by Sean Flynn
“Yeah, I’ve heard those stories,” I said.
“They just became a liability. I mean, I can’t afford to keep repainting my truck.”
I laughed with her. All the rest made sense, the price drop, the speed with which she was bagging up birds for sale, and, finally, the reason she would want to get rid of them. I told her the birds were locked up now, that they had a spacious coop and seemed happy. And that I didn’t really care whether there was an owl. I liked having peacocks, and if we’d known about the bloody bumper and the scratched hood from the beginning, we probably still wouldn’t have walked away.
* * *
I ran into Burkett a few nights later at the Sportsplex, where there’s a gym and a couple of pools and an ice rink. I helped coach Calvin’s hockey team, though only in the most generous sense of the term. Mostly, I collected pucks and moved nets and did whatever the real coach asked me to do. I was never more than a mediocre player, but I worked at ice rinks during high school and college, driving the Zamboni and sharpening skates and teaching kids to penguin-step across the ice. The rink was comfortable, familiar without being nostalgic, and if I was going to be there two nights a week, I’d rather be on the ice than sitting on a bench. They’re metal. Very cold.
Burkett was sitting outside one of the group exercise rooms. I didn’t recognize him right away, just saw a man, thin and bald and dressed in loose black clothing, glancing at me and looking away and then glancing again, the way people do when they’re certain they know you but can’t for the life of them figure out why. I was doing the same thing.
“Dr. Burkett,” I said, plopping myself next to him. We were both out of context, which was why it took us a few seconds. “What is my favorite avian veterinarian doing in this place?”
“Yoga,” he said. I would not have previously pegged him as a yoga man, but it made sense in this environment. He had the build for it. Also, he was holding a yoga mat.
I asked about the bird business and he asked about the peacocks. I told him the silver pied hen had gradually lost her limp. My new theory was that she’d come down hard from a high roost and pulled a muscle or some such. I told him about a coop-building seminar at the UPA convention, where I’d learned there should be three feet of glide space for every foot of descent so birds don’t hurt themselves making a steep drop. The planks I’d mounted ten feet above the sand did not have anywhere near the preferred thirty-foot landing path.
Burkett said that sounded reasonable.
“I’m fucked, aren’t I?” I smiled when I said it.
He chortled. I remembered the sound from the day I met him. “What do you mean?”
“The peacocks. I’m stuck with them.”
He raised a curious eyebrow.
“I mean, I can’t let them out. Not because they’d fly away, but because they’ll menace the neighbors. And if they did fly away, they’d be a menace somewhere else. So I’ve got them locked up in this fortified cage, and now you can hardly see them from the outside. And they don’t even care. They don’t know that we want to look at them, and they don’t want out. They’re perfectly content lounging around in their giant garbage condo.”
“Why would they want out?” he asked.
I scrunched my brow. The question seemed nonsensical. I had assumed almost any caged animal would prefer not being caged, especially one who had roamed free until someone shoved him into a feed sack and zip-tied his legs. Mr. Pickle and Carl and Ethel weren’t industrial farm chickens—they were birds of Greek gods and biblical traders, of myth and legend, fantasy and magic. They should want out, I supposed, because that’s what I would want, would demand, in their position. That they did not was befuddling.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What?”
“Why would they want out?” he repeated. “They’ve got plenty of space, they’ve got food, they’ve got water, and they’re safe. That’s a pretty good setup.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but they’re birds.”
Burkett studied me for a moment, as if he was waiting for me to realize my own epiphany. He nodded slowly. “That’s right,” he said. “They’re birds. They’re just birds.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Okra started dying one night in November. She’d always been a sickly cat, but in ways that were gross and idiosyncratic, not debilitating. She was allergic to mosquitoes, so half the year we were rubbing ointment on her scabby nose and ears. She’d pull out the fur on her back sometimes, too, give herself a Mohawk that ran to the base of her tail, and she went through periods of pissing and spraying on random pieces of furniture. She wasn’t affectionate until she was, and then she was clingy and demanding, almost nasty about it. There had always been at least one cat, and usually three, in my house since I was seven years old, and Okra was the only one who made me believe, as a Scottish study suggested, that cats would try to kill us if they were bigger.
