by Dawn Davies
“No one is watching them when we do homework, Mom,” the girls said.
“I’m watching them.”
“No, you’re not. You’re cooking. Just put them in their cage until we can give them our full attention. It’s not safe.”
“I hate the thought of them being locked up,” I said.
Rocky ate Pretzel first. I had put him on my shoulder one afternoon while I cleaned the mirrors and windows. I’m not exactly sure how it went down, because it happened so fast, but it involved the dog coming from behind, barking once quickly until I jumped and the bird fell off my shoulder. Because his wings were clipped, Pretzel’s frantic flapping did him no good and Rocky inhaled him like a line of cocaine. My younger daughter, who had named Pretzel, picked up his little body and handed it to me. She looked grim.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
“Put it this way, I’m going to make a good vet, because I’m already used to animals dying in my arms. Rocky sucks, and, I think, so does your pet sense.”
After that, I was not allowed to take the birds out when I was home alone. One day, while the girls were cleaning the cage, and I was watching Felvis, I let him fly to the curtain rod, then had a sudden urge to take the Browns to the Super Bowl, if you know what I mean, and I had been waiting for this event all day long. I’ll be quick, I thought. Rocky is in the backyard, Felvis is way up high. I’ve got the one moment this is going to take. I was on the toilet for the execution, but the girls witnessed the event.
“I hate Rocky,” my older daughter said.
“I still love him,” the younger one said, “but I never will trust him. This is the worst pet family ever.”
We replaced Felvis with Otto, a darling green parakeet. We put the cage high up on a bookshelf, and hung him outside on the patio during the day, so he could listen to the wild, rogue birds taunt him from high branches in the neighbor’s yard. The new house rule was that I was not allowed to handle Otto, or clean his cage, or make any decisions about his care, no matter who was home. Otto made it six months before Rocky got him. One day, when the kids were at school, I felt so sorry for the little bird sitting locked up in his cage that I broke the rules again. I took him out, only once, because he had looked so forlorn dinging the cheap little bell on his stupid little mirror. I put him on my shoulder while I did laundry and he was a happy thing. The pet store had clipped his wings when we bought him, and his feathers were beginning to grow back. We had seen Otto fly short trips from our shoulders to picture frames hanging on the wall, but on the day he died, Otto attempted a transcontinental flight from the living room to the big, lighted wall of windows in the back room that may have looked like real Outside to a bird, with the trees swaying behind the clear glass. Otto’s clipped flight feathers were about as useful for sustained lift as the waxed wings of Icarus, and he dropped, inches per half second, until he found himself two feet off the ground, when Rocky lunged from nowhere and snapped him out of the air. I hadn’t heard the dog come back into the house.
Why did we continue to bring animals into our home with a high-prey-drive dog? Why did I continue to break the rules? Why would I do that to the animals, let alone the children? The simple answer is: I am a fool. As an idealist, I always carry hope that a given situation will change for the better and that people and well-trained animals, especially me, will contribute to that change, although I am an idiot to have thought that an animal could curb its instincts.
It seems that in this case, neither Rocky nor I was able to improve. Each time I thought it wouldn’t happen this time, that we had it under control finally, that we thought we knew all the ways in which this devious dog could achieve a creative kill, he would find a new way to get to them. He was a dog—how many ways were there? I mean, he had a dog brain, for Pete’s sake. We were humans. We could see patterns. This higher-order ability should trump dog instinct, but it never did, because Rocky had no pattern, only infinite patience for the right moment, and a gifted dark art of knowing when we let our guard down.
Only one daughter was interested in replacing Otto, so we got a sky-blue-and-white baby and called her Claudia. We scrubbed the cage clean and the girls moved it, this time to a high dresser in my daughter’s bedroom, where I was not allowed to even look at the bird. Claudia made it long enough for both girls to become devoted to her, and one day, when they were out, I thought I would do them a favor and give the cage a quick cleaning. It would be better for Claudia, I thought. If she was going to live in a prison, it would be better to live in a prison that was not dotted with turds. I set the cage on top of the high breakfast bar, pulled out the poop tray on the bottom, washed it, then set it out in the sun to dry. Sun has antiseptic properties. I then went to lie down for a few minutes and enjoy my menstrual cramps, which had come upon me suddenly.
