Fowl Weather

by Bob Tarte

  CHAPTER 12

  Elbow Room

  Moobie enjoyed watching me peel off my pajamas as I got dressed to visit my mom. It wasn’t that she had a predilection for human nudity; it fascinated her that a person could suddenly turn into unfurling flags of cloth. Lying at the end of the bed, she wore an expression of amusement as she tick-tocked her head back and forth between fixating on my discarded garments and focusing on pasty white Bob. She involved herself in the disrobing process by sitting bolt upright and paddling her clawless feet against my hip. Then, as I flung the pajama bottoms toward the laundry basket, she took a chunky swipe at the empty air and began purring luxuriously.

  Deciding that Penny deserved her own little slice of Sunday morning pleasure, I trudged upstairs to receive a suspicious glare. Holding me in place at the side of the bed with her stare, she stood up, stretched her legs, and yawned, then flopped down facing the wall in a clear message that she wasn’t receiving visitors. I ignored the snub and bent at the waist so that my damp hair just touched the bedspread. Rolling over, she rubbed her head against mine, inhaled the essence of anti-dandruff shampoo, then straightened her body with dilated pupils and extended nails as if she had just eaten a couple of grams of catnip.

  Leaving a second cat in the throes of purring, I continued my effort to dole out cheer by picking up the phone and punching in my mom’s number to remind her that I would arrive shortly to take her to church. My father’s voice on the answering machine startled me. Since his death, I’d been unable to get use to his unintentionally ironic statement “We can’t come to the phone right now,” and hung up without leaving a message. Figuring that my mom was probably in the shower, I said my good-byes to Linda, Stanley Sue, and Dusty, and hopped into the car with the irrational hope that Father Paul’s weekly sermon might be short and that no grade school students knelt in roped-off pews awaiting a lengthy awards ceremony.

  I parked in front of Mom’s house. I turned and waved cheerily at her neighbor Pat’s Chevy across the street as she glided out of her driveway on her way to church, then saluted a movement of the Teanys’ living room curtains. My mom met me at the front door while I was struggling to balance my keys in one hand and the log of a morning paper in the other. Still in her robe, she blurted out, “The car is gone,” as I slipped into the vestibule.

  “Where did it go?” I asked skeptically.

  “I left it somewhere.”

  “When?”

  “I was at the foot doctor near Fat Boy just a little while ago,” she told me, citing a neighborhood landmark. “I forgot about the car and walked home, and now I can’t find it. I walked as far as Three Mile and back, but it’s gone.”

  “In your bathrobe?” I asked. “The car isn’t in the driveway?”

  “I left it somewhere.”

  Dropping the Sunday paper onto the nearest sturdy chair, I strode into the kitchen and peered out the window at my mom’s empty driveway. The absence of the car struck me as odd until I noticed that the garage door was closed.

  A month earlier, while psyching herself up to thread her big Buick through the needle eye of a garage built around 1930 to accommodate a Ford Model A, Mom had accidentally hit the gas pedal instead of the brake. She’d struck the front corner with sufficient force to knock one side of the building off its foundation. Luckily, she hadn’t hurt herself, and her next-door neighbor Ted, who was the maintenance manager for an apartment complex, had volunteered to repair the damage. He had just completed the work a couple of days ago, allowing her to park her car inside the garage for the first time in weeks. The sight of the empty driveway this morning had apparently unnerved her—though this didn’t explain the confusion with the foot doctor, or why she was still in her pajamas when we were due at church.

  I pushed the button that my father had installed in the back room and peered out through the window. The garage door opened like a theatrical curtain, dramatically revealing the red rear end of the Buick. “I’m such a dumbhead,” she said. “I was sure that I’d been out with the car today.”

  “It’s nothing to worry about,” I said, even though it worried me. “You probably dreamed about the foot doctor just before waking up. I dream about him all the time.”

  She smiled at the reassurance. “It’s nice to know I’m not going crazy.” Then she thought for a moment. “Were we going some place?”

  “We were supposed to go to Mass, but we’ll never make it,” I told her without regret. “Though why don’t you get dressed, and I’ll take you to the Fat Boy for breakfast.”

