Buddy

by Brian McGrory

  Pam’s never been one to let life happen to her. As a kid growing up with relatively modest means in central New Jersey, she set her sights on an Ivy League School, the University of Pennsylvania, and got there. Once in college, she set out after her lifelong dream of getting into veterinary school, and she achieved that as well, also at Penn. She opened her own clinic in Boston. She juggles that with her two daughters and menagerie of animals and me. Mostly, it all seems to work. So by that day’s end, she was walking the dogs around the neighborhood looking for a house that might happen to have a black SUV parked in a driveway. Of course, she found one, on a dead end—rather, a cul-de-sac—one street over, an oversized Colonial with an impeccably landscaped yard.

  “It’s really far away,” she groused when she got back home.

  “So you couldn’t hear Buddy when you were down there?”

  “Well, a little bit. Way in the distance. But it was a nice, soothing sound.”

  That is what I was up against.

  I convinced Pam that she couldn’t knock on their door, couldn’t bake them a pie, couldn’t invite them over to dinner—unless it was for roast chicken or chicken pot pie. Instead we waited for the next shoe to drop, assuming there would be one, and while we waited, Pam rededicated herself to the role of helping Buddy settle into his new environment.

  More than a few times, I would look out the kitchen windows, the ones over the sink, and get a back view of Pam and Buddy sitting side by side on the top step of our farmer’s porch. I could hear her saying again and again in her whimsical chicken voice, “Buddy, you’re so handsome and it’s so nice here. You don’t need to crow all day. Nobody’s going to get you. You can be a good, quiet boy.” He would, in turn, make appreciative and affectionate little cawing sounds at her, almost apologetic in their tone. I couldn’t help but think that he knew one true thing, and that was that nobody else in his life, in his kingdom, understood him—and, in fact, loved him—like the woman sitting next to him on the step.

  A week passed, then another, and another still. Pam was spending far more time in the yard, helping Buddy acclimate and having surprising success. The crowing wasn’t as loud and didn’t happen as often, though, believe me, that’s like saying a hurricane wasn’t as windy as the forecasters said. He was occasionally still a screaming, howling presence that wasn’t making life easy for anyone.

  On Halloween morning 2010, I was sitting on the couch with the Sunday New York Times, mentally preparing for the Patriots game coming up that afternoon, a pair of retrievers sprawled nearby on the floor, when the doorbell sounded. The dogs went berserk. The cats ran for cover. Buddy began crowing. And I heard Pam and the kids chatting with whoever it was on the porch. I assumed it was someone selling Girl Scout cookies or on some other all-American pursuit.

  Next thing I know, I see Pam and a woman in her sixties walking across our lawn, Buddy trailing behind them, heading in the direction of his red-and-cream-colored rooster palace. Through the living room windows, I could see the woman climb the ramp and actually walk into the house—a perfect stranger taking a tour of our obscenely expensive shed. She stayed in there for longer than should be considered normal, not that any of it was normal. In a few minutes she emerged with a big smile on her face, she and Pam chatting and laughing. She walked around the outside of the house, pausing at the front transom window, pointing upward, and saying something that made Pam laugh. She pulled a pink pad out of her shoulder bag, made some notes, tore off a sheet, and handed it to Pam. The two of them walked back across the yard like best friends.

  Ten or so minutes later, I heard a car door shut, tires on the gravel driveway, the porch door open, and footsteps inside. That’s when Pam suddenly appeared before me, clutching the salmon-colored sheet of paper she had been given outside.

  “We passed,” she said simply, her wide smile telling me it must have been an important test.

  “Passed what?” I asked.

  “Buddy. His rooster house.”

  She handed me the slip of paper, which had the state of Massachusetts seal on top and beside that the agency names, “Department of Agricultural Resources. Bureau of Animal Health.”

  Great. My old life was roughly two galaxies away. I now lived one that required visits from the farm animal inspector. Below that was a list of specific animals, from cattle (dairy, beef, or steers) to goats to sheep to swine. We fell into the “Other” category, just below equines and rabbits. The nice inspector had written “Rooster—1” on an empty line. To the question, “Do animals listed appear to be free from contagious disease?” she had written simply, “Yes.”

