by Tarte, Bob
The seven-year-old rewarded me by voicing my least favorite question in the world. “Does he talk?” she asked. I considered the question a cliché on the same order of asking a dog owner if his black Lab could speak. Of course, we always made the same inquiry of other parrot owners, but as bird people we were exempt from such taboos. I was spared the need to answer when the aunt’s and niece’s eyes simultaneously locked on Howard.
“Look at the beautiful pigeon, Aunt Jeanne,” cried the seven-year-old.
“He doesn’t talk,” I said a little hotly, bitter that the ringneck had once again trumped every other animal in the room by magnetically generating interest all out of proportion to his attributes. Our ownership of Ollie and Stanley Sue was hard won, and it bothered me that trouble-free Howard grabbed the glory. It happened so frequently, I had formulated a theory. People expected to see parrots as pets. Few North Americans had ever encountered them in any other context. But nobody anticipated seeing a dove in an indoor cage. Insofar as the attention reflected back on me, I was happy to nestle Howard in my hands, presenting him first to Susan, who squealed at my suggestion that she stroke his silky back, and to Jeanne, who was obviously experiencing her first contact with a winged pet. Her finger brushed his feathers, then jerked back as the dove craned his neck backward and flicked his beak against my palm. I released him, and he flew hooting to the top of his cage.
“Want to come out, ’keets?” Linda opened the parakeets’ door before busying herself in front of the refrigerator assembling four glasses of what she referred to as “fizzy water”: carbonated water topped off with an inch of cranberry juice. Jeanne ducked slightly as the parakeets first hit the air, then stood with a hand covering her hair until she felt foolish enough to remove it. I was about to snag my beverage and leave Linda to her guests when I heard Susan exclaim, “He’s riding piggyback!”
Not only had Reggie alighted on Howard, but he was also engaging in the most lurid display of interspecies affection that I had witnessed to date. Squawking in a high-pitched buzz, the blue parakeet curled his extended wings around Howard’s sides in passionate embrace, the better to throw his whole body weight behind the grinding of his lower abdomen against his unlikely mate. In metronome fashion, his blue and black ribbon of a tail chugged back and forth against Howard’s stout tail feathers. Equally enraptured, Howard wobbled his head back to give Reggie the avian equivalent of a kiss, beak rapidly rubbing against beak, his pupils dilated, his quivering carriage slanted forward in a submissive stoop.
“What are they doing?” Susan asked in wonder.
Because children raised in the country learn the facts of life in animal terms almost as soon as they can crawl around the sex-crazed barnyard, Linda laughed and told her visitors, “Reggie’s trying to mate with Howard. He’s a little bit mixed up.”
I waved a stained dish towel in the birds’ direction, once, twice, three times, and like adulterers in the parking lot of the Red Roof Inn, they parted without a glance. Jeanne’s face, however, was anything but nonchalant. “That was a funny game, wasn’t it?” asked Jeanne, shooting Linda a pained looked indicating that the sordid scene wasn’t suitable for discussion in front of a youngster. “I wonder what kind of games they’ll have at the fair? You like Whack the Mole the best, don’t you Susan?”
“I like watching the animals play.”
“You can see all the animals from way on top of the Ferris wheel,” concluded Jeanne, who was obviously fearing a worst-case scenario of lusty pigs and goat satyrs.
I slunk upstairs to let Linda mediate, returning just a few minutes later to bid aunt and niece good-bye. At the door, Jeanne leaned her head into Linda’s and told her with a smile, “We enjoyed our visit. But I don’t think I’ll bring Susan back until she’s a little older.” That marked the first time anyone had branded our house an adult establishment.
HOWARD SOON DEMONSTRATED a talent for thievery. Later that week, as I reviewed an album by a South African chorale group for my column, a song caught my attention on Black Umfolosi’s Festival Umdlalo. It was an a cappella ditty called “Inobembela Njiba.” Since my Kalanga language skills weren’t up to snuff, I relied on the liner notes to learn that the song was about “a dove that steals from granaries and is then bewitched, resulting in it wandering around aimlessly in a confused state.” I didn’t know whether Howard had been bewitched, but his confused state was inarguable. The stealing reference was right on target, too. When not falling prey to Reggie’s charms, Howard’s favorite pastime was preying on our other birds’ food.
