Fowl Weather

by Bob Tarte

  We’d already limited her out-of-cage hours to circumvent problems with the other birds. We rarely let Howard loose at the same time as Stanley Sue, because the defenseless dove would foolishly pick a fight with our winged whittler. We couldn’t trust Elliot the canary and our parakeets to keep clear of her as they buzzed between the rooms like colorful bumblebees. And the incessantly squawking Ollie proved too tempting a target for any of us. More than once, I had lunged at him myself. Remarkably, our two African grey parrots barely acknowledged each other’s existence, though Stanley Sue had enjoyed ambushing her previous owner’s macaw. That would have been a bad mistake with Dusty, who came out twice a day to play with Linda and menace me.

  Once we’d made the decision to keep Stanley Sue out of the kitchen, barring her way seemed ridiculously easy at first. She was inexplicably afraid of intimacy with many common household objects, including cardboard wrapping-paper tubes. We placed one of these across the floor in the space between the refrigerator and the dishwasher where the dining room became the kitchen. It made a most effective gate. Whenever Linda inadvertently squashed a tube underfoot on her way to the microwave with a heat pack for her back, she would simply replace the tube with another from the top of the refrigerator. A cluster huddled there, awaiting duty for thumping to drive the bunnies back into their cages when their morning or evening liberation came to an end.

  Although Stanley Sue could fly, it apparently never dawned on her that she could effortlessly sail above the cylindrical sentinel. The tube’s terrible power extended from floor to ceiling in an impenetrable curtain. Her timidity lasted just over a week. One day my e-mailing session upstairs was interrupted by the clunk of a drinking glass downstairs. I found Stanley Sue at the sink in an animated mood. The cardboard tube lay at a confused angle across the floor, the upended glass had darkened the rug with spots of water, and all was right with Stanley Sue’s world again. She had finally mustered the courage to shove the tube aside.

  A barricade of three tubes seemed promising. But its deterrent effect petered out after only an hour. Shooing Stanley Sue back to Bertie’s cage top, I placed our stuffed sock monkey Ed on the kitchen counter. At first sight of his face, her pupils dilated in distress and her feathers flattened against her body. She elongated her neck and stared at Ed with deep suspicion from across the room. The doll, which my Grandmother Ordowski had made for me decades ago, was now reborn as a scarecrow. To reinforce Ed’s menacing potential, I would occasionally lift him a few inches above the countertop and flop him back in forth in a madcap monkey dance. From Stanley Sue’s cocked head and taut posture, it appeared that she was genuinely relieved to have resumed her post at Bertie’s cage.

  She had even invented a new project for herself. By poking her beak between the cage bars at just the right spot, she could grab the bunny’s food dish and dump it upside down. It was a black afternoon when I headed to the kitchen for coffee and encountered Stanley Sue not merely sitting on the counter but further elevated on top of a gallon jug of spring water, as if to underscore her newfound primacy over the stuffed primate. Ed slumped ineffectually against the bread box.

  “You’re not doing your job,” I informed him.

  “I chased her off there fifteen minutes ago,” Linda told me as she rolled in the vacuum cleaner to tidy up the dining room for the ninetieth time that day. “She just goes right back up there again. We’ll either have to keep her in her cage or get something with flashing lights to keep her off my counter.”

  “What do you mean, ‘something with flashing lights’?”

  A HORRIFIC HOWL close to the house jolted me awake—a long, descending banshee call resembling a siren. Clear, unquavering, and downright scary, the sound had the same round-toned whoop quality that I had heard on the night of the furious snow. It wasn’t the wail of a dog or a coyote. It was primate-like rather than canine. An ascending howl followed, briefer but just as window rattling. I reached out a reassuring arm to Linda that was actually intended to reassure me. But her place in the bed was empty. I remembered that before we had turned in, she had told me that her back was bothering her and she might move upstairs so as not to bother me. In her absence I hugged my pillow.

