Why Peacocks?

by Sean Flynn

  I stroked the back of his neck and he opened his eyes halfway, then shut them again. He was groggy from the anesthesia. One of the two nurses in the room pulled the blankets tighter around him, lifted, took Carl back to his cramped cage.

  “I got a lot out, but there’s still some pieces in his intestinal tract,” Burkett said. “I’m hoping to flush them out with Metamucil. Works just like with people.” He picked up one of the stainless-steel bowls, swirled it. The pebbles plinked against the sides, a hard, cold sound. “We’ll give it a day, take some X-rays, see where we’re at.”

  “Is he suffering?” I asked. “Is he in pain? Is this prolonging something awful?”

  “Oh, no, he’s fine,” Burkett said, flicking at something in the dish. “I mean, not now, because he’s waking up from surgery. But other than that.”

  “And what’s the prognosis now?”

  “Hundred percent. I can fix him. First I want to get all this fluid out—we put a lot of fluid in him—and then see what it looks like.”

  I could see Carl through the doorway, bloated and woozy in his cage.

  “Is he just getting better to come home for an ass-kicking from Mr. Pickle?” I was sure no one had ever asked that question of anyone, ever, in any context. “You know, with mating season and all?”

  “There’ll probably be some reintroduction issues,” Burkett said. “They can be pretty hard on a bird coming back into the flock.”

  “After a week?”

  “Sure. Chickens can be, like, three days. But that’s all right. I’ll walk you through it.”

  That was somewhat comforting, his certainty that Carl wasn’t in agony and would fully recover. But only somewhat.

  “I gotta be crass,” I said. “How much am I in for?”

  He seemed caught off guard. The type of people who get surgery for their birds probably aren’t the same people who inquire as to cost. “Um… a lot. I mean, we were in there for hours this morning—”

  “Doc, you don’t have to justify it, really. I’m not looking for an accounting, just a number.”

  He looked up at the ceiling, down at the floor, up again, adding in his head. He gave me a number.

  “Oh, fuck me,” I said. “Seriously? Shit.”

  Neither of us said anything else.

  Carl was not magical. He had not sprung from a dewdrop. He could not possibly be trusted to guard the gates of Paradise, and he would not find favor with a goddess. He was a clumsy adolescent who lived in a death pit built from garbage by a selfish person who wanted a novelty pet.

  In through the nose, out through the mouth.

  “But we’re through the expensive part, right?”

  “Well, I want to see how the Metamucil works first. But I think so.”

  * * *

  I was already tired, distracted, too, by the time we sat down to dinner that night. Between trips to the Boutique, panicked lead swabbing, Calvin’s hockey game, and a deadline, I hadn’t caught the boys, or even Louise, up on Carl completely.

  When we sat down at the table, Calvin cut right to it. “Is Carl going to die?” That caught Emmett’s attention. He looked stricken. Any pet is more loved when it’s in peril.

  “No, no,” I said. “He’ll be fine.” I told them about the grommet and the pebbles and the Metamucil. Louise, who’d been a health reporter for a time, told the apocryphal Keith Richards story—“So Carl is like a rock star!”—but it failed to lighten the mood.

  “I promise you, Carl’s not going to die,” I said. “Dr. Burkett can fix him. It just might take a while. And cost a ridiculous amount of money.”

  I knew I shouldn’t have said that even as my tongue and teeth were forming the last syllable in money. The boys didn’t need to know that. Cost wasn’t relevant right then. I glanced sheepishly at Louise. She shifted her eyebrows enough to ask how much ridiculous was, and I shifted mine to suggest we should talk about that later, and then we both smiled at the boys.

  “Is Carl too expensive to fix?” Emmett asked. Children are drawn to the unspoken words, like hawks to field mice.

