by Jan Dunlap
Within minutes, the two men were back on our side of the lake with grim faces and an ID of the dead man.
“It’s Birdy Johnson,” the police chief announced to the assembled group. “I need all you folks who found the body to follow me back to the observation deck to give statements while our forensics team processes the scene. The rest of you need to clear out and give my guys space to do their jobs.”
“What happened?” Rosalie, the volunteer naturalist we’d met on the deck, asked, tears brimming in her eyes and lips trembling. “I just saw him a few hours ago.”
The chief held up his hands and motioned for us all to move back from the edge of the pond. “I can’t share anything at this point. I need everyone out of here and on the deck.”
I glanced around at what had grown into a small crowd of people in the aftermath of our unfortunate sighting.
Of the birders who’d been with us at Alligator Lake, the short woman with the straw hat and one of the men sat together at a table near the deck railing, quietly talking, while the remaining two fellows from our original group were listening to the instructions the local chief was giving to a crew of his deputies. Several detectives were comparing notes. Rosalie sat in a chair surrounded by other park personnel, saying nothing and wiping her eyes with a crumpled ivory handkerchief, while standing nearby, the park superintendent spoke quietly into her cell phone.
“I wonder if they’ve located Buzz Davis yet,” I said. “As the last one to see his friend Birdy alive, I’m sure the chief and detectives will have plenty of questions for him.”
Luce took a drink from the bottle of water she’d set on the table between us.
“I think I heard one of the park people saying he was going to go look for Buzz on the other side of the levee straight south from here,” she said, wiping a line of perspiration from her forehead with the back of her hand. “I gathered it’s a good spot for Sandpipers.”
“It is,” said one of the birders who’d just been hovering near the chief and deputies.
He was the white-haired birder we’d met at the lake. “I heard that you kids are visiting from Minnesota,” he said, extending his hand to shake mine. “I’m Schooner Benedict from Duluth.”
“I’m Bob White,” I replied, “and this is my wife, Luce. We live in Savage on the southwestern side of the Twin Cities. Nice to meet you.”
“I don’t know that I’d call the circumstances ‘nice,’ given that we’ve got a dead birder on our hands,” Schooner said, “but it’s always good to see another Minnesotan down here. I’m a snow bird myself. A Winter Texan, we call it.”
“So I’ve heard,” I said. I glanced at his wildly flowered Hawaiian shirt and the beat-up straw hat that topped his snowy white hair.
Schooner laughed.
“I know. I look more like an escapee from a Caribbean cruise ship in this get-up, but I’m really a dyed-in-the-wool North Shore boy at heart. I grew up fishing Lake Superior and hiking along Hawk Ridge in Duluth before anyone called it Hawk Ridge. Heck, when I was six years old, the only people who even knew raptors were migrating along there were the local guys who used the hawks for target practice.”
He took off his hat and held it over his heart, his face apologetic.
“I’m ashamed to say I shot at those hawks a few times, too, when I was a kid,” he confessed. “What can I say? I was young and stupid. Appreciating the hawks and eagles and all the other birds came with maturity.”
“Ah, don’t let him fool you,” a raspy male voice warned us.
The voice belonged to the man who had been sitting with the straw-hat woman at the table on the deck. He, too, had been in the group at Alligator Lake, I realized. Like the woman with the hat, he was short and round, but instead of straw, the hat on his head was a cloth ball cap with the White Sox baseball team logo on it.
“He’s not nearly as mature as he should be, seeing how old he is,” the newcomer said. “This guy’s a dinosaur.” He elbowed Schooner in the ribs. “I’m Paddy Mac. From the Irish side of Chicago.”
He likewise wore a Hawaiian shirt, but whereas Schooner’s shirt was loose and long over a thin torso, Paddy Mac’s barely buttoned over his big belly. Fortunately, before I blurted out an impromptu fashion assessment, the third birder, the one with the head bandana and gray ponytail, who’d also been with us at the lake for our gruesome discovery, appeared behind Schooner and Paddy Mac. He looped his arms over the first two birders’ shoulders.
“These clowns bothering you?” Bandana Man asked, leaning in towards me. He was a head taller than Schooner and Paddy Mac, his leathered face crinkled up by his grin. “I’m Gunnar,” he said. “We’re talking birds, aren’t we?”
I had the unmistakable sensation that this must be what it felt like to have a trio of magpies corner you, especially when all three men immediately launched into an animated discussion without any prompting from me or Luce.
“Of course,” Schooner said. “What else would we be talking about?”
“A dead body, maybe?” Gunnar suggested. “I don’t know about you, but that was never on my bird list. Was it on yours?”
Schooner shook his head. “No. Can’t say that it was.”
“I ran across a Native American burial mound in North Carolina once when I was birding,” Paddy Mac announced. “No one knew it was there until I found it.”
“But you didn’t see any actual bodies, did you?” Gunnar asked. “As in human remains?”
Paddy Mac gasped and melodramatically placed his hand at his throat.
