by Bob Tarte
“Enough of them survived to butcher,” he answered brightly. “They fetched two dollars apiece, dressed, which was pretty good money back then. Last week I went to see a friend, and he charged me twenty dollars for a butchered and dressed rabbit. Twenty dollars! But it sure tasted good.”
Having purged himself of this tale of death, he managed to free his feet for a few steps before his inner pedometer activated a set of steel brakes. Linda and I forged on optimistically, but instead of following our lead, he waited patiently in the sunshine until we slunk back to his side. “You got some ducks there,” he remarked, though they were barely visible from where he stood.
“Come see Victor,” Linda urged. “He’s the troublemaker of the flock.”
“You know what works best with troublemakers?” He dipped his head, smiling as his chin rested against his neck. “You throw them in the stewpot.”
“He’s not that bad,” exclaimed Linda. “We don’t eat meat. We love animals too much.”
“My son lives down in Arizona, and a bobcat kept getting his ducks. One night he waited outside with his shotgun and killed it. ‘That was one big bobcat,’ he told me. ‘How big was it?’ I asked him. He said, ‘Dad, I could barely get it into two garbage bags.’ “
The image proved too much for me. “We’ve lost a few ducks to raccoons, but we don’t shoot the raccoons. We don’t believe in anything like that. I catch them in a live trap and release them on the other side of the river.”
“I’ll tell you how to solve your raccoon problem.”
“How’s that?” I asked, fearing that another garbage bag loomed.
“Get yourself a bottle of fly bait, then mix it together with cherry cola.”
“What does that make, some sort of repellent?” I envisioned sprinkling the concoction around the perimeter of our duck pen and a raccoon bounding away after catching a whiff of it.
“You put it in a dish, the raccoons eat it, and it kills them. They can’t burp like we can,” he told us with a knowing lift of one eyebrow.
Inch by inch, stopping and restarting for one gory anecdote after another, we lurched toward the duck pen behind the barn—occasioning a market-value assessment of our white Pekin duck Richie, butchered and dressed, of course. Then we reversed course, following the trail of fondly recalled carcasses back to Harry’s pickup truck. He never once mentioned the pet-sitting job, acting as if the sole purpose of his visit had been to share treasured moments with us. With the hint of a grin crooking one side of his mouth, he touched the visor of his cap good-bye and rolled off in a haze of memories.
LINDA’S AD FOR a pet sitter also prompted a pair of unexpected calls. The first was sorely welcome. The second made me sore. Our ex-sitter Teresa graciously offered to come out of retirement long enough to give us a weekend away from animal drudgery. Even Linda’s full account of the various pets that had come and gone since Teresa’s last stint with us—along with the added chores, out-of-cage schedules, and esoteric rituals like the midday pink-cookie treat for the indoor birds—failed to discourage her.
“You guys deserve to take a break,” she told us.
“Thank you, thank you,” said Linda. “We didn’t think we’d ever find anyone.”
“It’s no problem at all,” said Teresa. But she hadn’t banked on interference from Eileen, and neither had I.
“I saw your classified ad,” reported my old schoolmate, who had defeated our caller ID by harassing us from an unfamiliar cell-phone number.
“You subscribe to the Lowell Ledger?” I asked. “Do you read the Ionia Sentinel-Standard, too?”
“Marcie Merczenski lives just outside Lowell.”
“From Mrs. Edkins’s eighth-grade class—“
“She’s Marcie Merczenski-Cummiskey now. She has a large and luxurious house in that new development up on the ridge.”
“We’ve already got a pet sitter,” I told her as I tilted my head toward the wall clock, whose second hand seemed to be spinning backward. “Thanks so much for offering your services. And give my best to my good friend Marcie.”
She treated me to a sputter of exasperation. “I’m calling because I’m just a little concerned that you would entrust my beautiful geese to a stranger.”
“Teresa isn’t a stranger. She’s looked after our animals several times, and I would trust her with any of them.”
“When are you going out of town?”
Despite my better judgment, I couldn’t resist bragging that on the last Friday of the month Linda and I would be embarking on a dream weekend in the Toledo area.