Howard was energetic in his thievery. He had to be in order to squeeze his handbag of a body through the wallet-size door of the parakeets’ cage only to revel in the exact same food he received in his own seed cup every day. Eating was secondary to the relentless search for some obscure fantasy delicacy that loomed large in his peanut brain. Using his beak as a rake, he dug deep into the dish to scatter impressive quantities of seeds admirable distances across the dining room. Compared to Howard, messy Ollie at mealtime was Miss Manners. Not even Stanley Sue discarded food with the dedication of our dove. I took to winding adding-machine tape around the invaded cage, threading it in and out of the bars as a backstop, which left heaps of otherwise untouched parakeet seed on the cage bottom. For all the industry of his mining operation, Howard retrieved few nuggets to his liking. He swallowed them whole with a total disregard for taste, leaving me to wonder if he weren’t an aesthete whose love of food was driven by the pursuit of textural perfection.
As Stanley Sue became more relaxed in our household, she spent less of her free time on top of her cage, devoting her exercise hours to harassing Bertha, opening and banging shut floor-level cupboard doors, and energetically gouging our baseboards. While Howard ignored Stanley Sue, he considered her dish fair game. The varied shapes and sizes of the parrot seed mixture proved so irresistible, he was willing to risk the larger bird’s wrath. Every week or so, I’d walk into the room to find a tattletale faun-colored tail feather on the floor of Stanley Sue’s cage, while Howard nursed his wounded ego on a chair back across the room. Because Stanley Sue had never shown aggressiveness toward anyone but the bunny, and even that was mostly bluff, we hadn’t realized we were putting Howard’s life in danger.
I learned about Stanley Sue’s temper the day I arrived home after a grueling five hours at the office and was going through my usual afternoon’s routine in anticipation of my nap. I took Bertha outside and plopped her in her backyard pen. Indoors, I popped the latch on Chester’s cage, liberated the parakeets, and then opened Howard’s door. I could see him ruminating on how best to take advantage of this unexpected stroke of fortune. I said hello to Stanley Sue, fruitlessly repeating the desired answer, “Hi, Bob, hi, Bob,” in hopes she would start talking again. Swinging open the door to her cage, I trundled off to the bedroom, where I upset a snoozing Penny by turning back the bedspread. Oh, what a strength-sapping half-day I’d had writing training materials for office-seating dealers. I closed the shades, shut my eyes, and slid into blissful unawareness.
Though I’m so light a sleeper, a falling dewdrop could disturb me, I heard no indication that anything was out of sorts. The only bird who might have alerted me to Stanley Sue’s attack on Howard was Howard himself, and his vocabulary was inadequate for the task. While the parrots, parakeets, and even the canary had peeps, chirps, and squawks with which to signify a broad emotional spectrum, Howard was capable of emitting only a surprised laugh that indicated he was on the make and a boastful hooting that asserted his magnificent presence. I know of no other bird in nature limited to just two sounds, and marvel that two are sufficient for social interactions among doves. Maybe other ringnecks can glean vast quantities of information from these unvarying calls. If so, I wish an in-the-know dove had pecked me on the forehead and led me into the dining room before Howard ended up on the bottom of Stanley Sue’s cage, his back torn open and smeared with blood.
“Oh, baby, baby, what’s happened t
o you?” I moaned, certain he was dead or on the verge of death. Shouting for Linda, who had just walked in the door. I gingerly picked up Howard and carried him into the bathroom. His eyes were open but cloudy. He barely moved as I held him. “Stanley got him,” I managed to say. “I think she must have cornered him in her cage.”
Linda uncapped a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and antibacterial Betadine, which we kept on hand for emergencies. I could hardly watch as she daubed the wound with a cotton ball. “I don’t think it’s as bad as it first looked,” she reassured me, as she cleaned him up. “It doesn’t seem to be too deep.” Still the silver dollar–size abrasion between his tail and wings was bad enough. If the pain was too great or if the wound became infected, he wouldn’t last the night.