  It was the next question, though, that I’m sure gave everyone a good laugh: “Are accommodations adequate with reference to situation, cleanliness, light, ventilation, and water supply?”

  Adequate ventilation? I assumed that the two screened windows and the cedar double doors probably provided most of that. Light? This certainly was the only rooster in these United States with the benefit of a transom window. Situation? You could fit twenty of Buddy’s rooster friends in there jumping up and down on the world’s bounciest trampoline, and they’d still have plenty of room. Cleanliness? I think it was cleaner than the kids’ rooms.

  I looked up at Pam, who was still beaming and about to explain why. “She told me it was the single nicest rooster dwelling she had come across in more than thirty years of inspections.”

  How about the single nicest rooster dwelling any inspector anywhere had ever come across in the history of inspections?

  It was nice to see Pam so bubbly about it, but in truth, in her triumph, I was coming to terms with my own sudden sensation of deflation.

  “Did she say what brought her out here?” I asked.

  “Not really,” Pam said. “I was thinking it was a little weird, too, and I kind of asked. But she said she works Sundays because she has a better chance of catching people at home than during the week.”

  That sounded mildly plausible, but in my heart and in my head, I knew that an inspector doesn’t just happen to wander by the house unannounced on a nondescript Sunday morning and knock on the door. The rooster house, first and foremost, looks about as much like a rooster house as I look like an NFL quarterback. She had to have been told that a rooster lived there. And maybe it was my thirty years in the newspaper business that was causing me to connect too many dots, but I imagine the person who began this whole process just happened to drive a black sport-utility vehicle.

  The guy with the camera calls the town. The town notifies the inspector. The livestock inspector comes to the house, figuring that the best way to indict the amateur chicken owners is to cite them for improper care of the animal and suggest they get rid of that which they are unable to handle. Then she gets there and, holy Christ, it’s the Taj Mahal of chicken coops.

  All of which meant that my one government-sanctioned shot at emancipation from this creature had suddenly and officially backfired.

  “She did say that this town likes to honor its farming legacy,” Pam said, adding “There are no laws, no ordinances, against livestock, and in fact, the community leaders encourage it.”

  Great. Just great. This bird was rolling sevens everywhere he turned.

  By that point Buddy must have heard Pam’s voice, because he had waddled to a patch of grass right beneath an open living room window and proceeded to let out a thunderous cock-a-doodle-doo that caused even the dogs, who had grown used to his noise, to jump to their feet. The funny thing, though, was that I didn’t sense a tone of complaint in his howl but a sense of triumph—Buddy the conqueror. The rooster pretty much had me beat.

  21

  I’ll say this for Buddy: he was a more sophisticated enemy than I had ever given him credit for, a devious little devil to the point that I found myself one day Googling “Do chickens have brains?” I knew the answer. I just wanted to understand it better.

  I got a ream of feedback in return, almost all of it showing that, yes, in fact, chickens may
not have big brains, but they certainly have agile ones, with Lesley Rogers, described in one website after another as a “prominent avian physiologist,” concluding that chickens have “cognitive capacities equivalent to those of mammals, even primates.” Great. Buddy was as clever as a chimp.

  That wasn’t really news to me, not, for instance, on the late-autumn day when I walked outside to see Abigail, Caroline, and their friend Claire doing what they loved best, which was running in wide circles and leaping across horse jumps as they videotaped one another’s efforts with their mother’s iPhone. Buddy wanted in, to the point that he would run all the way up to the wooden jumps, where he would stop and cluck in a frustrated tone.

  “Come on, Boo-Boo,” Caroline said, urging him, from the other side of the raised pole, to leap over it.

  Buddy cackled some more. Caroline offered another dose of encouragement. Eventually the bird walked around the jump and followed the kids along their route. I watched as Abigail nearly tripped over him, bent down, and said sternly, “Buddy, stay out of the way.” I can’t tell you that he understood the exact meaning of her words, but I will report that he walked toward the dogs, who were lying off to the side chewing sticks, and sprawled out between them. That bird scared me in a variety of ways.