  Although I had wanted another chance to hear the mystery animal, this was too much of a good thing and far too close besides. It might, after all, be how Bigfoot announced his presence before peeling the wall off a house. In full light of day or by the flickering light of The Beverly Hillbillies, the howl would have intrigued me rather than compacting me under the covers. But this wasn’t a mere counterpoint to a host of familiar noises. It was the classic cry of a monster in the dark that creature-feature movies had warned me about since childhood. Only a bit player slated for first-reel extinction would get up and investigate.

  I lay quietly as the clock ticked off my fears, hoping to hear telltale thumps from above, indicating that Linda had gotten out of bed and was on her way downstairs. She would be worried about the safety of the ducks rather than a mythical being. Checking on the animals was exactly what I needed to do, even if it involved nothing more physically compromising than glancing out at the backyard pen. If I was fortunate, I might merely witness an unearthly apparition that would doom me to spend the rest of my days on talk shows, trying to convince jaded studio audiences that hairy humanoids were real. I might not get off that easily, though. I might witness a scene so unimaginable—such as a peanut-shaped spaceship piloted by an African grey parrot—as to crack my poor brain open like an egg.

  Marshaling my courage, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and sat for a while. Then I sat for a while longer. Having pretty much mastered sitting, I forced myself to my feet. Turning nervousness into momentum, I marched through the dark into the living room, then into a dining room flooded with moonlight. Our birds and rabbits snoozed peacefully in their cages without a care. Through the window, the ducks and geese at the bottom of the hill appeared unfazed as well. The pen doors were safely closed. The wire walls and roof remained intact, and the wooden uprights hadn’t been splintered like so many matchsticks by a raging behemoth.

  The outdoors looked ominous in the glow of the nearly full moon. The woods were a confusion of inky shapes reaching up and thrown back down to the ground in sinister shadows capable of concealing a particularly skinny intruder—such as my evil twin. Each ditch and depression in the softly glowing snow hosted dark areas that a mouse-size being could have made into a hiding place. The spectral quality of the scene and my giddy state of mind created an inverted sense of seeing that pushed the familiar further away rather than bringing it closer, as if I were staring at an X-ray of our property. I found myself actually hoping for a bit of a scare. Even so, I wasn’t able to psych myself into projecting a mystery animal onto the landscape. A deer in the right spot might have helped. I would even have welcomed a skunk.

  Aware of my presence, Stanley Sue flapped her wings inside her covered cage. In another moment she would ring her bell, annoyed that my worried lurking was disrupting her sleep; then Howard would awake and start to coo, Dusty would whistle and imitate the ringing of the phone, and the curtain would crash down on my brush with nonordinary reality. Taking one last dispirited look, I shuffled back toward the bedroom, only to collide with a colossal white shape in the hall. It turned out to be Moobie, the overweight cat that was straining our feed bills and floorboards until we could find her a home.

  “WHAT SOUNDS?” LINDA asked the next morning as we sat on the edge of the bed drinking cups of acid-free coffee. “Did that raccoon come by again?”

  In the full light of day it was difficult to convey the mystery and fear I had felt while cringing under the covers in the wee hours. My description of the unsettling howl piqued her interest only slightly.

  “Are you sure it wasn’t an owl?”

  I knew the voices of the common Michigan owls—barred, great horned, and screech—and they didn’t in the least resemble this piercing clarinet wail from hell. “I think it was a how
ler monkey,” I told her. “Or maybe some sort of gibbon.”

  “Funny you’re the only one who seems to hear these things.”

  “That’s because you don’t fascinate the space people the way I do.”

  “It was probably an owl. Owls make all sorts of sounds.”

  I protested this ridiculous suggestion with dignified silence.

  After breakfast I hopped onto the Internet and began downloading sound files of owls, along with those of other birds that might have ventured out into the Michigan night no matter the time of year, from goatsucker to nightjar to long-eared owl. I listened to hoots, groans, croaks, whinnies, barks, gasps, and whistles, along with a whip-poor-will, a chee-chee-chee, and even a pee-ant. But nothing with wings filled the bill.

