by Kym Brunner
I weighed out two ounces of thawed rabbit meat and plopped Flip’s dinner into his bowl. He opened his mouth in alarm. Couldn’t he understand that I was his guardian, not his enemy? “See you tomorrow, Flip. Hopefully you’ll start to trust me.” I trudged into the rehab center to wash up. When I was halfway through scrubbing rabbit guts off my fingers, Mom yelled from the house, “Mercer! Your cell phone’s ringing!”
Lucy! I shut off the water, and without bothering to dry my hands, I sprinted out of the rehab center screaming, “Don’t answer it!”
That’s when I fell over the hose that some stupid Apprentice Boy forgot to wind back around the hose reel and nearly broke my neck.
EIGHT
“IT’S A GIRL,” MOM MOUTHED AS SHE HANDED ME MY PHONE, a confused look on her face.
“Yeah, so?” I was a little irritated that she had answered my cell, but even more irked that she seemed so surprised that a girl was calling me. I snatched the phone from her, bits of grass and mud still clinging to my forearms from my fall. I played it cool, leaning against the kitchen counter as if talking to the hottest girl in town was no big deal.
I reached for the deepest tones of my voice range. “Hello.” Mom rolled her eyes before turning around to pour herself a glass of juice.
“Mercer? Is that you?” Lucy asked.
I decided to forgo the bass tones, not sure I could keep it up anyway. “Yeah, it’s me.”
She sounded relieved. “It’s Lucy Wendel. To talk to you about HALT, remember?”
I jerked my head, nervously glancing at my mother. She didn’t flinch, so she obviously hadn’t overheard the dreaded word HALT. “Of course I remember.” I didn’t tell Lucy that her phone call had practically been the only thing on my mind the entire day.
Since I felt pretty self-conscious talking to Lucy with my mother listening, I headed downstairs. It was comfortable enough in the basement—two navy leather couches, a flat-screen TV, a pool table, and a dartboard—but more important, it was nearly soundproof.
For the next ten minutes, Lucy babbled excitedly about how HALT was so wonderful because society had such a blatant disregard of the rights of animals. She explained that many HALT members were also vegetarians, because the need for animals would decrease over time if people didn’t buy meat products, thereby saving thousands of animals’ lives. I thought the whole idea of boycotting meat sounded like wishful thinking, but I said, “Uh-huh” and “You’re kidding me!” at all the right spots, and that seemed to do the trick. Lucy was convinced that I was convinced, and that was all that mattered.
“So what do you think?” she asked breathlessly. “You want to join?”
Getting a girl to call me and talk about her club was way different from actually being a member. My stomach contents jostled at the thought of being part of the very group that had attacked my mother. Would joining HALT get me the private key to Lucy’s heart, or was this how she treated all potential new members? I decided to ask a few more questions. In the name of scientific testing, of course. “How often would I see you? The group, I mean. Like meetings.”
I shook my head at my stupidity. Any more slips like that, and she’d hang up.
Lucy cleared her throat. “Well, my friend Haley and I are starting up a teen HALT chapter at our school this year. She was one of the yellow Labs protesting with me.” She giggled. “Do you go to Woodley High?”
I confirmed that I did, and she answered with a cheerful “Awesome! Me too,” making me give a silent yet exuberant thank-you to the god of good-looking girls. She continued, “I thought maybe you could, you know, be part of the club too. With me.”
“That might work,” I said, struggling to maintain my cool when all I could think about was that Lucy went to Woodley! First, how incredible would it be to see her every day, but second, how had I missed seeing her in the hallway the first three days of school? I must have been sleepwalking.
“Cool!” she chirped. To my eager ears, it sounded like she meant it too. “Oh, but there is one thing you should know before you join.” She sighed into the phone, making me worry that what was coming next was an admission that I’d have to arm-wrestle her boyfriend for the job of treasurer. “You’d be our first guy in the club. I know that would suck, but maybe you could eventually convince your friends or whatever.”
Yeah, it’d totally suck being the only guy in a group of overly enthusiastic girls who didn’t want to hurt animals. I could already picture myself entertaining Lucy and her friends with stupid jokes or wowing them with the new muscles I’d be building as soon as I started lifting those weights. That’s when I heard the door leading to the basement open, followed by Dad’s booming voice. “Mercer, get your butt up here and roll up the hose!”
