Love and Ordinary Creatures

by Gwyn Hyman Rubio

  Caruso lowers his eyelids and looks inward. Fear. There is danger all around. What will become of him? Pet or family member? Feathered friend or unfulfilled lover? Captive he remains and has been ever since he came to this continent and was thrust into their human world. If he’s not careful, her kind voice, her sweet smile, her gentle touch will capture him once more. If not careful, he could lose the little bit of birdness that remains inside him.

  “Most of the locals are staying,” comes Joe’s voice from the kitchen. “The desk clerk at Blackbeard’s is keeping an eye on the lodge for the owners.”

  “Rick won’t stay at the restaurant, but he’ll check on it afterward,” Clarissa says, smiling at Caruso when they pass beneath the doorway. “Beryl and her family will be here also. And a hurricane has never chased Catherine O’Neal off the island. She’s a fearless old salt.”

  Unlike Catherine O’Neal, Caruso isn’t fearless. Yet it is not the hurricane that frightens him, rather the thought of living without love.

  “There used to be a pattern to hurricane season,” Clarissa says, “but nowadays the storms blow in all the time. Look,” she says, pointing. “The sand is a flying carpet.”

  “Go pack your clothes, and I’ll board up the rest of the windows,” Joe tells her. “After that, we’ll load the van.”

  Once she loved him the way she loves Joe, Caruso thinks, keeping his eyes on her as she hastens down the hallway. She still loves him, but now her love is different. Or maybe she loves him the way she always did, he decides, more than she would love a pet but never as a partner. Earlier Joe called them a trio—a healthy whole. They are a triangle, Caruso thinks, except their sides aren’t of equal length. While Joe’s and Clarissa’s are equal, his is shorter. Caruso is loved, but not as much as they love each other.

  Loss and longing, Caruso thinks wistfully. These are the constants of life. Past loss, future longing. Over and over until one’s life is over. What if he could learn to live again in the present with love and hope in his heart? Then what? he wonders.

  With all the windows boarded up and the power off, Caruso watches them in darkness through the wedged-open doors.

  “Is there enough room for these old vinyl records?” Clarissa asks.

  “Sure,” Joe says, picking up one of the crates beside her feet and sliding it into the back of the van, parked now behind the deck. “Where are your clothes?” he asks as he slides in the other crate.

  “Here,” she says, stepping to one side, revealing two large, bulging suitcases.

  “Come January, we’ll need to rent a truck,” he says with a mischievous grin.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Sisters,” he quips.

  “Will I get to meet them this trip?”

  “That depends on Emily,” he says, shoving each suitcase between the two crates. “If she makes a big mess, you’ll want to come right back.”

  “Yes,” Clarissa says. “But at least I’ll see your place.”

  “Typical student apartment,” he says. “You know, mattress on the floor, beanbag chair, makeshift bookshelves, tiny kitchen with a dozen takeout menus on the wall.”

  “Apartment?” she says, as though she has never considered this.

  “We’ve never talked about it, have we?” he says after a moment’s thought.

  “Not really,” she says. “I just assumed you had a house. Caruso can’t live in an apartment.”

  “And why not?” he says stiffly.

  “You’re kidding, right?” she says with a disbelieving smile.

  “People have pets there.”

  “Yeah, dogs, cats, gerbils, parakeets—pets like that—but no right-minded owner of an apartment building is gonna rent to someone with a parrot.”

  “Caruso’s well behaved.”

  “You’ve heard him shrieking.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “How do you think your neighbors would feel if he did that?”

  “Truthfully, I didn’t give it much thought.”

  “Yeah,” she mutters, her face clouding over. “Maybe Beryl’s right. We should be leisurely sailing to our future, not racing there.”

  “So I’ll find another place. An old farmhouse out of town, where Caruso can scream all he wants.”

  “Wouldn’t that be expensive?”

  “I’ll scrimp and save.”

  “What about your lease?”

  “I can deal with that.”

  “Leases are contracts, Joe,” she reminds him.

  “Don’t do that,” he says testily. “I know contracts are serious business.”