  I popped a forkful of broccoli into my mouth before I answered. A stall tactic. His question was blunt, but there was nuance in the implications. By any standard I would have applied eight months earlier, yes, Carl was too expensive to fix. That is, if the fates had whispered then that medical care for a bird that lived in a cage in the yard would cost this particular amount of money, there would not be birds in the yard. But last year’s standards were irrelevant. We now owned three peacocks, two boys and a girl, and we were responsible for their food and shelter and health care, even if it involved chelation and surgery. Could it get too expensive? Was there a hypothetical point where the sunk costs would be worth writing off? If Burkett told me the price going forward would double or triple, would that make Carl too expensive to fix? Not philosophically, just as a matter of financial practicality.

  I chewed very slowly, considering my options. Maybe was a terrible answer, the kind that leads to nightmares and therapy. I remembered the exotic animal vet didn’t charge me for telling Emmett his snake was dead.

  “No, not at all,” I said. I was locked in now.

  Emmett kept looking at me as if that answer required elaboration.

  “Do you remember Otis?” I said.

  “The old orange cat?”

  “Yeah, the old orange cat.” That was their first pet, but he’d been dead for a few years. “I got him when he was a kitten, runt of a litter that lived in a vacant lot across the street. When he was about eight or nine, back when we lived in Boston, he got really sick. He had a hole in his diaphragm, this muscle between your stomach and your chest. Probably had it his whole life. And then one day all of the organs in his abdomen, his stomach and his kidneys and his liver, popped through that hole into his chest.”

  Emmett widened his eyes in alarm. “Ouch. That must’ve hurt.”

  “Yeah, I’d think so. The vet told us we should put him to sleep because the only other option was this surgery that was stupid expensive. More than Carl. They’d have to split him open, put all his organs back where they belonged, fix his diaphragm, staple him shut. And then we’d have to feed him by hand and clean up after him until he got better.”

  “What’d you do?”

  I smiled, tipped my head toward him. “Pup, that was five years before you were born. Yes, we got the surgery. Your mom—who is wildly allergic to cats, by the way—fed him pureed chicken four times a day for two weeks, and he lived another ten years.”

  Emmett relaxed a bit, visibly relieved.

  “Sorry,” I said. “That wasn’t supposed to be a cliffhanger story. The point is, Carl’s not suffering, and Dr. Burkett can make him better.”

  I should have stopped right there. But my brain continued emptying through my mouth. “Now, if he was going to die no matter what or he was in terrible pain, then we’d think about it differently,” I went on. “But it’s not Carl’s fault he’s sick. Well, actually, it is sort of Carl’s fault, but I guess he didn’t know he shouldn’t eat copper grommets. Either way, he’s our responsibility. We decided to have these birds, so we have to take care of them. It’s no different than Tater.”

  “What about Comet and Snowball?” Emmett asked.

  Louise was giving me side-eye. She knew I was making the world far too complicated for a fourth-grader worried about his pets.

  “Well, chickens are different—” I stopped myself. Why were the chickens different? If I were a chicken farmer, there would be a cost-benefit question. But I’m not. We have pet chickens. I trained them to perform a jumping trick, like circus chickens. Those birds come when they’re called. They recognize our voices. They express joy and confusion and something like affection. How are Comet and Snowball, in that sense, any different than Tater, let alone Carl? Where is the line between animal and pet, and did I really want to try to draw it right then?

  “You know what,” I said, “we’re just gonna hope the chickens don’t ea
t any copper.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  When Kristina Frandson was a little girl in Idaho, back in the early aughts, her great-grandmother wanted to be her pen pal, which was a thing that people who grew up before the invention of email continued to do out of habit and tradition. She would mail Kristina letters from California, where she lived in a white ranch house at the top of a shallow canyon, in the hope that Kristina would reply in kind and they would continue a proper correspondence.