“Be right there!” I shouted back, glad when I heard the door close again.
“Was that your dad?” she asked tentatively. There was no way I was going to explain that, at this very moment, we had thirteen birds housed in the rehab center—large, mean birds who ate fluffy little bunnies—and that I’d carelessly left the hose unwound, the same hose that, incidentally, washed away the bones of the birds’ victims. Better for her to think that my dad had some anger management issues instead of me having laziness ones.
“Yeah, he wants me to do some chores. Before I go, I just wanted to say that I think you’re doing a real nice thing.” I cringed at my choice of words, thinking I sounded like a total wimp. I cupped my hand over my mouth so as to speak directly into the phone in case anyone upstairs could hear me. “And that I’d be happy to join HA—your club.”
Though I knew I’d never protest at my mom’s workplace, I figured they did other things I could get on board with. Hopefully, Lucy would be so completely smitten with my charm that soon enough it wouldn’t matter to her if I went on her protests or not.
Or that I liked to hunt with hawks in my spare time.
Or that I regularly ate cows, pigs, and chickens in addition to freshly killed pheasants or grouse, courtesy of Dad’s falcon, Troy. I grimaced at the thought of how much stealth I’d need to pull this off, but there was no turning back now.
“Great. I can’t wait to see you at school on Monday,” she cooed. Was that a touch of flirtation I heard?
I almost blew my cover by blurting out an excited “Me too! I think I love you!” but I lowered my voice and gave a manly “Cool. Me too.”
After we hung up, I raised both fists into the air while doing a three-second victory dance. If I could pull off playing Mercer, Protector of All Animals for a bit, perhaps there was a chance Lucy would go out with me. I didn’t know how long it would take to win her over, but she sounded like she was digging my Father Nature side.
On Sunday morning, after three reminder yells from Dad to get up and clean the mews, I rolled out of bed, worried that the next time, he’d show up with a cattle prod in hand. I wrestled my black CEREAL KILLER T-shirt out of the drawer and threw on the crumpled jeans that were on the floor from yesterday. If I could barely see the rotten tomato soup splatters, I figured no one else could either. There was a bit of an odor when I sniffed my pants up-close, but nothing a shot of Intimidate cologne wouldn’t fix. Three squirts later, I was good to go.
When I got downstairs, Maddie was sitting at the kitchen island with a plate of microwaved pancakes, watching some lame teenybopper show. She had her hair pulled back into the same messy hairstyle I’d seen on girls my age at school, along with her usual array of pink glittery attire. In honor of my T-shirt, I inhaled two bowls of Cinnamon Toasters, but was still hungry. When I glanced at Maddie’s breakfast, the scent of the warm maple syrup made me drool. I waited for her to get distracted and then snatched the last pancake off her plate.
“Give that back!” Maddie lunged for the pancake. On the way, she bumped her glass, sending a huge sploosh of milk across the table. “Now look what you did, Mercer!”
It was hard to drum up any sympathy for her—she should have known better than to leave
food unattended when I was around. “You want this back?” I made a show of licking the entire length of pancake before offering it to her. “Here you go, Sister Dearest.”
“I'm telling Dad, you big jerk!” She huffed and puffed more than the Big Bad Wolf. “You eat it now.”
“For me?” I gave her my biggest movie star smile, touching my chest. “You shouldn’t have.” I folded the pancake in half and took two huge bites. “Thanks, toots.” I winked.
“Pig.” She even talked like the wolf.
I was headed toward the family room when I spied a Waupaca Comets window decal stuck on the patio door. A pang of homesickness hit me square in the chest. “Where’d this come from, Maddie?” I pointed at the decoration from the high school I would’ve attended if we hadn’t moved.
Maddie glared at me, her arms crossed. I could tell she was torn between wanting to be the one to broadcast this insignificant bit of news and torturing me by keeping me in the dark. Seconds later, she spilled. “Lincoln found it in the junk drawer this morning, so he stuck it there.”