Linda rushed Howard to Dr. Carlotti, a country vet who ran a small practice from his farm a few miles from us. I stayed home, trying not to strangle Stanley Sue. Instead, I inflicted on her the worst punishment I could think of. I put her in her cage and took away her bell, the bell that functioned as her proxy voice. It was the bell she rang whenever she wanted out of her cage, whenever she wanted some attention, whenever she wanted something to eat, whenever something in the house disturbed her, or whenever she was just plain moody. Taking her bell was as serious as slapping a prisoner in solitary confinement. In the three years we had owned Stanley, I had only taken her bell away twice: once when she had bitten me for no apparent reason, and once when she had bitten Linda without asking my permission.
Within an hour I relented. “Here’s your bell back,” I sighed, realizing that Stanley hadn’t been at fault for attacking a rival who had invaded her territory and stolen her food. She had simply followed her wild nature. I was to blame for Howard’s injury. I had seen the signs of trouble but naively assumed nothing worse would happen than plucked tail feathers, because that wouldn’t be nice, and Stanley Sue was a nice bird.
Stepping back from anthropomorphizing our pets while still feeling close to them was always difficult. It took me years to accept the fact that animals don’t act according to human standards of generosity and forgiveness—which I seldom followed, either. We could teach them certain behaviors we considered appropriate, but we couldn’t override the instincts that had allowed their species to survive for thousands of years. When mixing potentially incompatible pets, the best we could do was provide an environment that kept the chances for serious conflict near zero. For every lovey-dovey Howard-and-Reggie relationship, there could just as easily be a Howard and Stanley Sue.
Linda returned from the vet, and I could tell from her mood that Howard’s injury wasn’t life threatening. She even smiled as she showed me the celluloid “Elizabethan collar” that Dr. Carlotti had fashioned for him. “The doctor gave him a shot of Baytril and said Howard would probably be okay if we can keep him from picking at himself. But he doesn’t like that thing on his neck at all.” No longer in shock, Howard twisted his head in one direction then the other, unable to believe he was encumbered with the plastic cone contraption.
“We could put a ruffle on it. Make him look more like a clown,” I said.
“The trick will be getting him to eat. I don’t know if he can eat from his dish with the collar on, and we can’t take it off him for two weeks.”
During the first days of his recovery, Howard was glum. He sat motionless on his perch, legs folded beneath him to allow his abdomen to help support his weight. For much of the time, he kept his eyes closed, as if putting himself into a yogic healing trance, never uttering a sound, not even a single “om.” Linda performed the hard work of keeping his wound clean, though I took over some of the care once the injury became less evil looking. My role primarily consisted of hovering over Howard’s cage and making encouraging noises, then clucking accusingly at Stanley Sue. I cajoled him to eat by wiggling homemade bread under his beak until he pecked at it purely out of exasperation. After a few days, he graduated to spray millet, a cluster of dried seeds that I attached to his bars with a wooden clothespin. Once he’d had his fill of such lackluster fare, he mastered balancing the weight of his collar well enough to lower his head and root through his dish. By the end of the first week, he was once again shoveling seeds in all directions and had recovered his appetite for hooting.
Dr. Carlotti had told Linda that the patch on Howard’s back might never grow feathers again, or that feathers might only pop up here and there after his next molt. “Reggie won’t like that,” I complained. “It won’t give him anything to grab on to.” But within ten days, we could no longer see the rapidly healing wound through the feather shafts that sprouted up thicker than tattoos on a teenager’s shoulder. As Howard’s health improved, he grew restless in his cage. Collar or no collar, we decided to let him exercise. Owing to the peculiar aerodynamic qualities of the plastic cone, however, when he flapped his wings in an attempt to fly forward, he sailed backward across the room, startling the parakeets, who had never experienced so serious a violation of avian flight bylaws.
Linda and I had assumed that as long as we kept Stanley Sue’s door closed when Howard was at large, we could eliminate future fights. But once our ringneck had returned to full fettle with a luxuriously feathered back, he immediately tried to stage a rematch, armed with no more impressive weapon than his own foolishness. Having two birds that needed separate out-of-cage time added to the complexity of pet-keeping. It was also a harbinger. Within a year, we would find ourselves juggling three rabbits who couldn’t share a single room without engaging in fur-shredding melees. More complexity meant more scheduling, which meant more of my free time flew out the window.
