“Damn,” he said. He shoveled the worms onto the ground with the lid. One of them landed in the V between two seat planks. He tried to pick the worm out and then, thinking he might squish it, he went back inside and got a pencil and used it to work the worm carefully along the groove. He didn’t want squished worm on his hands.
He went back inside, made coffee, and took the newspaper upstairs to bed. Arthur, the dog, who was splayed out on the couch, opened one eye to watch him pass and then fell back asleep.
Dave and Morley gave the bird feeder to Stephanie last Christmas. Who knows? They thought it might distract her—get her involved in the greater world around her. It was an unqualified failure. When she opened it on Christmas morning, Stephanie squinted at the bird feeder, frowned, then checked the gift tag. “Is this a mistake?” she asked, without a trace of enthusiasm.
So it was Dave who ended up assembling the feeder and it was Dave who filled it each day. Every day through the dark mornings of January and February, when the snow and ice were piled up in all the provinces, it was Dave who beat the path from the back door to the bird feeder on the pole in the center of his backyard.
At first the only birds interested in his efforts were a thuggish gang of sparrows. They flung Dave’s birdseed onto the ground, where it was pecked over by a bunch of pigeons. The pigeons had begun to hang out under the feeder like a squad of squeegee kids.
“It’s more like a shelter for the homeless than a bird feeder,” said Morley.
The only member of the family who displayed any real passion for the feeder was the cat. Galway spent hours perched on the kitchen radiator, her face against the back window, her tail twitching in frustrated concentration. There were not only birds to lust after but squirrels, too.
The squirrels appeared on Boxing Day, an hour after Dave got the feeder up. They spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s trying to shinny around the squirrel guard. They would get halfway up the pole and then drop to the ground like plates of china. One by one they gave up, leaving the only squirrel who was not a quitter. If anything, its determination grew. Having failed from below, it shifted strategy and began hurling itself at the feeder from rooftops, the fence, a tree, and Dave’s television antenna.
Dave would be washing the dishes, and there would be a blur of gray in his peripheral vision, and he would turn just in time to see the squirrel ricochet off the barbecue. Galway studied each of its attempts with the intensity of a general studying military history.
One afternoon Dave and Galway watched the squirrel haul itself, upside down, along the clothesline—paw over paw to within a few feet of the feeder before it lost its grip, hung from the line for a moment by one leg like a doomed mountain climber, and let go, its tail flailing in the air as it tried to right itself for landing. As it dropped, Galway, who was sitting in Dave’s lap, dug her claws into his leg. Dave flew out of the chair, unsure if Galway’s reflex was in sympathy for the squirrel or out of the forlorn realization that this, too, was a lost opportunity.
“Wouldn’t it be simpler,” said Morley one lunchtime as the squirrel bounced off their compost bin, “to take the winter off? Isn’t hibernation an option?”
In the New Year, Dave added a blue jay and a Junco, and then a gang of chickadees and some birds who seemed to be traveling with them. But the vast flocks he had imagined filling his backyard were avoiding it. Short of amusing the cat, the feeder seemed to be filling no real need in the universe—and certainly none in the bird universe.
Then, on a chilly gray Saturday in the middle of the month, something came. Dave pointed it out to everyone at lunch.
“Over there,” he said. “See. In the Lowbeers’ pine tree.”
No one was particularly interested.
It was not a big bird—not as big as a robin—with olive green above its wings and dull yellow below. It seemed to favor the evergreen hedge that bordered their backyard. It would flick out of this thicket and peck at the seeds in the feeder tray, then vanish into the hedge again.
Dave watched it for a week before he asked Gerta Lowbeer if she knew what kind of bird it was. Gerta brought over her three bird books and her binoculars. She said, “It looks like a tanager. A female summer tanager. But a summer tanager is not supposed to come this far north.” Gerta’s finger was moving along the small print of her bird book. “In January a summer tanager is supposed to be on a beach in Mexico or Brazil.”