  “That’s right, Joe. The l-a-w is serious business. When you least expect it, it comes back and bites you in the butt.”

  “Well, it won’t bite me,” he says. “‘Laws, like the spider’s web, catch the fly and let the hawk go free.’”

  “Well, Mr. Joseph Hampton Fitzgerald,” Clarissa fires back, “a hawk like you can get away with everything, I guess, while shit just happens to us flies.”

  “Whatever you say,” he says, grinning. “I’ll be a hawk if you want me to be.”

  “No, thank you,” she says briskly. “I’ve already got the bird I want in my life.” Pausing, she swallows hard and stares into space, her face expressionless as she thinks. “Did you tie down the propane tank?” she finally asks him.

  He nods.

  “Clean out the gutters?”

  “Not if we want to catch the last ferry at five.”

  She walks past him, moving to the left toward the front yard.

  “What are you doing?” he calls out after her.

  “One last check,” she says. “I’ll take this side, you the other. We’ll meet up front. Whatever’s left out we’ll lock in the shed.”

  At this moment, Caruso wishes he were some inanimate object so that they could lock him in the toolshed, too, forget about him, and go on with their lives. Their lives, he muses, the full meaning of those words, at long last, sinking in. He could fly away, he thinks, just like Clarissa had flown to her grandmother’s house when her life became too unbearable at her parents’. He could start over, same as she. Sometimes a journey to find oneself becomes a loving gift to others. But with whom could he live? he wonders. Certainly not with Sallie. The Great Mother wouldn’t have such a twisted sense of humor. With Beryl, yes. With Beryl, that’s who, he thinks, his heart thumping with the possibility, his mind reeling with a thousand different thoughts. Hadn’t Beryl offered?

  He nudges up the latch with his beak and steps out of his cage onto the worktable. With a determined flap of his wings, he sails through the wedged-open door and into the yard. The strong gusts of wind push his small body back, but he is determined to move forward. He flies over the crape myrtles and wings toward the oleander hedge along the perimeter of the restaurant’s terrace, landing beneath the whistling branches of the live oak. He focuses his gaze on the roof’s overhang and follows it until he comes to the corner where the kitchen and dining room meet. Beneath the gutter, he spots the dark round hole through which he has witnessed many sparrows coming and going. Once, he even saw a cat stealing in to raid a nest. His breast leaning into the gale, his gold crest whipped flat, he lurches across the patio toward the crevice. When he is directly below it, he flutters upward through the empty space and into the darkness. There, he crouches, his mind still racing.

  Time passes, and the weather worsens—the wind roaring, the rain pelting against the eaves. The water in Silver Lake Harbor slaps against the dock pilings. The foghorn of the Cedar Island ferry sounds its last call, and he can imagine their van kerthumping over the steel ramp and onto the deck. In his mind’s eye, he can see her distraught face, can hear Joe saying that it wasn’t her fault, that they had looked everywhere, had waited until they could wait no longer. They will be better off without him, Caruso thinks. He must learn from his mistakes.

  With five deep, mournful groans, the ferry announces its departure. Loss and longing, Caruso thinks as the boat grumbl
es through the choppy swells and recedes into the distance. Loss and longing. Love and hope. No creature on this planet can avoid the pain of living, he reflects. No living creature can avoid the pain of his decisions.

  Somewhere nearby a loose gutter is banging against a wall. Rap. Rap. Rap. What does that sound mean? Rap. Rap. Rap. The sound of last chances, he thinks. Of choices made. Of consequences. The Morse code of his mistakes. What is the voice of truth trying to tell him? At last, Caruso allows himself to remember:

  It was two weeks after Olivia’s birthday, two weeks after Pascal had appropriated the box of pink roses that Theodore Pinter had sent her, two weeks after the old man had failed to win Olivia back. Upon rising that morning, he had taken the coverlet off Caruso’s cage, and, like the other fourteen days, had not spoken a word to him or opened the draperies, only gone back to his bedroom and closed the door, as if he were trying to escape from the world, to run from the loss he was feeling. Lulled by the old man’s snoring, Caruso had shut his eyes and drifted off. Rap. Rap. Rap. The sharp tapping on the back door whipped his eyes open. Unlatching his cage, he fluttered down, the urgent sound of the rapping drawing him to the kitchen, where he saw Olivia’s face pressed against the glass door. She was sobbing.

