Buddy

by Brian McGrory

  I thought about Harry. I thought about Buddy. I thought about the kids sitting upstairs, bored and frustrated out of their minds. I thought about Pam, wanting what she had and having much of what she wanted, and if that wasn’t the case, she was smart enough to keep it inside. It’s called adulthood, or maybe just commitment, and perhaps I was failing my crash course. Or maybe not, because suddenly I felt a little ridiculous standing in the mudroom in a down jacket getting ready to flee a situation in which I should have been doing anything but. Did Buddy ever try to jump over the fence?

  So I peeled off my coat and walked up into the family room. I arranged logs in the fireplace and lit a fire. I settled onto the couch with a travel magazine and realized I shouldn’t be reading about faraway places, so I put it down and picked up Golf Digest. Before I could even read “The Six Things to Know About Perfect Chips,” there was a kid beside me, Caroline, asking if I wanted to play a game, something about states and their capitals, all of which appeared on cards that we spread out on the floor.

  “I bet I can beat you,” she said.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “If you lose, you have to kiss Nuggy,” she said.

  Nuggy is one of her dozen or so nicknames for Walter, a dog she happened to love and an animal she suspected, rightfully, that I didn’t.

  “And if I lose, I’ll kiss Baker,” she said. She loved Baker as well. That bet didn’t seem fair, but I accepted anyway.

  Suddenly Abigail drifted over. “I want to play,” she said. They bickered momentarily over the color of their board pieces. I shuffled the cards. Caroline dealt them out. All the while, the cats were nosing up against the score sheets, and the fire kept everyone warm.

  I somehow lost the first game. I mean, Jefferson City is the capital of Missouri? Jefferson City? Really? And Carson City is the capital of Nevada? “Wait a minute,” I said. “This game isn’t fair. I’m getting all the hard ones, and you’re getting the layups.”

  Abigail giggled. Caroline stuck out her tongue in a mocking way.

  “Come on, one more game,” I said.

  The fire made a loud popping sound. Walter was snoring like a rhinoceros. Abigail let on like it would be a burden but replied, “All right, last one.”

  23

  Seriously, can a grown man really learn from a young rooster?

  I’ll address the question with a situation. My phone rang just as I settled into my car in a hard-luck city twenty or so miles outside of Boston. I had just finished an interview for a column, and it was Pam on the line, and she sounded awful. “Abigail,” she said, trying to hold back tears, “was bucked off her horse. We’re heading to the hospital. I think she broke her arm.”

  It was raining, just after dusk, and the glare from tired storefronts shone on the wet pavement of a Main Street that had seen better days. I sat there for a long moment trying to get my bearings, to collect my thoughts, to determine the best course, one where I would be helpful without being at any risk of getting in anyone’s way. My natural impulse was to head straight home to tend to the animals, start some pasta for the kids, and get the house ready for Abigail’s return. What it lacked in impulse it made up for in pragmatism.

  But something nagged, and that something had feathers. If I didn’t actually ask myself the question What would Buddy do? it’s only because I didn’t have to. I already knew. The little beast strutted around the yard as if he owned the world, and in his mind he did, his world being everything within that fence. He peered through the doors and windows looking for his flock. He pecked at the glass to remind people he was there. He slept silently on the top step of the basement to feel closer. And he expressed unembarrassed delight when the kids came into his yard.

  That’s a long way of saying that Buddy would be at the hospital.

  It was early November, eight months after Buddy’s stay in the basement, eight good months—very good, even. Abigail and I read regularly. We joked constantly. We did homework together. Caroline and I rode bikes across the street, took walks around the neighborhood collecting flowers, and watched movies on TV. I even got them to watch a few innings of the Red Sox from time to time. Were there moments? God, yeah, constantly. That’s called real life, and I came to terms with the reality that real life is about trade-offs. What was it that Pam once said, that I was the adult? Ended up, she was right. Usually.

