by Tarte, Bob
Her eyes widened. “This was someone’s pet. Joyce said the poor thing has been eating sunflower seeds all winter. I opened the patio door and tried to feed him. He came pretty close before he ran away. He’s one of those tiny Netherland dwarf bunnies we looked at when we bought Binky. Joyce’s husband is going to catch him.”
“And do what with him?” Linda’s glee had aroused my suspicions.
“He’s been eating the lower branches of their shrubs, and they just want to catch it, that’s all.”
But I knew there was more to come. A couple of days later, George Howell caught the rabbit in a basketball hoop–size trout net and zipped it over to us. Someone had conveyed the idea to George that we would welcome a new rabbit, and that someone called me downstairs from my upstairs hideout to meet our new resident.
Wearing thick leather gloves capable of repelling eagle talons, George engulfed the tiny animal with his hands, extracted it from a cat carrier, and hurriedly plopped it in Binky’s old cage, which someone had carried from the basement to its familiar place in our dining room. “I hope he doesn’t bite you,” George enthusiastically warned us. “That guy’s been taking out branches thicker than my thumb. I think he’s part beaver.”
“Wonderful,” I said, giving Linda the evil eye.
“He looks just like a Beatrix Potter bunny,” Linda bubbled. “Can we let him out?”
“Wait till I get out of here,” said George, who was clearly anticipating bloodletting and rampant destruction once we uncaged the beast. Before George was back in his car, Linda was petting the rabbit she’d initially named Bertie after P. G. Wodehouse’s pampered and clueless protagonist. But we turned out to be the clueless ones, along with our new veterinarian, when Bertie pulled a gender switch similar to Stanley Sue’s. Examining our bunny, whom we learned was the escaped pet of an unconcerned neighbor of Joyce and George’s, Dr. Colby initially sustained our guess that our rabbit was a male and suggested a second appointment to have him neutered. An intact male rabbit can earn its disproportionate title of “buck” through aggressive behavior toward people, furnishings, and female “does,” including occasionally spraying anything that moves or stands still. Having been hosed by Binky a couple of times, I was anxious to get Bertie snipped. But the day we dropped him off for surgery, Linda casually asked Dr. Colby just before leaving the examination room, “Are you sure he’s a male?”
The effrontery to veterinary science embarrassed me. “Dr. Colby already told us that he was,” I growled. Graciously our vet agreed to humor Linda by giving Bertie’s nether regions a second look. With some chagrin she pronounced Bertie to be the female we renamed Bertha.
Not long after, Linda came home from work with another sad animal story. “You know that lady, Terri, with the teenagers who just bought the tropical fish? They’ve got a really sweet parakeet, and no one pays any attention to him now. He’s all alone in a dark room, and his mate died a little while ago. He used to lecture the girl bird all the time, but now he just sits there and doesn’t chirp or hop around the cage.”
“That is a shame,” I told her, foolishly assuming that a show of sympathy would cost me nothing.
“I’m trying to talk Terri into giving him to us,” Linda concluded, as if we had already flung open the door to parakeet ownership.
Naturally, I was opposed to taking on another pet, but Linda convinced me that no less troublesome animal than the parakeet existed anywhere in nature, microscopic life included. I surrendered to the argument that an older bird wouldn’t even want to come out of his cage. Fortunately this turned out to be true with the blue-and-yellow Farley, whom Linda named after the Canadian nature writer Farley Mowat. On the sole occasion that Linda urged our parakeet out, he flapped around the dining room in such a state of disorientation, we consequently left him contentedly behind bars.
Caring for Farley was easy indeed. But I hadn’t figured on the companionship aspect.
“He misses Lilly,” Linda told me. “Lilly was the mate who died. He needs a little friend.”
“You’re fairly little,” I pointed out.
“Oh, look how sad he is. It’s not right that he should spend the rest of his days all by himself.”
“I don’t know. I sort of envy him.” But I had a feeling this discussion would recur until I finally gave in.
THE GREEN-AND-YELLOW budgie Linda picked out was so tame, she sat on Linda’s shoulder on the car ride home from Betsy’s Beasts. I illogically named her Rossy after a pop group from Madagascar. Within a couple of days, Farley’s personality did a 180-degree flip-flop. The old guy went back to the happy chattering of his peak parakeet years, and like an elderly bachelor who marries a young thing, he died a month later of sheer bliss.