“I’m marking down those dates in my day planner,” she said. “I’ll make sure to check up on this sitter, and I’ll read her the riot act if she isn’t doing right by my geese.”
“I forget where you kept your geese when they lived with you.”
“I’m just looking out for them. Somebody needs to.”
Not for the first time did I puzzle over Eileen’s insistence on keeping in contact with us despite her weirdly escalating level of hostility. But I had decided long ago that trying to understand her motives would only increase my own mental turmoil. Though birds, rabbits, and cats weren’t exactly what you might term rational beings, their straightforwardness had it all over the convoluted maze of human psychology, and Eileen’s psyche seemed to suffer from an excess of dead ends. Even our excessively moody parrot Ollie was a creature of crystalline purity compared to her. Whenever he burbled messages of love on my shoulder only to clamp his beak into my neck muscles a moment later, he wasn’t acting out deeply submerged and muddy impulses. He simply enjoyed burbling followed by biting—always had and always would. I never asked, “Why me?” when the vise grip ultimately came, but I invariably posed that question to myself whenever Eileen phoned.
I tried insisting that the date of our trip remained in flux. “We might not actually get away until the coming fall, Eileen. Linda’s back is particularly bad this time of the year. It gives her problems during rain and meteor showers.” But I didn’t get anywhere with the lie.
I did warn Teresa before we left for Ohio that an annoying woman might stop by to offer unwelcome, unwarranted, and wholly inexperienced animal advice. The information didn’t faze her. “If she gives me any trouble,” Teresa said, “I’ll lock her in the pen with her buddies.”
IN THE PAST, our trips to exotic locales like Toledo necessitated that we lug along a cooler chocked with ice and cold compresses for Linda’s back. But having discovered that heat packs were more effective against inflammation, Linda now shunned motel ice makers for convenience-store microwaves to charge up a hot compress of her own design—the one and only Stinky. Stinky had started life inoffensively enough. Linda’s Thomas Edison – style search for a heat-retaining material had progressed through sand, aquarium gravel, and various rare earth elements before she’d ultimately settled on uncooked white rice, which she’d poured into a snake-shaped pillow. Frequent overheating had scorched the organic stuffing, resulting in a charred-popcorn smell each time Stinky left the radar range.
In service station after service station, I’d bide my time fueling the car while Linda recharged her heat pack; then I’d slip into the building to experience the overpowering odor of an electrical fire at a cereal plant. “Fifteen dollars of gas on pump number two,” I told a teenager at a truck stop just north of the Michigan-Ohio border. He struggled to connect the seemingly innocuous redheaded woman who’d just left the building clutching a fabric hot dog with a possible industrial chemical spill whose fumes were seeping in from the parking lot. “Coffee smells good,” I chirped as I thrust a twenty-dollar bill under his nose. “Must be an exotic Indonesian blend, but you might be brewing it a bit too strong.”
My final glance through the car window found the stoop-shouldered attendant shuffling toward the coffeemaker carrying a plastic pail and giant brush. “This is even worse than your meat-colored gel pack,” I grumbled to Linda as we tore out of the parking lot. “That looked weird, but i
t didn’t have a smell.”
“The rice holds the heat a whole lot longer than the gel.”
The important thing was that I had distracted the attendant long enough to forestall a phone call to the EPA or local law enforcement personnel. In fact, by the time it finally dawned on him to investigate the microwave, I figured, we would be safely across the state line. But I was nervous about our heating hit-and-runs anyway. If a cop pulled us over for a traffic infraction, I couldn’t imagine what illegal substance he would suppose Linda was smoking while sprawled out in the back seat.
For my part, I tried combating the fumes by cranking open the window and drowning them in fresh air. But Stinky laughed at the inrush of wind and burrowed its odor molecules deep into the pores of the car upholstery. “What do your housecleaning customers say about that thing?”