This was a different kind of sickness, acute and rapid-onset. We had no idea how old she was because she’d arrived fully grown eleven years before, but suddenly she was decrepit. She wobbled out of a bedroom and bumped into a wall, though not hard enough to hurt herself because she was moving so slowly. “Okra?” I said. She bumped the wall again. I bent down and rubbed behind her ear to get her attention, and she turned toward me. She looked like she’d crawled off a black-velvet painting: Her pupils were big as nickels, fully dilated, the way they would be if she were hunting in the barn on a moonless night. And she was frighteningly thin. She’d been losing a little weight over the months, but I hadn’t realized until I picked her up that she was bony, almost skeletal.
I set her on the chair near the front door where she liked to sleep. I waved two fingers in front of her face. Nothing. She was blind. I snapped my fingers next to one ear, then the other. Deaf, too.
I found Louise in the kitchen, then peeked into the dining room to make sure the boys weren’t close enough to overhear. “I think Okra’s dying,” I said.
“Again?” she said, without shifting her attention from the onions she was dicing. “There’s always something wrong with that cat.”
“No, really. She’s dying dying.”
She stopped dicing and looked at me, trying to read my face. “You’re serious,” she said, putting the knife down and wiping her hands on a dishtowel. “Where is she?”
I nodded toward the front hall and followed behind her. Okra was still on the blue chair, shrunken and still. “Oh no,” Louise whispered. She bent down and stroked the base of Okra’s neck, her fingertips slipping into a divot between the cat’s shoulders. She glanced at me, clearly unnerved by Okra’s rapid decline. “Do the boys know?”
“Not yet. I just found her.”
“Let’s not rush it,” she said, turning back to the cat, softly touching a spot behind her ear. “You poor sick girl.”
There was a familiar tenderness in her voice. Okra was a difficult cat on her best days, mewling and destructive on her worst, and a constant allergen to Louise regardless. We hadn’t adopted her so much as she just never went away, and then somehow, without anyone ever planning it, we were taking her to the vet and paying for creams and ointments and special kibble so she wouldn’t get fatter. The boys adored her, but they weren’t the ones scrubbing pee stains out of the rugs. On balance, Okra could be fairly described as tolerable.
Until she was dying. Nothing stirs forgiveness and softens perspective like imminent death. It’s instinctual: Calvin and Emmett were never more fond of Carl than when he was bubbling with poison. Whether that instinct is born of empathy for another’s misery, a fear of one’s own impending loss, or some combination of the two is immaterial. What matters is that it exists. Louise and her father were closest in the last, irradiated years of his life, when his cancer couldn’t be fixed but they each could somehow make it better. She is finely tuned to the suffering of others, and her gentleness is directly proportional to their vulnerability.
Including, I knew, to that of a cat who made her wheeze. She
slipped away to the kitchen and returned with a shallow ramekin of water and a tiny scoop of finely chopped tuna. Okra nibbled at it from a spoon Louise held up to her mouth, then lost interest and returned to staring wide-eyed at nothing. We, in turn, stared at the cat, quietly calculating her odds of midterm survival.
I didn’t hear Emmett coming until he ducked past me and sat on the floor so he was eye-level with Okra.
“What’s wrong with her?” he asked, sounding more curious than worried.
“I don’t know, pup. I’ll get her to the vet in the morning.” I doubted she was going to make it until morning, but he didn’t need to know that. Okra was already here when he was born. He’d had a snake for two months and chickens for ten months, but he’d had a cat his whole life.
“Can she see?”
“No, I think she went blind,” I said. “And probably deaf.”
“Why?” He was looking at me, expectant. “Is she gonna be okay?”
I took a breath, bought a second to think. Yes would be a lie, no would be crushing and, possibly, incorrect; the boy had already witnessed a peacock brought back from the edge of death. I punted. “Maybe. I’ll get her to the vet in the morning.”