While I was lying down, Claudia climbed to the bottom of her cage and slipped through the gap where the tray slid in, and Rocky, who must have gone crazy from seeing the bird bouldering around the outside of her cage, vaulted up, knocked over the cage, and destroyed the bird. I had nothing to say when my daughter got home from school. There was nothing to say. After that we got fish, which, it seemed, I could also kill without effort, but Rocky had no interest in them.
* * *
You are sitting alone on the back patio reading Lust for Life by Irving Stone while the kids are at school, as you have vowed, for no reason, to only read books published in the 1930s and 1940s until you have finished all that you can locate. You have also taken up knitting and furniture painting, and tropical gardening, and feng shui, and you have decided to let your hair grow very long, so you can re-create Victorian updos in a tacit protest of the other soccer moms’ bleached, hacked bobs shingling up the backs of their necks. You want to be prettier than the other soccer moms, you think. You want to set yourself apart somehow, and you do, because it is too hot for your kind of hair to be worn long, and you sweat and frizz under it all day long and mostly look homeless.
Beside you is the cairn, who has come up panting from digging a hole and licking the dirt inside it, because he had located a scent trail of the worm belly that dragged across the same dirt the previous night. The worm belly is as easy for him to smell as the hamster snatch, and even though there are no more animals to tantalize him inside the house, he stays plenty busy protecting the yard from interlopers. You reach down to pet him on the top of the head and he feels sticky, even though he was bathed and brushed, against his will, two days before. An unwelcome iguana jumps from the neighbor’s passiflora vine onto the avocado tree that leans over onto your property, and the cairn leaps vertically in a paroxysm of excitement, lands, then scrabbles his feet on the wood of the deck, grunting hard, trying to dig his claws into the wood the way spinning rubber grabs asphalt, smoke erupting from his back paws, powering up to launch himself off the deck wall and three and a half feet down into the backyard. The iguana bolts and leaps into the canal, the dog roaring at it from the seawall. In the distance a phone rings. You sigh. There are mounds of laundry coming to life in the garage. A rotten zucchini liquefying in the fridge. You still haven’t planned dinner and you have all of this book to finish. Something needs to change, you think, but you can’t see how it ever will.
* * *
One fall, right after Thanksgiving a few years after we were finished with the hamsters, and the rats, and the birds and the fish, the eccentric old lady at the top of the street stood on a stool in her kitchen to reach a high shelf, and fell, hitting her head hard on the way down. It was a day before anyone noticed her absence; she was not out front flagging down neighbors for rides to the supermarket or the doctor’s, or complaining about unseen barometric molestations of the plants on her front stoop. On the second day the neighbors began to try and peek through her windows, which were always covered by heavy blinds. By the time we broke the door in, she was in a coma, her head stuck to the linoleum by thick, dark, congealed blood, her fingertips resting on a can of soup, the stool upended and
tangled in her feet. After the ambulance took her away, we milled about in her living room and kitchen under the pretense of putting things in order and locating her relatives, but we took advantage of the unfettered access to her life to look around and have a good gossip.
We had never been inside her house and were surprised that, instead of the hoarded piles of newspapers that we had imagined, her home was a tidy 1967 time capsule that smelled of toilet bowl cleaner and mothballs. An empty amber ashtray sat on top of an old console television set, and above it hung a dark, velvety clown. A bedroom dressed in pale pink chenille hosted a collection of tiny dancers, figurines, embroidered pillows, paintings, a small jewelry box, a ghosted hint at a previous life with a daughter. When we opened the box, a ballerina popped up and began to dance. I wondered where this daughter was now, and thought of my neighbor left alone for so many years with nothing but a few relics of childhood to dust on Saturdays. Off the kitchen, a small, bright green lovebird sat in a cage in the middle of the dining table, hopping from perch to wall, screaming for our attention.