  Buddy and I really did form something of a truce. Maybe it was the talk we’d had at the door of his house that night or the fact I had put up with him under my roof for those couple of months. Maybe, displaced in the cellar, he’d taken a lesson from me, just as I had taken lessons from him. But I think I’m getting beyond myself—or at least him.

  I even defended him when Pam couldn’t figure out who was swiping the strawberries in her garden, only to watch from a distance one morning as Buddy sneaked to the back garden fence when he didn’t think anyone was around, hopped over it, ate the fattest, juiciest strawberry off the vine, and sneaked back into the main yard. He’s just being a guy, I said.

  Traffic continued to slow down as it went by our house, and the drivers weren’t trying to get a long glimpse because I lived there. A woman down the street told us that her kids played a game called “Spot Buddy” every day, the winner being whoever saw him first. We live across from the town high school, and so many kids would casually call out, “Hey, Buddy,” as they walked by. He’d give them a self-satisfied cluck in response. One afternoon I pulled into the driveway and an SUV followed me in. As I got out of my car, the driver, an older woman, came walking toward me with a slip of paper in her hand.

  “I’m the livestock inspector,” she said. “I was here last year.”

  I remembered her, the woman who had crushed my modest middle-aged dream.

  She handed me the sheet and said, “Here’s your certificate for another year.”

  I said, “Don’t you want to see the bird and his house again?”

  She laughed at that, as if in the world of livestock, or at least poultry, I had just said something really funny. “Not unless something big has changed,” she said.

  “Nothing’s changed except for his satellite TV,” I replied.

  She laughed harder now. “I’m all set,” she said. She kept laughing as she got back into her truck. Give me my own act, and I’d kill them in Des Moines.

  Speaking of last-ditch hopes, a house just around the corner went on the market, and it wasn’t long before a new owner moved in. As I watched the moving truck arrive one morning, the thought struck me that maybe, just maybe, they would be the people who would refuse to tolerate a rooster in their midst. I’m begging them, please.

  So on Halloween night the doorbell rang and there were a couple of adorable young girls on the porch, one dressed as a bumblebee, the other as a witch, with a father next to them. We were chatting, and he said, “I’m Tom, your new neighbor. We moved in around the corner.”

  My face lit up.

  “And about your rooster …” he began.

  The long-dormant organ music cued up from above. Hope had literally come knocking at my door. I thought, for a brief, passing moment, about Susan Orlean’s memorable New Yorker story about her pet chickens, the one in which she noted that chickens are—her words here—“women’s livestock.”

  “Women and chickens just seem to have a natural harmony,” she wrote.

  And there I was on my front porch with a guy who was at long last ready to address the utter absurdity and untenability of my situation, guy to guy.

  “I love him,” he said. “I just love him.”

  “You do?”

  “Oh God, he’s wonderful.”

  “The noise doesn’t bug the hell out of you? Oh boy, sorry, girls.”

  “It’s music,” Tom said. “If you don’t like the sounds of a rooster, move to the city.”

  Well, there is that.

  Quick question: why did I feel more relief than despair over the outcome of that conversation?

  So b
ack to Abigail and the horse-riding accident. I strode into the emergency room early that evening and was directed through some double doors, down a hallway, and into a private room. Abigail lay on a bed, her father dutifully perched in a chair on one side of her, her mother and sister in a chair on the other side. I was where every step-anything constantly finds themselves, which is in a place you’re not quite sure you belong. I tapped her shoes and told her how sorry I was. She began to cry. Then I pulled out my iPad and said I thought she might want to play the video golf game that she likes at home. She nodded her head, tears rolling down her smooth cheeks.

  I stayed another moment and said I’d be in the waiting room just down the hall. Maybe half an hour later, Pam came out and said that the diagnosis was heavy bruising, nothing broken, and that Abigail would be given a sling to wear for a few days. It was a huge relief.

  That night Abigail, still hurting, wanted to sleep next to her mother, so I retreated to the guest room down the hall, the one with my bed from Boston in it. It was about midnight, and I could hear Pam in the kitchen making school lunches for the following day. I was reading when a sleepy little figure appeared in my door and climbed on top of the bed—Abigail, in footed pajamas, carrying her blanket.

