by Bob Tarte
“Whoa, what’s this?” He lowered his window and leaned out. A pair of birds paddled in a circle not thirty feet from the car. They resembled sandpipers, but with their red throats and reddish-striped grey backs, they were nothing I remembered from hours spent dreamily paging through my field guides. Bill located the bird in his Calvin Coolidge – era guide, which I believe still included the dodo. “They’re, uh, red-necked palindromes. Or phallic symbols. Or something.”
“Phalaropes,” I said. “But they can’t be.” I scrambled to confirm it in my Kaufman Focus Guide. Unless the tectonic plates had shifted during the night, Muskegon still lay far south of the birds’ Canadian Arctic range. Yet the phalaropes were unmistakable.
“Migration,” concluded Bill. “Or global cooling.”
“Well, that’s the catch of the day.”
And it used up the rest of our luck. After a fruitless, shovelerfilled drive alongside the landfill area, Bill announced, “I’ve got to pee bad,” descended the dike, and disappeared among the weeds. I unfolded myself and stretched my legs just as the green van appeared from a side road in a curtain of dust. It slowed and pulled up past Bill’s car.
“Bob?” A man got out of the van and walked toward me. “Bob Tarte?”
He hadn’t changed much since junior college, or at least his field markings had remained distinctive enough that I could identify Nick Farley without looking him up in Kaufman—squarish, vaguely Volvo-shaped head, stooped shoulders, and a gravelly voice that sounded as if he had swallowed a handful of sunflower seed. We exchanged pleasantries, and as Bill climbed up the hill to fetch a swig of bottled water, I introduced them to each other. “I didn’t know Nick was a birder,” I said.
“I’m really not,” he replied, which appealed to Bill. “It just gives me something to do.”
He told me he had read about my father’s death a few years earlier and expressed his belated sympathies. “Now, this is going to seem really off the wall,” he said, “but by any chance did Eileen Kucek show up at the funeral home?”
Bill nearly spit out his water in classic Danny Thomas Make Room for Daddy fashion.
“Yes, she did,” I said. “Why do you ask?”
“Remember Tim Crosley from Catholic Central? His mom died in December, and Eileen was at the funeral. Tim hadn’t seen her since—I don’t know—madras shorts were in style. Anyway, she drops in on him all the time, and he can’t get rid of her.”
“Tell him to tough it out,” Bill suggested. “He’ll be off the hook when someone else’s parent kicks off.”
“Does Tim Crosley have pet ducks?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“Eileen has a thing about ducks.”
“Stuffed ducks, maybe.”
“What do you mean, ‘stuffed ducks’?”
“She’s got a stuffed duck in her vestibule. No, I guess it’s a woodcock. She’s got a stuffed woodcock in her vestibule.” Noticing my puzzled expression, Nick explained, “She and her husband are hunters. They just got back from a goose hunt up near Tawas Point. They were gone the whole weekend, and let me tell you, Tim was happy for the vacation.”
I COULD HARDLY avoid the irony that a trip to the waste-water-treatment system had significantly lifted my spirits. Little did I know that the cheering appearance of birds in that unhealthy environment foreshadowed a brightening avian presence that would flutter above the stagnant stew of my own internal ecological disaster. Something like that happened.
Our telephone brought us so much trouble over the years, the beast deserved its own cage in the dining room right beside Ollie’s. It disguised a squawk as a ring as I poured myself a cup of coffee. When I recognized the name on the caller ID as one of Linda’s duck-pen cleaner-uppers, I should have let our answering machine earn its keep. But in the wake of Nick’s revelation about Eileen and her pathological interference in people’s lives, generosity seized me. I hadn’t been singled out and cursed by fate after all. An entire Catholic grade school class had fallen under the same topknotted cloud of ill luck as me.
Tossing my better judgment to the floor to mingle with Howard’s seed husks, I picked up the phone and bid Bruno a pleasant hello, figuring that he was angling for odd jobs. “Linda’s out shopping, but I’ll have her call you back.”
“I’m calling because my friend’s got this bird, and he’s going to let it go.”