“Ah, no,” he said, his Irish brogue thick and exaggerated. “That would have been awful, me boy. Though I know a fella who found a skeleton when he was birding in Alaska,” he said. “It was at the bottom of a ravine. He had to report it to the state patrol, but they said they couldn’t get to it for a few days since it was such a long drive from their headquarters. They told the fella they doubted the skeleton would be going anywhere, anyway, so there was no rush in retrieving it.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Bandana Man Gunnar said, giving Paddy Mac a suspicious glance.
“No, it’s the truth,” Paddy insisted. “The birder found a skeleton, but he never found out how it got there.”
“Speaking of which, what do you think happened to Birdy?” Schooner asked Gunnar. “Drug-runners or illegals?”
“Could have been a heart attack, for all we know,” Gunnar answered. “It wouldn’t be the first time one of us old birders kicked the bucket out in the field.”
“Canoe,” Schooner corrected him. “He kicked the canoe. It was lying on top of him. He must have tripped getting out of it and it flipped over on top of him. That’s the only reason the gator didn’t have him for lunch. Ooh,” he cringed, “that would have been ugly.”
“Would you fellows keep it down?”
I looked behind me to find the chief standing a foot or two away. I remembered from our brief introduction earlier when Luce and I gave him our statement about sighting the corpse that his name was Pacheco—Chief Juan Pacheco of the City of Weslaco, Texas. Like a large part of the population in the area, the chief was Hispanic, and I guessed he was in his mid-thirties, which put him in the minority age bracket with me and Luce, compared to the crowd of over-sixty-five-year-olds surrounding us on the park’s deck.
Luce’s earlier comment that we might have had a heart attack on our hands came back to me. As a high school counselor, I’ve taken training with our school nurse to keep my CPR certification up to date. I’d never considered that those same skills might be a pre-requisite for birding with Winter Texans; now that I thought about the age of most of the birders we’d met since arriving in the Rio Grande Valley, I could see where some emergency medical skills might come in handy.
Not that birding with older folks was anything unusual for me. I’ve been birding since I could
hold a bird guide in my hand, which meant that I was typically the youngest birder by at least forty years in every group until I hit my own twenties.
In the last decade or so, however, I’ve noticed a marked increase in the numbers of younger people getting involved with birding, which is great for birds and birders everywhere, since appreciation of our natural spaces and species benefits everyone. At the same time, the ranks of birders have been expanding with the addition of new retirees as the baby boomers invest their interest (and money) in new hobbies. And since southern Texas was a magnet for retirees, it seemed like most of the folks Luce and I had met birding since we’d arrived were well into their senior discount days.
Gee, maybe there was a new occupational niche waiting for me here along the Rio Grande—I could lead birding trips with CPR available as an add-on option.
Then again… maybe not.
You know what they say—careful what you wish for, because you just might get it. I had to admit that, at this point in my life, counseling teenage drama queens still sounded pretty good to me compared to holding unexpected CPR sessions with senior birders.
Meanwhile, the chief had moved closer to our little clutch of conversation. He planted his feet apart and took a classic policeman’s stance, folding impressively muscled arms over his uniformed chest.
It occurred to me that if a wrestling match had developed between him and the alligator, I would have bet on the chief winning. And if for some reason, he hadn’t been able to throw the gator with a chokehold, the lawman did carry a mean-looking gun on his hip.
I hadn’t noticed one on the alligator’s.
“Rosalie is pretty upset as it is, gentlemen,” Chief Pacheco told the three birders, nodding in the crying woman’s direction. “In case you’re unaware,” he told them, “Rosalie and the deceased were very close, so I’d ask you to respect her grief and keep your comments to yourself.”
“Sorry,” Gunnar said.
“I wasn’t thinking,” Schooner chimed in.
Paddy Mac nodded. “We know Rosalie. I can’t imagine how awful this is for her.”
“And,” Pacheco continued, “if you fellows want to share your theories with me, I’d be happy to have you come down to the station, and we can talk about it there, if need be. But I’m going to wait until I have the coroner’s report before I start looking for suspects or speculating about what might have happened to Birdy. As far as I’m concerned, there was a very sad accident here this morning. Until my guy tells me different, I’m not jumping to any conclusions, and you guys shouldn’t either. This is my department’s business. Not yours.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Paddy Mac said, nodding in agreement, his raspy tone turning contrite. “We beg your pardon, Chief. Our behavior has been inexcusable.”
I caught Schooner and Gunnar exchanging a glance. It struck me that they were surprised at Paddy Mac’s sudden change of demeanor, but neither man said a word about it. Instead, they shrugged, mumbled a few more quiet apologies to Pacheco, and then turned away to rejoin their birding comrades near the deck’s railing.
That left Luce and me alone with the chief.
“You’re free to leave,” Chief Pacheco told us. “Thanks for your cooperation. And I’m sorry this happened on your vacation here. We’ve got a great destination for birdwatchers, and we’re always happy to show off our Valley to visitors.”
A commotion on the far side of the deck interrupted our conversation, and the three of us turned in the direction of the raised voices.
“What do you mean, Birdy’s dead?”
