Enslaved by Ducks

by Tarte, Bob

  So I had hopes that Stanley would be a kind of homunculus with whom I could converse, joke, collaborate on crossword puzzles, and conspire against Linda. But his phrase book began and ended with “Big boy, Stanley” and “Hello,” which barely opened the door to banter, much less discussions of particle physics. Even worse, the more comfortable he grew with us, the less exercise he gave these four words, apparently deciding that they were superfluous psychic baggage from his former life with Lynn. Instead, he sharpened his mimicry skills on household sounds, including door squeaks and oven-timer beeps. Whenever Linda was foolish enough to kiss me in his presence, he made kissing noises back at us. I learned that this was mockery when the same editorializing greeted any nice words that I lavished on Ollie or our cat Penny. He’s made an impressive mental leap from imitation to recognition of the larger context of smooching, but I had expected that intelligence to manifest itself more in his striving to develop desirable human traits like mine. Vaguely and hollowly, I longed for more from Stanley.

  “Look what I’ve been reduced to,” I complained to Linda in the living room, while a Wheel contestant from Bangor was busy buying a vowel. Perched per his usual routine on the couch-side cage top, Stanley lowered his head and presented the nape of his neck to me. His pupils contracted with bliss as I rubbed the skin beneath the shafts of his feathers with a crooked index finger.

  “Stanley loves you,” Linda shot back.

  “Then why doesn’t he rub my neck once in a while? Everything is give, give, give. It’s the same thing every night,” I sighed, little realizing that I would soon have cause to long for uncomplicated tedium.

  The following evening, when I bent down to pick up Stanley, he refused to cooperate, backing away and flashing me a wary look. “Step up, Stanley,” I insisted.

  “Step on Poppy’s hand,” offered Linda from her perennial kitchen-sweeping posture.

  “What did you just call me?”

  “You’re their poppy.”

  “I’m not anybody’s poppy,” I grumbled, thrusting my hand at Stanley a second time. He reluctantly got on board. But once I began carrying him toward the living room, he unleashed a harried yelp and flew back to his cage. Deciding that some benign inanimate object such as Linda’s broom had scared him, I tried again. This time the squawk was louder, and he bit the back of my hand, drawing blood. “What’s gotten into you?” I demanded, retreating to the bathroom to douse the tiny wound in torrents of cold tap water. But I knew better than to press a disaffected parrot.

  The issue of his behavior grew more serious over the next few days. Sensing I was agitated over this new development, Stanley considerately didn’t bite. But he refused to stay on my hand, crying out and fluttering desperately across the room each time I tried to lift him. When he emitted the same painful squawk while scaling the bars of his cage, I scheduled an appointment with Dr. Benedict.

  I’d always been impressed by the liberties that the quiet and diminutive Dr. Benedict managed to take with an unfamiliar bird. Shortly after we acquired Stanley, I took him in for a checkup, and our vet had handled him with aplomb at a stage when Stanley would barely glance at me, much less climb upon my coffee mug. This time neither of us succeeded in picking him up, forcing us to corner Stanley on the floor and throw a towel over his head as if we were parrot-nappers. Carefully wrapping the whimpering bird to protect himself from the beak, Dr. Benedict wiggled the bird’s toes with his fingers, gave him a lightning-quick nail trim, then probed the length of his legs. “Here’s the difficulty,” he murmured. In the area the doctor called Stanley’s groin, and which Linda referred to as “Stanley’s armpits,” where each of the bird’s legs met his rounded abdomen, our vet showed me an angry lima-bean-size patch of featherless, abraded skin. He couldn’t say what caused the painful condition, though he added, “Except in the case of certain rashes, symmetrical lesions are extremely rare.”

  “So you think this is a rash?” I asked, once we had returned Stanley to his carrier.

  “It would be worth checking the literature,” he told me with a smile, implying he was leaving to do just that, as he popped out the examining room door. He reappeared minutes later accompanied by a stern young woman who towered over him in a telltale veterinarian’s smock. “This is my new colleague, Dr. Stallings,” he told me. “I’ve asked her to consult with me.” Having already performed the glamorous part of the job, Dr. Benedict was turning Stanley’s treatment over to an associate, apparently freeing himself to trim more nails and check the literature on other problematic cases. Since brusqueness often passes for efficiency, I was impressed by the speed with which Dr. Stallings produced a squeeze bottle of ointment from the lab, complete with a perfectly centered, pasted-on instruction label and a baggie full of cotton swabs as a sidekick.

  “Apply this to the injured area twice a day,” she informed me. Detecting my hesitation, she said, “You can handle your bird, can’t you?”

  “Certainly,” I nodded, envisioning Linda taking on the job.

  We managed to bushwhack and towel-wrap Stanley that evening in the manner taught to me by Dr. Benedict. He chewed at the folded material as we swabbed his twin groins with a Q-Tip, but he didn’t make a serious effort to pay us back with a bite. His gentleness impressed me even as his condition worsened. Within forty-eight hours, his droppings had become watery, and soon we were changing the newspapers on the bottom of his cage three times a day. A phone call to Dr. Stallings elicited the bland response, “That’s a typical side effect of the medicine. If it continues,” she said, “it may mean your bird has suffered liver damage, and we would have to investigate possible treatment protocols for that condition.”