I’d been twirling the phone cord, but I stopped abruptly. “What kind of bird?” I asked, wondering how the answering machine would have handled the situation. “Is this a wild bird or a pet bird?”
“I don’t know what it is, but my friend’s tired of it going to the bathroom all the time, and he wants to just open the cage and let it go. I told him I knew these people with birds and not to let it go until I called Linda.”
“Well, I guess you’d better bring it over,” I said, and he agreed. “Thanks for calling,” I added, suppressing the urge to beep.
I expected that Bruno’s buddy might have chased down a flightless robin fledgling in his backyard or scooped up a sparrow that had stunned itself flying into a window. I never imagined he would consider sending a caged bird with no street smarts out into the world. But I realized that this had been the plan when a NASCAR-jacketed Bruno walked into the living room with a gorgeous cockatiel inside a battered cage.
“He doesn’t want this bird?” I asked. The teenager shook his head. “Where did he come from?”
“His dad gave it to him. Me and John are moving into an apartment, and we don’t have room for a lot of stuff, so he wanted to get rid of the bird. He eats too much seed.”
“Well, you’ve done a good deed,” I told him in my best Ward Cleaver fashion. Although Beaver’s father wouldn’t have approved, I fished around in my wallet and handed him a twenty for his trouble. Linda had told me that he hadn’t been able to find a job so far.
“What’s the bird’s name?” I shouted as the NASCAR logo headed out the door toward John’s muffler-challenged wreck.
“He didn’t name it anything. He said you can keep the cage.”
Keep it? I hardly dared pick it up. It had a taped-on section of a plastic bag in place of the missing cage top, two taped-together food dishes, and even a broken perch splinted with a piece of tape. I hoped that the cockatiel didn’t have a tapeworm. Since I couldn’t envision using the abused cage in our dining room, I needed to find an alternative. In the basement, I surveyed the few cages we had: they were scaled to fit parakeet-size birds, but not a long-tailed cockatiel. Only one would fit the newcomer. Swallowing, I walked over to the corner where I had stashed Stanley Sue’s cage. Once I had lugged it up the stairs, the cage all but skittered across the room on its metal legs and settled into its familiar spot beside the telephone.
Over a decade ago, Ollie had taught me that the smallest hook-billed bird could inflict a bite painful enough to make your eyeballs roll back into your head. With great trepidation I unlatched the cockatiel’s door and ventured my hand inside, wondering if I’d be warned before losing a chunk of flesh. The bird raised the spidery crest on its head as if in provocation, then nimbly hopped onto my finger, crawled up my wrist, and parked itself on my shoulder. I had difficulty prying its toes loose from my shirt to convince it to check out its spacious new quarters. I let it linger on my finger, the better to luxuriate in its impressive coloration. Each feather on the bird’s back, nape, and wings started with a center blob of grey, reconsidered that as too bland, then kept the grey at bay by lassoing it inside a fat yellow border. This combination gave the feathers a slight suggestion of opalescence, which explained why that particular plumage pattern was commonly called “pearl.”
But it was the face that immediately endeared the bird to me. The buggy, active eyes, the wispy grey crest that shot up like a feathered fountain, and an overall amused demeanor reminded me of one of those Galápagos Islands lizards that had learned to tolerate human company. Scientists debating the link between dinosaurs and modern bird
s needed to look no further than our cockatiel. And I already considered the bird ours. In other words, I’d been Moobied. But I didn’t know how Linda would react.
While I was herding the hens and ducks inside the barn, I heard the cannonball slam of Linda’s car door and felt the ground tremble as she clomped toward the house. I lobbed bits of bread toward Muscovy duck Victor—he caught five consecutive pieces in midair—and scattered a container of table scraps on the cement floor, expecting my wife to barge in at any moment and startle the hens. I finished the feeding without incident, snapped off the lights, and bade a hissing chorus of Victor and Ramone good night. Peering up through the dining room picture window before toddling back into the basement, I saw Linda on the phone making her nightly call to her mom. Just as my foot hit the stairs, I heard the explosion from above.
“What in the world is this?” she asked her mom, who must have wondered what in the world was going on. “Who are you? What are you doing here? Why are you in Stanley Sue’s old cage?” She shot her final question at me as I came up from the basement. “Who does he belong to?”
