Sunshine State

by Sarah Gerard

“I always keep sutures around with me. I started sewing and sewing and sewing and sewing. It’s sew and tie it off, come a little bit further and sew and tie it off. I did that because I didn’t want to take a chance on him turning around and grabbing one of the stitches, and pulling the whole thing out like unraveling a sweater.” He made a spiral with his finger. “You can open the whole damn thing back up. I did interrupted stitches on purpose, and then once I was finished, I coated the whole wound real thick with antibiotic ointment.”

  Ralph kept the heron in a cage on his dining room table.

  “I would pick him up and put him on the floor while I changed his cage and everything. Then pick him up and put him back in. This was now, probably, three years ago—and I on purpose didn’t take him over to the hospital because obviously a bird that trusts you so much to lie still on your washer and dryer while you sew him up—to say he trusts you would be an understatement. I mean, he’s not moving! He’s not moving a feather! You know? Not kicking or flapping his wings or nothing. He’s just lying there absolutely like he’s in a coma. But he’s not; he’s wide-awake looking at you.”

  When the bird had recuperated, Ralph brought it to his porch. He opened the door of its cage. It stepped out onto the sand and sat looking at the water. For a long time after that, if Ralph walked down on the beach at night, the bird would fly to him.

  “You know how I knew it was the same bird?”

  I asked him how.

  “He had a big oily patch on his back. He had a big oily spot on his back where I coated him with the antibiotic ointment.”

  Ralph smiled. This was his favorite story.

  In January 2016, Tampa Bay Newspapers ran an online story about a blue heron approaching Ralph at the sanctuary.192 It was late at night, and Ralph was there alone. Just as in the story he’d told me, the heron reportedly approached him and Ralph put his arm around it. Only, in this version of the story, there was no hole in the heron’s back—this heron’s leg was broken. It was dragging a foot.

  Just as in the story he’d told me, Ralph said he realized the bird wasn’t going to hurt him. He laid the heron on the examining table. He began to work on the heron alone.

  But in this version, he put a splint on its leg and taped it in place. The bird watched him the whole time. It acted like it had known Ralph all its life.

  Ralph kept the bird for a month, then set it free. It had come back to the sanctuary twice since then.

  “We knew it was him because of the bump on his leg where the break had healed,” he said in the article.

  Near the end of our conversation at the Greek restaurant I had asked Ralph, for the third or fourth time, if he would show me the warehouse. Again he’d said no. He explained that it was “personal,” that he “keeps it private,” even though, until recently, it was owned by the sanctuary and by Florida state law any animals kept by the sanctuary as permanent residents must be made available for public viewing.193 Now housed in a space owned by his sons, the birds were officially Ralph’s personal collection. Different laws applied to them.

  Ralph’s birds wouldn’t react to me like they do to him, he explained. “Birds take a real long time to bond to you. To bond to you is like a permanent affection, or a permanent love, or a bond. Birds, the ones that I live with, are very different when there’s a person around as compared to me.”

  In May 2016, Florida Fish and Wildlife received an anonymous report describing the abusive and disgusting living conditions of the animals kept in Ralph’s warehouse. Lieutenant Steve Delacure and Officer Robert O’Horo investigated the claim.194 “A cloud of rancid-smelling particulate hung in the air,” O’Horo reported.195 The warehouse was so dark he needed to use a flashlight. “As I entered the room, my boots sank into the wet spongy mix of substrate, feces, spoiled food and feathers. I observed roaches running over my boots on several occasions and my boots were caked with fecal material after my visit.”

  The report included photographs. I finally had my access to the warehouse. There was the sprawling, windowless building, light blue with brick borders and painted details of palm leaves. Inside, turtles with deformed shells swam in murky, fetid pools, and crawled around on filthy concrete floors. Ducks and chickens wandered in dark rooms with walls coated in mold and waste. Pigeons and exotic birds sat locked in cages caked with droppings and rotten seed. The wing of a federally protected laughing gull had been amputated and bound in duct tape.196 Some of the birds had gone blind. None of the animals had clean water.

  Thirty-three box turtles were removed immediately, and nine red-eared sliders. O’Horo issued five misdemeanor citations for rehabilitating wildlife at an unapproved location, possession of migratory birds without a federal permit, failing to maintain wildlife in humane or sanitary conditions, failing to maintain intake records for the animals on-site, and possession of Florida box turtles without a permit.

  Ralph’s federal rehabilitator’s license had already expired and will likely not be renewed. Lieutenant Delacure recommended a Pinellas County judge suspend or revoke Ralph’s state license; he was still on probation for the fifty-nine violations Florida Fish and Wildlife had issued him in 2014, and was charged with violating his probation. He pled not guilty to all charges.197 I called him to ask what happened.

  “Oh, I just hadn’t had time to. My assistant who was working there passed away unexpectedly,”198 he said. “And then the fellow who was helping me—you know Jimbo? You remember Jimbo, of course.”

  I said I did.

  “He had to check himself into alcohol rehab or he’d have been dead. So, I kind of got behind on my work there and everything.”

  He told me he had a new person working with him now, a woman who was strong and very good with the animals. But he had a lot to do that day to prepare for the storm that was expected to make landfall Monday, he said. I should give him a holler the day after tomorrow.

  “I just have one more question, Ralph,” I said. “When we talked in November, you were preparing to move into the warehouse. Did that ever happen?”

