Fowl Weather

by Bob Tarte

  Whiskers, a big male rag-doll mix, tended toward irrational exuberance, so I couldn’t fall into my usual feline-petting reverie with him without risking a nip on the hand. Realigning my arm a few inches, I scratched calico cat Baby behind the ears, then turned my attention to a medium-size black cat that had hopped from the side of our unfinished stairway onto the basement floor, passing through the unoccupied fledgling flight cage like a breeze through the branches of a tree. Agnes, our small black cat, was at the moment asleep on the arm of the couch in the living room upstairs, and this solid-appearing yet shadowy form definitely didn’t belong to her. It disappeared as soon as it hit or didn’t hit the cement. The ghost cat had returned.

  A week earlier, shortly after Nancy Ann’s friend Al had first dropped off the skittish Whiskers and Baby, I had seen the not-really-there black feline for the first time. As the two flesh-and-blood visitors tentatively investigated the new space, the apparition popped into our basement long enough to take a few steps, vanishing as soon as I gave it a second glance. Why it had accompanied the pair, I couldn’t imagine, but it clearly possessed the tenuous and intermittent toehold in reality that people popularly associate with ghosts, unless ethereal apparitions have nothing to do with spirits. Perhaps at the moment of death a kind of turning inside out of the pockets of the physical form occurs. Unimportant traces of bodily existence show up like pennies that materialize under the cushion of a favorite chair, only to be misplaced again.

  Or maybe more like paper clips. Shortly after Joan and Bett moved my mom to the furnished apartment at Testament Terrace, Bett phoned me to ask, “Remember the rubber bands and paper clips Mom claimed Dad was leaving around the house? I guess he approves of what we’re doing. Before we had even started unpacking Mom’s things, I found a green rubber band and a paper clip on the floor of her new bathroom. I have no idea how they could have gotten there.”

  Perhaps, I thought, if paper-fastening products rained down from heaven, then the K-A-U-F-M-A-N coincidence might be another form of precipitation. Clouds filled with apparent meaningfulness grew heavy over time, dumping symbolic snowflakes onto our heads. The problem was, I never knew how to interpret the fallout. Trying to glean content from apparent absurdity tugged my underpowered brain in conflicting directions as I wondered whether propitious or ill events hung before me. If I had taken a mental step back in time, I might have recalled the coincidence involving another field guide—the National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Weather which had nettled me in the wake of my father’s death.

  AFTER I ARRIVED home from my morning job, I opened Stanley Sue’s cage door to allow her to wreak her usual mild havoc on the dining room. The descent from her cage and clamber up Rudy’s cage were sluggish. Once on the summit, instead of taking a few token beak swipes at the rabbit snoozing safely far below the wire top, she sat on the edge of the cage huffing and puffing.

  “Something’s wrong with Stanley Sue,” I called to Linda, who hurried in from the tiny back room, where she had been working on the month’s bookkeeping for her tiny church. “She’s having trouble breathing.”

  Of all the critters in the house, Stanley Sue received my closest attention. I hadn’t noticed the slightest sign of any problem earlier, except that the previous night she hadn’t squawked and rung her bell with her usual annoyance.

  “She doesn’t look very good,” Linda said, as Stanley’s Sue chest rose and fell alarmingly with each breath. “We’d better get her to the vet today.”

  Dr. Fuller, the gifted avian vet who usually treated her, couldn’t squeeze her into his afternoon schedule at such short notice. Dr. Hedley, who consulted for several zoos in the Great Lakes area and had saved the lives of a number of our pets, managed to clear space for her immediately.

  I brought Stanley Sue into the examination room in a shoe-box-size pet carrier. Prickling my conscience with a plaintive series of peeps, she inveigled me into opening the carrier door and letting her hop to the top to wait for the doctor. But the door started to ease shut beneath her. When I extended my hand to prevent it from pinching her scaly grey toes, I startled her. She flew heavily around the room in two slow spirals before sinking to the floor in the corner. As soon as she landed, she toppled over onto her side and didn’t get up.

  I rushed to her, lifting her body in both hands and placing her on the towel in the carrier. She lay breathing heavily for a half a minute and managed to make it back to her feet just before Dr. Hedley came in. With a shaky voice, I described what had happened.