Dave was watching his bird through Gerta’s binoculars. He had never seen it so close. It had a stubby bill, almost swollen—not pointy, like a robin’s.
“And it shouldn’t eat seeds,” said Gerta. “A tanager eats insects and wasps. It’s a carnivore.”
When Gerta left, Dave put out a few pieces of tangerine. The sort of thing you might expect to eat if you were used to wintering in Brazil. Then he drove to a pet store to see if he could buy his bird some insects and wasps. He settled for a bag of crickets.
The bird fell on the crickets as if she hadn’t seen a decent meal in months. That bird was starving, thought Dave. For two hours straight, she flicked back and forth from the hedge like windshield wipers. But as happy as she seemed with the crickets, Dave could see that they weren’t going down easily. She was having trouble with the shells.
It was now a quarter to six.
Dave returned to the pet store and came back with a bag of mealworms. He set them on the counter and wondered how he was going to get them to the feeder. The idea of dipping his hands into the seething bag revolted him. He tried a pair of Morley’s oven mitts, but they were too large and clumsy to work with. He imagined sucking them up with the turkey baster, and experimented with the barbecue tongs. He settled on the flour scoop.
The bird didn’t stop eating until nine-thirty that night. She’s going to be sick, thought Dave.
Then he looked at his nearly empty bag of mealworms and thought, I’m going to be eaten out of house and home by a bird.
He went back to the pet store first thing in the morning.
When he came home at supper, only half the worms he had put out that morning had been eaten. The rest were frozen to the feeder.
It took only a few days for the bird to train Dave.
By the end of the week, they had worked out a routine that seemed effective. A scoop of worms at breakfast, a scoop of worms at lunch, and a scoop of worms at dinner. It meant Dave had to come home at noon.
“I don’t mind,” he said.
And he didn’t. He would fix soup and cheese, or a sandwich, and would sit at the table and watch his bird through the sliding glass doors that led out to the backyard.
She was not a spectacular bird; she didn’t have the blood reds of a cardinal or the rich yellows of a fall warbler. On dull days she almost looked dingy. But in some lights, she was beautiful. If the sun was low and the light warm, she would glow with a reddy hue. Almost gold.
Usually, she spent only a moment or two on the feeder, preferring, it seemed, to eat her worms in the obscurity of the hedge, but one sunny afternoon she sat on the feeder for nearly five minutes, looking around and singing softly.
Dave knew that if Gerta was right, the bird would die if he stopped feeding it. By February he had bought so many mealworms that the pet store was giving him a discount. He felt a sense of pride about what he was doing—he felt honored that the bird had chosen him.
It was not long after Valentine’s Day when Gerta mentioned the bird to her friend Nick, who, she said, was a bit of a birder. She brought Nick over that evening so he could see it for himself. Nick watched for half an hour and said, “I’m not sure. Do you mind if I call my friend Bob?”
Bob was there in under an hour. He was wearing camouflage pants and a heavy sweater with a high neck. He was carrying a pair of binoculars in a canvas shoulder sack. He took one look at Dave’s bird and asked if he could use the telephone. He didn’t even use his binoculars.
“I’m phoning from Toronto,” he said into the phone, his right foot bouncing u
p and down excitedly. “I’m in some guy’s kitchen.” He smiled at Dave, then looked at him quizzically. “About fifteen minutes from downtown. Right?”
Dave nodded.
“You aren’t going to believe this,” he said into the phone. “Summer tanager.”
When he hung up, he turned and smiled at Dave and Sam. “That’s the bird of the winter you’ve got there.” He pulled out his bird book—the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America—and flipped it open and pointed at a picture. Dave peered at the page and nodded.
The man said, “There are a few of my friends who would love to see it. Would that be okay?”
Morley came home at seven.
“Guess what we have in the backyard,” said Sam.
“What?” said Morley, throwing groceries on the kitchen counter.
