Bob Tarte

by Enslaved by Ducks

  Fortunately, Linda had been keeping tabs on Ollie from the living room. Finding the kitchen uncharacteristically quiet, she headed down to the basement and in disbelief traced the sound of his angry chirps outdoors, down the hill, and beyond the backyard fence. She ran back into the house and hollered up the stairs, “Ollie’s out in the yard way in the top of a tree.”

  I thundered down the steps and followed her outside. Linda pointed and shouted, but I couldn’t pick him out from the foliage. His emerald-colored body blended in perfectly with the newly emerged leaves. For once Ollie’s incessant chirping served him well, and using his voice as a guide, I pinpointed him in a hack-berry tree just on the other side of the fence, clinging to a branch about twenty feet off the ground. I was shocked at how small and vulnerable our avian dictator looked. Though escaped Quaker parakeets have taken root in environments as inhospitable as Chicago and New York City, there wasn’t a chance Ollie would survive outdoors if we couldn’t lay our hands on him. His bad attitude was nothing like street smarts. It was the pampered personality of a spoiled rich kid in feathered knickers who was tough only when it came to dominating his owners. Bluff and bluster would mean nothing to a hawk, and none of the trees on our property sprouted spaghetti or mashed potatoes at mealtime.

  “Ollie, come down from there,” Linda said, but she was talking to the wind. Under the best of circumstances, Ollie had never listened to us, and in this case he had determined that safety constituted the branch his toes were wrapped around. Our only chance was to try to reach him, which struck me as extremely unlikely. I don’t climb trees, chop them down, or even plant them. A ladder was the obvious recourse, but the last time I had used one, it was to clear debris off the nearly flat roof above our dining room, and once there I had been too frightened to climb down again.

  This time I had no option but to fight my fear of heights. I wrestled an aluminum stepladder over our wire backyard fence and with no small effort followed the ladder with my body. I managed to penetrate a clinging barrier of wild black raspberry bushes and was already panting by the time I reached the base of the tree. Ollie scolded me as I searched in vain for a semisolid patch of ground that would simultaneously support all four legs of the ladder. The front legs immediately sank as I made my ascent, knocking the ladder against the tree trunk and almost pitching me off.

  As I began my shaky climb, I lost all sight of Ollie. “I don’t see him anymore!” I shouted to Linda, who was helping to steady the ladder.

  “He’s right there,” she called back, grazing my chest with the pointing finger at the end of her arm. From the way we were shouting at each other, you would have thought we were on opposite sides of the swamp instead of within backslapping distance. “On this one?” I exclaimed, my voice rising louder with hope as I indicated a shoulder-height branch at a level a scant two steps up the ladder.

  “No, that one,” Linda said, thrusting her finger toward a patch of sky split at a dizzying height by a thick grey line of bark. Blood hissed in my ears as I continued my ascent. After each successive step, I’d stop and raise my head from my thumping chest, hoping that the branch was suddenly closer than it had last appeared and our bird was miraculously within arm’s reach. He seemed more distant than ever when I arrived at the last step. The edge of the top platform pressed sharply against my shin, stimulating various bad ideas whirling through my brain, including spraying him with a hose or wrapping the hose around the branch and pulling it down to where I could grab him. Any plan that involved a hose somehow seemed appealing.

  Linda directed my attention to a long, thin branch that branched off Ollie’s branch. “Can you get hold of that?” she asked me.

  “I think I’m okay,” I told her, then I realized it wasn’t my safety that concerned her at the moment.

  “To pull his branch down!” she shouted.

  My legs oscillated as I climbed to the top platform of the ladder, which was emblazoned with an orange sticker depicting the teetering silhouette of a foolish man with an X stricken over his body, along with the warning DO NOT STAND ON TOP STEP. Wondering why it was called a top step if it wasn’t a step at all, I hugged the tree trunk with one arm, stretching myself into an impossible geometric shape in order to snag the tip of the dangling tendril. “Got it,” I told Linda with more confidence than I was feeling. The branch was a match for my own physique, far too weak and spindly to be of much help. It barely budged the parent branch when I gave it a healthy yank. By pulling it in a waltz rhythm, however, I managed to get the tree limb swaying a little. I gradually increased the momentum until, at the far end where Ollie sat, the swaying was converted to a crack-the-whip bounce that snapped him squawking into the air.