  Kristina typically did not. Being a child, she was an unfortunate choice for a reliable pen pal. She loved getting the letters, though, because her great-grandmother wrote in a flowing cursive on handmade stationery and, more often than not, folded the paper around small iridescent feathers, sparkling like jewels, from the train of a peacock. She was able to do that, Kristina knew, because she lived in a wondrous place where there were real, living peacocks in the yard. Kristina had seen them many times because she visited her great-grandmother, who lived with Kristina’s grandmother and grandfather, with some frequency. The ranch house was on the Palos Verdes Peninsula south of Los Angeles, three lots from the dead end of a street called Dapplegray Lane. Two other lanes, Buckskin and Sorrel, branch off of Dapplegray, which is why the neighborhood locally is known as the Lanes. The place is only twenty-five miles from downtown L.A., but the physical distance is a pittance relative to the atmospheric remove. Much of the peninsula is semi-rural, as is the Lanes, 168 houses, mostly modest and midcentury, on large lots sloping into canyons. There are no sidewalks or streetlights in the Lanes, but the neighborhood is surrounded by bridle paths that connect with miles of other trails in Rolling Hills Estates, and there is an equestrian ring at the bottom of a track that runs down from Buckskin. It all feels secluded without being isolated because Dapplegray is the only way in, and each of the three streets dead-ends, Sorrel to the east and Buckskin and Dapplegray at the northern edge, beyond which is a nature preserve that is a haven for an indigenous butterfly, the Palos Verdes blue, that is struggling to keep from going extinct.

  There used to be many dozens of peacocks and peahens roosting in the pepper trees and scratching at the slopes and slow-walking the streets, and they had been there forever, or at least since long before anyone thought to pave three dead-end lanes off of Palos Verdes Drive. Kristina’s great-grandmother used to feed them in the backyard, bread mostly, an indulgence that peeved her daughter, Kristina’s grandmother, no end. Kathy Gliksman, the grandmother, liked the birds just fine, but they’d leave droppings on the deck. “It isn’t that you can smell it,” she says. “It’s just that it’s poop and, you know, there it is. Dear God, if you leave it sitting in the sun, it takes days to dry out enough where you can knock it down with a broom.”

  One particular peacock had a twisted foot, the right one, gnarled from an old fracture that didn’t heal right. His toes didn’t work as well as the other birds’—he couldn’t hold the branches in the pepper trees as tightly—so if the wind got to blowing hard, he’d settle in on the Gliksmans’ deck and lean against the wall of the house. He was not at all a pet, but he was familiar, as if he’d chosen their place for sanctuary. Also, he was the only peacock a little girl from Idaho could pick out among all the others, on account of his mangled foot. Kristina named him Beauty, not because he was especially beautiful but because that is not an inappropriate name for any peacock.

  Beauty gradually got comfortable enough with Kristina that he ate out of her hand. She was six or seven years old, so she was a little intimidated by the size of him, a sharp-beaked giant with one good set of talons. But he was gentle, never aggressive, this big, wild bird taking treats from a child. “And that adds to that whole magical thing,” Kristina told me many years later, “you know, that they’re these wild animals and you’re making that connection with them.” She might not have been an ideal pen pal for her great-grandmother, but they bonded over the birds and especially over Beauty.

  Beauty died on May 3, 2014. He was found at the bottom of the deck stairs in the Gliksmans’ backyard. A veterinarian determined that he died probably because he was very thin. But Beauty also had buckshot in his breast, and lodged under his skin, that would have slowly poisoned him with lead, the least unpleasant symptoms of which include decreased appetite and weight loss.

  More disturbing, Beauty was the forty-sixth peacock killed in the Lanes in less than two years.

  The very next day, someone ran over a peahen on Buckskin. Peahens don’t lurch into traffic, and it’s impossible to drive fast enough on Buckskin not to notice a large bird in the road. That killing seemed intentional, though perhaps aggressive accidents happen. But the one two weeks after that? When someone walked up on a peahen docile enough not to be spooked and fired a six-inch metal bolt from a mini-crossbow into her back?

  That was definitely on purpose. There were peacock killers, or a single serial killer, loose in the Lanes.

  * * *

  Peafowl arrived in Palos Verdes the same way they arrived everywhere outside of India, which is that a rich person brought them. Frank A. Vanderlip, Sr., a banker from New York who, among other things, helped design the Federal Reserve, bought sixteen thousand undeveloped acres on the peninsula in 1913. He was a serious bird fancier, the sort who built enormous aviaries on the land below his cottage and employed a full-time bird doctor. Vanderlip, in turn, most likely got his peacocks, two males and four hens, as a gift from one of the daughters of a man named Lucky Baldwin.