Sam looked at Dave.
“What?” said Morley.
“The bird in the backyard,” said Dave. “The one I’ve been feeding worms …”
“It’s cosmic,” said Sam.
“It’s a summer tanager,” said Dave.
That night as Morley was brushing her teeth, Dave said, “Some people might drop by in the morning.”
“Who?” said Morley.
“To look at the bird,” said Dave.
“What bird?” said Morley.
“The bird I feed the mealworms to,” said Dave. “It’s supposed to winter in Brazil.”
“It chose our backyard over Brazil?”
“So people want to see it,” said Dave, “because it’s a rarity. It’ll be okay. These are birders we’re talking about—nice people.”
“I don’t want people poking around our backyard in the morning,” said Morley. “Can’t they wait until the weekend?”
It was so early that the sun wasn’t up when Dave heard the noise. He listened for a moment and then he thought, Raccoons. And he went back to sleep.
When he woke the second time, Arthur was beside the bed, whinging—padding to the window and back again. Raccoons aren’t that noisy, thought Dave dimly. Then it dawned on him: Someone was stealing the bikes. He leaped out of bed and opened the curtains and squinted into the backyard. There was a smudge of gray on the horizon. When his eyes focused, he gasped and stepped back from the window and said, “Sweet Jesus on a bicycle.”
There were maybe fifty motionless men lined up in the shadows behind his house—strung out along the alley, leaning over his back fence, and scanning his backyard with large binoculars. Dave inched forward and peeked out again. Then he pulled the curtains shut and sat on the edge of his bed.
“Houston,” he said softly, “we have a problem.”
Morley mumbled and rolled over. Dave said, “Don’t wake up. I need a plan before you wake up.”
He wasn’t saying these things out loud. He was saying these things in his head. It was the closest he had come to prayer since last Christmas morning when he defrosted the turkey with the hair dryer.
He needed to wake up. “Coffee,” he said prayerfully.
It was only when Dave was downstairs, standing in the middle of the brightly lit kitchen, scratching, that the enormity of his problem struck him. As far as the fifty men in his backyard were concerned, he was standing on a spotlit stage. He stopped scratching. Then he turned off the kitchen light.
It was six-forty-five A.M .
Fifteen minutes later, Sam’s clock radio snapped on. Here we go, thought Dave. Liftoff. He was sitting at the kitchen table, not sure what he should do. Before he could do anything, the phone rang. It was Carl Lowbeer.
“Dave,” he said. He was whispering. “There is something terrible going on outside.”
Not as terrible, however, as what was going on at the Turlingtons’. Two doors down, at the Turlingtons’ house, Mary, Bert, and the Turlington twins were lying on the floor of Mary and Bert’s bedroom with their hands over the heads.
At six-fifty-five A.M., Rachel, one of the twins, had looked out her bedroom window to see if it was good snowball snow. When Rachel saw the men with the binoculars, she ran to her parents’ bed and said, “The house is surrounded by police. I think it’s the swap team.”
Bert, who is not what you’d call a morning person, nearly stroked out when he saw the men in the dark jackets with their binoculars trained at his kids’ window. His first thought was the carpet installers who had been accidentally shot dead through their motel-room door by overzealous police in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. It was a case of mistaken identity—as this obviously was, too. Bert dropped to the floor and crawled around his house, waking everyone up.
“We’re surrounded,” he said. “Get into our bedroom. Fast.”
And now the whole family was there except for Bert’s fifteen-year-old son, Adam, who had locked himself into the upstairs bathroom. Bert wormed his way into the hall and pounded on the door.
“What are you doing?” he howled.
Adam, who had never gotten up so fast in his life, was desperately trying to flush the first marijuana he had ever bought down the toilet. He had bought it three weeks before from a kid at school. Afraid to smoke it, he had hidden it in an old pair of sneakers in the back of his closet. Now the marijuana kept floating to the top of the toilet. And the police were here to arrest him.