I felt somewhat comforted that Lincoln seemed to miss Wisconsin as much as I did. When Mom got the director job at the university’s science lab, we moved from the coolest place on Earth to this quasi-rural town of Woodley, Illinois. Not only did I have to leave behind all my friends, but living in Illinois now made us FIBs—“Effing” Illinois Bastards—a term every Wisconsinite over the age of eight knew. Whoever made up that acronym of shame wasn’t “fibbing.” Sorry to say, some of them—I guess “we” would be more fitting now—even deserved it.
Every weekend in winter and all summer long, thousands of FIBs packed up their cars and headed to Wisconsin to escape their polluted, congested Chicagoland so they could inhale some clean Wisconsin air. During hunting season, everywhere you turned there was a FIB. They seemed nice enough—unless you talked football with them—but what I hated most was seeing them take down prize Wisconsin quarry, while some locals went home empty-handed. That part sucked. Like when the opposing team wins the homecoming game—it just doesn’t seem right.
After my breakfasts, I went outside to clean the mews. Since I knew Dad would be watching me like a hawk, ha-ha, I hosed down all thirteen way better than I had yesterday. I gave a relaxing back rub to Monocle while she brushed her head against my hand. An hour later, I strolled into the rehab area. Dad had a new patient in the Raptor Restrainer, and he stood there clutching his chin, as if deciding what to do.
“Hey, Dad.” I plopped on a stool. “I finished cleaning. I’m ready whenever you are.”
He glanced up. “You’ll have to wait a bit. I’m trying to decide what course of action to take with this female Cooper’s hawk.”
“What’s wrong with her?” I scooched my stool closer, wanting a front-row view of my father in action. Not only did he possess the knowledge to cure a million avian illnesses, mend broken bones, and recognize exactly what type of infection a bird had simply by looking at it, he was also the Superman of the raptor world, zooming in faster than a speeding bullet to rescue injured birds. People called from all over the Midwest, looking for my dad’s help. Good thing he was such an expert because one bad move with raptors and the DNR swooped in and removed all of your birds. Kind of like the FDR or whatever the organization Mom said watched over her drug testing. My favorite part of this whole rehabilitation thing was that after the bird healed completely, we released it back to the wild. Just as I’d do to Flip in a few months. Seeing a wild raptor get a second chance at life choked me up every time.
Another well-guarded secret of the rugged-but-majorly-sentimental Mercer Buddie.
“She’s got a nasty case of bumblefoot.” Dad turned on the hinged light and pulled it toward the hawk, lifting her foot so I could look underneath. “See those lesions?” He pointed to two red, puffy holes oozing fluid on the bottom of the hawk’s foot. “This is why a falconer has got to keep his bird’s perches wide enough so that when the bird is standing on them, her talons don’t come around and pierce the bottom of her own foot.”
“Whose hawk is it?” I was curious to know how far this falconer had driven to bring his bird to Dad. So far the record was 785 miles, all the way from Wichita, Kansas.
“Shockingly, she’s from a fairly well-known zoo. It might be forgivable if she belonged to an ill-trained apprentice, but a zoo? They shouldn’t be allowed to keep raptors if they don’t know what they’re doing.” He frowned, shaking his head. “I’m required to report all zoo injuries to the licensing board, so they’ll have to deal with them. Not going to give her back until they assure me things have been corrected.” He strode to his medicine cabinet and opened the door. “You want to help me with the meds?”
“Sure.” While I waited for Dad to get the supplies he needed, I scanned his personal Wall of Fame mounted over the examination table. There were at least ten plaques citing various accomplishments: MR. RICHARD BUDDIE, MIDWEST FALCONER OF THE YEAR; RICHARD FRANCIS BUDDIE, MASTER FALCONER; RICK BUDDIE, WILDLIFE REHABILITATION SPECIALIST. And there were a ton more in the drawer. I bet he had more certificates than the raptor workers of all the nearby zoos combined.
He set a variety of colored tubes and sterile tools wrapped in plastic on the table before putting on a pair of disposable medical gloves. “This zookeeper is lucky that he brought this hawk in when he did. Bumblefoot can be a killer, but I think this one will be okay.”