  Awkwardly stretched between branch and ladder like a wishbone, I was unable to turn my head to follow Ollie’s flight path without losing my footing and joining his descent. He was a green blur at the edge of my vision as he shot off the tree limb and began an arc toward the ground. Linda scrambled past me. I felt rather than saw her brief pursuit of him across the litter of last year’s fallen leaves, then heard his indignant squawk as she scooped him up.

  “I got him!” Linda told me.

  “Is he okay?” I called out in a pinched voice, as I slowly reeled myself in.

  Clutching Ollie in her hand, she thrust him under the open front of her jacket and rushed toward the house. “Are you okay?” she asked him. I realized that he was in perfect shape, none the worse for his brush with disaster, when I heard her cry out in pain. Happy and healthy, Ollie gave her a healthy bite.

  He wasn’t grateful, of course. He simply took it for granted that when he squawked, we would cater to his whim. It didn’t matter if he was stranded on top of the highest oak or merely wanted another spaghetti noodle to nibble on, then fling at us. He gave the order, we obeyed—and were typically punished anyway. We must have been masochists to allow such an imperious creature into our house. Little did we know that his willfulness was all too typical of birds.

  CHAPTER 3

  Stanley Sue’s Identity Crisis

  By all logic, Ollie should have thoroughly discouraged us from ever owning another parrot. He had exactly the opposite effect. Whenever Linda and I went on vacation to dream destinations like Grindstone City, Michigan, or Wisconsin’s House on the Rock, rather than inflicting Ollie on the housesitter who looked after our pets and princely possessions, we’d board him at Jonah’s Ark. It was our way of getting back at the people who sold him to us. While dropping him off at Jonah’s, which had inexplicably moved to the cramped back room of an office-supplies wholesaler, we found ourselves mesmerized by parrots that had appealing personalities. When we ventured into bird shows at local motels, dealers thrilled us with live birds that didn’t bite.

  We wanted one of these. Sadder, wiser, and beaten down by Ollie, I did actual research this time. After much thumbing through bird magazines and gawking at well-behaved pet shop hookbills, we came up with a checklist. Our wish was for a bird that was quiet, friendly, undemanding, could talk, wouldn’t bite us, and wouldn’t bite us. In other words, except for the talking part—if you count under-the-breath muttering as talking—we were looking for the polar opposite of Ollie.

  Of all the breeds, the African grey seemed exactly what we were looking for, except for the problem of price. Betsy’s Beasts, our local pet shop in Lowell, displayed a handsome fourteen-inch-tall Congo African grey named Oscar selling for a wallet-flattening $1,350—“but that’s including the cage,” owner Jerry assured us. We came close to considering an installment plan, but dallied so long that Jerry was forced to return Oscar to the breeder who had placed him at Betsy’s on consignment. It didn’t pay to try to make a living selling expensive birds in our small town. Shortly after returning Oscar, Jerry went out of business. His store was taken over by an oddball who refused to sell us a mirror for our canary—“It makes them mean,” he insisted—and posted the confidence-building sign over his aquariums NO REFUND WITHOUT FISH CARCASS.

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nbsp; Despairing of our chances of latching on to an affordable grey, we drove to the nearby town of Coopersville, where a breeder who advertised in the Grand Rapids Press classifieds waved his arm at a pungent floor-standing cage full of meat-eating African hornbills. The owner suggested I keep my hands well away from the bars, lest these birds that resembled a charmless variation on the toucan mistake my fingers for chicken strips. Motioning Linda and me into another room, he introduced us to an Amazon parrot he admitted needed some work. “I wouldn’t trust him,” he confided. Extending one of the longest wooden perches I’d ever seen, he removed the attractive red and blue bird from its cage, making sure to keep it well away from any of our bodies. “This bird isn’t for everyone,” he warned in an intimate tone that implied we’d be special people in his book if we bought his problem bird. “I don’t accept returns,” he hastened to add. At least not without a carcass, I assumed.

  Deciding against bringing home a larger, meaner, louder version of Ollie, we held out until the afternoon we were buying perches for Ollie at Pet Supplies “Plus.” Linda breathlessly dragged me over to a bulletin board near the entrance.