Bert inched his way back to the bedroom and pulled himself up to the window to peer over the sill. There were cars everywhere, parked on both sides of the street and pulled up onto the sidewalk. Bert’s heart was pounding. There were men who looked like they were carrying telescopes running down Dave’s driveway toward his backyard.
High-powered rifles, thought Bert.
The Lowbeers’ dog was barking.
A man came running out of Dave’s yard and pointed directly at Bert’s house. Bert gasped and dropped to the floor.
“Blessed Mother of Mercy,” he said. “We are going to die.”
Twenty minutes later, Dave was still trying to explain things to the neighbors standing on his lawn.
“It was announced on some birders’ hotline,” Dave was saying, when there was a sudden commotion at the Turlingtons’ house.
Dave stopped talking, and everyone turned just as the Turlingtons’ front door flew open and the entire Turlington family burst out of the house. They had wrapped themselves in a large white sheet and were moving down their sidewalk like a bunch of Shriners in a horse costume. They all had their heads low, even Bert, who was leading the way, waving his hands in the air and screaming, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”
Arthur, sitting at Dave’s side, began to bark furiously and pull on his leash.
That night at eleven-thirty, Dave was standing on a ladder in his kitchen, tacking a sheet over the sliding glass door in the kitchen.
“It’ll be over soon,” he said to Morley. “There can’t be that many birders in the city.”
The phone rang at midnight.
Dave and Morley stared at each other.
Dave picked it up.
“Yes?” he said.
There was a pause, and he said it again, “Yes.”
Then again.
“Yes.”
And again.
Then he said, “You’re welcome,” and he hung up.
“Who was that?” said Morley.
“Some guy from Halifax asking if the bird is still here.”
“Halifax,” said Morley.
“He said he’d be up on the weekend. He said he heard it was a mega-twitch.”
The next morning Arthur began barking at six-thirty. When Dave opened the door to pick up the paper, two men passed him on their way down his driveway toward his backyard.
“Morning,” they said in unison.
“Morning,” said Dave.
It rained on Friday. One of those unpleasant February rainstorms.
When Dave lifted the sheet in the kitchen to look outside, there was a group of seven men standing in his driveway staring back at him balefully. They were looking at his coffee. He let the shee
t drop. “It’s not my fault it’s raining,” he muttered.
Saturday morning at nine-thirty, when Dave came downstairs, there were already fifteen people outside. Sam was heading out the front door with a hammer and a large piece of cardboard.
“Where are you going?” said Dave.
Sam stopped. As he flipped over his sign, he dropped the hammer. SEE THE BURD, it said in large hand-painted letters. Under the writing was an arrow that Dave assumed would soon point down his driveway.
“We’re going to sell hot chocolate,” said Sam.
By ten o’clock there were close to a hundred people milling around Dave’s house. Arthur was beside himself. He spent the morning throwing himself around the house, barking from window to window. By eleven o’clock he was getting hoarse.
“Shut up, Arthur,” said Dave.
Even though all the birders were within twenty yards of the bird feeder, they had ringed it with binoculars and telescopes, many on tripods. One man was peering through a camera with a lens as big as a toilet bowl.
At noon, when Dave stepped outside with fresh worms, he heard someone whisper, “Feeding time.” He sensed the crowd stirring. He felt like an aquarium showman. Maybe, he thought sourly, he should climb onto the feeder and hold the worms between his lips so the bird could pluck them out on the fly.
After lunch Dave watched a woman pushing a man up his driveway in a wheelchair. The man had an IV drip in his arm. The couple were arguing. When she got him to the end of the driveway, the woman stormed to her car and drove away without looking back.
Early on Sunday a man arrived in an airport limousine, ran into the backyard, saw the bird, jumped back in the limousine, and headed back in the direction he came from. He never even closed his door. The limousine never shut off its motor.
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