of food, big chickens, small chickens, young chickens, old chickens. There was nothing fair about it, but it was life. Still, this kind of outlook would not have been well received, so I kept my mouth shut on the topic. Actually, what I said was “You’ll find just the right place” and headed upstairs to take a shower.

  Ends up, “just the right place” wasn’t so easy to find, although please don’t accuse me of cynicism if I harbor the sense that maybe Pam wasn’t looking all that hard. She would set out with Buddy in a box to visit area farms. She would come back with Buddy in a box, only mildly disappointed with the news that the farmers wouldn’t add an outsider to their flock, what with the potential for diseases and all. The fear she saw in my eyes prompted her to keep trying.

  She made calls. I heard them. She sent e-mails to various farmers and groups. I saw them. She even reached out to her old veterinarian school contacts and to the author of a book about backyard chickens. She hit one wall after another, and it never seemed to particularly bother her.

  All the while, Buddy grew—and fast. Her yellow feathers were turning white. The once cavernous dog crate began to look tight. It didn’t matter to the kids, who continued to cradle her in their arms, sit her on their laps as they watched TV, play with her on the kitchen floor, and generally fuss all over her. In truth, I kept waiting for the appeal of Buddy to wear off, to the point where she’d be sitting unnoticed for long swaths of time in a lonely crate and I could make the argument that life wasn’t being fair to her anymore. That did not happen.

  One early summer evening I arrived at Pam’s house after work to find Buddy and the kids in the yard outside, the bird tentatively high-stepping around the lawn, picking at the grass with her beak, the kids delighting in her every maneuver.

  “Brian,” Caroline called out in her squeaky voice as I got out of my car, “Buddy loves it out here. Look at her. She loves it.”

  Abigail swooped Buddy up in her arms, thrust her toward me, and said, “Pet her.”

  “I’m not going to pet the chicken,” I said, reflexively stepping away.

  “C’mon, pet her,” she said again, holding the chicken closer.

  “Abs, I’m not going to pet the chicken.”

  Abigail got a delighted look on her face, mischievous at the same time, and called out, “Awww, great big Bwian is afwaid of a lil lil chicken. That’s too bad for Bwian.” Bwian, she said, like it’s spelled.

  Caroline started chiming in. Buddy was squawking. I looked up and saw Pam in the door laughing.

  It was four on one, unless you include the two dogs, Baker and Walter, who were trying to jump on me, but they weren’t really taking sides. They just wanted me to throw the ball for them. So I reached my left hand out and went to pat this bird who, on the occasion of our last physical contact, had bitten me. As my fingers got close to her downy, increasingly white flank, she let out a long, loud guttural sound that basically said, Touch me and I’ll peck your eyes out.

  I stepped back, probably quicker than I intended. The kids laughed—at me, not with me. Pam was smiling. The joke was on Bwian. And I was just starting to get a very clear idea of the extent of it.

  “Brian’s a bigger chicken than Buddy,” Abigail said. Before she even finished her thought, young Caroline let out a little chicken squawk.

  Dinners and work and all that kind of stuff kept me in the city for a few nights, so when I finally found myself back in suburbia, it was Friday evening, the kids were at their father’s again, and Pam’s house was very quiet when I arrived. We headed out for a suburban dinner, meaning something extraordinarily mediocre, invariably involving too much cheese. But the food didn’t matter. Much as I adored the kids, it was always nice getting a good, healthy dose of Pam alone. We talked, we laughed, we drank a little bit, and when we got home, I didn’t notice anything different at all.

  The next morning, getting ready to head to the field with the dogs, I saw there was no crate in the living room, meaning there was no Buddy in the crate. My heart lightened. Whimsical thoughts danced through my brain. Pam had finally come to terms with the fact that Buddy should be at a farm, needed to be at a farm, and everyone involved was the better for it. For the life of me, I couldn’t believe she hadn’t told me about it the night before or when it happened. I mean, we only talked on the phone about ten times a day. She must have been holding it back as a surprise.

  I tried to
control my joy, thinking that was best in this situation. Pam was in the kitchen when I casually walked in.

  “Are we missing something here?” I asked. Keep your voice straight, Brian. Straight.

  She looked at me quizzically.

  “Buddy,” I said. “Where’s Buddy?”

  Pam was still wearing her trademark surgical scrubs and a heavy sweatshirt. It could be ninety degrees and that was what she wore to bed, unless she was feeling particularly risqué, and then it was a T-shirt and surgical scrubs. Her hair was tangled. Her eyes were sleepy. I was expecting her to take a seat and start telling me a long story about her sad kids, who had finally realized that they had to let Buddy be the bird she can be, and the nice farmer who’d agreed to take her in.