As early as I can remember, I have always nursed a special contempt for people who make surrogate children of their pets. They’re the people who dress their animals in small plaid suits, bring them along on dinner dates, and spend sleepless nights worrying that an isolated cough is the first sign of a dreaded virus. Though I hadn’t done any of these, I knew that as soon as I had uttered the word “baby” when finding Howard hurt in Stanley Sue’s cage, I had unwittingly crossed an emotional threshold.
But at least my affection was no longer unrequited. Along with his grudge against Stanley Sue, Howard had emerged from his disaster with a new appreciation for us. His heart still belonged to Reggie. But when he wasn’t chasing the parakeets around the dining room, stealing seed from their dishes, or dreaming of vengeance against Stanley Sue, he might unexpectedly land upon my shoulder, bow and hoot in my direction, and tenderly chatter his beak against my cheek. The fact that this invariably happened during dinner, when I had a piece of bread in hand, I chalked up to mere coincidence.
CHAPTER 5
The Real Trouble Begins
Even with helping tend a cat, seven birds, and a rabbit, I was able to call most of the day my own. Breakfast was admittedly intense. Ollie and Stanley Sue insisted we hand-feed them portions of whatever Linda and I were eating. Penny, Bertha, Howard, the parakeets, and the canary each required individual servings rather than graciously sharing a communal bowl of cornflakes. They also each demanded a change of water and, once again, they wanted it in separate bowls. In the afternoon, juggling various out-of-cage times for the birds and the bunny, Bertha, nibbled away at more of our time. And Ollie still launched occasional wall-penetrating fits of attention-seeking throughout the day, though the companionship of the parakeets had blunted his vigor.
Dinner meant a repeat of parrot food-flinging antics followed by floor and ceiling cleaning. After dinner, once the parakeets and canaries had been cajoled into returning to their cages via handclaps and verbal threats, Stanley Sue demanded a half-hour of coddling with head scratches and exaggerated praises. Bertha then got her own romp through the house and a hide-and-seek-style roundup later. Finally, all six animal cages required covering at staggered beddy-bye times, and Stanley required peanuts at frequent intervals to curtail bouts of bell-ringing. Despite all this, and even though the day really wasn’t my own after all, I still maintained the fiction t
hat the animals were merely peripheral to my life. Needless to say, this fiction was soon to dry up and blow away.
Howard’s injury had spurred us into a flurry of home-nursing, but our efforts were meager compared to the long struggle we soon faced with Bertha the rabbit. After surviving a harsh winter stripping evergreen foliage from the Howell’s treasured shrubs, she adjusted nicely to the cushy conditions inside our house. Even though she retained a wild streak from her months on her own outdoors, her independence manifested itself as impishness rather than insolence, the quality Binky had taken as his trademark. She hid from us but never resented being found. Her guinea pig size made her an expert at wriggling into the most hopelessly obscure portions of our house geography, including a crack between the living room couch and wall so narrow it might thwart a chubby mouse. To keep her more visibly entertained, I found a long, narrow box that once held a Try and Put Me Together–brand CD rack and filled it with crumpled newspapers. Bertha could structure an entire evening around shooting in and out of the box to rearrange the papers or eject them with her back feet according to her whim.
A doglike good-naturedness was her strongest point. Here was a rabbit who would not only sit upon our laps and enjoy petting but would also lick us to show appreciation—and not so obsessively as to suggest mindlessness. But her mood could abruptly change once we plopped her outside in her pen. A female John Henry, she dug and tunneled furiously in the sand, though without obvious escape attempts in the works. Her ability to tear around the pen in furious circles put Binky’s circumnavigation to shame, and I often kept an eye on the troposphere directly above our house for fear that she might generate a deadly funnel cloud. This ferocity was safely channeled as long as I left her to herself. But if I tried curtailing her fun too early, she might fling herself at my legs, snapping her teeth in crazed toy terrier fashion. I’d be forced to retreat to the house empty-handed, convinced that George Howell’s thick leather gloves weren’t such a bad idea.