“I found an address book,” someone said. “I’ll see if I can get ahold of her family.”
“Should we clean up the blood?”
“No, leave it. There will probably be some sort of investigation.”
“What are we going to do with the bird?” someone else said.
“We’ll take it for a couple of days,” I said without thinking. “At least until she gets better.” The dog was older, the kids were older. It would be fine for a few days, I thought.
“I don’t think she’s going to get better,” someone said. I hooked my finger into the ring at the top of the birdcage roof and we walked home, the bird, stunned quiet by the sunshine, blinking in the corner of its cage. I would be careful, I thought, and besides, this would be only for a few days.
Lovebirds are busy, squat, feathery fireplugs of mischief, and this one didn’t look back when I took him home. I set him up high on the kitchen bar. He popped from perch to perch to floor to food bowl, hung upside down from his roof, looked around brightly, and shrieked at me every time I walked past his cage. Rocky loitered conspicuously around the kitchen like it was a methadone clinic and he was looking for a fix. He stood unnaturally still, somewhat secretively so, hunch-walking slowly around where the birdcage sat, a single-focused predatory stare in his eye.
“I’m watching you,” I told the dog. He didn’t break his gaze at the bird.
“Okay, get out,” I said, and put him on the back deck. His tight little body was stiff, and once outside, he turned and ogled the bird through the window until the girls got home from school.
It didn’t feel right to name a bird that wasn’t ours, so we ended up calling him Birdy Bird, a noncommittal nickname that I called all birds. The girls loved him. They locked Rocky in the laundry room and took the bird out to play several times per day. He crawled up and down their backs, hid inside the collars of their shirts, played in their hair, and sobbed for them when they walked past his cage and he was locked in it. He sat on their shoulders when they did homework. He squawked incessantly, a sharp caw that was so bracing that it caused me to see stars out of the corners of my eyes, but the goofy spirit in which he cried out was possible to appreciate. The girls would take him into a bedroom, close the door, and play Red Rover with him.
“Red Rover, Red Rover, send Birdy Bird over,” they said, and with a tiny flick of the finger on which he perched, he would take off and fly to the other daughter’s finger. Back and forth he would go until it was time for his bath in the sink. He would slide around the bottom curve of the porcelain and play in the thin stream of water they turned on from the tap before they put him in his cage for the night and let the dog back in.
“This lovebird is the best bird ever,” one daughter said.
“He is,” the other one agreed.
We heard our neighbor died on the day we brought home the Christmas tree. The girls jumped up and down and clapped their hands.
“Wow,” I said.
“We’re sorry she’s dead,” they said. “But can we keep the bird?”
“I don’t know. I’m worried about Rocky.”
“We’ll use the system,” they said. “We’ll lock him up when we want to take the bird out. It’ll be fine.”
“We say that every time,” I said.
“It’ll be different,” they said.
“We say that, too.”
“It will be this time if you promise to stay out of it,” they said. “We’re not the ones who screw it up. Please can we, Mommy? Did we mention how particularly youthful and lovely you are looking lately?”
“Don’t come crying to me when he kills it,” I said, though I was well aware that the weak link in the system was me.
* * *
The bird loved the Christmas tree. Every evening, the girls would put Rocky outside to occupy himself with his patrol and then they would let the bird out in the living room. He would fly a few laps around the room, then land on the lower half of the tree. There he preened the branches, then hiked to the top of the angel, stood on her arm, opened his throat, and sang like a toad. Occasionally, he would rappel down to a feathered bird ornament and make a pass at it, clicking his beak into the reflective glass chest, and stealing the glued-on tail feathers, which he would fling at us. Occasionally, when we walked through the room, he would fly at our heads, grabbing our hair with his feet the way a jet landing on an aircraft carrier hooks the arresting gear to keep from toppling into the ocean. These were happy times.