  “Ran out of gas, huh?” he asked with a look of concern.

  “I thought she was dead,” I said.

  The parrot chittered in protest as he held her on her back and listened to her chest with a stethoscope. “She’s got pneumonia.”

  The diagnosis shocked me almost as much as Stanley Sue’s collapse. I fought a falling-in-the-elevator sensation as a prickling of heat throughout my body announced the leading edge of a panic attack. It was one thing to hear bad news about an animal that had suffered a lengthy illness. But Stanley had appeared perfectly healthy just twenty-four hours earlier, and I couldn’t accept the idea that she was gravely ill.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “This is very upsetting.”

  He peered at me over his glasses. “Of course it is. She’s your buddy.” His voice projected strength and confidence, two qualities that had never taken root in me.

  “Do you think she’ll be okay?”

  “There’s a good chance, as long we caught this soon enough,” he answered as he slipped her back inside the carrier. I pushed my finger through the grate and wiggled it genially near her beak in a halfhearted gesture of reassurance. “We’ll try her on an antibiotic and see if she starts to show improvement in a couple of days. In the meantime, it is vitally important to keep her very warm.”

  When I came home, I found Linda in the kitchen squatting in front of the refrigerator, eating banana cream pie from a spatula. “How is Stanley?” Straightening up, she stopped chewing when I told her what had happened.

  Following Dr. Hedley’s instructions, we turned Stanley Sue’s cage into a tent that would keep in the heat, covering all sides but the front with blankets. Then I carried in a space heater and proceeded to install a tropical climate in the dining room.

  WE STARTED GETTING late-evening calls from the staff at Testament Terrace that my mom was wandering the halls, waiting for Joan or me to pick her up. “We send her back to her room, and she’s okay for a while. Then just when we think she’s settled down, she’s out wandering again.” A few nights after I had taken Stanley Sue to the vet and was watching a home improvement show with Linda, the night manager phoned. “Mrs. Kelsey just walked into her room and found your mom going through her dresser drawers, pulling out clothes. She said she needed to pack for a trip to Port Huron to visit her sister. It might calm her down if you talked to her.”

  When I gave my mom a call, she didn’t mention anything about leaving town. But she did claim that she had the front-door key to her former neighbors Ted and Lesley’s house. “I’ve got to get it back to them, or they’ll be locked out.” I suggested that the errand could probably wait until morning, and she surprised me by agreeing and deciding to go to bed. Just before hanging up, she said, “Have you seen Dad recently?”

  I was speechless for a moment. The question somehow reminded me of hearing his dislocated voice on the answering machine. “He’s been dead a few years now. Remember?”

  “That’s odd,” she replied. The news didn’t seem to upset her. “I could have sworn I saw him this morning when I was walking to the dime store.”

  Since she couldn’t recall Dad’s passing, I didn’t see the value in pointing out that the Jolly Store had gone belly-up at least twenty years ago and was miles away from Testament Terrace. “I think about Dad a lot, too,” I told her, and I could imagine worse delusions than passing his smiling figure on the sidewalk.

  I GOT OFF THE phone with Mom just as Linda b
rought out the last two slices of banana cream pie. It proved to be as much of a hit with our twelve-pound rabbit Frieda as it had been with the pair of humans in the house. She interrupted our snack by hopping up onto the couch and thrusting her feet and face onto Linda’s plate.

  “Frieda,” Linda complained, “you’re going to make me drop it.”

  “She shouldn’t be having sweets anyway. She already weighs a ton.”

  After being unceremoniously shooed onto the floor, Frieda demonstrated her displeasure by running behind the recliner and glaring at us. Eventually, her love of being pampered trumped her disgruntlement. She loped back to plop down beside the couch so that I could pet her. Recognizing an opportunity when he saw it, brown bunny Rudy snuggled up beside her, pressing his small body against her massive bloat so tightly, I couldn’t stroke her head without petting his as well.

  “It’s like a dinghy beside an ocean liner,” I told Linda.

  My mood had eased since dinner, when Stanley Sue had shown improvement by digging into her veggies, potatoes, and gelatin dessert after days of poor appetite. She had even treated me to an angry whistle when I had thrown the black cover over her cage.