  Caruso listened for any movement in the old man’s bedroom, checked to see if he might be coming. No.

  He glanced back at Olivia, kept his eyes on her fist pounding against the glass, and noticed the small card, Theodore Pinter’s birthday card, trembling in it like a time-worn dance card from her youth. “Teddy! Teddy! Teddy!” she called, banging and banging. “Teddy! Teddy! I know they were from you.”

  And although he should have done something, should have gone to the old man’s bedroom and woken him, Caruso could not do it.

  “Caruso!” Clarissa cries, her voice as clear and real as the clamor of wind and rain outside his hiding place. “Caruso!” she cries again.

  Claaa-risss-a! he thinks, recalling, at that moment, everything he has ever loved about her. Her sweet soprano singing “Summertime” to him. Her fingers dropping white grapes into his mouth. The smell of lavender rising off her skin. Her infectious giggling. Oh, how well she has loved him!

  He hears something large and metal slamming against a wall. One of the limbs of the live oak groans and then snaps in half. He freezes, makes not a sound, as he listens to Joe—insisting they go back to the cottage and wait there for him. Next to Clarissa—insisting she won’t go back until she finds him. The wind howls around his cubby hole. The furious pounding of the waves echoes in his head. Seconds later, their voices become sharper, spiking upward, surfing on crests of wind that rise up to him. Now, she is telling Joe to leave, shouting that she does not love him, and he is yelling back that he’s staying with her no matter what.

  Everywhere there is chaos and turmoil, compelling him to make a choice. The right one, this time.

  Being loved or loving. I choose loving. I choose you, Clarissa, he thinks, soaring through the gap and shooting upward, like a white bolt, into the dusk. The gusts try to shove him back; the rain stings his eyes. Though he promised he wouldn’t, he must see her for one last time. Fiercely fluttering his wings, he looks down. And there she is in all her glory—her long neck thrown back, her alabaster arm raised high, her blue eyes following him in flight.

  Thirty-five

  The storm pushes Caruso westward, away from Silver Lake Harbor. Below, the flagged red cedars are whipping to and fro. He spots the Island Grill, its silver shingles ripping off and cartwheeling in the wind. He flaps his wings and goes on, gliding by the Old British Cemetery. A tree limb cracks and falls, and he worries about those buried beneath the mossy, weathered gravestones. Does the sound of the roaring gale frighten them? He hopes the animals are hiding in places that will keep them safe from harm.

  He shuts his eyes tightly against the stinging rain, searching for Warramurrungundji in the lonely void inside him. He wonders if She will rise up from the water and empower him with Her strength. Will She do it now that selfless love, not selfishness, fuels his wings? When he opens his eyes again, he is flying above Oyster Creek, the wind pushing him into the abyss of Pamlico Sound, where the waves surge upward like gigantic nets trying to snare him and pull him down. Why won’t the Great Mother speak to him?

  Far below, the moored boats resemble inebriated sea monsters rocking on the five-foot swells, slamming relentlessly against the shore. He breathes in salt, feels it circulating through his body and crystallizing in his feathers, already heavy with rain. Once more, he asks Warramurrungundji to help him, to bless him with powerful, stalwart wings. He listens for Her voice in the raging wind. Nothing. He searches for Her spirit shining in the darkness above the waves, but She is not there. She has forsaken him, and he will not ask again.

  Lowering his head, he fights the storm alone. If Warramurrungundji will not come to his aid, will any power greater than he intervene?

  His body weakens with fear as he imagines Clarissa and Joe, unable to return to the cottage, riding out the hurricane inside Crab Cakes. He pictures them crouching between the large refrigerator and freezer in the storage room, the wind ripping the metal shutters off the front windows, panes of glass shattering in the air. In his mind’s eye, she is crying—not for herself and Joe—but for him.