  “Sweetie, this lady’s selling an African grey named Stanley. Her ad’s even got a picture. Isn’t he cute?” An overexposed photo stapled to the file card showed a parrot tearing apart a box of Sun-Maid raisins. The condition of the couch Stanley perched upon made me wonder what else the parrot enjoyed chewing. “He’s only three hundred and fifty dollars including the cage,” she squeaked.

  “I’m sure he’s already sold.”

  “I’m going to call her right now.”

  “You might as well wait until we get home. It’s long distance.”

  “I’ve got a bunch of quarters in my purse.”

  “I wouldn’t even bother,” I sighed, laying a consoling hand on her shoulder. “Too bad we didn’t see this a couple of days earlier.”

  I turned and headed for the car as Linda made a beeline for the pay phone. A few minutes later she delivered the news that the woman hadn’t sold Stanley yet.

  “Gee, it’s kind of far to White Cloud,” I complained. Anything spur-of-the-moment distressed me. I wanted to go home and brood about it for a while, but Linda’s momentum nudged us northward instead.

  Lynn was packing boxes when we arrived at her box of a house set in the middle of a neighborhood of miniature cottage-style homes from the 1950s. The houses on her block huddled closely together despite the vast wooded tracts and open fields that flowed out in all directions from the town. Across a compact front yard, Lynn’s car was waiting with open hatchback for the armload of jackets and dresses that met us at the door.

  “I won’t be needing these,” Lynn told us, as she stuffed the clothing into a carton, led us out to her car, then took us briskly through a side door into the kitchen where another box was waiting. As we scurried behind her, she explained that she was moving to California to become something known as a mobile nurse. I envisioned Lynn conducting medical treatment from a speeding vehicle while patients ran alongside trying to keep up with her. “I’ll work in one city for a few months, and then get assigned a new hospital in another part of the state,” she said. “So I have to get rid of all my birds. Stanley’s the only one left. He’s an African grey Timneh. I just sold the Congo African grey and used to have a cockatoo.”

  “What about your dog?” I asked. A Boston terrier scampered at her heels, toenails clicking on the hardwood floors. He backed off as we trailed Lynn into a cluttered living room, where a pigeon-size parrot clinging to the flap of an empty box flashed the terrier a look of warning. No fan of small, hyperactive dogs, I immediately admired Stanley. From his fluffed-up mantle of silver-tipped grey feathers to the sense I got of blazing intelligence behind each of his reptilian eyes, Stanley was clearly cut from a different cloth than our clownish orange chin parakeet. A patch of bare white skin encircled his eyes, but the skin of his feet was scaly grey, and the stubby tail feathers were tinged with the deepest maroon.

  “Casey’s coming along. He doesn’t mind riding in a car. Stanley’s another story. Aren’t you, big boy? That’s one of the phrases he knows. ‘Big boy, Stanley.’ Two people owned him before me, and he must have picked up the ‘big boy’ from the girl and the ‘Stanley’ from the guy. So he’ll say ‘big boy’ in the woman’s voice, then ‘Stanley’ in a deep voice,” she chuckled, lowering her own voice an octave to emphasize the “Stanley.”

  “Is he bitey?” Linda asked.

  “Stanley is very gentle. With people,” she added, looking across the room at Casey. “I used to let my Congo and Stanley out together, but Stanley started jumping on her back. Casey’s gotten nipped a number of times. But Stanley won’t bite me.” Stanley lowered his head and parted his beak ominously as Lynn extended her hand to the parrot, but there was no sign of Ollie-style belligerence. “I don’t know if he’ll take to you right away,” she warned, as she brought Stanley toward us. But I was spared the decision of surrendering my flesh to a bird whose mandible strength was capable of crushing walnuts when a flutter of wings sent Stanley disappearing into another room.

  “That’s one thing I should tell you,” Lynn added. “Stanley loves the bathroom. He’ll sit all day on the towel rack, and he loves to take a shower with me. He’s really low maintenance. He isn’t fussy and only gets loud around dinner time.”