I zeroed in on the tall fellow who was angrily stamping his big antler-topped walking stick on the deck, his bushy white eyebrows raised in alarm.
“It’s your astronaut,” I said to Luce. “Buzz. I guess the park employee located him after all.”
“Where is he?” Buzz shouted. “I want to see him!”
Another loud wail came from Rosalie, the volunteer naturalist.
“This is not helping,” Pacheco muttered and strode briskly away from us, towards Buzz.
“What is going on?” Buzz demanded, his voice only a degree less in volume.
From where we were standing, it looked like Buzz was using his walking stick to keep a park employee and a deputy at bay while they were trying to get the former astronaut to take a seat at a table on the deck. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the park superintendent, a petite brown-haired woman, fall in behind Pacheco as he approached Buzz.
“She’s no fool,” Luce commented about the superintendent’s move. “I’d want a brawny chief between me and that walking stick, too. That antler on top could be lethal given the right circumstances.”
We watched Pacheco and the superintendent maneuver Buzz into a chair. Whatever they said to him calmed the man enough to convince him to lay down his walking stick and stop yelling. I could still hear Rosalie sobbing, and the crowd of birders and deputies continued to mill aimlessly around the park deck.
So much for another morning of successful vacation birding.
“Well,” I said briskly to Luce. “I think we’re done here, don’t you? We got our Green Kingfisher and a Vermilion Flycatcher, so mission accomplished. How about lunch?”
Luce let out a heavy sigh. I saw her lovely blue eyes rest on Rosalie, who once again was wiping her eyes with the wadded-up handkerchief. Another uniformed park employee had taken the superintendent’s place behind the bereaved naturalist, his hand resting on Rosalie’s shoulder.
“This is so sad,” Luce commented. She turned to face me and leaned in for a kiss. She smiled into my eyes and lightened her voice, too. “Yes, Mr. White, I think it’s time we got out of here and got some lunch.”
She looped her hand around my arm and we walked to the edge of the deck platform, but we came to a stop before stepping onto the brick-paved path that led back to the parking area.
“Oh, my gosh,” she breathed.
“I see it, too,” I said.
Perched almost directly in front of us on a branch of mesquite was a Great Kiskadee. While we’d already seen several of the native flycatchers during the last few days, this one was especially distinctive. Its yellow belly was almost incandescent amidst the branches, but it was its large head with its striking black-and-white face pattern that really caught our attention.
Especially since it was missing an eye on that head.
“It’s the one-eyed Great Kiskadee,” I said. “I thought Rosalie was joking earlier.”
Luce studied the bird, which seemed perfectly content to sit for her inspection.
“I wonder what happened to it?” she mused. “How does a bird lose an eye like that?”
A reply to her question came from the other side of the mesquite.
“No one ever said Mother Nature was a push-over.”
I could have sworn I knew the voice, but the spikey fronds of a Sabal Palm blocked a clear view of the person climbing out of the tangle of brush and trees towards us. I caught a glimpse of a flannel plaid shirt and bright red suspenders just as the visually impaired Great Kiskadee flew away.
“In fact, sometimes she can be downright nasty, you know.”
The man ducked his head to avoid the last branches of mesquite and emerged onto the brick pathway. His big belly preceded him.
I blinked, just to be sure I wasn’t imagining the familiar face above it.
“Crazy Eddie?” I said. “What in the world are you doing here?”
My old friend Eddie Edvarg beamed us a big grin through his full white beard. A Norwegian by birth and Minnesotan by residency, Eddie had won an enormous lottery many years ago and secluded himself and his wife on a big spread north of Duluth, which he rarely left. The only times I now ran into Eddie were when he’d been enticed by someone to take on a high-tech, electronics project that
had captured his interest. The man was an absolute genius when it came to gizmos.
Even if he did look like a Santa with his white beard and round belly.
“I was pretty sure I heard a Bob White over here,” Eddie laughed.
“Eddie, what a nice surprise!” Luce said, throwing her arms around him for a hug.
Over my wife’s shoulder, my old buddy gave me a wink.
“So you went and married this kid, huh?” he asked Luce. “Even though he’s not Norwegian? Well, you could have done worse, I suppose. He could have been a full-blooded Swede. This still calls for a drink.”
He began patting his plaid shirt and baggy khaki pants, obviously looking for the small bottle of Aquavit, the traditional Norwegian liquor, that he always carried. I remembered the first time Luce met Eddie when we’d been looking for Boreal Owls up in his neck of the Superior Forest—she thought he was Santa on an ATV—and he’d been enchanted by my wife’s Norwegian heritage, not to mention her striking Nordic looks. Despite our decade-long friendship begun when we worked together one summer tracking moose for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, Eddie never missed an opportunity to give me a hard time about my mother’s Swedish background. I think he felt obligated to keep alive the traditional not-always-friendly rivalry between Norway and Sweden.
Even though he was as American as I was.
“Now where did that bottle go?” Eddie muttered, hunting methodically through his pockets. “Cripes, where did I leave it?”
“So what are you doing here?” I asked him again.
He gave up his search for the Aquavit and folded his arms over the top of his stomach.