As I watched my father squeeze a small blob of pinkish ointment onto a cotton swab I considered rehabbing birds for a living when I got older. Helping sick and injured birds seemed like the coolest thing ever. My dad didn’t make a lot of money, but if I could find a wife like my mom—pretty, smart, and who brought in the big bucks—it’d be awesome. Although if I could marry a girl like Lucy, I bet I wouldn’t care how much money we had.
Dad’s voice broke into my daydream. “Hold her foot for me, okay?” I applied steady pressure so the hawk couldn’t move as he dabbed antibiotic on the oozing wounds. “When we’re through here, I’ll check your cleaning job, and then we’ll get started with today’s training session.”
I winced at the suggestion that I needed checking on. “You don’t have to check. I did a good job this time.”
“This time?” Dad raised his thick brown-gray eyebrows. “How about every time?” I rolled my eyes after he turned and walked to the medicine cabinet to return the ointment. “Go have Flip fly off the perch to you a few times and then I’ll meet you out back in five minutes. Okay, Buddie Boy?”
“Sure thing, Dick.” I knew I was pushing it, using the old-fashioned nickname for Richard, but how many times did a guy need to ask his dad to stop using his childhood nickname? “Kidding,” I added quickly, giving him a fake smile and a shrug. Maybe this time he’d take the hint.
“Not funny, Mercer.”
“I know. Sorry.” As I walked away, I felt guilty. If only Dad treated me the way he treated Lincoln, things would be fine between us. When would he see I wasn’t a kid anymore?
Passing Liberty’s mews, I spied a nasty chunk of something white and lumpy underneath her perch that hadn’t come off with the hose earlier. If Dad saw that, he’d probably ask if I wanted Lincoln to go over the disinfecting directions with me again. No, thanks. Part of me wanted to leave it there, telling myself that I might as well act like a little kid, since Dad treated me like one. But I knew if I did that, I’d remain at the bottom of this family totem pole. So I went and obliterated the heck out of it with the heel of my shoe.
After depositing the mute pile into the trash, I washed up and grabbed a bag of rabbit tidbits out of the fridge. I hoped Dad was right about Flip being hungry today. To be honest, I didn’t know if my arm could take being held out in the extended position for as long as I’d held it out yesterday. With a heavy sigh of apprehension, I slid into position against the wall inside Flip’s mews. Sweat started to build up under my arms as I stood there motionless, waiting for him to notice the food in my hand.
Three heart-pounding minutes later, it happened. Flip flew to me, just as Dad said he would. I brought Flip outside on my fist, happy I hadn’t needed Dad’s help. I knew that wild birds were much harder to work with than imprinted ones. Imprinted birds were raised by humans right out of the egg, so they practically begged to be trained.
Dad was waiting for me when I got out to the training area. He had me practice basic retrieval techniques for the next thirty minutes, but like yesterday, it didn’t go well. Flip didn’t seem to understand that I wanted him to fly after the swing lure—a long rope with a piece of rabbit skin attached—and catch it in his talons. At first he ignored the swing lure completely, but then Dad showed me how to load it with bait, and things got a little better. Flip eventually caught on, but then, even after he knew what he was supposed to do, he still acted like a rookie, snatching the lure only two out of nine times.
“Is it me or is it him?” I asked, wanting a straight answer.
“I guess he feels compelled to live up to that ridiculous name you gave him.”
“Ha-ha.” If this were anyone but Dad, I’d probably have shown him the literal version of Flip’s name.
“I’m teasing, Buddie—I mean, Mercer. Flip doesn’t trust you yet, which is the falconer’s greatest obstacle. But the more time you spend with him, the sooner he’ll love being with you.”
I nodded, the burning tension in my chest easing. As I walked back to the mews with Flip on my fist, I wondered whether the same tactics would work on Lucy. If I spent time with her to get her to trust me, would she love being with me too?
There was only one way to find out.
NINE
WHEN THE ALARM BUZZED FOR SCHOOL THE NEXT MORNING, I hopped out of bed on the first ring. I needed extra time to shave the stubble on my jaw and upper lip without cutting myself. I figured toilet paper wads stuck on my face with dried-blood glue might not be hugely attractive.