  If a Bigfoot-size creature had paid us a visit, it would have plowed a hard-to-miss path through the snow. A multitentacled extraterrestrial might have left sucker prints behind for a sucker like me to find. I felt almost intrepid as I suited up for a tracking expedition, donning a pair of barn boots fitted with ice cleats in case the terrain got rough, and pulling rubber work gloves over cotton gloves to keep my hands dry should I need to rummage in the wet for clues. As a finishing touch, I slung my binoculars over my shoulder, in case, I suppose, I wanted to spy on suspicious squirrels on the bank of the Grand River.

  I never made it as far as the river. The soft ground cover of a few days earlier was truly a thing of the past. Thawing and refreezing had created a crunchy surface that collapsed and threw me off balance with each lurching step. The cleats were useless under these conditions, though they saved me from falling once I’d crawled over the backyard fence and rapidly descended the hill on a sheet of ice courtesy of nine wild turkeys and my wife. The turkeys’ daily visits for scratch feed scattered by Linda had packed down the snow and polished it into a toboggan run.

  Turkey prints were only the beginning. As I trudged through the hollow I discovered a complex freeway system of animal routes. I crisscrossed deer, squirrel, rabbit, house-cat, and possum paths along with prints from critters I couldn’t identify. Several tracks looked promisingly weird until I got on top of them and found familiar hoofprints at the bottom. Faced with so many prints to investigate and no obvious primate or cephalopod shapes, I called it a day after less than twenty minutes. The amount of traffic was mind-numbing. The animals were clearly the property owners. Linda and I were just squatters huddled inside a box.

  Back indoors, I kept replaying the howl through my head until the idea that I had heard it before paid off. I rooted through my CDs and found a collection of Malagasy music called A World Out of Time, Volume 2. Linda was cleaning birdcages in the dining room when I triumphantly slid the disc into the boom box and hit the play button. Overlapping primate whoops burst forth over a drumbeat.

  “What is that?” she asked as she filled Howard’s seed dish.

  “Lemurs,” I announced with a note of triumph in my voice. “Indri lemurs. Native to Madagascar and found nowhere else on the planet.”

  “That’s a sound Dusty would love to copy. We’ll have to start playing it for him.”

  “That’s more or less what I heard in the yard both times,” I said. “Not exactly what I heard, but closer than anything else I’ve found.”

  “You could make that sound, couldn’t you, Dusty?” Her parrot was not only adept at dead-on mimicry of our voices but also impersonated electronic appliances, hand claps, creaking doors, and ice cubes falling into a drinking glass. “Maybe you just heard Dusty,” she said.

  “Dusty? How could it have been Dusty? He hasn’t even heard the lemur calls until this very minute. I haven’t played this CD in years.”

  “But he could have made a sound like that. It could have been Dusty.”

  I retreated upstairs.

  SHIFTING MY SHORT attention span to our gnawed kitchen woodwork, I recalled reading about high-end robotic toys that moved and emitted sounds in response to motion or noise. They seemed tailor-made for discouraging Stanley Sue from venturing into the room. I found the budget version at a store just down the road. The blue mechanical bird with transparent red crest, wings, and tail feathers resembled a cross between a baby blue jay and a tuna can. The two pairs of eyes hinted at the dual nature of what proved to be a troublesome toy. Red plastic domes the size of quarters bulged from either side of the head where a bird’s eyes ought to be. But a black rectangle up front, just above the yellow beak, contained two more eyes. These were red LEDs that blinked and changed shape from hearts to X’s, depending upon the robot’s mood.

  Waving a small magnetic corncob near the beak was equivalent to feeding the bird, and the automaton expressed its gratitude by chirping “Merrily We Roll Along” or another annoying ditty, accompanied by head swivels, wing flaps, beak snaps, and enthusiastic bowing. A sharp noise near the toy caused a happy twitter, as did waving a hand across the light-sensitive eyes, which I hoped could detect a close encounter with Stanley Sue.

  More than anything else, though, the mechanical bird craved pressure on its crest. Pressing the plastic plume whenever I entered the kitchen kept the toy nattering joyously in response to the piercing chirps, squawks, and whistles from our parrots and parakeets. Failing to press the plume or forgetting to proffer the magnetic corn plunged the bipolar robot into a silent depression so unshakable that no crescendo of noise in the room could lift its spirit.