  As we murmured our appreciation for a bird that didn’t squawk from dawn to dusk, Lynn grabbed a stack of Bird Talk magazines and Mattie Sue Athan’s Guide to a Well-Behaved Parrot and packed them in a box for us. That would make our third copy of the book. I was too embarrassed to mention that my sister and a friend of ours had both presented us with the Guide in response to their not entirely satisfactory encounters with Ollie. As she assembled our care package, Lynn rattled off Stanley’s preferences: apples, pizza crust, and Neil Young records. “When I come home at night from the hospital, I’ll turn on the lights, put on After the Goldrush, and Stanley will wake right up and start bobbing his head to the beat.”

  I had a couple of Neil Young LPs and an old harmonica stashed away in a dresser drawer, so I felt confident as I traded Lynn a check for the music-loving parrot. The cage went in the back of Linda’s Escort, and because a cage wasn’t the safest traveling container for a bird, Lynn plopped Stanley in a carton with a plump towel under him and sealed the top with a roll of brown tape. Her movements were so fluid, I glanced behind us to make sure she hadn’t inadvertently boxed up Casey, too.

  “He sure seems like a nice bird,” Linda told her consolingly, before closing the car door, expecting Lynn would want to bid Stanley a heartfelt farewell through the cardboard. But with a brisk wave to us, the mobile nurse was already headed back to the house, her mental gears engaged with the problem of what to pack away next.

  While Ollie had spewed forth the full, unadulterated extent of his personality as soon as we had brought him home, Stanley would barely make eye contact with us at first. Sulking inside the cage with his back turned to us, he intermittently emitted a sharp whistle while ringing a hanging bell, a combination we later learned signified disapproval. Though wary of the new surroundings, he at least did not seem traumatized by the move. After giving Stanley a couple of hours to get used to the kitchen, we opened the cage door and Stanley climbed out with no hesitation to stand on top of the cage, facing away from us.

  Unsure what welcoming step to take next, Linda and I retreated to the living room. I had just spread out the newspaper on the couch when Stanley surprised me by flying in and perching uneasily on a lampshade.

  “Now what do we do?” I asked Linda.

  “Pick him up, I guess.”

  I raised my hand, paused to study Stanley’s wicked-looking beak, then turned to Linda, and asked her, “How?”

  Linda strode past me and moved her hand toward Stanley, who lowered his head the better to reach her for a bite. “Maybe we’d better wait,” she decided. “He’ll probably fly right back to his cage.”

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p; But Stanley showed no sign of budging, preferring to nip at the top of the lampshade instead. Remembering what had happened to the raisin box in the photo, I unplugged the floor lamp and carried the whole thing, bird and all, back to Stanley’s cage in the kitchen.

  We wanted to keep close tabs on Stanley that first evening, but we were already committed to eating dinner with our friends Brad and Pam. They were remodeling their home, paying contractors for the kind of large-scale devastation of existing walls and flooring that Binky had provided us for free. Instead of dining in a cluttered kitchen that also served as their living room, bedroom, and walk-in closet, the MacMillans whisked us to a pleasant vegetarian restaurant in the middle of farming country. While Brad and Pam spoke excitedly about the renovation, I was shrouded in a fog of concern for Stanley. From the remoteness on Linda’s face, I could tell her mind wasn’t on double-pane insulated windows or ceiling joists either.

  “We’re after the effect of an Elizabethan-cottage style,” Brad admitted. “Which means we’ll probably end up painting the tongue-and-groove woodwork in the kitchen white to match the walls and ceiling in the rest of the house.”

  I nodded my wholehearted agreement and added, “If Stanley really hates it in the corner of the room, we can always move his cage closer to the windows.”

  That night I had trouble sleeping. From our ongoing battles with Ollie, I had expected that our biggest problem with a second parrot would be managing another boisterous personality. But Stanley was truly an unknown entity. I hadn’t realized that parrots were sensitive enough to be stressed out by new living situations. I did recall boarding Ollie at Jonah’s Ark while we were on vacation the previous year and a young clerk telling us when we reluctantly reclaimed him how fortunate we were to own such a sweet creature. She had reportedly kept the little terror on her shoulder while tending her duties at the pet shop. When Linda inquired how many times Ollie had bitten her over the course of the week, the girl looked as perplexed as she would’ve been if Linda had asked how frequently Ollie had beaten her at canasta.