  I definitely needed a break from worry. Stanley Sue’s sickness had become my sickness. Ever since her collapse at Dr. Hedley’s, a steady drip, drip, drip of dread had distracted me from concentrating on anything but her. Stanley Sue, my feet tapped out as I walked down the basement stairs. I’d see people chuckling together in the grocery store aisle and think, They don’t know what I know. If I relaxed my guard or tensed—I wasn’t sure which—the dread increased its grip and leaped into the foreground. My locomotive gears would freeze as I stared dully into space until some stimulus jarred me loose. If by an uncharacteristically optimistic surge I managed to banish the worry, I’d pay for my relief moments later when the fear resurfaced with vengeful vigor.

  It didn’t help matters that Stanley Sue hated being handled, and medicating her twice a day added to our distress. In full bloom of health, she could be timid about stepping onto my finger, and I couldn’t risk her flying in a panic around the room and passing out again. So each morning and evening I would open the cage door, toss a hand towel over her, and carry her to the kitchen countertop. Linda would hold her as I wriggled the tip of a syringe between her jaws. The trick was squirting the antibiotic slowly enough that she would swallow rather than spit it out; but if I took too long, she would chomp down on the syringe and destroy it. By the time I returned her to the cage, her pupils were wide with anxiety, her chest was heaving, and my stomach hurt.

  Although Stanley Sue’s appetite was better, her breathing remained labored. Linda phoned Dr. Hedley, who suggested that we try a different antibiotic. For a couple of days, I fooled myself into thinking it had helped, but that weekend she plummeted downhill. Dr. Hedley had left Michigan to sit with his sick father out west. Late Sunday afternoon, Dr. Fuller returned Linda’s call from a bedand-breakfast in northern Michigan. He instructed us to completely cover Stanley Sue’s cage and move her to a room that we could heat to eighty-five degrees. He would see her the next morning.

  Joan drove Stanley Sue and me to the vet. Linda couldn’t drive me, because of her back problems. I could have driven myself, but I welcomed the moral support and well-heated SUV. As Dr. Fuller examined the whimpering bird, I sat on a chair in the room and erupted in a torrent of tears.

  “He’s been under a lot of stress lately,” Joan said to Dr. Fuller. “This isn’t just about Stanley Sue.” She was thinking of my father’s death and my mother’s Alzheimer’s disease.

  I was too ashamed to glance up at Dr. Fuller, who had treated our turkeys, rabbits, ducks, geese, and indoor birds over the years but had never seen me in lunatic mode before. I couldn’t explain the psychological sickness that I was suffering over my parrot, because I didn’t understand it myself. A hand had reached inside me and flicked on a switch labeled “Despair,” and I couldn’t find it in the dark to turn it off. I decided it was red, like the button on my mother’s furnace.

  Without holding out any hope, Dr. Fuller offered to keep Stanley Sue overnight. “We’ll give her a few nebulization treatments,” he told me, which meant placing her in an empty aquarium and pumping it full of oxygenated air mixed with an aerosol antibiotic. “That’s the most effective way of getting the medicine deep into her lungs.”

  “Do what you can,” I sobbed as I floated past him on a flood of tears. “I’ll understand if she doesn’t make it.”

  Out in the parking lot in the passenger’s seat of Joan’s SUV, I slumped forward like an accident victim, with Joan clutching my arm. A wintry mix of rain and sleet ticked against the glass. Her wipers cut two arcs across the windshield. “She’s going to be all right, “she assured me, taking my hand. “She’s going to be all right.”

  I STARTED SEARCHING for signs that she would be okay.

  I tried divining meaning behind license plates, newspaper articles, snippets of overheard conversation, items appraised on Antiques Roadshow, song lyrics, bank statements, TV Guide summaries, cereal boxes, spam e-mail, crossword puzzles, fortune cookies, billboards, dreams, New Yorker magazine cartoons, weather reports, gastric upset, and whatever else crossed my path. I blamed this grasping at supernatural straws on my Blessed Sacrament Elementary School years steeped in saints, miracles, heavenly portents, and, of course, incessant guilt—though the truth may have simply been that I was mentally ill. Nevertheless, I kept searching. But nothing transcendental emerged. The ghost cat and K-A-U-F-M-A-N had already spoken their piece.

