by Sean Flynn
She was unloading birds like Black Friday TVs. Clearly, I’d underestimated the demand for peacocks, which wasn’t surprising, considering I hadn’t known forty-eight hours earlier that there was a demand. In any case, we were back to three.
I replied that I’d be there as soon as I could.
FABULOUS!!! TEXT WHEN YOU ARE ON THE WAY!!
An hour later: BIRDS ARE BAGGED & READY TO GO!
That was a curious word, bagged. I imagined a peacock’s head poking out of a grocery sack, his body restrained in some mysteriously efficient way yet his expression calm and regal, as if he were refusing to concede that he’d been bundled up like produce. They’d probably ride in the backseat, watching out the window like chauffeured royalty.
She wanted a bargain-basement $125 for the three of them. I told her I was leaving, just had to get some cash.
FANTASTIC! THEY ARE SITTING IN THE AC IN MY TRUCK. NO HURRY. She stuck a thumbs-up emoji at the end.
* * *
Danielle’s pickup was running when Emmett and I pulled up next to it. The birds were definitely bagged, though less like groceries and more like gamblers who’d stiffed their bookie too many times. They were stuffed headfirst into feed sacks, the open ends of which were cinched with twine. The only thing poking out from two of the bags were legs zip-tied together and attached to unsettlingly large feet. This obviously was done for safety. A peacock’s feet are the color of interstate pavement, scaly, and shaped like the claws in those arcade contraptions. There are three long toes in front and a short one in back, each tipped with a dagger of a talon. About an inch up the back of each leg is a spur that looks like a tooth from a large shark. I had not been aware that peacocks are so well equipped for violence.
The limbs poking out of the third bag, however, were barely noticeable because they were overwhelmed by the fully sprouted train of an adult male. The spine of each feather was bone white, and they appeared to be delicate stems in a dense iridescent bouquet. If anything, the feet seemed to be scraps of misplaced bark that Danielle forgot to pick out of a bundle of alien foliage.
“So this is how you transport a peacock?”
“If you’ve got the feed sacks, those are really the best,” she said. “They’re the right size, and the birds calm right down once they’re in there and their feet are tied.” She picked up the closest bag, handed it to me. I felt a bird shift inside. It was lighter than I’d expected. “This is the hen,” Danielle said.
Emmett took two quick steps backward, as though the bird might explode out of the feed sack if he got too close. I laid the bag down gently, almost gingerly, in the back of our Subaru, trying to position the hen on her side. Emmett stepped forward again, leaned in for a closer look, snapped back. “Those feet are terrifying,” he said.
“This one,” Danielle said, holding the second bag, “is a juvenile male. And this big fella”—she jerked her head toward the feathers spilling across the seat of her truck—“is a black-shoulder male.”
“What do you mean?”
She cocked an eye at me. “I mean he’s got black shoulders. You’ll see.”
With the birds loaded, I paid Danielle and started down the driveway. I went slowly because I’d never had three peacocks bound and bagged in the back and didn’t want to bounce them around. Surely they were fragile. They were definitely quiet. Ten minutes from home, I began to wonder if they were dead, or if they’d merely surrendered to their fate as cargo.
“Hey, Emmett, do me a favor,” I said. “Reach back there and give one of those birds a poke. Gently.”
I saw him in the mirror, furrows in his brow. “Poke it with what?”
“Your hand. Just reach over the seat and—”
“What if it kicks me?”
“It’s not gonna kick you. I just want to make sure they’re not dead.”
“Dead! Why would they be dead?”
He looked stricken. Shit. I remembered too late that the last animal we’d had in a car was his dead snake.
“I’m sure they’re not dead. Just nudge one. Talk to it.”
He looked uncertain but started to twist around in his seat. I heard a soft crinkle when Emmett touched one of the feed bags, then an abrupt rustle. “It moved,” he said. I was surprised that he did not immediately turn back. Instead, I heard another crinkle, longer. Emmett was stroking one of the bags. “It’s okay, peacocks,” he said. “You’re almost home.”
