they’ll see their own face reflected back
instead of mine.
BIRD BONES
The gardeners didn’t notice it first, but they were the first ones that anybody took seriously.
The birdwatchers had been saying that birds were acting weird for months, but nobody listened, or if they listened, they assumed that the birds were acting weird because something was wrong with them, the way the crows had batted themselves against walls and windows when R-strain West Nile virus had come through and infected half the flocks in North America.
The Cornell Ornithology Lab put out a statement saying that peculiar flocking behavior was being observed in a number of backyard birds, causes unknown, but they didn’t dare say what the behavior looked like, for fear of losing their funding. Some tree-huggers made hysterical claims about urban development driving birds insane, but people paid even less attention to them than the birdwatchers.
A number of homeless people in urban centers could have told Cornell some really astonishing things about the behavior of pigeons in recent months, but the homeless were considered only marginally more credible than the birdwatchers.
So it wasn’t until the gardeners, who kept their birdfeeders stocked with bulk black oil sunflower and millet, had noticed it and started calling their local radio stations and TV stations and writing long letters to the editor that the rest of the world—slowly, grudgingly, and with a great many jokes—started to pay attention.
Louise sat on her back deck and watched the birds drill in formation over her garden.
She didn’t know what else to call it. The sergeant, a hefty Carolina wren with a jaunty tail, sat on a fence post and shrilled orders, while flights of chickadees and titmice flew overhead in perfect wedges and chevrons. A red-bellied woodpecker clung to the bark of the big pin oak just over the back fence and drummed a measured march on the trunk.
Louise considered the possibility that she might be insane. It was possible, she supposed. She’d had to go on some pretty serious medications for her heart, and the list of side effects was a mile long and included things like “bladder rupture” and “sudden death.” Hallucinations about military birds might have been on there, too. She’d stopped reading after the bit about sudden death.
The wren chirped a long liquid sequence, and three cardinals swept across the yard, surrounded by swirling clouds of chickadees.
Louise swatted at a mosquito. She’d forgotten to wear bug spray, as usual. A few years back, that would have been very dangerous—R-strain was no kinder to humans than to crows—but the sprays had been very effective. R-strain was wiped out in a single season. The usual sorts of people had complained about scientists playing god and there were still people claiming that little Timmy had become autistic after being bitten by a treated mosquito, but Louise was pretty sure they were full of crap. Some people would scream about anything with the word “vaccine” in it. Generally the same people who would buy anything with the word “organic” in it.
Another chirp, and the cardinals reversed direction, stacking themselves into a tight wedge. The chickadees broke formation and landed in a swarm in the holly bushes. A thin shriek of feathers announced the arrival of the mourning dove squadron.
There was a thud against the sliding glass door behind her. Pibb the cat had apparently noticed the avian display. Louise glanced back at him, and saw him scrabbling his paws against the glass, eyes huge.
“Leave it, Pibb,” muttered Louise. “You’re not getting out.” The wren glanced at her briefly, then went back to calling orders.
The doves weren’t very good. They kept falling out of time with the woodpecker, and they couldn’t keep formation half as well as the cardinals. Louise could have sworn she heard the Carolina wren sigh, and as she watched, it lifted a foot and rubbed it across its forehead, as if it had a headache.
Two mourning doves collided. The chik-a-dee-dee-dee’s that came from the holly bushes sounded like sniggering.
Louise picked up her teacup. She was pleased to see that her hands weren’t shaking at all. Apparently insanity was agreeing with her.
The wren gave up and uttered a flat, nasal chirp. The woodpecker stopped. The birds disposed themselves about the trees and bushes. A few landed on the birdfeeder and began squabbling over who got the best bit of seed.
She counted species—blue jay, dove, titmouse, chickadee, woodpecker, wren. There were goldfinches on the thistle feeder, although they hadn’t taken part in the maneuvers, and a white-breasted nuthatch picking its way down a nearby pine tree. No grackles or robins, no house sparrows or house finches.
No crows. That was to be expected. She hardly ever saw crows any more. They had been hit terribly hard by the R-strain. She’d come out one morning and found that a flock had been in the trees over her property, and there were twenty-seven dead crows littering her deck and backyard.