  But no, that story never came. Instead, Pam said, “Oh, she’s in the garage.”

  Although it wasn’t the answer I’d been hoping for or expecting, it was certainly something I could work with, an improvement over Buddy as living room–based pet. The move to the garage, at the very least, was a strong signal that the women of Checkerberry Circle were starting to get sick of their chirping bird. I had to assume, happily, that we were a halfway house to a farm.

  “When you take the dogs, would you mind letting her outside?” Pam added casually, pouring herself a cup of coffee.

  The three of us made for the front door, the two dogs bouncing with excitement about the tennis ball–fetching session that was about to come, the human endlessly curious about what he was about to find in the garage. I pulled on the door, but it didn’t budge. I was basically the last person in suburbia to understand that that isn’t how anyone opened garage doors anymore. I figured it out, opened Pam’s SUV, which was parked in the driveway, and hit the door opener.

  I walked into the dank space filled with old furniture spread everywhere, dried-out leaves on the floor, and garden tools and the like lining the walls, and saw nothing that even resembled a bird. I poked around the kids’ bikes, their scooters, a giant stuffed horse, but still nothing.

  “Buddy?” I said quietly. “Buddy, are you here?”

  I was really hoping to find her sitting in a small cage by the trash, but I knew that was too much to ask. Sharper now: “Buddy?”

  I heard a soft, guttural squawk. I saw something out of the corner of my eye, something that was actually above eye level. I looked up, surprised, and saw Buddy sitting on a shelf in the rear of the garage behind a mess of mismatched and otherwise useless furniture. My God, Pam had her on a shelf. This woman/bird love affair was finally, decisively over. Common sense wins again. Next stop: poultry farm.

  She squawked louder now, and I asked if she needed a hand.

  “Buddy, you poor thing,” I said, my point being to press the point that she certainly appeared on the outs, a far cry from the bird who’d lived on the living room floor curled up with a stuffed animal in her likeness and free constantly to watch TV with two adoring girls.

  I started pushing through furniture to get to her, when she did something that I’ll never forget: she stood up on the shelf and leaped effortlessly down upon an old dining room table right beneath it, the surface of the table covered with discarded beach towels. She walked purposefully across the dining room table and leaped upon a chair, similarly covered in a sheet. From the chair she floated casually to the ground. The whole journey took about twenty seconds. Once on cement, she strutted proudly through the garage door to the great outdoors to greet the new day.

  Left behind, I noticed that there was a nest of quilts and blankets on the shelf that was serving as Buddy’s bed. I think the top one was angora, but I could be wrong. It couldn’t have been cashmere, right? Jesus. I followed her outside to see a much livelier Pam walk out the front door carrying a cereal bowl filled with oatmeal, shredded cheese, and cracked corn. She spread her arms wide and excitedly talked to Buddy in what can only be described as her chicken voice, telling her how pretty she was, how smart she was, and how much she’d love her breakfast. The bird cooed along as though she were trying to sing a song of thanks. And then she pecked ravenously at the contents of the bowl.

  Later that morning, Pam and I were heading out to look at houses. Buddy was high-stepping around the lawn.

  “She’s okay here?” I asked, starting my car.

  “She’s fine,” Pam said, settling into the passenger seat, peering across the dashboard at the bird.

  “She won’t go anywhere?”

  “Where would she go that’s better than here?” Pam asked.

  As I backed out, Pam rolled her window down. “Hold on,” she said to me. Then, to the bird, “Bye, Boo-Boo. Have a good afternoon!”

  Boo-Boo? The bird had a nickname? People, let alone Pam, don’t give away animals with nicknames. Later that night, Buddy took the reverse route to bed, hopping onto the chair, then the table, then the quilt-lined shelf. After dark Pam shut the door to protect her from coyotes, which, by the way, had become my new, favorite, nondomesticated animal, such that I made my screen saver at work an outsized photograph of a coyote who was shooting a look at the camera that basically said, “Don’t you worry, I’ll take care of everything.” The food chain is a vital part of our natural world.

  “Good night, Boo,” I heard Pam say from the kitchen.

  And no one ever spoke of getting rid of Boo again—well, no one not named Brian.

  10

  As a kid, I was given what almost seem like unfair advantages in my life. No, we didn’t have a lot of money, though I imagine we had enough. My first memories were of our apartment on the bottom floor of a two-decker house on a crowded one-way street in the Boston neighborhood of Roslindale. It was pure bliss. My grandparents, who owned the house, lived upstairs. I slept on the upper bunk in a bedroom with my sister Colleen, who would tell me ghost stories that I didn’t want to hear on our way to sleep. My other, more maternal sister, Carole, slept in the refinished attic.