  Numbness radiated through my body. “And this is all because of the drug you gave me?” I asked.

  “It happens occasionally.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that?” I demanded. “Why wouldn’t you warn me about the side effects of a drug before prescribing it?”

  “It’s your responsibility as a pet owner to ask about side effects before administering any medicine,” she insisted. “If we were to get bogged down with the question of side effects, we couldn’t even prescribe aspirin.”

  Sickened and depressed, I basted my worries with the glum certainty that I had somehow harmed my bird through negligence, failing Lynn, failing Stanley’s previous two owners, and reneging on a promise whispered through a cage cover to spoil our bird, not ruin him. I managed to squeak a request to Linda to make an appointment for Stanley with the dependable Dr. Hedley.

  Dr. Hedley divided his time between his private clinic and consultations with zoos in several cities. Though neither massive nor obviously muscular, he projected a sense of strength that made it easy to envision him wrestling an ostrich to the ground to administer an antibiotic injection or placing his head in a lion’s mouth to check its molars. If anyone could help Stanley, I figured it would be a man who dealt regularly with rhesus monkeys and Maribou storks, and Dr. Hedley didn’t disappoint me. He told me he’d been busy at his northern Wisconsin cottage excavating hollows in dead trees at fifty-foot elevations to serve as housing for pileated woodpeckers.

  “Doesn’t the height bother you?” I asked.

  “If it doesn’t bother the woodpeckers, now why should it bother me?” he laughed. “Actually, your bird looks pretty good. We’ve got a couple of leathery scabs developing where the injuries were, and they make a natural bandage better than anything I could prescribe.”

  When I showed him the medication Dr. Stallings had prescribed, he assured me Stanley’s watery droppings were nothing more serious than a short-term side effect. “But I would never use a cortisone-based medicine for a bird,” he admonished. “The problem is that birds won’t leave an injured area alone. They lick it, and any topical ointment gets into their systems through their tongues. Our best bet is to let Stanley continue to heal without any intervention.”

  Eager to prevent another parrot owner from going through a similar experience,
I naively called Dr. Benedict that same day and told him what Dr. Hedley had advised me regarding Dr. Stallings’s prescription. Dr. Benedict had been our vet of choice in dealing with the difficult Ollie, and we enjoyed such a good rapport, Linda had more than once considered inviting him over for dinner. After hearing me out, he was silent for a moment.

  “So you’ve been badmouthing our practice,” he said.

  “I haven’t been badmouthing anyone,” I replied, as my delight at sharing a clinical insight evaporated. “I didn’t mention any names,” I insisted, failing to mention that Dr. Stallings’s name was clearly visible on the perfectly centered squeeze-bottle label. “I simply told Dr. Hedley what another vet had instructed us to do and the effect it had on Stanley, who seems to be doing a little better,” I added brightly. But Dr. Benedict would not be lured into discussing Stanley’s health.

  He made me explain in detail how we had administered the ointment to our bird, then quizzed me on minute aspects of the procedure like a prosecuting attorney probing for the weakness in a robbery suspect’s alibi.

  “Dr. Stallings’s instructions call for the application of a thin layer of the ointment. How did you determine whether you were applying a thin layer or not?” he asked with great satisfaction.

  After several minutes of cross-examination, I managed to hang up the phone.

  Following Dr. Hedley’s orders, we ignored Stanley’s abrasions, and he healed, to enjoy once again a half-hour of television after dinner. But I soon learned to avoid nature programs, since the appearance of a hawk in flight prompted him to emit an ear-piercing alarm call. A year later, his mysterious condition recurred, though it was far milder the second time around. Dr. Hedley was in Illinois treating a wildebeest, forcing us to try yet another vet. The lanky and affable Dr. Fuller told us that Stanley’s problems were behavioral. When I asked for a translation, he told me, “He’s chewing on himself.” He reminded me that parrots occasionally engage in feather-plucking and other self-mutilating behavior when they become agitated over a prolonged period of time. “You told me this occurred the first time almost exactly a year ago. Is there anything that happens this time of year which might be causing your bird anxiety?”

  “Nothing that I can think of,” I answered. “This is the time of year we always go on vacation.”

  “That could well be the cause,” he said. “Especially if your bird has a tendency toward nervousness.” Just to be on the safe side that nothing microbial was amiss, Dr. Fuller took a blood test, then asked if I’d like a drop of Stanley’s blood reserved for determining his gender through a new DNA test. I agreed to the procedure without giving it much thought. But a week later I was shocked to receive a laboratory report in the mail that stated:

  Subject’s name: Stanley

  Type of bird: African grey Timneh parrot

  Gender: Female

  “I knew it,” Linda moaned. “You never should have gotten him tested.”

  “We had to know,” I insisted. “I really should have figured it out a long time ago, anyway. She’s way too much of a pest to be a male.”