  I DIDN’T KNOW what I had expected from Walter’s cancer. I must have assumed that it would progress invisibly, like the air sac tumor that had killed our parakeet Rossy a couple of years ago. She had quietly died in her sleep one night. But over the course of the summer, Walter’s leg had started to swell, and the tumor eventually erupted. The open wound horrified me, but Linda faithfully dressed and bandaged it each evening while I held him on the kitchen countertop and stared intently at the toaster.

  Walter refused to allow the illness to interfere with his routine. After dinner, he would scratch at the plywood board that barricaded the dining room until Linda lifted it and allowed him to gallop into the living room. Grunting, buzzing, and snuffling heartily, he would explore the real estate behind the recliner and the plant stand, add his twenty-five cents to the litter box and another dollar to the plastic floor runner on either side of the box, then mark every object at rabbit head level with the scent gland on his chin. The cancer slowed his pace but in no way diminished his enthusiasm.

  The situation grew grim when the wound became infected, and the vet put Walter on an antibiotic. Although the medication encouragingly diminished the size of Walter’s tumor, the tumor alarmingly diminished the size of Walter. He stopped eating and became so weak that we would have to carry him into the living room at night to reserve what little strength remained for his scent-marking forays. It seemed time to say good-bye, but as soon as the antibiotic regimen expired, Walter’s appetite returned. Within a couple of days, he was back to bounding into the living room, and we held hopes that we had actually starved his tumor into remission, until another one popped up below it.

  After so many struggles with so many ill animals over the years—from rabbits to geese to turkeys to ducks and other birds—I could hardly bear to witness another decline. I suggested that it might be best to put him to sleep, but Linda disagreed.

  “As long as he’s still eating and enjoying life, we should just let him be,” she told me. “Wouldn’t you rather he died at home?”

  “Well, if he could.”

  “Maybe he’ll just pass on like Bertie did. That’s how most of the other rabbits went.”

  We agreed not to interfere unless it became absolutely necessary. Within a month, we reached that unhappy point. One morning, Walter was unable to stand up, so I lifted him, placed him on a towel in a pet carrier, and took him to the vet.

  I sat sobbing in the examination room, waiting for the doctor to appear. Then a remarkable thing happened. Walter somehow managed to struggle to his feet. He stood proudly in his carrier, ears pointing straight toward the heavens, a bright light illuminating his eyes. He stared at me as if to say, “I’m okay with this, so you should be okay with it, too.”

  I wasn’t, though. Animal deaths always hit me hard. Despite the fact that the end of Walter’s ordeal came as a great relief, I was squashed in the grip of mourning that dredged up all of our other losses over the years.

  “You’ve got to snap out of it, sweetie,” Linda told me as I lay on the couch with my arm covering my face for the third day in a row. “Walter wouldn’t like you suffering so much.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “I worry about what would happen if you lost one of your favorites, like Moobie, Stanley Sue, or Howard.”

  “Maybe we need to get away for a little while,” I mumbled through my arm. “We could visit Colonel Sanders’s first kitchen,” I told her, as some
thing resembling a snicker rose up inside my throat. “And there’s an Australian animal zoo in Kentucky that has lorikeets you can feed.”

  “Why don’t we go do that,” said Linda. “Trouble is, we need to find a pet sitter.”

  “Here we go again.”

  OUR FALL TURNED into a rerun of early summer. Linda placed a classified in the Lowell Ledger for a sitter, and among the applicants who made it through the screening process was a young mother who showed up with her four-year-old son. He impressed us right off the bat by kicking Rudy’s cage while Mom politely suggested, “Darling, please don’t do that.” When I stepped between Darling and Rudy, the youngster decided that he’d retaliate by locking himself in our bathroom.

  “Come out, sweetest,” she urged him, tapping delicately with her fingertips rather than knocking on the wood. “Mommy has to see the rest of the animals.” The cherub made no reply. “Does your husband have a hammer and a screwdriver?” she asked Linda matter-of-factly. “We usually have to take the door off the hinges.”