* * *
I pulled the car close to the garbage pen and Emmett bolted out of the backseat, hollering like a town crier. “We have peacocks! We have peacocks! Mom, Mom, come quick! We have peacocks!” He stood at the back of the car, not really hopping but sort of bouncing and flapping his hands as if shaking off hot liquid.
The birds were unloaded in reverse order. I carried the big male to the pen first. He squirmed, either frightened or annoyed that his surrender had been interrupted. I set him on the ground, still bagged and bound, and retrieved the next two. I realized I’d lined them up in a neat row, the way body bags are arranged after a fire or a nightclub shooting. I tugged the last bag out of the line, turned it perpendicular.
“That looks like three peacocks you’ve got there,” Louise said.
“Shit,” I said. She seemed to be suppressing a smile, but I couldn’t quite tell because she was on the other side of the wire and backlit by the light of late afternoon. Last she’d heard, I was picking up two. Not three. “I totally forgot. It happened so fast. We had to go right away—”
“They’d better be spectacular.”
The pen suddenly seemed quite small and the birds much bigger than when I’d put them in the car. And those feet. The talons appeared to have grown in the past thirty minutes, and the spurs were glinting like the edge of a razor. Danielle had told me to cut the zip ties around the feet, then start pulling the bags off. Odds were, they’d wriggle out before I could move the bags very far.
I closed the door and latched it with the hook I’d installed on the inside so I wouldn’t have to worry about a bird busting out when I was puttering around in there. Emmett, Calvin, and Louise were on the other side of the wire, but I told them to take a step back. Who knew what havoc a freed peacock could wreak? Would the birds be angry and slash the closest non-peacock? Or scared and flap their wings and kick their feet, which as a practical matter would be the same as angry? And what happened when their feet were unbound? Had they been coiled like springs, waiting to erupt in a furious kicking spree?
It occurred to me that I really should have considered those questions before that moment.
I got down on one knee in front of the bag with the hen. I wrapped my left hand around her legs and carefully positioned the tip of a pair of tin snips over the zip tie. I clamped my left hand a little tighter, squeezed the snips, and heard the click of the tie severing.
Nothing happened. The bird didn’t noticeably react. No kick, not even a wiggle. I loosened my left hand, and still no reaction. I let go completely. Nothing.
“Huh,” I said, turning to Louise and the boys. “That was easy.”
I scooted around to the other side of the bag, slid one hand under it to get the hen off the ground, and began to gently pull. The bird stirred, twisted to get her feet under her, and sort of backed out while I lifted the bag away. When she was completely out, she stood motionless in front of me. I realized in that instant, which was possibly far too late, that I had purchased three birds sight unseen, peacocks in a poke, as it were. But this one did not appear to have any obvious deformities. She was about the size of an affordably priced ham, and her back and wings were the color of stale chocolate. Her breast was a lightly toasted almond that darkened closer to her neck, which was short and woven through with green that increased as it got closer to her head. The green-brown continued up the back of her neck, over her scalp, and washed down to her beak. Her throat and the sides of her face were smudgy white, except for a slash of brown across each eye and dark dots on the sides of her head about whe
re ears belonged. The overall effect was an almost calculated neutrality, as if a tangle of unremarkable underbrush had sprouted legs. She appeared perfectly camouflaged to nest on the ground.
She blinked at me once or twice, as if considering whether to move and how fast, whether I was a threat or an inconvenience. She settled on the latter and took a few casual steps to the far corner.
“What do you call that thing on her head?” Louise asked, waggling three fingers on top of her own head, a rough imitation of the tiny stem-and-puff feathers poking up from the hen’s scalp. “A toodle?”
“Mom,” Calvin said, an eye roll in his voice. “Toodle isn’t a real word.”
“She calls me toodle,” Emmett piped up.
“All cute things are toodles,” Louise said. “I use the word indiscriminately.”
I pivoted to the next largest bag. “Okay, number two.” I repeated the steps, but quickly, more confidently. When the sack was almost off, the young male ducked his head out and leaped toward the yard. He bounced off the chicken wire, careened to the back of the pen, ricocheted off the wall, and took another run at the chicken wire.