Emmett nodded, then turned back toward his cat. He stayed on the floor for almost an hour, stroking her paw and feeding her bits of tuna.
Okra would probably spare him in her killing spree.
She was still alive the next morning, though she was too weak to resist when I slid her into the cat carrier.
The vet disappeared into the back with my emaciated cat. I waited in a small exam room, reading pamphlets about heartworms and fleas and vaccines for feline immunodeficiency virus. We’d had another cat years before, Pasha, who’d come to us already infected with FIV. We had to put him down a few months before all of Otis’s organs slid out of place.
There was a knock on the door, followed by the vet stepping inside. She was about Louise’s age, and she had the same soft touch for bad circumstances. “Okra’s still in the back,” she said, “getting some fluids. How are you?”
I told her I was fine, and she told me Okra’s blood pressure was dangerously high and that an extreme spike had detached her retinas. The doctor didn’t think the cat was deaf but, rather, that she might have been ignoring me because she was disoriented. There were medicines to get her blood pressure stabilized and subcutaneous liquids to get her rehydrated and some other pills to do another thing.
“So this is something we should be treating?” I asked, trying to be delicate with that last word.
The vet paused but didn’t break eye contact. “It’s all treatable,” she said with what sounded to me like a practiced optimism.
I’d put the emphasis on the wrong word, on treating rather than should. Really, I’d been asking if it would be kinder to put her down, but instead I’d presented myself as a person who would take extraordinary measures to save a cat. Which we’d already done for Otis. And a bird no one could even pet.
Okra came home from the vet with a bag of pills and syringes preloaded with an appetite stimulant to squirt down her throat twice a day. The syringes were easy, but she’d always been impossible with pills. She didn’t have much fight in her, but she could still spit a pill like a kitten. Louise ground them into a powder that she sprinkled on top of a dollop of the wettest cat food we could find. Okra didn’t eat past the top layer.
Her pupils shrank and she seemed to regain at least some of her sight, shadows and shapes, light and dark. She did not otherwise get better. She stayed on the blue chair most of the time, deteriorating but not uncomfortably so for a few days. After a week, though, she was clearly ready to be done with it all. I made another appointment with the vet.
That evening, Emmett was on the floor in front of her again, like he had been every night. He had two fingers on her paw, and she was purring, a raspy, rattly sound, as if cartilage was coming loose inside.
I sat down beside him, put a hand on his back. “She likes you being here,” I said. “You make her feel safe.”
We stayed there, the three of us, silent except for Okra’s grinding purr until he asked when we could take her back to the vet.
“Tomorrow morning, pup. I made an appointment.”
“What do you think they’ll do for her?”
I was glad he wasn’t looking at my face. I wasn’t sure if I should say it, and I took a few seconds to decide. “I don’t think she’s coming home, pup.”
He kept his eyes on his cat. “What do you mean?”
He knew what I meant.
“She’s dying, pup.”
“But they can make her better.”
“Maybe, but I don’t think so. They can keep her alive, but that’s not the same thing as better.” I paused to let him digest that. “Do you think she’s happy right now?”
He stroked her cheek with one finger. Okra stared back without appearing to see. I told him the story again of how she showed up in the okra patch one day and lived in the barn and wouldn’t go away so we took her in. We talked about the mice she left on the back steps for us when she was young and feisty, and we decided that, all things considered, she’d had a long and happy cat life. She had food and water and safety and people who loved her.
Emmett started softly crying for his cat. I stayed with him, not saying anything because there wasn’t anything left unsaid. I wasn’t sure that I’d gotten any better at discussing death with him, but at least we could trudge through it together. Maybe that was all that mattered.
After the boys were in school, Louise bundled Okra in a towel and held her on the drive to the vet. A crate seemed needlessly cruel at the end. We held her while she drifted off, and took her home wrapped in plastic and sealed in a box that we could bury next to Cosmo.
I picked up Emmett from school early that afternoon. He got into the car with a forced hopefulness. “Is Okra home?”
“No, pup. I’m so sorry.”