“Nothing,” Linda said defensively. “They might ask me, ‘What’s that smell?’ “
The outgassing addled my senses, turning what should have been a three-hour trip to Toledo into an inexplicable five-hour marathon that brought us to the Toledo Museum of Art a mere forty-five minutes before the stingy four P.M. closing time.
“That doesn’t even give us enough time to look at the frames, much less the pictures,” I complained to the museum’s parking lot attendant, who gave me the shrug that my comment deserved.
Once I managed to blunder back onto the freeway, I hollered at Linda, “Why did we ever come to this stupid city at all?” though it had been my idea. “Why didn’t we just take a trip into the country?” I said, though this had been her suggestion from the first.
Bogged down by endless freeway construction and urged on by gleeful orange Department of Transportation signs advising us, “Expect long delays, choose alternate city to visit,” we decided to skip the rest of Toledo’s attractions and opt for the reliable Cleveland Metroparks Zoo instead. Coveting a stay in a rural America, we took blue highways east and ended up at the Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge on Lake Erie. A great egret waved us past a logjam of birders in minivans who were hoping for a glimpse of a visiting scissor-tailed flycatcher, seldom seen in the Great Lakes. We headed for the woods to walk off our art museum frustration, triumphantly emerging with several pricey morel mushrooms, which had gone unnoticed by birders scanning for warblers.
When Linda accosted a ranger to find out that the ducklike diving birds we’d been seeing were in fact old coots like me, he added that at the Magee Marsh Wildlife Area, a quarter mile down the road, a migrating Kirtland’s warbler had been spotted on the beach. I knew this to be one of the rarest birds around, a warbler whose only nesting site in the country was a few tracts of jack pines in northern Michigan, and even then only among young trees that grow in the wake of managed forest fires. But there didn’t seem to be any point in us poking around the shoreline for a bird we probably couldn’t find and wouldn’t know if we did, so we continued east in search of a motel.
Unable to locate the sort of old-fashioned mom-and-pop motel smack in the middle of nowhere that Linda insisted still existed, we settled on a room at the Shorebird Motel in the part marina town, part ConAgra factory city of Huron. Being cooped up in a strange bedroom occasionally triggered a panic attack in Linda. In an attempt to bleed off a trickle of her boundless energy, we took one of our weirder after-dark strolls. Having headed for the beach in hopes of a walk across the sand, we chanced instead upon an eerie Lake Erie fishing pier made of trailer-size blocks of concrete. With only the distant city lights as our guide, we felt our way along the narrow, quarter-mile-long structure. Waves lapping over the cement blocks kept the surface slippery, while gusts of wind encouraged us to press our arms to our sides to stave off spontaneous windsurfing shortcuts back toward shore.
Just as the feeble yellow light of a navigational marker at the end of the pier caught my eye, a huge sailboat rose up out of nowhere to flash its ghostly white sails at us. Except for a rustle of canvas and a slight ripple of water, we didn’t hear a sound as the boat skirted dangerously close to the pier before the murk swallowed it up again. I hadn’t seen a soul on board, animate or otherwise.
“The Flying Dutchman,” I sputtered. “Spirits of the dead.” I stubbed my toe against a concrete crevice for the thirtieth time or so as we reversed direction and started retracing our steps. “It’s a warning that this is incredibly dangerous.” The uneven blocks weren’t the worst obstacle, though. Two college students, apparently taking a break from pet-sitting responsibilities, had decided that the middle of a pier in the black of night was the perfect spot for stretching out and embracing one another. I nearly tripped over the lovers and embraced Davy Jones as a result.
The next day, at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, I lectured Linda on every animal we saw, explaining how each one reminded me of her. However, my mind was elsewhere. I was preoccupied by a stuffed monkey I’d seen for sale in a gift shop window near the zoo entrance. The toy held the promise of companionship for Ed, the sock monkey my grandmother had sewn for me as a boy and who’d come with us on the trip to keep Stinky company. Crushing disappointment followed, for when I finally had the chance to examine the monkey’s pouting molded-vinyl face up close, I realized that the Chinese manufacturer lacked my grandmother’s empathy for primates. So I reluctantly left it in the window.