“You,” I told her on the spur of the moment. In the long run, and for many reasons, it seemed like the easiest thing to do. As soon as Linda hung up the phone and I had explained the cockatiel’s presence, I called Bill to brag about having added another life bird, more or less.
CHAPTER 15
Bella
Linda named the cockatiel Lulu. The name stuck until the morning Lulu froze my feet to the linoleum by hanging upside down in Stanley Sue’s cage while fanning her wings and tail feathers in a display so extravagant that it would have embarrassed a peacock. The spectacle impressed the heck out of me. Partly it was like seeing an exotic headdress worthy of Carmen Miranda come to life, and partly it made me feel as if I’d caught a keyhole peek at some secret ceremony.
Our how-to book on keeping cockatiels trumpeted the alleged fact that only male birds engaged in these flirtatious displays. On the basis of that authority, we changed Lulu’s name to Louie. The name stuck until an unpleasant surprise unglued it. As I ate my breakfast bowl of oatmeal in preparation for a grueling half-day at the office, I flicked my eyes at our cockatiel and blurted out the unappetizing statement “There’s some kind of bloody mass hanging out of Louie’s rear end.”
By the time I had rushed the bird to Dr. Hedley’s office, the blood had rubbed off in the carrier, revealing not the tumor I had feared but an egg trapped mid-transit.
“She’s egg-bound,” our veterinarian told me, referring to a condition in which a bird’s reproductive ductwork doesn’t work. “It’s not all that uncommon, especially if this is her first egg. But it can be quite serious if you don’t attend to it.”
Dr. Hedley treated our supposed male bird in the back room for a few minutes, the egg slid out, and that was that. Except for another perceived gender change and a touch of postpartum soreness, Louie suffered no ill effects.
“Egg-binding is often caused by a calcium deficiency,” Dr. Hedley explained. “The easiest remedy is to grind up an antacid tablet and sprinkle it in her food. That will give her something to ‘grab on to’ the next time she lays an egg.”
Over the next week, Louie squeezed out three more eggs without impediment, then tired of the novelty and quit. We tired of the name changing and continued to refer to her as Louie, which I decided possessed a latent feminine aspect if I said it in a high-pitched voice. Considering that Stanley Sue had come to us as a male named Stanley and later turned out to be a female, whereupon I dubbed her Stanley Sue, gender blurring by the bird that lived in her cage seemed entirely appropriate.
Our cockatiel had another trick up her sleeveless leg to show us. Every morning, Linda slapped together a toy for Dusty by stringing wooden shapes on knotted leather shoelaces and hanging them in his cage. Naturally, he destroyed each toy within an hour. Otherwise, the brotherhood of African grey parrots would have yanked his membership. Although he gnawed off the points of his wooden stars and split his wooden beads in half as if they were pistachios, he did nothing as crass as biting through the laces. Instead, he amazed us by untying the knots via a Houdiniesque manipulation of toes and beak. My loud praises of this feat went a long way toward improving our rather rocky relationship.
But newcomer Louie nearly knocked Dusty off his leather throne. When I made a version of the shoelace-and-bauble toy for Louie, she bested the big parrot by untying each knot in under fifteen seconds, using just her beak. Thus, a toy with four wooden pieces amused Louie for about a minute, which was less time than it took for me to string the thing together.
Unlike Dusty, who refused to loosen the laces if I fixed my eye upon him, Louie wasn’t the least bit shy about performing her stunt for an audience. That made her the only one of our birds who faithfully fulfilled our brags in front of company. Dusty balked at talking, Howard hovered but rarely landed on my head, and Ollie neither bit us into oblivion nor unleashed his usual torrent of hideous squawks for the amazement of strangers. But Louie proved utterly dependable with the shoelace trick. All I had to do was tie a knot and she immediately undid it, to the oohs and ahhs of onlookers.