He slumped into the seat next to me, sighed. He did not seem surprised. “That’s okay. I didn’t think she would be.”
It was a short drive home, no longer than five minutes, and he was quiet until we were at the back door. “Do you think it hurt?” he asked.
No, I told him, I was sure it didn’t. “The doctor gave her a shot, and she fell asleep with me and Mom.”
“Do you think she knew? That she was dying?”
“I don’t think so. I think she knew she was tired and not hungry and couldn’t really see and some parts hurt. But I don’t think animals have the same concept of death that we do, that one day we won’t be here.”
He considered that for a moment, then nodded. “That’s good. She wouldn’t be scared if she didn’t know.”
Tater heard us on the porch, started with his insistent, harmless bark. “Wait a minute, dog,” I said through the door, and turned back to Emmett. His eyes were damp again. “Did you want to talk some more?”
He shook his head. “Not now,” he said. “I just wish all my pets didn’t die.”
He opened the door before I could answer. Tater shot out, wiggling and panting as if we’d been gone for days.
“We’ve got Tater,” I said, scooping him up and depositing him in Emmett’s arms. “He’s young and healthy. And we’ve got peacocks—”
“Those are yours, Dad,” Emmett said.
“Yes, I know. I see that more clearly every day,” I said slowly. “But they’ll end up yours. I hear they’re supposed to live forever.”
Acknowledgments
When you write about other people for long enough, it becomes possible, even habitual, to find a narrative in even the most ordinary-seeming lives. Except, perhaps, your own. For that, you sometimes need the sharp eye of an excellent editor, who in this case would be Sean Manning. Over Chinese food and cocktails one night, he began teasing out of me the story of my strange birds; he saw something I could not, and for that I will always be grateful. He shaped the manuscript and took out the lousy parts, made sentences
and paragraphs and chapters so much better, and he did so with a tremendous amount of patience.
David Black has been a fierce advocate and loyal friend for more than twenty years. It’s a privilege to be represented by him and to work with everyone at his eponymous agency, especially Joy Tutela, Sarah Smith, and Ayla Zuraw-Friedland.
Any errors, and accompanying embarrassment, are mine alone. But there aren’t any because Julia Ellis, a tenacious researcher, double-checked every fact in the preceding pages. Thanks also to Jonathan Karp, Dana Canedy, Richard Rhorer, Elizabeth Breeden, Tzipora Baitch, Brianna Scharfenberg, Alison Forner, E. Beth Thomas, Yvette Grant, and the rest of the Simon & Schuster team.
Tanja Vujic sent the text message that brought Ethel, Carl, and Mr. Pickle to the garbage coop. Jonathan George, Jason George, and the staff at Barnes Supply Company helped me keep the birds and Tater well-nourished; and Christine Bristor recommended we buy the peeping puffballs who grew up to be Comet and Snowball. Cameron Alworth and Berit Brown keep this place looking like a little farm, and they tolerate the summertime noise. Andrew Ovenden first introduced me to a domesticated bird, and Paula Scatoloni, I realize now, began pulling at the first narrative threads years ago.
Roslyn Dakin and Jessica Yorzinski indulged my early, ill-informed questions and kindly explained their research to me. Lisa Schubert was a delightful and welcoming guide to St. John the Divine, and Kathy Kerran generously shared a trove of stories about the peacocks at the Los Angeles Arboretum. Rebecca Halpern introduced me to Palos Verdes, and Mary Jo Hazard, Kirk Retz, and Jack Alexander filled in a lot of the background, as did Ana Bustillos of the SPCALA.
Ian Moir of the Fire Station Creative, Lisa Edwards of Dunfermline Delivers, Jack Pryde of Discover Dunfermline Tours, and Frank Connolly were excellent hosts. Judge Andrew T. Park dug through old files to help a stranger with a weird request. Justin Diggs delivered a whole lot of sand, Mary Thacher and Holly Rogers let me in on a joke, and Sadie Fraleigh, DVM, was kind and compassionate to an old cat and two sad people. I’m indebted to all of them.