Rocky killed the bird on Christmas Eve. I don’t know what to say other than this: A melee of people came in through the front door, which startled the bird away from his perch in the Christmas tree, forcing him to fly directly into the mouth of a very surprised Rocky. The dog, whom we hadn’t known was indoors, had come in from a stint outside and was minding his business for once, certainly not expecting to be given this rare gift. He hadn’t even had to hunt, which may have been a little anticlimactic, but no matter: He ate the bird whole.
On Christmas morning we watched Rocky squatting out back under the avocado tree, straining to crap out the bird’s skull and beak. It would take him two days to complete the project and would leave him with hemorrhoids.
“This dog is the worst dog ever,” my younger daughter said.
“I hate to say it, but it serves him right,” I said, trying, as always, to see the humor in unfortunate situations. My older daughter side-eyed me.
“I can’t believe you said that,” she said. “What were you thinking allowing that lovebird into the house with our kind of history? You are the worst pet owner ever.”
* * *
Years later, when the kids have all moved away and your husband is out of town and you are lonely, you take the cairn for a walk. When you pass your old neighbor’s house, you think of the pink chenille ballerina bedroom, and the sense of emptiness the leaving of a daughter can produce. The old dog has slowed down some in his senior years, but still likes to stroll up to the park twice a day for a sniff and a poo, and he still guards the yard with a single-minded focus, as if his life or yours depends on it. The yard remains free of intruders. While walking back, you notice he lags behind, a strained look on his face. At home, his wheezing, which you have never before heard, fills the room. Perhaps he ate something in the yard, you think, some old bones, or a stick. He is gross like that. Sometimes you have had to hinge open his jaws and hook things out of his throat with a crooked finger to keep him from choking. You look in his mouth and see nothing, so you call your husband.
“It’s Sunday. What do we do?” you ask, knowing that you can’t afford to pay for unnecessary vet bills. “Should I watch him?”
“He’s a tough little bugger, but I’d say no, not with that wheezing. Let’s take him in.”
“It’s going to cost extra with the after-hours fees,” you say.
“I don’t care.”
While the vet listens to his heart and l
ungs, the cairn shoves his nose into your armpit, and allows you to pet him on the back. The dog does not want to be there on a Sunday any more than you do.
“He sounds perfect,” the vet says. “His vitals are great.”
“Yeah? Good.”
“I’m going to take a quick X-ray to make sure we are covering our bases.” The vet tucks the cairn under his arm like a football and carries him to the back part of the clinic.
He comes back ten minutes later without the dog, wearing an uh-oh on his face. He shows you the X-rays of the dog’s lungs, which are so stippled with cancer that they look like marble. It is nothing he has ever seen before, he says, and he doesn’t know how the dog is even upright. It is more of a marvel that the sudden wheezing had been his first symptom, and that his lungs sounded as clear as a puppy’s through the stethoscope. There is only one thing to do, so you do it.
The cairn goes out like an old soldier fifteen minutes later, stoic, no lingering, no complaints, dignity intact as he slides softly into your arms for the first time in his life, dreaming of white bellies that he can bite, fields of shaded fern under which lizards writhe and replicate endlessly, the undersides of waxed wings flashing bright in the sky, mile-long borders of soft grasses to defend, and winking stars in the tarnished bowl of night sky that finally bark back. It seems impossible that he is lying so still on the metal table. You pet him all over, under his arms, his belly, between the pads of his feet, exploring his little body as if for the first time, and for the first time, he doesn’t resist.
* * *
I called my daughters to tell them the news that Rocky had died. I chose the second daughter first, the one whom I thought would take it the hardest, the one who had bathed him, and walked him, and brushed him, and fed him and attempted to teach him tricks, the one who knew his nature and didn’t hold a grudge against him for killing most of her other pets. This daughter was away at college, in the middle of studying for finals, but I was sure she would not want me to withhold that kind of information. During the conversation, she was factual, concerned, and sad, but there were no tears. Those had dried up with the death of the second hamster. She waited patiently at the other end of the phone for me to stop crying.