  Nevertheless, I didn’t want to start over with a brand-new name. Stanley had been through enough trauma in her short life, and suddenly calling her Guinevere or Edwina could send her over the top. Recalling that bird behavioralist Sally Blanchard had rechristened her African grey Bongo as Bongo Marie once she had learned the parrot’s true gender, I promptly adopted Stanley Sue as the full legal name for our pet.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Linda complained. “That’s my middle name.”

  “You took my name when we got married. You were Linda Bush. Now you’re Linda Tarte. So you can share one of your many names with Stanley. Fair is fair.”

  As it turned out, Stanley’s self-inflicted injury did not amount to much the second time around, though she was fussy about hopping onto my hand for about a month. Dr. Fuller opined that Stanley was learning to trust us. My thinking was that finally calling her a name that more or less suited her gender had deflated a latent sexual identity problem. Or something along those lines. But so much had happened over the last twelve months that Stanley’s gender switcheroo was a minor adjustment. Our animal population had suddenly exploded. Somehow, when my attention had apparently been vaguely directed elsewhere, we had taken on a rabbit, a ring-neck dove, and three parakeets, a combination that dramatically complicated our lives.

  CHAPTER 4

  Howard the Clumsy Romeo

  No more animals,” I told Linda.

  “We hardly have any.”

  “A cat, two parrots, and a canary. That’s more animals than I’ve ever seen together at one time. And they all live in our house.”

  “Well,” she shrugged, “I told you we should get some animals for outdoors. I can’t understand why anyone fortunate to own a barn like ours wouldn’t want a couple of cows or a donkey.”

  Linda had always lived out in the country, and that was a big difference between us. Her past included subsistence living with a pig and several chickens in the Michigan north woods, while I had merely lived with Catholics in suburbia.

  Antirural sentiments ran deep in the Blessed Sacrament Parish neighborhood of my youth, where no one would admit to watching The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, or Petticoat Junction, though with shades drawn, such activities undoubtedly took place. During the five-hour trip from Grand Rapids to my mom’s hometown of Port Huron in the ancient pre-interstate era, whenever we got stuck behind a poky driver on the sense-dulling cornfield-lined roads along the way, my good-natured father would inevitably grumble about “another damn farmer.” Branding a person a farmer was one of the choicest insults you could level at any hapless soul. In high school, we drew a line between the suburban high-steppers and the downtrodden yokels from outside the city limits. Even during the rebellious 1960s, however much I disdained the middle-class pursuit of manicured lawns bounded by smooth, rolling sidewalks, I considered life in the country a fearful remnant of Dark Ages chaos.

  By the time I bought our 1907-vintage farmhouse in 1989, my attitude had shifted to the degree that I esteemed rural life as an escape from a series of apartments in crime-spattered downtown Grand Rapids. In a single year, thieves had broken into my battered Toyota so often that I installed old stove knobs on the in-dash cassette deck to demonstrate its worthlessness and left the doors unlocked at night to spare myself the cost of yet another broken window. Even so, some crack-crazed kid snatched the eighty-nine-cent notebook I used for jotting down business mileage, along with the stick-on digital clock my dad had gotten as a freebie with his subscription to Time.

  Linda, who had been living in an ailing trailer with no phones, lights, or plumbing in northern Michigan, immediately loved the house on the outskirts of Lowell. And it answered my need for a yard where I could walk around without people looking out their windows and seeing that I was walking around a yard.

  The first time I drove my parents out to see the house, their reaction to our little slab of rustic Shangri-La wasn’t particularly positive. When I proudly showed off the two acres of swampy thicket behind the back fence, my mother asked, “How are you going to get a lawnmower in there?” She gestured toward the rear door of the barn. “You’d better keep that closed,” she advised me, “Otherwise an animal is liable to get in.” I should have listened to her.

  To this day, the barn remains something of a puzzler. Earlier owners of our property must have found something to grow and harvest somewhere, unless the vast storage capacity of the double-decker barn was sheer whimsy. Steep, nonfarmable hills shoot up just across the road. What I suspect was formerly arable land out back has since become a swamp. I blame a century of industrial tinkering with the Grand River for the biannual flooding that forces our neighbor to resort to rowboat trips to reach his truck each spring and fall. Initially used as a lumber waterway, the Grand River was later exploited as a source of fill-dirt for the cities on its route, though it also conveyed the clam harvesters pursuing
cheap mother-of-pearl shell substitutes for a button factory in Lowell. The clammers camped on the shores of our property in the years before World War I, announcing their presence with the hearty smell of bivalves boiling in great cauldrons and, no doubt, the shouted melodies of traditional clamming songs.

  More recently, the folks who sold us our house had spent decades grazing cows in the cowslip and kept porkers that were wont to stray upon the porch. After I moved in, and as my lifelong immunity to animals shifted to susceptibility, I came to suspect that an Amityville Horror–like entity was drawing beasts to our house, and I was merely the spirit’s latest vehicle for pet acquisitiveness.

  Certainly I seemed fated to house a procession of rabbits whether I sought them out or not. Bertha came to us unbidden. Linda rushed in one afternoon from a housecleaning job and told me, “You’ll never guess what I saw at Joyce Howell’s underneath her bird feeder.”

  “A bird.”

  “A little charcoal grey bunny with brown and silver highlights.”

  “I thought wild rabbits were solid brown.”