I stayed as still as possible until he burned himself out and settled in the back corner with the hen, of whose dignity I made a mental note. The male paced, two steps one way, two the other, over and over. He’d left cartoon dents in the chicken wire, like when the coyote gets blown through a wall, but he didn’t seem hurt.
He had a toodle, too, except the puffs atop the stems were the same blue as his breast.
The big fella came out easy. A quick snip, an easy tug, and he stood up, stretched his wings, and calmly walked over to the other two. He had, as Danielle said, black shoulders or, more accurately, black wings. On closer inspection, it was more complicated than that. Instead of the brown-and-beige striation of the other male, his wings were a lacework of dark blues. The feathers were an indigo so deep it could almost pass for black except on the edges, where there was a fine and delicate thread of cobalt. He turned ever so slightly so that the light hit him at a marginally different angle, and the cobalt melted into the darkest jade. He shifted again, just a few degrees, and the cobalt returned. On his back, set off by the black wing on either side and the bright blue of his neck, were what looked like polished golden fish scales edged in a deep glossy green. His toodle was the same as the one on the other male.
The barn was very quiet, the four of us staring at this hijacked bird’s extraordinarily intricate feathers.
“Okay,” Louise murmured. “Pretty spectacular.”
I nodded, still staring at the big one’s back. “What do we call them?”
“The girl is Ethel,” Louise said. “That’s a good, sturdy name for a sensible bird.” Calvin groaned and she poked him in the side. “If you’d been a girl, I wanted to name you Edith.” He’d heard this before, of course, but it never failed to make him shudder.
“We’ll call the young male Carl,” I said.
Emmett gave us a sour look. “Those are dumb names,” he said. “Why Carl?”
“No reason, really,” I said, which was true. “I like how it sounds. One syllable. It’s got that good cuh-cuh sound at the beginning. Goes with Ethel. Carl and Ethel, Ethel and Carl.”
“We should call the big one Mr. Pickle,” he declared.
Calvin burped out a laugh. “Why Mr. Pickles?”
“No, no—Mr. Pick-el. Just one pickle, ’cause there’s only one of him.”
“What does a peacock have to do with pickles?”
“His tail,” Emmett said. “It looks like a giant pickle.”
I looked at the bird. His long feathers lay on the ground, trailing behind him like an overlong cape. The shape was right, once you thought to look for it. The colors were all off, but the eyespots could pass for the bumps on a pickle. “All right,” I said. “Mr. Pickle it is.” It was no more ridiculous than a chicken named Comet.
Chapter Four
Early the next morning, after the chickens had been released for the day, I dug a mildewed camp chair from the recesses of the barn, unfolded it outside of the pen, and sat down with a cup of coffee to admire our peacocks. The boys and I had installed perches the evening before—a plank mounted kitty-corner on the walls; a pair of limbs, thick as rolling pins and cut from the privet that invades the periphery of the yard, that we hung with steel wire—so Carl and Ethel and Mr. Pickle, singular, wouldn’t have to squeeze together on a sawhorse. I had no idea if they’d roosted on them: The birds had huddled as far away from us as possible while we worked, shifting together in a tight cluster and mirroring our movements from a safe distance. They remained together in a corner until it got too dark to see and we went inside for the night.
They were all on the ground again when I saw them in the morning, and they avoided me with the same efficiency. Before my chair was set up, they retreated as a group to the far side of the pen. But I could see there was less food in the feeder, and their water was down an inch or so. At the very least, they were nourished and hydrated, which I considered a small victory. Three peacocks had not died on my watch the first night.
“Good morning, pretty birds,” I said. “How are you this morning?”