  A phone call later in the week didn’t seem at all promising. A woman named Dawn advocated her eighteen-year-old granddaughter for the job. Linda described our abysmal track record with most sitters under forty, but Dawn met her protests with an insistence that Jamie showed maturity far beyond her years and had grown up on a farm caring for animals. She offered to oversee the girl, if that would ease Linda’s mind.

  “Absolutely not,” I told Linda. “It isn’t worth the bother. Don’t even ask them over.”

  When Dawn and Jamie arrived for their appointment the following day, Jamie easily won us over. While she didn’t gush over any of the animals, her quiet regard for each bird, cat, and bunny that we introduced her to was genuine, and she didn’t seem fazed by the amount of work involved.

  “This is our baby,” Linda told her, taking Rudy out of his cage.

  Jamie held him in a manner that indicated she knew her way around rabbits. “I’ll make sure the baby gets extra attention,” she assured Linda, thus ensuring herself of the job.

  As a test run, we tried Jamie out one Saturday while we visited Linda’s mom in Battle Creek. We returned home to a pleasant surprise. Not only had Jamie performed every annoying task that we had requested, including giving the birds their afternoon pink-cookie treat, but she had also left us three notebook pages brimming with her observations. “Stanley Sue took a peanut, but she didn’t want to come out of her cage,” said one entry. Another note informed us, “One of the brown ducks seems to be limping. I picked her up, and her foot looked okay.”

  In my exhilaration, I almost picked up the phone to brag to Eileen about Jamie. But as a cheerier alternative, I visited Walter’s grave in back of the house.

  LINDA’S PARENTS HAD both been born and raised in Tennessee, and our trip to Kentucky tapped into her rural roots. She started speaking fluent hillbilly the second day of our trip as we ate lunch at the Cave Café in the city of Horse Cave.

  “Could I maybe get me another one of them delicious biscuits?” she asked the restaurant owner. When the woman returned with a basket of them, Linda said, “You wouldn’t know the name of that little prospector guy at the rock shop down the road?”

  We’d come to Horse Cave to revisit the clapboard rock shop that had enchanted Linda with chunks of crystal onyx when we had breezed through the area on our honeymoon, more than a decade earlier. We also returned to visit a new attraction called Kentucky Down Under, where unseasonably cold fall temperatures quashed the Australian outback verisimilitude. Still, we enjoyed the interactive presentation that allowed us to pet a kangaroo, fend off emus bent on devouring our shoelaces, and watch an Australian shepherd dog herd a flock of sheep that had been through the demonstration so many times, they guided themselves into their pen while the dog romped in the grass. Best of all, we entered an outdoor aviary and acted as human feeding stations as rainbow lorikeet parrots landed on us to snatch bits of apple from our hands. Few events in life had ever pleased me so thoroughly.

  Linda declined the biscuits in the southern Kentucky town of Corbin, site of Harland Sanders’s first restaurant and now commemorated as the Colonel Harland Sanders Cafe and Museum, located on the premises of a modern KFC eatery. During the 1950s, years before a cash-strapped Sanders purportedly parlayed his Social Security check into a coast-to-coast fried chicken franchise, he’d built a motel next to his restaurant. In a visionary piece of marketing, restaurant patrons were confronted with a sample motel unit attached to the dining room as a way of impressing mothers with the cleanliness of Sanders’s motel. The Corbin KFC preserved Sanders’s original kitchen, cooking implements, model motel room, and memorabilia from the days before he had adopted the honorary title of “Colonel,” including posters from an unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate. But the display case that held his trademark white suit and cane was enigmatically empty.

  “Where could they be?” asked Linda.

  “They’re probably lying on the fishing pier at Huron, hoping I’ll trip over them.”

  Near Lexington we visited the Kentucky Horse Park. “Pastor Larry recommended it,” Linda said. “He’ll ask me if we went there.” The almost complete lack of horses at the 1,032-acre horse park in general and in the World’s Largest Horse Barn in particular saved the day for me. The park was essentially visitorless, too, apart from a few presumed acquaintances of Pastor Larry’s.