She sighed into her tea. It had been terribly sad. Scary too, of course, but mostly just sad. Louise had put on rubber gloves and gathered them all up into a plastic garbage bag, crying the whole time. She’d barely pulled herself together long enough to call the county to come out and get the bodies. They’d been so limp, their glossy heads dangling when she picked them up, their eyes like bits of broken glass. Their beaks had punched holes in the plastic bag and she’d had to double and triple-bag them. It had been an awful morning’s work.
She looked out at her backyard full of birds, who were indisputably alive. They didn’t appear to be doing anything strange. Perhaps the hallucination had passed.
If it had been a hallucination, why had Pibb reacted? He’d seen something outside. He was still sitting at the glass, chattering his jaws the way cats did when they saw prey.
“Birds,” muttered Louise to herself. “He saw birds, is all.”
The Carolina wren hopped up to one of the uprights on the deck and sang teakettle-teakettle-teakettle at top volume, the way wrens always did. He probably weighed less than an ounce. Pibb was an indoor cat and weighed an insolent nineteen pounds, and no mouse set whisker inside the house without suffering immediate and violent death.
Louise would have put all her money on the wren.
Her tea had gotten cold. Louise went inside.
She noticed the next thing three days later. Normally she wouldn’t have seen it at all—she usually went out to the Presbyterian church on Thursday afternoons, where they had a little bit of potluck and some singing. The singing was pretty bad, but the potluck was pretty good, so Louise figured it evened out.
This particular Thursday, however, she’d had a flat tire and had to get the car towed and by the time she paid the bill and got home—eighty-nine dollars! For a tire!—she was so cross and out-of-sorts that the thought of listening to thirty well-meaning people butcher “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” was just too exhausting to contemplate.
She made a grilled cheese sandwich, looked at the liquor cabinet, looked away guiltily, grabbed a dill pickle spear, looked at the liquor cabinet again, then thought Eighty-nine dollars! and poured herself a rum-and-coke.
Balancing sandwich, pickle, and rum-and-coke, Louise shoved the sliding glass door open with her elbow, blocked Pibb’s bolt for freedom with her foot, and slid out onto the back deck.
A shriek of rage and terror rang out behind her. She jumped, felt the sandwich plate slide, started to grab for it, felt her grip on her drink slip, and made an almost instantaneous cost-benefit analysis. Pickle and sandwich hit the ground. Louise looked down at the wreckage of her dinner, kicked pickle brine off her foot, and took a slug of rum-and-coke.
Then she turned around.
As she’d expected, it was Tilly.
Tilly was the neighbor’s cat and Louise didn’t much like him.
For one thing, Tilly had a habit of sitting just on the other side of the glass and taunting Pibb, who would work himself into a howling frenzy and run through the house, knocking breakable objects off end-tables and nightstands. This would have been reason enough to dis
like Tilly, even leaving aside that he smelled bad and usually had fleas, because his owner, Mrs. Gothaway, was an irresponsible twit.
Worse, however, was the fact that bird-hunting was Tilly’s religion. Louise had cleared all the cover around her birdbath and feeder, elevated the feeder five feet off the ground, and still he would kill them. Bluebirds, sparrows, fledglings in the nest—he’d bring home two or three a day sometimes, Mrs. Gothaway reported. She was proud of this fact, and there was no point suggesting a belled collar or trying to tell her about national declines in songbird populations. Mrs. Gothaway distrusted anything that resembled science or education and was proud of the fact that she had never voted in her life.
Louise, unfortunately, possessed a B.A. in mathematics, and somehow Mrs. Gothaway had learned this fact, with the result that she distrusted Louise as well, as if a seventy-three-year-old woman was going to descend on her in the night, tie her to a chair, and carve the quadratic equation into her back with a butcher knife.
Tilly shrieked again. He was not hunting birds. In fact, it looked like birds were hunting him.
Louise took another drink.
Three mockingbirds, in tight formation, were dive-bombing him when he tried to break for the woods. That wasn’t particularly unusual—mockingbirds mobbed cats all the time, and hawks and crows and anything else they disapproved of.