  “Good boy, Buddy!” Caroline yelled over. Then she ran inside to get him a fistful of Parmigiano-Reggiano.

  It wasn’t exactly that way when it was me and him, which is what I mean about his sinister nature.

  He developed numerous ways to attack me, like an allstar pitcher expert at changing his speeds. He was so slick, so seemingly knowledgeable about my movements around the yard, where he might trap me, how I’d react, when he would thrust, whether he should parry, it wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d sat in his rooster house in the dark of the night studying film.

  Interesting that when he’s with the dogs, he never looks behind him. And when he’s reading the paper, he’s essentially blocking his own view of anything in front of him. Look at how he’s lamenting the condition of his lawn in the far corner, basically trapping himself in an area with no escape.

  There was, of course, the blitz. I’m out in the yard, Buddy says, “Screw it,” and charges like a linebacker jacked up on every imaginable steroid. There was no finesse involved with it, no fakery, no mild chicanery. No, it was just Buddy sprinting in my direction, usually while ca-cawing in as menacing a voice as he could muster, his beady little eyes bulging out of the sides of his furious, puffed-out face. Unless and until you’ve had a twenty-pound rooster racing at your legs and midsection at a speed you didn’t think possible for him to achieve, it’s hard to imagine the gamut of emotions involved—white shock, abject fear, a hazy sense of regret that you may never partake in sexual relations again.

  Then there’s the “Wouldn’t it be nice to be friends” approach, where Buddy gradually, casually pecks at the lawn as I throw the tennis ball for the dogs, slowly coming closer, closer still, don’t-mind-me-I’m-just-finding-all-kinds-of-interesting-bugs, until, Bam! he’s on me, euphorically going after my legs, the expression on his face scarily similar to Jack Nicholson’s in The Shining. The dogs give me a look like You didn’t fall for that again, did you? What a waste of thumbs.

  There’s the shuffling sidestep, or the sidestep shuffle, a move that should be familiar to anyone who’s ever darkened the doors of a boxing gym in South Boston or Brockton: Buddy approaches unabashedly from the side, does a little two-step, and there I am, engaged in a fight I never wanted.

  Finally there’s the stand and peck, which, the fatter he gets, the more he falls back on. It basically involves him picking the door he thinks I’m coming out of next, positioning himself near it, often just out of sight, and lunging in my direction the moment he has a clear view. In a variation on a theme, sometimes he hides in the hostas by the side gate, only to emerge the moment I push the gate open on my way in from wherever I’ve been.

  All of which has required me to develop my own defensive strategies. On the blitz, I used to simply turn and run until I quickly realized that a man being pursued by a frantic rooster around the front and side yards of his house caused quite a stir among passing drivers. There’s surprisingly little sympathy, or even empathy, apparent. More often it’s hilarity. That’s not to say that fleeing isn’t still a fallback. Sometimes it’s just reflex, and the good news is that Buddy generally tires out after a minute or two of running. The bad news is that so do I.

  I open doors to the outside slowly. I walk softly and carry a rolled-up newspaper. I peer into the gardens before pushing on the gate. And when Buddy’s doing the peck-at-the-grass routine, I slowly, calmly migrate to another part of the yard.

  “You have to pick him up and hold him,” Pam told me one morning for about the thirtieth time. That time, as during virtually every other before that, she happened to be cradling him in her arms, the chicken loving every minute of it, shooting me a look that said, as the kids so often do, “She’s mine.”

  “If you hold him, it shows your dominance,” Pam said. “Here, just take him.” She held him in my direction. Buddy let out a loud squawk. I backed away. Pam pulled him back in.

  “I’m not touching that thing,” I said.