  AT LEAST STANLEY SUE had returned home. Dr. Fuller had phoned to tell me, with a smile in his voice, that I could pick her up. But he obviously hadn’t approved of my breakdown in his office.

  “These birds are extremely perceptive,” he warned me as I hovered near the examination table, “so it is important that you maintain a positive attitude around her. If you’re upset, she’ll read that. Her recovery depends on getting plenty of encouragement.”

  It also depended on medication, the proper temperature, and nutrition. For the foreseeable future, Stanley Sue had to live in an aquarium in our back room to keep her warm and out of drafts—and to prevent her from straining herself by climbing the bars of a cage. To supplement the small amount of food that she ate on her own, I had to tube-feed her a special high-protein, high-vitamin mixture twice a day.

  Tube-feeding represented a particular horror that made dosing her with antibiotic seem as easy as flinging table scraps to a hen. Holding the towel-wrapped parrot firmly against my chest, I learned to work an angled metal nozzle down her throat and into her crop, being careful not to take the wrong passage by mistake and cut off her air. Once I had situated the end of the tube in her crop, it would make a telltale bulge an inch below her beak. Then I needed to keep her absolutely still as I depressed the plunger of a fat syringe and trickled in the liquid food. The procedure never went smoothly, thanks to my fear of hurting her. I often had to give up following a botched attempt and try again a few minutes later, once bird and Bob had calmed down. Although I exhibited cowardice over most aspects of my life, I probably couldn’t be faulted for squeamishness when it came to the tube-feeding. It was a delicate, nerve-racking, cringe-inducing procedure that reduced each day to a ticking off of hours before I had to do it all over again.

  Less unnerving but still fussy was keeping the back room at eighty-five degrees in the middle of December, since it required continual adjustment of a space heater that hadn’t been built for precision. The first two nights that Stanley Sue had spent back home, I slept on the couch in the living room. Every two hours I woke up and, with the aid of a flashlight, checked the thermometer inside the aquarium, then nudged the heater thermostat up or down. It took me a few days to figure out how to keep the room temperature from bouncing around. Once I finally moved back into the bedroom, I still got up once or twice a night to peek at her. If I wielded the flashlight too intrusively, she would nod her head in dis
approval and tap her beak against the glass.

  She took the abuse remarkably well. I had no idea what an intelligent creature thought of being confined to a glass box. I hated subjecting her to the discomfort and indignity. I removed her bell from her cage and taped it to the lip of the aquarium so that it hung down inside. She couldn’t exactly ring it, but she could rattle it in greeting or displeasure, and this seemed to please her. Considering that she was so shy that even introducing a new perch to her cage sent her into nervous throes, she coped courageously with the fish-bowl existence.

  Some days, she seemed to show progress. Her breathing difficulties lessened, her eyes grew brighter, her appetite increased. Other days her poor lung function necessitated a hurried trip to Dr. Fuller’s office and another nebulization treatment. Because the antibiotics hadn’t cured her, he drew blood to check for a fungal disease or virus, but the tests came back negative. “We really need to take an X-ray to find out what’s going on inside of her,” he said, “but in her present state, that much handling might be risky.”

  The ups and downs drove me crazy. I tried to compensate for the absence of a medical diagnosis by seeking omens in the usual detritus of my life, from clues on Jeopardy! to graphics on candy bar wrappers. Nothing pointed toward a cure. My anxiety level shot up when Linda arrived home from grocery shopping one afternoon to announce that she had run into a friend of Henry Murphy’s, who’d informed her that our master gardener had dropped dead from a heart attack.

  “He sure was a character,” Linda told me. “A couple of days before he passed on, he was over at the cemetery standing on a tombstone, trying to get his kite to fly.”

  Cemetery? Flying? I thought. This doesn’t sound good.

  STANLEY SUE’S SICKNESS didn’t exactly put me in a holiday frame of mind as symbols of Christmas sprung up throughout the house. Santa Clauses invaded our bookshelves. The coffee table sprouted scented candles, ceramic snowmen, and a radioactive red candy dish. Strings festooned with greeting cards traversed the dining room, presenting a navigation hazard to the birds, while the Christmas tree in the living room gave the rabbits a fortified hiding place. Rousting them meant risking a poke in the eye with a branch or, worse, dislodging an ornament and earning a reprimand from Linda.