“Rossy isn’t used to being by herself,” Linda reported a day after Farley’s demise.
“She can look at Stanley Sue,” I countered uselessly. “Or she can latch on to Ollie. Ollie’s her size, and he’s just a cage away. They can forge a strong platonic bond.”
“She needs a little friend.”
Powerless, I gave in to a chipper blue-and-white male Linda named Reggie, because she liked the way the name went with Rossy. But those two didn’t go together at all, avoiding one another in the cage with the steely deliberateness of Stanley Sue ignoring a new perch. A third parakeet, the yellow Sophie, added balance to the batch with her retiring personality. Before I had a quasi-say in the matter, these most unobtrusive of all possible pets were flying around the dining room and kitchen, chewing on the upper-level woodwork, and sampling morsels from our plates. I worried that Ollie would make mincemeat of the effervescent budgies, but they were fast enough to tease him and steal food from his dish, too. Ollie and I could only watch and squawk. Rossy, who continued to spurn Reggie’s affections, followed my suggestion of developing a crush on Ollie. She enjoyed sharing his cage top at mealtime just out of reach of his beak.
“We can’t take in any more of these hard-luck cases,” I groused during a particularly beleaguering dinner. Stanley was refusing one food after another via the fling method. Ollie was exercising his vocal tract. Penny, our usually well-mannered cat, kept sneaking into the dining room to get within pouncing range of the parakeets, who buzzed my head like deerflies. Bertha had somehow wormed her way into the inner springs of a small couch and was dulling her teeth on the wooden frame. “It would be one thing if there was a limit to them, but every single person you work for has an animal they’re thrilled to foist on us.”
It’s difficult explaining why I hadn’t mustered more resistance to the new arrivals, much less to any of the animals. If Linda had put the question to me, “Sweetie, should we get a rabbit, canary, cat, two parrots, and three parakeets?” and my answer would have had a meaningful effect on the consequences, I can’t imagine replying yes, and I would never have taken the initiative to acquire any of these pets on my own—with the possible exception of a cat. I was essentially just going along for the ride, as I had with most everything in my life.
Back in my early college years, I’d been abstractly enthusiastic about saltwater aquarium fish, because my girlfriend, Mary, enthusiastically bought them for me. I loved the bright colors and fluidity of the clownfish and other reef fish, the strangeness of the anemones and other invertebrates, and the exclusivity of a hobby that required safaris to neighboring towns.
I didn’t love my fish, but I loved the idea of having them. They were a logical extension to pawing copies of National Geographic and naively mooning over exotic alternatives to life in a bland suburban neighborhood that was more in line with Reader’s Digest. To my parents’ horror, my bedroom hobby expanded to fill several tanks, including a fifty-five-gallon aquarium whose water, salt, substrate, rocks, filters, pumps, and lights weighed over six hundred pounds and eventually cracked the ceiling plaster of the living room below.
Down the hall from my oceanarium was a second-story walk-out porch my family called the airing deck. My parents had replaced the original tar-
paper surface with a flooring of loose, crushed white stone. Because this material reminded me of the bottom of my tanks, or because I was addled by a mixture of hormones and self-absorption, I decided that the porch made a convenient dumping ground for dirty aquarium gravel and the expended contents of aquarium filters. Leaves, seedpods, twigs, and sparrow droppings fallen from the huge maple that overhung the airing deck disguised my lazy landfill for several months. By the time my crime came to light, the organic medium had nurtured the growth of a tenacious layer of moss that no amount of bleach or careful harvesting could remove.
“Did I tell you about the Taylors’ French lop bunny, Bea?” Linda asked, as I chopped up a brussels sprout with my fork and tried to get Stanley to accept a bite.
“Whatever her problem is, we can’t take her,” I proclaimed, fully realizing that the firm line I was drawing could easily be erased. I was far more comfortable falling guilelessly into events rather than making decisions. I would endlessly second-guess my decisions if things went well, or blame myself if things went wrong. Letting circumstances wash over me was the way I navigated through life. It was how I had acquired a steady freelance writing job, how I had blundered into co-owning a typesetting business a decade earlier, and how I had acquired a column in a national music magazine. I was lucky that nothing dark and sinister had ever presented itself to me with each nut and bolt perfectly aligned to the mushy contours of my weak will, or I might have absorbed a felony just as I had absorbed reef fish, invertebrates, rabbits, a canary, a cat, two parrots, and three parakeets.