  The front yard was so small you could reach every corner by standing in the middle, but it didn’t seem to matter. I’d build snow forts as my grandfather, a retired Boston police sergeant, watched from the sun porch on the second floor. One day a paving truck showed up and covered the whole backyard, such as it was, in blacktop, because my grandmother had grown tired of my grandfather’s failure to mow it. When I got home from school that day, it was as if Heaven itself had paid a visit to our house; we could now bounce balls and draw with chalk and not get yelled at for being in the street. Everything was in walking distance, whether it was Boschetto Bakery or Ashmont Discount or the Rialto Theatre in Roslindale Square, or the Cumberland Farms a block away. Healy Field, a huge park with baseball diamonds, was just behind our house. Everything was crowded and loud and busy, meaning it was perfect.

  Then one day we moved. I remember the truck slowly meandering down our street, the neighbors shedding tears, my sisters too distraught to talk for the entire ride down the highway to the nearby suburb of Weymouth, where my proud parents had bought our own house, with our own grassy yard, where I would have my own room. I was eight years old, and pretty much everything I knew was gone.

  I was surprised to discover that Weymouth was great for many reasons: the people, the schools, the teachers, the parks, the basketball hoop in our narrow driveway, the bedrock normalcy of it all. There was nothing stuck up about it. Parents worked hard. Kids got jobs. Nobody lorded over anyone with new cars or nicer clothes or built-in swimming pools. I was able to play sports, make good friends, find part-time work. The real advantage I had, though, was two wise and wonderful parents.

  Yvonne and Leo McGrory knew the rare times to hover but mostly when to pull back. They gave me the freedom to think, to experiment, to make mistakes, which is something I didn’t see nearly enough of in the girls’ world of contemporary suburbia. I often came home from school to an empty house, which was great. I had to find my own rides to work. When I graduated from college, my father proudly handed me a $35 golf putter as a gift and said, “Congratulations, you d
id exactly what you were supposed to do.” Nobody nagged me about getting my homework done. Of course, if I showed up with anything but As and Bs on a report card, I caught holy hell.

  These days, every game, every recital, every pageant, is a capital-E Event, parents in suits and dresses jostling for the best seats, cameras whirring, kids constantly looking from the stage or the court for their family in the stands. There are Brazilian supermodels who aren’t photographed as often as a typical kid in the year 2012. In my entire childhood, I’m not sure I ever made it to video.

  For all their wisdom and strengths, my parents, however, had one basic shortcoming: they weren’t dog people. They didn’t get dogs, didn’t want dogs, and were forced to spend an outsized amount of their time battling my pleas to get a dog.

  Like so many other kids, I had a fantasy of what it would be, me and my dog. I saw us sleeping together, eating together, walking together, playing together. I saw the dog doing great things for me and me doing great things for the dog. We would be best friends, inseparable soul mates. People would say, Wow, they even look alike, this boy and his dog. He’d be the one I’d confide in after a particularly tough day at school or a bad loss on the Little League diamond. I’d be the one he’d come to if his paw was ever sore or he had a sour stomach. It would be two as one, me and my dog.

  Miraculously, when I was eleven or twelve, I wore them down. I don’t know what put them over the edge or whether it was just the constancy of it all. But one day, my father told me we’d take a drive to the Weymouth dog pound to see what they had. I didn’t know much then, but I certainly knew this: a father doesn’t take his son to the pound and come away empty-handed.

  The Weymouth dog pound was at the end of a dead-end street next to the town incinerator, back when towns had incinerators. We walked inside, and I realized it was nothing more than a glorified garage with hard, unforgiving floors and unromantic cages lining the walls. I’m not sure exactly what I had expected, but it wasn’t that. In those cages were dogs—big dogs, small dogs, silent dogs, loud dogs, young dogs, and old dogs. I paced every cage, analyzing every dog, taking note of who approached the metal wire and who hung back in the shadows, who seemed hyperactive and who seemed calm. There was another variable that kept entering my mind: who was particularly adoptable and who wasn’t. To that last point, I kept focusing on a mangy German shepherd mix who simply sat alone in a cage with a vacant look, so skinny you could see every one of his ribs. As I methodically made my rounds, I kept coming back to one thought: if I didn’t take the shepherd, nobody would. Every kid that age lives a hero fantasy. That dog would rescue me from a life of boredom, and I would rescue him from a life of confinement.