“Don’t say anything to him about it,” I whispered to Linda, inclining my head toward Ed in the back seat as we headed back to Huron for dinner at Denny’s and another perilous pier walk. After Ed’s failure as Stanley Sue’s kitchen-countertop sentinel and his apparent rejection by the diffident Stinky, I didn’t want him to suffer another letdown.
Morning got off to a bad start as Linda realized that between the zoo and Denny’s she had managed to lose her favorite stocking cap, Sagey, who now joined the ranks of missing hats Greenie and Grapey and misplaced sweater Piney. But her mood brightened when we visited Crane Creek State Park, near the Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge. The state park’s Magee Marsh boardwalk proved to be a smorgasbord of songbirds fluttering in the thickets on both sides of the path. Without moving a muscle we had within arm’s length a bewildering array of warblers tired and tame from their migration: blackburnian, chestnut-sided, yellow, black-and-white, black-throated blue, common yellowthroat, yellow-rumped, magnolia, and others; plus, we blundered into a green heron hiding in the bulrushes.
Emboldened by our effortless success, Linda asked a birder weighted down with binoculars, cameras, and a spotting scope whether anyone had sighted the Kirtland’s warbler that day. He gave us what I considered needlessly precise directions to the bird’s last known appearance on the beach.
I envisioned a hushed and tedious wait across from a stand of trees, a flash of feathers in the foliage if we were lucky, another long wait, then the trudge back to the car spent reassuring one another, “We certainly saw something.” But this was not to be. Instead, at the promised spot on Lake Erie’s southern shore, we met a flock of slack-jawed birders who formed a thirty-foot-diameter circle. At the center leisurely pecked and hopped a small grey-and-yellow bird wearing an air of casualness and self-effacement at odds with its exalted status. At one point this elusive Kirtland’s warbler—fresh from wintering in the Bahamas and perhaps one of only twelve hundred males in the world—actually skittered between the legs of a dumbstruck observer.
“How many of these are here at the park?” I asked a father birder who was sharing the spectacle with his fledgling son.
“Just him,” he told me.
Despite the thrill of a close look at an endangered warbler that was seldom seen during migration, the experience muddied my mind with questions. In a park of several hundred acres, how did anyone manage to locate such a tiny, solitary bird, how did they keep from losing him overnight, and why didn’t he simply fly to a spot where he could enjoy his privacy? But what troubled me the most was the irritating coincidence of sharing a beach with a bird associated with controlled forest burns and a wife associated with uncontrolled rice heating. Stin
ky was obviously more powerful than I ever would have guessed.
EILEEN HAD GOTTEN stinky in our absence. We found a veterinarian’s bill on our countertop and a note from Teresa saying that she had taken goose Patty to nearby vet Dr. Leroy for treatment after one of the other geese had bitten her beneath her eye. We galloped to the backyard pen to examine the minor bruise; then I phoned our sitter to thank her for taking prompt action. “Did you have trouble getting the goose into your car?”
“No,” she laughed, “I had more trouble with your friend Eileen.”
I felt a pinch of dread in my stomach. “She’s not my friend, but what happened?”
“She dropped by just as I got Patty back from the vet, and she lit into me with ‘How could you let something like this happen to my goose?’ and all sorts of nasty things. That girl really got worked up.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “It’s bad enough you had to deal with an injured goose, but to suffer through Eileen on top of that.”
“I didn’t pay any attention to her. I let her get it out of her system, and then I asked her what she would have done differently.”
“What did she say?”
“What could she say? She just stomped off. But she called me several times after that to holler at me about Patty. Once she even asked me, ‘Did that goose die yet?’ “
“I’ll cook her goose,” I trumpeted, but I didn’t get the chance. Eileen’s call within the hour threw me off balance. When she began by railing at us for allowing harm to come to Patty, I told her that the goose had received a clean bill of health from Dr. Leroy.
“Well, I wanted to talk to you about your pet sitter,” she said.
“What’s that?” I replied, ready to lower the boom.
“I was very impressed with her,” she told me. “She’s a keeper, and I hope you use her again.”