Linda must have recognized my attempted resolve by the quaver in my voice, because no rabbit named Bea or any other orphans directly followed. There were better ways of slipping animals into the house.
ON OUR THIRD wedding anniversary, Linda presented me with a large package whose festive, hole-punched wrapping paper concealed a cage.
“Oh, my gosh, another bird!” I said with a big smile on my face.
“It’s a dove,” Linda told me.
“Aw, you shouldn’t have,” I insisted, my smile still frozen in place. “I mean it, you really shouldn’t have.” But even I wasn’t enough of a curmudgeon to object to a gift that my wife had carefully framed as an expression of love. Howard, for his part, refused to toe the line as a symbol of peace, opting instead to perpetuate interspecies incompatibility.
Most commonly called a ring-neck dove (but also referred to as a barbary dove, collared dove, or turtle dove), Howard was a fawn-colored, mourning dove–size bird with a thin black ring around the back of his neck. An apricot-colored eye with a large black iris gave him a demeanor of perpetual surprise. His straight yellow toothpick of a beak originated just in front of his eye, suggesting an artist’s drunken slip of the hand while painting the upper mandible. Though he was handsome enough while standing still, the darting of his tiny head while the bulk of his body remained motionless gave Howard the air of a clown. His feet seemed borrowed from another species. In contrast to the velvety surface of his feathers, which often drew our finger pads to his back, Howard’s legs and toes were a scaly earthworm red indented with concentric circles.
The first time we opened the door to his cage, Howard stayed rooted to his perch for several moments, as if he couldn’t believe such magic were possible. With a hop he plopped both feet onto a lower perch, hesitated, turned his body toward the beckoning exit, then jumped onto the open door extending from his cage. A few steps across the bars took him to the door’s edge, where he waited like an Olympic diver mustering concentration for a difficult combination. Finally he flung himself across the dining room, wings flapping heavily as he settled on a chair back facing the parakeets’ cage. A maniac’s laugh, hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo, erupted from his chest. Bowing rhythmically, he launched into a lusty series of hoots timed to the dipping of his body, raising one foot at the completion of each bow. His chest swelled as he hooted, but his beak remained clamped shut. As we soon learned, this series of hard-wired actions, instigated by the presence of other birds, was a fixed ritual for Howard. Whenever we freed him from his cage, he followed the same routine, from his initial look of disbelief to his concluding strutting-in-place recital.
The parakeets were unimpressed with Howard’s unvarying song and dance, and after a couple of days, I had to throw in with them. Our dove was a bit of a dud in the companionship department. Though he’d contentedly sit on a wooden perch for hours, once out of his cage he refused to wrap his toes around a human finger, cling to a wrist, or rest upon a forearm. He didn’t seem to be so much afraid of contact with us as he was completely disinterested in the concept. While Ollie cocked his head and chattered at the sound of our voices, and Stanley Sue at least cocked her head, Howard paid no more attention to my “Oh, what a pretty, pretty bird” soliloquies than rabbits Binky or Bertha had ever paid to the shouted command “No!” Howard struck me as a bird particularly ill suited to sharing space with people and their possessions, no more at home in a house than a rooster, and the cramped quarters of the dining room diminished whatever natural grace he possessed. Only when he abandoned those four walls and sailed into the living room to land on the handlebars of our exercise bike did a small hint of the beauty of his long-distance flight unfurl. Truly he belonged in the open sky or, at the very least, in a large aviary packed with palm trees, bromeliads, and docents.
My 1984 edition of Simon & Schuster’s Guide to Pet Birds described Howard’s ilk as “friendly birds, even toward small finches and such.” But not, apparently, toward any birds we owned. Our initial fear was that the mischievous parakeets might pick on Howard the same way they got the best of Ollie. Instead, Howard delighted in chasing the three budgies and Chester the canary around our dining room. His flight was clumsy compared to theirs; he was a bomber outmaneuvered by looping stunt planes. But as long as he could scatter the competition and subsequently crow from the top of the refrigerator, he was satisfied with his work.