What was unusual were the birds in the trees. They appeared to be using slingshots.
Louise set down her drink, slid the glass door open and fumbled for her binoculars, which she usually left on the end table by the door. She wasn’t an avid birdwatcher—she didn’t keep a list, and she wouldn’t fly to some foreign country with bad plumbing just to see a strange bird—but she liked to know what she was looking at, and that meant keeping binoculars and a bird book within easy reach.
She found the binoculars, blocked another attempt by Pibb to visit the Great Outdoors, and focused in on one of the attackers.
It was a tufted titmouse, a little grey-and-white bird with a pointy crest and big dark eyes. It was standing on one leg and holding a very small slingshot with the other, pulling the strap—was that a rubber band? Looked like it—and a very small stone back with its beak. Then it opened its beak and left fly. Tilly yowled.
The titmouse fluttered down to the ground, picked up another tiny stone, then returned to its perch and took aim again.
Louise swept her binoculars through the trees. There were over a dozen birds visible, and probably more hidden in the leaves. They reloaded slowly, and their aim seemed to be erratic, but there were a great many of them, and the mockingbirds were keeping Tilly out in the open. Even if they didn’t have enough force to cause real damage, the rocks had to sting. Tilly was spinning and yowling at every blow.
With her binoculars held firmly in place with one hand, Louise groped around for her rum-and-coke, found it, and drained it to the bottom.
She lowered her binoculars, wondering if it was worth it to try and find her camera, and Tilly caught sight of her and apparently thought that any human equaled salvation. He broke away from the mockingbirds, sprinted up the deck steps, and dove under a deck chair.
The mockingbirds looked at him, and then at Louise.
Louise gulped.
They flew towards her in tight formation, and landed one-two-three on the railing. They were less than four feet away. She could have taken a step forward and touched one.
They had hard bright eyes and their beaks looked suddenly menacing. Louise took a step back.
This is ridiculous. A human afraid of a couple of mockingbirds! It was like something out of that ridiculous Alfred Hitchcock movie. Louise had always thought the movie was stupid, since if the birds were going to run mad and kill you, sparrows and starlings were the least of your worries. A couple of angry swans could have taken out Tippi Hedren and crew in ten minutes, and spared everyone a lot of overacting.
Tilly hissed under the deck chair.
One of the mockingbirds let out a brisk squark! noise, and as one, the birds extended their left wings, dipped their heads, and bowed to Louise, as precisely as a team of Lipizzaners.
“Oh,” said Louise out loud. “Oh. Goodness.”
She tried to drink the rest of her rum-and-coke, discovered that she had already drunk it, thought vaguely that drinks just did not last as long as they had in her youth, and then, for lack of anything better to do, she bowed back.
“Always be polite. Bein’ polite costs nothing,” her grandmother had always said. Grandma had probably not been thinking of eerily intelligent mockingbirds, but it was good advice nonetheless.
She straightened up again. She wondered if they had really bowed—a primate gesture, a monkey gesture, wasn’t it?—and whether returning it would make any sense to their tiny avian minds, or if they would construe it as a mortal insult and order the artillery flock to attack.
And that I am even wondering this probably means that I have finally gone crazy. Completely around the bend. Oh dear.
The mockingbirds took off again with a flip of their long tails and vanished into the trees.
She wondered if they knew the militant Carolina wren.
“I should tell someone,” she said out loud. “I should…no, I can’t, can I?”
If she were ten years younger, she would have called someone. The police, or the newspapers, or maybe her nephew. But she wasn’t ten years younger, and people no longer spoke to her without the shadow of senility in their eyes.
“They’d put me in a home,” she said glumly. “It’d be the Good Shepherd for sure.” Where there were no birds—with slingshots or otherwise—but also no rum-and-coke, and the gardens were sad, stunted things with a lot of clipped boxwoods and no proper flowers.
“Waaaaoaargh,” said Tilly.