  Lucky Baldwin introduced peacocks to California in 1879, six India blues imported from the subcontinent and set loose on Rancho Santa Anita, eight thousand acres he bought four years earlier for two hundred thousand dollars, the first payment for which he made in cash counted out from a tin box. He was an ideal importer: Only a person such as Lucky—not simply wealthy but flamboyantly so, a character invigorated by the glaring limelight—would have indulged in such birds.

  His real name was Elias J. Baldwin and he hated being called Lucky (which pretty much everyone did) because it sounded like he hadn’t earned his fortune with his wiles and his grit. Lucky considered himself a self-made man, and that was mostly true; he was an Ohio farm boy who made a profit on the wagon train to California by selling brandy, tobacco, and tea to the Mormons in Salt Lake City. He made millions investing in gold and silver mines, and he owned luxury hotels and Thoroughbreds and almost fifty thousand acres of land, much of it among the most fertile soil in the San Gabriel Valley. He also liked to gamble and carouse and chase women, and none of that was a secret: He’d been married four times, twice to brides who were only sixteen, taken to court more than once by jilted lovers, and shot in the arm in his own hotel by a woman who said she was his cousin and that he “ruined me in body and mind.” Playing the villainous cad was part of his brand, and he dressed the part, too, with a black hat and black coat and bushy silver mustache he wore like a costume.

  Indeed, that was basically his defense when a young hairdresser from Pasadena sued Lucky in 1896 for what was called, scandalously, seduction. Lillian Ashley, who was originally from Boston and forty years younger than Lucky, claimed that the old man, one night in his hotel, jotted a wedding contract on a piece of stationery and swore it was as binding as a church wedding. They both signed it and spent the night in her room in his hotel. A week or so later, she discovered her purported husband was already married, and not quite nine months after that, Lillian gave birth to a daughter. She named the baby Beatrice, and then she sued the old man for seventy-five thousand dollars, which, to add some perspective, is about $2.3 million in today’s dollars.

  Lillian’s basic claim, that they’d had sex in his hotel, was not in serious dispute. Lucky just didn’t want to pay her off. He wasn’t in the business of giving away money. He would stiff the lawyer defending him and an expert witness, too. Quite the archetype, Lucky. But his defense was viciously simple: Lillian Ashley was, in the euphemism of the day, an adventurous woman. “My public reputation,” he was reported to have once s
aid, “is such that every woman who comes near me must have been warned in advance.”

  Near the end of the trial, when Lillian was on the stand, her little sister Emma, who’d been quietly reading her Bible on a bench at the back of the courtroom, slipped toward the front and took a seat at the gallery rail directly behind Lucky. No one thought anything of it. That’s where Emma had sat through all of the testimony, never making a sound, just reading her Bible. She was in the Gospel of John that morning, thirteenth chapter, verses twenty-six and twenty-seven, the moment when Satan enters the heart of Judas Iscariot.

  Emma pulled a revolver out of her handbag and held the barrel not two inches from the back of Lucky’s head.

  Then said Jesus unto him, That thou doest, do quickly.

  She pulled the trigger, but she jerked it, tipped the gun up, put the bullet in a wall, and left a powder burn in what was left of Lucky’s white hair. A bailiff hauled her out as she sang “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”

  “It would not have been murder,” she said from the jail. “It would have been retribution. I tried to kill that man because I believed it my duty before God to rid the world of the wretch who seduced my innocent sister and dragged her down to the lowest depths. I believed it to be God’s will that he should die by my hand, but it was not to be and I accept His will.”

  A jury took only two minutes to decide that Emma was temporarily insane when she pulled the trigger, a verdict that appeared to be concerned less with her actions than with her target. A judge, meanwhile, ruled that Lillian was not entitled to any compensation from Lucky because, as Lucky’s lawyers had argued, she had indeed been an adventuress.