  The good news is, he’s never really touched me, either—not hard anyway, not like he once did with his chicken sitter, an uncommonly nice guy by the name of Dennis who regrettably fell for the old “Let’s be friends” routine one Saturday morning, which left his blood spurting at a ninety-degree angle from his right calf. Our neighbor Tim rushed over with a tourniquet to stem the bleeding. “I’m fine,” Dennis assured us when we got home from a weekend away. He said it as he was limping to his car as fast as he could to get the hell away from our house.

  No, Buddy and I had engaged in many battles, but they had always ended in a draw, typically with a frustrated chicken undoubtedly vowing to himself that the next outcome would be significantly different. I will say this: in every one of the encounters, Dennis was vividly on my mind. If Buddy struck a vein, if Tim wasn’t around to help, if I passed out on the lawn, if Buddy pecked me to death, Pam would surely grieve, but I’m not sure she would have put the bird down.

  One day, Pam called out the window in her chicken voice, “You’re so handsome out there, you good boy.” I didn’t have a view of the outside, but I heard him cackle his appreciation in return. She turned to me and said, “You two are getting along better these days. Right?” It was more a statement than a question.

  I suppose we were, to a limited degree, though that didn’t always seem to be the point, so I said to her, “I don’t think you can ever possibly understand what it’s like to walk around your own yard, to walk out your own front or back door, to walk through your own gate, to be on the property that you own, that you pay a mortgage on, that you go to great lengths to maintain, that you take great pride in, I don’t think you can understand what it’s like to feel constantly endangered and always on edge because something that lives there would rather have you dead.”

  She started to giggle a little, as she often did when I got a little melodramatic, then caught herself when she realized I wasn’t joking. In fact, I was in a pretty bad mood, not only because of Buddy but also because of everything. Buddy, I was starting to realize, had come to symbolize, gradually, then suddenly, how unwelcome I sometimes felt in my own reconstituted life.

  Pam said, “You know, right, that he can’t help what he’s doing.”

  Did I?

  Buddy, Pam explained to me, had never met another rooster, never been part of a flock, never even had a brother or sister from the day he’d been hatched as part of the Nixon Elementary School science fair. For all Buddy knew, Pam said, he was one of the dogs that he liked to waddle with in the yard or one of the kids he was constantly searching for through the windows and doors. All he knew was that this space, this yard, this new house was his home, and it was his job, his unwavering instinct, to protect it. It was who he was. It was what he d
id. He wasn’t trying to be obnoxious. He didn’t even mean to be loud. He just didn’t know anything else.

  “Yes,” Pam said, “you’re a challenge to him. He tries to dominate you because he can’t or won’t trust you, not yet anyway.” She paused and added, “It’s your responsibility to improve that relationship, because he’s a chicken and you’re the guy.”

  Rather than complain, I needed to take things into my own hands if I wanted to make them better.

  It was December. I had been in the new house for more than six months. The bird still wanted me dead. I still had no idea what food was kept in what cabinet in the kitchen. I’d see one of the kids casually pull out a drawer I didn’t know existed to grab a bag of chips or pretzels I didn’t know we had. The refrigerator was so packed with condiments and salad dressings and various fruit juice drinks that there wasn’t a spare spot for me to keep a bottle of Gatorade or water, meaning I had to go down to the cellar every time I wanted a drink. There were horse jumps set up all over the house that the kids were constantly leaping over—and I was tripping across. My brush, the times I could find it, was covered in blond hair. My toothbrush would sometimes be wet before I used it. Every time I walked into the bathroom, like magic, someone was knocking on the door. They had completely taken over the TV I had spent an absurd amount of money to buy.

  Case in point on the last one. The Red Sox are playing a must-win game against the Yankees during the stretch run. I’ve already given up my seats at Fenway Park to be at home. When I go to catch a few innings on TV, the kids are watching something called The Suite Life on Deck that couldn’t be missed, even though I’m reasonably sure they had seen the exact same episode about three days before. They scream. They hide the remote. They’re not joking. I end up in my office watching on a small screen, my dog sprawled beside me. When the bases are loaded and Dustin Pedroia steps to the plate, young Caroline pops her head in and says in her squeaky voice, “Come on, Brian. We’re going to bed. Come tell us a story.”