“Uh-huh,” said Louise. She inspected the mysteriously empty rum-and-coke. She should probably be a little drunk, but she felt deathly sober. She reached under the chair and hauled Tilly out by his scruff. “Let’s get you home.”
Tilly gave her a half-hearted scratch, but he was clearly a beaten cat. He hung limply the entire walk up Mrs. Gothaway’s driveway.
The porch was covered in spiderwebs and broken yard equipment. Through the screen door, Louise could hear the sounds of a TV preacher promising hellfire upon the queers, the fornicators, and for some reason, the Amish.
She knocked on the frame of the screen door two or three times before she heard someone heaving themselves up from the chair inside.
“I’m comin’…”
Mrs. Gothaway appeared. She was skinny and bright-eyed, with knuckles like walnuts and nicotine stained fingers.
“I have your cat, Mrs. Gothaway,” said Louise.
“I see that. Somethin’ been after him?” She narrowed her eyes. “Dog? Coon?”
“Birds,” said Louise, without thinking how that would sound.
“Birds?” Mrs. Gothaway stared at her as if she were crazy. “After my Tilly?”
“Um,” said Louise hastily. “No, it was—ah—a big bird. Some kind of bird of prey, I think.”
Mrs. Gothaway looked suitably horrified. “Well, I’ll be. I’ll tell Sonny to get his gun out. No bird’s gonna mess with my Tilly!”
“No!” said Louise, horrified. Sonny Gothman was stupid, cruel, and perpetually unemployed. “Mean as a snake,” Louise’s grandma would have said. He was bad enough when he was out shooting mailboxes and drinking up his mother’s welfare money—the notion of him shooting at living creatures, particularly the disturbingly intelligent, if undeniably courteous mockingbirds, gave Louise the creeping horrors.
The heavy lines around Mrs. Gothaway’s mouth got heavier as she frowned. “You sayin’ Sonny can’t shoot a bird on his own land?”
“No,” said Louise, thinking fast, “but if it was a bird of prey, it’s illegal to shoot ‘em. Sonny could get in trouble with the government.”
This was the right thing to say. Mrs. Gothaway hated “the guv’mint” more t
han she hated just about anything, except maybe queers, fornicators and the Amish. Louise bore out the resulting five minute tirade, handed Tilly over, and beat a hasty retreat.
Louise seethed as she walked home. Couldn’t be bothered to put a flea collar on the beast, couldn’t be bothered to get him his shots, let him run around without getting fixed, siring half the unwanted kittens in the neighborhood, but let the cat get into a scrape that could be solved with firearms, and suddenly he was “my Tilly” and a valued member of the family.
“Ignorant old biddy,” muttered Louise. “And I’m twice as bad, for thinking it would turn out any other way.” Why had she said it was birds?
There was a story on the news that night, in the lighthearted “human interest” section that they aired after all the wars and stock-market crashes. A man who fed the ducks every day was attacked in the park by a feral dog. The ducks had turned on the dog and driven it away, saving the man from severe injury. In the interview, the man looked grateful but puzzled, and there was a hesitation to his answers that made Louise think that he might have found his ducks doing military drills across the pond recently.
“But of course you can’t tell anybody,” she said out loud to Pibb. “Because they’ll think you’re crazy. And since half the gardeners and birdwatchers out there are old people, we don’t dare tell anybody, for fear they’ll come and stick us in the home.”
She wondered if anybody had said anything at the Garden Club meetings. She’d stopped going years ago, when the competition over bringing a perfect rosebud to the flower show had gotten so cutthroat that a ninety-two-year-old woman had been caught slashing her rival’s tires with garden shears. Some of them wouldn’t notice a herd of water buffalo in the garden, unless they suspected it of having designs on their dahlias.
Pibb rubbed against her shins. Louise sighed and went to bed.
She was up early the next morning, picking Japanese beetles off the roses. She only had two rosebushes these days. Cantankerous plants, roses, always getting weird little diseases and pests and scales, as if the world was never entirely to their liking. The hypochondriacs of the plant kingdom. They smelled beautiful when they bloomed, but they never bloomed long enough, and then, of course, you get beetles.
Jackalope Wives And Other Stories Page 5