“I hope he doesn’t hurt the other birds,” I grumbled to Linda, less because I thought he could actually do any harm and more because I hoped to make her feel guilty for inflicting this rabble-rouser on us.
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s harassing the parakeets.”
“No he’s not. Howard’s a romantic. He’s courting them. What do you think the bowing’s all about?”
That made sense. He never hooted at his rival, Ollie. Instead, he’d plop down next to Ollie and make a cudgel of his wing, attempting to knock him off his cage. For the moment, Howard stayed well clear of Stanley Sue. But his attention toward the budgies did indeed smack of ardor. Rossy, who had her small black eyes set on Ollie, cold-shouldered Howard’s come-ons. Sophie, who hadn’t decided whether or not she cared for Reggie, never considered a liaison with a dove. But Reggie, the spurned blue bon vivant of the parakeet set, had ideas of his own. Once Howard had exhausted his erotic repertoire and settled on the countertop or chair back to survey his uncooperative harem, Reggie swooped in behind him. Landing in the middle of Howard’s back, far removed from the business end, he would chatter excitedly while rubbing his loins against Howard’s wings in a miniature frenzy of delight. Howard basked in the attention. Craning his neck, he’d twist his head backward and with a series of short pecks diddle Reggie’s beak. Once his eyes had cleared of passion, Howard would snap to his senses and abruptly fly off, carrying Reggie on his back for a couple of wing strokes.
“Where’s your camcorder, sweetheart? They’d pay us $10,000 for that,” Linda urged me, referring to a television program that aired painful “home movies” from viewers each week.
“That’s a family show,” I quipped, little realizing that our boy-bird pals could actually make a grown adult blush.
One warm summer day, we received an unexpected visit from Jeanne Trost and her niece, Susan. Jeanne was a member of the Mecosta County church that Linda had attended during her carefree, electricity-free life up north before marrying electricity-free me.
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��Jeanne! What are you doing down here? Is this your little niece?” Linda exclaimed. Shepherding them into the dining room, Linda immediately kicked over the oscillating fan that sat on a small footstool just inside the doorway. Stanley Sue, who was pacing Bertha’s cage top in search of a way of biting the bunny through the bars, jumped and flapped her wings at the noise. “That thing again,” Linda complained, as I righted the much abused fan. It barely survived a four-hour span before getting its face pressed against blue linoleum. Its grille was bashed in within a molecule’s breadth of the blades, resulting in intermittent ticking that numbered its days in our employ.
“Look at all these cages,” marveled Jeanne in a tone of voice I had lately begun to recognize as meaning, “Are you people out of your minds?” Reaching behind the refrigerator, Linda grabbed the end of an ugly plywood board and let it crash to the floor within inches of my stockinged foot, forming a two-foot-high, partially effective rabbit-proof barrier between the dining room and the rest of the house.
“I’ll let the bunny out in a minute,” Linda explained.
“I thought Susan might enjoy visiting the 4-H fair,” offered Jeanne, whose pinched mouth indicated that she wondered whether the fairgrounds would be less chaotic than our house. “This is my favorite niece in all the world.”
“Jeanne, have you met my husband, Bob?”
“You got pigtails,” said the little girl.
“I wish my hair was as pretty as yours,” Linda answered.
“Aunt Jeanne, I’m your only niece.”
By this time, I had safely squeezed behind Stanley Sue’s cage and table, retreating to the far end of the room to pry an ornery Ollie off his perch. Chester was obligingly trilling an aria that earned him a more puzzled than appreciative glance from Linda’s friend, who hadn’t moved from her entry point beside the peninsular counter that separated the dining room from the kitchen. Stanley Sue, handsome as a small hawk and bristling with intelligence, got a brief moment of glory when she delicately plucked a peanut from Susan’s fingers. “Isn’t she a good girl? Stanley’s a very good girl,” Linda observed. I brought Ollie over to show the pair, dangling him upside down from my finger. Cradling his back in the palm of my hand, I spread a wing to show off his secret yellow feathers, receiving a painful bite for my trouble and a polite mumble from Jeanne.