  “Do you want to watch a TV show with me?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  She pulled my iPad off the nightstand, did some tapping, inexplicably knew my password, and there we were, watching Wizards of Waverly Place in the guest room of our humble home. Pam appeared a few minutes later, surprised by the midnight visit. “Do you want to come down and we’ll watch the rest of the show?” she asked.

  “No, I’m good here,” Abigail said.

  And she was. We watched until the show was over, until Abigail’s eyes were droopy, until I walked her down the hallway so she could get the rest she desperately needed.

  And somewhere, the rooster slept.

  Afterword

  It was a day meant for beginnings. It was a Sunday in May, the start of warm weather. The plants were blooming, the grass was growing, the sun was shining in that kind of way that made it feel like life carried endless possibilities in the soft breeze.

  I was driving to get a cup of coffee when my phone rang. Pam was on the other end of the line, as distraught as she had been six months earlier when she’d called to say Abigail had hurt her arm—maybe worse. I could barely make out what she was saying through the panic and the tears.

  “It’s Buddy,” she cried. “Come home.”

  Buddy.

  These last six months, Buddy had become an almost entirely different creature. He had quieted down—not completely, but noticeably. He spent the better part of an uncommonly mild winter lying on a bed of blankets by the back door, watching the world from the vantage of our covered porch and waiting for the hour when he would be brought inside. As darkness fell each afternoon, Pam carried him down to the cellar, to a desk covered with quilts, where he slept in warmth and security. In my point of view, this marked a big improvement, but for Pam this muted behavior inspired watchful concern.

  Buddy had begun treating me less as a mortal enemy, more as a harmless, if pointless, nuisance, something he could begrudgingly tolerate. This meant no more surprise attacks, and fewer attempts to castrate me as I flipped burgers on the outside grill or tossed the ball for the dogs. He began regarding me with a look and tone that said, “You’re not worth it.” You’ve got to take victory wherever you find it in life, and so this evolution delighted me to no end.

  It even got to the point that I—yes, me—learned to carry him between the porch and the basement. If he wasn’t tolerant, he was at least complacent. I would don a thick down coat to absorb any fierce pecks and leg scratchings, pull on a pair of heavy gloves in case he went right for the hands, and always follow Pam’s wise counsel to never, ever, look him in the eye. I would corral him on the porch or corner him on his desk with an oversized beach towel, so that he looked like Goldilocks with a cape flowing from his head as we made our way up and down the stairs. Quite the pair.

  One frigid weekend in March, Pam took the kids to a horse show in some random part of central Florida while I happily stayed home with Buddy. Well, Buddy, Baker, Walter, Charlie, Tigger, Lily, Dolly, and the two rabbits in Abigail’s room whose names I could never remember. When I got in from work that Friday afternoon, I heard Buddy cawing on the back porch, but when I stepped out to carry him inside, cape in hand, there was no Buddy.

  I could hear him, but he was nowhere to be found. Darkness was settling in. Sleet was pelting the ground. I knew Buddy wasn’t roaming the yard, because he certainly wasn’t the type who needlessly subjected himself to unfriendly elements.

  “Buddy?” I called out.

  “Ba-back. Ba-back,” he said in response.

  I poked through a shallow alcove on the porch where we kept a small pile of firewood, but he wasn’t there. I noticed Baker had climbed off the deck and was now peering under it, into some narrow, dark gap between the side of the porch and the ground. I climbed down and did the same.

  Cold pellets of ice kept thwacking me on the head as I crouched on all fours trying to look through the opening. At that point, I could hear Buddy cackling ever more clearly, so I went inside for a flashlight. Kneeling on the wet, icy ground, I shone it into that mysterious little world beneath my back porch.

  There were paper coffee cups under there, I assume from the construction workers. I saw a few torn pages of a newspaper. The dirt was dry and coarse, piled in some areas, cratered in others, probably from various scary animals that live in the dark. If Pam met them, she’d undoubtedly invite them inside. Then the light shone on Buddy, standing upright about fifteen feet from me, and staring back into the beam with a look that said, “What the hell do you want?”