Ethel and Mr. Pickle looked at me. Carl stared at the wall. I wasn’t expecting any particular acknowledgment, let alone the kind of enthusiastic greeting Comet and Snowball reliably provided. But I couldn’t let them out to decorate the yard until they were comfortable with the barn being their home, which I assumed meant they had to be comfortable with me as well. Acclimating them to my voice and my presence seemed a logical first step. I could sort through emails and headlines while sitting by the peacock pen almost as comfortably as in my office. Plus, Mr. Pickle surely would hoist his enormous feathers at some point, and I preferred to be there when he did.
Comet and Snowball clucked at my feet, tilted their heads, looked up at me with greedy orange eyes. “Go eat some bugs,” I said. “Appreciate your freedom. You could be like those big birds, stuck in a cage.”
That word sounded unusually harsh to my ear. Cage. No, I reminded myself, this was a coop, a protective enclosure, sanctuary from a headhunting owl. On the other hand, I supposed, the difference between a coop and a cage depended on which side of the wire one stood. Those three birds had been running loose on a farm the day before, sun on their feathers, grass beneath their feet. That was all they’d ever known. Now they were under a metal roof instead of open sky, confined to a patch of dirt and pebbles the size of a FedEx truck, and saddled with ridiculous names.
“Straw,” I told the birds. “I’m gonna get you guys some hay, something softer to walk on.”
Nothing, just a blank stare from Ethel in the corner.
I drove to Barnes Supply later that morning, my first peacock-related excursion. I was a little giddy, stepping out as a rare breed myself, owner of magnificently extravagant birds. “I need a bale of wheat straw,” I said to the first employee I saw, who was stacking sacks of high-end dog food.
“We got some out back,” he said.
“Oh, good. I need it for my peacocks,” I said with an overenunciated enthusiasm.
“Just one?”
“No, there’re three, actually. I’ve got two males and—” I caught myself. His expression told me that wasn’t the question. “Yeah, just the one.”
“All right. Anything else?”
Another opening. “Well, yeah, come to think of it. What do you have to feed peacocks?”
“Game Bird Chow should do. Maybe the growth-and-plumage maintenance. Or you could just go with Flock Raiser pellets.”
I pretended to contemplate this for a moment. Peacocks, I reasoned, probably were not exotic to people who sell game-bird chow by the pallet. Also, there’s game-bird chow? And more than one kind? “Let’s go with the growth-and-plumage,” I said. “We’ll see how my peacocks like it.”
Back at the barn, I lugged the straw into the coop, scattered half on the ground, put the rest of the bale against t
he back wall, just inside the door, and sat down on it.
All three birds were at the front of the pen, reflexively keeping their distance from me. Only Carl was fidgety, pacing again, but he was up to three steps each way, expanding his range. Mr. Pickle was standing in profile to me and very still. His train popped with bright dots of sunlight but otherwise did not move. Only Ethel was looking at me. I thought she might be studying me, actually, that she seemed more calm and curious than edgy and wary, and then I thought that was a dumb thing to think because if I were her, I would definitely be more wary than curious. She was in a cage, and she’d gotten there after being jammed into a feed sack and zip-tied at the ankles. From her perspective, assuming she had one, I was her captor.
Danielle had told me the birds could be set free once they ate out of my hand, a conditioning that would take six to eight weeks. Training would commence immediately. Blueberries seemed about the right size, and I’d brought a carton into the pen. I pinched the top open, and Comet and Snowball started clucking. They were on a sawhorse on the other side of the wire and recognized the berries. Chickens have excellent daytime vision. “Stop,” I whispered. They did not.
I picked one blueberry out of the carton and extended my arm like a sloth reaching for a leaf, moving slowly so the birds wouldn’t startle. With the slightest flick of my wrist, I lobbed the berry toward Ethel. It landed in the straw about a foot in front of her. She didn’t flinch, just looked at it, then returned to staring at me.
Comet and Snowball clucked more urgently. A blueberry was loose.
“It’s a blueberry,” I said to Ethel. She only blinked.
I tossed a dozen more before I slipped out the door. Ethel still hadn’t moved, but the chickens rushed me. I sat on the sawhorse, fed them the rest of the blueberries. When I walked away, Ethel was picking at a piece of straw with the wheat seeds attached.