  This insistence on attention proved to be the toy’s downfall. For nearly two weeks, Stanley Sue stayed in the dining room, well away from the mechanical bird with its repertoire of random-interval song-and-dance routines. My heart soared with hope that her behavior had finally changed. But the robot bird’s behavior had shifted, too. The sadists who had programmed its microchip had decided that every few days it would be fun to have the toy cycle through a sullen phase that required intensive plume pressing and magnetic feeding. Otherwise the mechanical bird merely issued a brief grumble in response to stimuli. Frankly, I wasn’t having it. It was one thing to coddle a flesh-and-blood pet; it was quite another to include a plastic bird in my daily schedule of chores and visits. For a while, I solved the sulking problem by turning the toy upside down, then removing and replacing its batteries. This reset it to a state of chirpy ecstasy. But I grew sick of the battery changing, and Stanley Sue soon decided that an intermittently active bird was no threat whatsoever. She retook her prized countertop and perched on top of the water jug.

  “If you want to stay up there, you can’t be near the bread box,” I informed her.

  She took exception to the restriction. When I moved the water jug toward the center of the countertop, out of reach of things wooden, she startled me by springing off it and flying back to her cage. She didn’t fly short distances gracefully. Her wingbeats were as loud as those of the robotic bird, and she bobbled slightly off balance when she landed.

  I looked at her. You could almost hear the snap of a spark as our gazes locked. I drifted toward her, pulled across the room by the irresistible force that bound the two of us together. Oh, that alien, I thought. That alien has got me again. My two eyes focused on her one eye. I came closer. I smiled at her, and the black pupil changed size ever so minutely, pulsing in and out as it floated in a thick white yolk lit with a hint of gold.

  Her eye was welcoming, but that’s because I knew she welcomed me. In point of fact, I’d noted the same glint in the eye of a parrot that wanted nothing better than to chomp my hand. You couldn’t see the affection in her face. Her upper beak curved backward in a frown from the wickedly pointed tip, then, at the last moment, flowed upward in a smile. That mouth could mean anything. She was aggressive toward our other birds, having once sent Howard to the vet in terrible shape. Another time, she caught our canary in midair and threw him to the floor like a ceramic spoon rest. But she was tolerant toward my wife and the essence of gentleness with me. Leaning over the cage top, she lowered her head beneath her feet and raised it again, never taking her eye off me, in what I had lear
ned was her silent approximation of a chuckle.

  “Stanley,” I told her. “Stanley Sue.”

  She opened and closed her beak, making a quiet clucking that was probably her attempt to mock my speech. Unlike Dusty, she didn’t talk, but she spoke volumes nonetheless. I leaned down, touching my nose to her beak. I laughed, and she clucked. Demonstrating her extreme satisfaction, she began to preen the feathers on her chest, ignoring me as I finally walked away. Before leaving the kitchen, I picked up the mechanical bird and placed it on top of the refrigerator, where it could keep the cardboard wrapping-paper tubes company.

  THAT NIGHT, I ASSUMED my post at the bathroom window, hoping to hear the primates whooping it up again. It wasn’t a pleasant vigil. Linda had replaced the heating grate next to the sink, because it had started to rust. But she’d had trouble fitting the new grate in place until a stroke of inspiration had convinced her to rip out the metal vanes that limited the heat flow. A shower became a visit to the sauna. While the water faucets glowed red-hot, and toothbrushes melted into sticky puddles, a cup of steaming tea anywhere else in the house froze solid in a matter of seconds.

  I slept lightly most of the week, keeping one ear cocked for teeth-jarring cries. One night, a disturbance out in the duck pen woke Dusty, and he responded with a descending whistle, which I tried to pin on a geographically challenged lemur. But the harmonic complexity was missing. Dusty hadn’t made my mysterious nocturnal noises, if there had been any noises after all. I started to convince myself that I had dreamed the entire thing.

  I sat up in bed an hour or so later to find a grey-skinned extraterrestrial skulking near the bed and bent on the usual kidnapping. I played along with the abduction, but once we reached the front door, I grabbed the little fellow by the scruff of the neck, ushered him off the porch into the hard-packed snow, and turned to close the door. His baseball-size eyes bore a wounded look.