  Reality abruptly punctured the airy pastry of our vacation. Linda had left Stinky at home with sock monkey Ed, citing the efficacy of a new type of gel pack she had discovered—though when pressed she admitted that Stinky’s smell had finally gotten to her, too. But no compress, hot, cold, aromatic, or odorless, could have combated the sudden locked-up condition that beset her vertebrae on our way back from the Horse Park, forcing us to limp home two days earlier than planned.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have encouraged you to pull that hay wagon on your own,” I admitted.

  Jamie had performed brilliantly while we’d been gone, and if Ollie scolded us more caustically than usual at first sight of us, he undoubtedly preferred our sitter’s no-nonsense approach to the fruitless teeter-tottering between cajoling and hysteria that we typically plied him with. As Linda drove Jamie back to her grandmother’s trailer, I climbed the stairs and subjected myself to one uneventful phone message after another. A few responses to Linda’s outdated pet-sitting ad from socially challenged or whiskey-addled individuals trickled in, along with the usual barrage of wrong numbers and telemarketer come-ons.

  A frantic voice stirred me from my driving-induced stupor.

  “Bob, this is Lesley, Ted’s wife, your mom’s neighbor. Your mom fell while raking leaves, and I think she needs to go to the emergency room. I’ll try your sister Joan if I can’t get hold of you.”

  Her message was dated the preceding Saturday, just hours after we had left for Kentucky. I couldn’t even imagine what had happened in our absence.

  • • •

  “I JUST GOT THROUGH living with Mom for a week,” Joan told me on the phone, and her tone left no doubt that this hadn’t been an enviable experience.

  “What happened? Lesley said she fell.”

  According to Joan, she had showed up at Mom’s last Sunday morning to take her to church, when Mom hollered from upstairs that she seemed to be having trouble dressing, because her arm hurt. “No kidding,” Joan told me. “I was shocked to see how swollen her elbow was. She said that she had been raking leaves into the street and fell on the cement when she misjudged where the curb was. I took her to Saint Mary’s Hospital right away.”

  Linda tried keeping tabs on my phone conversation as she put the birds to bed, refreshing seed and water before covering their cages. Unaccustomed to the telephone being in another person’s hands, she would dart toward me like a bee approaching a flower, then hover until I fed her a piece of information.

  “Joan says that they X-rayed Mom’s arm, and the doctor described her elbow as ‘shattered,’ though this didn
’t turn out to be the case. She had to stay overnight at the hospital for surgery the next morning,” I told Linda.

  “She had surgery?”

  “No, no. Joan says they put a heavy cast on her arm, and it really killed her shoulder, because she has no padding between her bones.”

  “From the arthritis,” Joan clarified.

  “From the arthritis,” I echoed for Linda’s benefit. “Hey, why don’t you get on the upstairs phone?”

  “I can’t, I have to take care of the birds,” she told me, ducking into the dining room just as Stanley Sue commenced her bell rattling in quest of an undercover peanut.

  “I’d spent eleven hours with Mom at the hospital, and I was totally exhausted when I got home,” Joan continued. “But as soon as I walked through the door, the nurse called and told me that Mom was trying to escape. She kept looking for her clothes and her car keys. If a family member didn’t come there and spend the night, the nurse said, they’d have to strap her into bed.”

  “Oh, no.” I sank down to sit on the edge of the couch. My arm shot up to cover my face.

  “What? What?” asked Linda.

  I shook my head and waved her off as Joan described how her husband, Jack, had rushed to the hospital in Joan’s place and slept on a cot in Mom’s room. The next morning, the doctor decided that her elbow was fractured rather than shattered and that she could probably get by with physical therapy instead of surgery. “So, they scrapped the surgery, Bob, but they’d given Mom morphine for the pain, and she was really out of it. Mom had no idea that she had spent the night at the hospital. She was positive that we were at church selling raffle tickets.”

  “Raffle tickets!” I exploded.

  “What about raffle tickets?” Linda asked.

  “She kept saying, ‘If we’ve collected all the money for the tickets, can’t we go home?’ Finally, I looked at Mom and said, ‘Repeat after me: I have a broken elbow, and I am in the hospital.’ And she said it, word for word.”