  “Buddy, come here,” I said. Maybe a little too firmly. He cawed.

  “Come, Buddy. Come!” He cackled. But he didn’t move.

  The sleet continued to pound on my head and back, my knees ached, and long icicles hung perilously on the porch roof ready to provide the most wonderful obituary: McGrory dies in rooster-related accident.

  Buddy didn’t move when I spread diced-up chicken nuggets, oatmeal, and Reggiano cheese at the mouth of the crack. Plan B, trying to prod him toward the opening with a frozen branch, didn’t work, and Plan C involved little more than begging, pleading, and, okay, some shouting. I tried squeezing through the opening myself, but the good people of Häagen-Dazs had pretty much wiped out any possibility of that.

  I stood drenched and freezing in the kitchen and called Pam, hoping she would tell me that Buddy ducks under the porch for privacy all the time, and if I left him alone, he’ll be back up when he’s ready.

  “He’s where?” she asked, shell-shocked.

  “Under the porch,” I replied, pulling ice balls out of my hair.

  “I don’t get it. How would he get under the porch? Why would he go under the porch?” Needless to say, she had no creative ideas but was certainly worried. Maybe that call wasn’t my best idea.

  I sat at the kitchen table with visions of a fox ripping Buddy apart in the early hours of a March morning, and while that would have brought a smile to my lips a couple of years before, now the image made my stomach churn. Forget the fox, I wondered if he’d freeze to death down there. I also wondered how much it would cost when the builder came the next morning to rip up part of the porch so we could reach him. Probably not as much as Buddy’s transom window or mahogany gangplank, but hey, this is our beloved family pet.

  And that’s when it hit me—the window. In the basement, high on the back wall, there was a narrow sliding window that, unless I was spatially challenged, looked into that dark expanse beneath the porch. Maybe, just maybe, I could coax him to the window and get my (gloved) hands on him. Short of that, I could squeeze through the opening, slide along the frozen dirt like a member of the Special Forces, and grab him, preferably without him pecking out my eyes.

  I r
aced downstairs, anxiously climbed atop a step stool, and shone the flashlight through the glass hoping to catch a glimpse of Buddy in the murky dark. I almost fell backward from what I saw: Buddy—about three inches from my face, perfectly illuminated, standing in the well of the window with his beak pressed up against the glass. The two of us had come up with the identical plan at the same time, which was a little more than a little scary.

  Of course, he didn’t make it easy on me. He never made it easy on me. When I slid the window open, he cawed and pecked until I was finally able to turn him around with a beach towel, grab him from the side, and twist his body through the window. None of this was normal, but when I placed him on his desk for the night and called Pam with the good news, it was one of the most triumphant moments of my life. Buddy and I both slept very well that night, with two floors between us.

  Back to Pam’s call on that warm Sunday in May. I banged a sharp U-turn and roared toward our house. Buddy, I had come to believe, was invincible. He was seemingly immune to the hawks that flew overhead. He was left untouched by the area foxes and coyotes that wouldn’t or couldn’t penetrate our fenced-in yard. Here was a bird that had once beaten up a dog.

  Beyond that, he was a constant companion to Pam, who found in Buddy things that pet owners rarely, if ever, realize about their animals. He was a playmate to Pam’s kids. He was also my unexpected and unusual mentor in terms of leading a flock. In many ways, he was a mascot for all of us, a symbol of an unusual suburban house, full of activity, its owners opting for an unorthodox course. The rooster in our yard sent a message to all: this isn’t Leave It to Beaver here, folks.

  I came up behind some slow-moving Sunday morning traffic, and there was little I could do. I thought of Buddy as a fuzzy, chirping chick sitting between the kids on the couch. I thought of young Caroline proudly showing Buddy the first tooth that she had ever lost. Buddy regarded it for a moment, opened his beak, and grabbed it. Pam spent the next two days searching through his droppings in vain.