This did not please Dusty, who was loath to lose the knot-loosening concession, so he came up with a dazzling topper of his own. His modus operandi had always been to drop the leather laces to the floor of his cage when he had finished untying them. But one afternoon as I was about to change his water, I noticed that he had looped a shoelace through the metal bracket that held his dish in place. My exaggerated acclaim for this latest stunt turned genuine when I realized that he had decorated the end with a fancy knot that neither Eagle Scout nor New England fisherman would be apt to duplicate.
“Oh, my gosh,” I asked him, “did you do that?” He stretched his neck and bit his rope toy in response, in a sure sign of his delight.
His handiwork became an almost daily ritual. Before leaving for work in the morning, I’d put in my request: “Are you going to tie me a knot today?” If Dusty found himself in a generous mood, by midafternoon he’d leave me another of his creations. More often than not, he’d dunk the knot in his water dish, and I’d have to hang out his little piece of artistry to dry.
“Two of those would make a nice pair of earrings,” Linda observed.
“Let’s give him some gold wire and a few diamonds and see what he comes up with,” I suggested.
Instead of filling the gap left by Stanley Sue, my interactions with Louie and Dusty made me miss her all the more. I started thinking that the only way to get over her death would be to get another Timneh.
Bill Holm oh so helpfully advised me in the matter while we tramped through the woods near the river, making too much noise to find any migrating spring warblers.
“If Turbo were to be, say, crushed by a boulder, I’d grieve.”
“Turbo? Who’s Turbo?”
“But I would probably buy another Volvo and love it,” he rattled on. “I couldn’t bring myself to call it Turbo, because nothing could replace him. Volvos are not interchangeable.”
“Only the parts and pieces,” I said.
I didn’t see this as an issue of interchangeability. But I had to admit that should anything happen to Bill, I would certainly want another self-obsessed Swede for a pal.
The simple fact was that I seemed to need a Timneh the same way a schizophrenic needed voices in the head. But I wouldn’t expect another parrot to take Stanley Sue’s place—not unless it miraculously developed a penchant for clipping off rabbit tails, slitting open dove necks, and eviscerating the woodwork. Stanley Sue would eternally remain my sweetie no matter what other Timneh brought its complicated disposition into my life.
OVER THE YEARS, Linda and I had taken in orphaned birds—from starlings to geese—as well as the occasional wayfaring cat. Few folks offered us mammals, which had resulted in a glaring deficiency in the skunk department. As I poked my head down the stairwell in response to voices just inside the living room, I knew without a doubt n
ot only that Linda was discussing an animal but also what kind of animal was involved.
“I didn’t know if you’d take it,” a man said, “so I didn’t bring it with me.” Even from the top of the stairs, I begged to disagree. He might have left the skunk at home, but he carried its essence with him.
“Sweetie,” Linda called. I followed my nose downstairs, and she introduced me to Lou Parrish, our neighbor from a mile down the road. “A poor mother skunk got run over in front of Meijer, and one of the babies sat next to her body for six hours.” I shook Lou’s hand, wondering if this act transferred Pepé Le Pew’s calling card to me. “The baby hadn’t had any food all day, and Lou’s kids felt so sorry for it that he finally picked up the baby and took it home, and gave it food and water. His daughter held it in her lap and petted it, and she didn’t get sprayed.”
I nodded at our neighbor. He seemed fatigued by the rescue process and apparently ignorant of the fact that the miasma of skunk clung to his clothes. The baby must have picked up the smell from its flattened mom. I hoped that Lou wouldn’t offer me a ride in his assuredly odoriferous van to pick up the foundling. I had no grudge against skunks, since they infrequently visited us. Yet I felt slightly disturbed that we were evidently the go-to people in the area when it came to them.
Linda didn’t even need to open her mouth. I knew what she was going to ask. “Can we take the baby and keep it in the barn? Lou’s got to go out of state this afternoon. He has to visit his son in Oklahoma, so he can’t take care of it.”
I couldn’t come up with an excuse to head out of state myself. “I guess it’s okay. As long as it stays in the barn,” I added with my usual naïveté. Fate, aided by Linda, would soon decide otherwise. I failed to take another important fact into consideration, too: one of us would have to transfer the skunk from Lou’s pet carrier to a rabbit cage in the barn. That task automatically fell to me.