  The foam clings like life buoys to the towering breakers as they roll backward, emptying out Pamlico Sound, leaving behind its sandy, pockmarked bottom, as stark and empty as the outback of his native land.

  The past and the future fuse together, and he listens to the truth of the now. Trust in love. Trust in hope, a voice deep inside him whispers. You are her guardian.

  With all the stamina he has left, he breathes in deeply, fills his lungs with oxygen, and sends it into the air sacs at the rear of his body. He brings his wings down, and his body rises up. If he wants to save her, he must become a powerful bird of flight, as mighty as the wedge-tailed eagle. He breathes in again, and with each breath he takes, his wings become a little stronger, his air sacs a little bigger, his lungs a little more forceful. Buffeted by the rain and wind, he hovers stationary in the tempest. His spirit falters. How can he perform the miraculous, when he is such a flawed creature? he thinks. Why would any Being bless such a despicable bird?

  That is not you. I know you, comes the voice of Warramurrungundji from out of the darkness. Take off your masks, She says. See who you really are.

  He recalls his many selves. A cockatoo, from the top of his crest to the tip of his tail. A fledgling who loves the bush of Australia, his hole in the tree, his parents, his flock, his birdness. Then the net falls over him, and he is born again into a cage crowded with birds he doesn’t know. All he wants is to escape from this cold metal jail—to fly home to his parents. Day in and day out, he grieves. Day in and day out, he nurses his grievances, feels disdain for his birdmates and a grudging admiration for the Homo sapiens who water him, feed him, and clean out his cage. A Sulphur-crested Cockatoo he remains, but one who is angry, vindictive, forever plotting.

  Theodore Pinter steps in and saves him from a life of parrot mills and misery. Over the years, Caruso learns to like, if not love, the old man. He learns to appreciate Olivia Greenaway, to understand why Theodore Pinter loves her, but he also doubts the old man’s lack of action—his life of dreaming about romance behind a wall. Still, he sees the card in her fingers, her fist rapping against the glass door, her voice calling—Teddy! Teddy! Teddy! He should wobble the few steps to the old man’s bedroom and wake him. He should shriek out. Do something. Anything. For hasn’t Theodore Pinter earned this moment of joy? Haven’t he and Olivia traveled a lifetime to get here? Yet he can’t. His body is frozen. Why? he wonders. Is his brittle heart so filled with bitterness that he is unable to do right by the old man? Is this the truth of who he is?

  Look deeper, the voice of Warramurrungundji tells him.

  His heart fearful, he does what She demands and pulls off another mask. Caruso deeply loves the old man a
nd is afraid of losing him. Just as he was afraid of losing Clarissa. Through the years, he has made one bad choice after another. Each in the name of love. The same mistake over and over because he was too fragile to see the real bird behind the false mask he had created.

  Be brave, Caruso, Warramurrungundji says. Take off the last mask now.

  Trembling, he tears it off, and it flies through the air, spinning away from him.

  You are the sum of everything you’ve ever been, the Great Mother tells him. No better, no worse than any other living creature. I bless you with My love.

  With newfound strength, Caruso shoots through the slanting wind and rain, away from the shoreline and toward the vast, dark sea. His powerful wings push onward. Every time he flaps them, he takes some of Emily’s wrath with him. For he will not let the hurricane have Clarissa.

  Focusing his energy into the center of his being, he breathes in deeply. The oxygen shoots through his body and propels him upward, and he steals even more of the tempest’s fury. Then, with one final effort, he transforms his wings into a million beating oars and adamantly drags the hurricane away from Ocracoke Island.

  Subdued now, Emily follows him. He orders her to ride on his back as he soars high above the Atlantic Ocean, where the two of them dance in the sunny tranquility of the eye wall. Guided by pure love, he breaks free of Emily’s embrace and sails into the realm of Dreamtime.

  There, he rests his eyes upon a flock of cockatoos, perched in a casuarina tree on the bank of the Murray River. “Home,” he says aloud as he flies toward the Great Barrier Reef and glances down, but its million coral polyps do not shimmer like they used to. He circles the continent, unable to find the radiant glow that once sustained him. The Great Mother, now one with him, leads him to Ayers Rock.