  “Right now I’m just trying to get organized,” he said. “Call me back Tuesday.” He hung up. That was that.

  When I had returned to Brooklyn in November 2015, my husband and I had adopted a green-cheek conure and named her Magnolia. She was about the size of your hand, and jewel-toned, with green wings, bright blue flight feathers, and a smudge of a red heart on her breast. She belonged to a South African fashion model who traveled frequently for work and was concerned that Magnolia, née Kitten, wasn’t getting the love she needed. Magnolia came to us in a stately metal cage with a scrolled hook at its top, food, bedding, and two dishes. She loved bananas. She made happy chirping noises and sang with the doorbell. She loved to bathe in the sink and ride around in my hair, and she preened constantly, as if invested in her appearance. When we left the room, she’d cry and call for us until we returned. During the daytime, she’d find a safe place beneath my ponytail and stay there for hours while I wrote, cooing softly, nuzzling in my neck. We awoke in the mornings to her singing in the sun. She learned games quickly. She always wanted to play.

  But Magnolia was filthy. She shat all over the furniture, and us. Our attempts to return her to her cage ended with bloody fingers. She was moody and restless—full of energy, all of it focused in her beak, which she ground constantly. She chewed everything: papers, electrical cords, books, scabs. She sought out our wounds and pulled at them, then groomed the open flesh even wider. She had a taste for blood. She ate her own feces. When she was mad at us, she tantrummed in her cage and threw seed and bits of produce all over the floor. Reasoning with her was futile. I stroked her head sweetly, looked into her eyes: in them I saw the void of a mind I will never understand. Magnolia was an enigma. Stubborn, willful, animal, id. She derived pleasure from our frustration. To her, everything was a game.

  On the fourth day of our cohabitation, I awoke to Magnolia’s chirping. I had learned to anticipate it as a response to the alarm I set
on my phone. I pretended to fall back asleep, not ready yet to entertain her. My husband and I were unaware we should set a schedule for cage time; I felt it was expected of me to take her out of her cage on my way to the bathroom. But that day, I didn’t. I felt her eyes on the back of my head as I passed her cage, rounding the corner of the kitchen. Leaving the bathroom, I moved directly to the coffee maker. I carried the guilt with me through my morning routine, hearing her stir in her cage, vying for my attention. I remembered something Greg had told me, a rule of thumb for releasing birds: If it can fly, it’s free. Like spirit, like wind.

  That night, we returned her to the fashion model, who had given us time to decide. We’d realized we couldn’t give Magnolia the attention she needed, either. In our four days as her caretakers, we had been forced to rearrange every aspect of our lives: putting off sex and socializing, smoking in the bathroom, going to bed early. We had thrown away all of our Teflon cookware. We had watched training videos on YouTube, joined a Facebook group for conure owners, ordered books, visited Reddit forums. I had asked my friend with a bird: What does it mean when she taps her beak this way? What does it mean when she bobs her head this way? We had lengthy discussions about the meanings of certain gestures. In the end, my husband and I decided she spoke a language we couldn’t learn.

  Rabbit

  My grandmother is a sensible woman with expensive taste. Most of the gifts she’s given me over the years have been jewelry. Or clothing: when I was young she loved to take me shopping at Neiman Marcus, then visit the top-floor restaurant for tea and miniature sandwiches. Each time I visited Cleveland, she took me to get my long, tangly hair cut, and for a manicure if I’d upheld my promise not to bite my fingernails since my last visit—not gifts so much as traditions. I’d sit nearby in the beauty parlor as my grandmother got her practical short hair restyled at her weekly appointment, then accompany her to her friend’s home salon, where she’d get her acrylics touched up and I’d eye the wall of colors for one that fit my mood.

  I was eight when she gave me the rabbit, an unusually sentimental gesture in our relationship. She made no overtures about it, simply handed it to me one afternoon as we were passing each other in the hallway. I was coming up from the basement after some ritual exploring of the terrain—old stacks of Playboys, boxes of liquor, and letters on brittle paper; she was hanging her coat in the entryway closet after running errands. The endowment happened, and then it was over.

  The rabbit was gray with satin ears, a smooth pink nose, a white face and white hands and feet. Its long limbs made it perfect for sitting upright or pulling close, carrying by one arm or dressing in doll clothes. Though I felt I was too old for stuffed animals, I started sleeping with the rabbit every night. Eventually, her soft fur wore down and became patchy, her body flattened, and her white face grew yellow.

  My grandmother met my grandfather in 1945 at a Valentine’s Day dance held at the local synagogue. She was nineteen, just out of high school and planning to go to college for accounting. He was twenty-two and just out of the army, where he spent three years stationed in the Pacific theater and contracted dengue fever. This is one of my favorite stories: he spots her across the ballroom, sitting with her girlfriends. She’s the most beautiful woman in the room—big brown eyes, strawberry blonde hair, serious expression. He works up the nerve, approaches her table, asks her to dance.

  “No,” she says. “You’re too short.”

  My grandmother is a certain kind of independent. She was the bookkeeper for my grandfather’s industrial-barrel business from the day they married until the day he died, sixty-five years later. She was also an expert homemaker: adept at making beaded floral arrangements, crocheted blankets, and ample baked goods. Though introverted, she’s notorious for doing and saying whatever she pleases at any given moment. Once, in the middle of a dinner party, she removed a section of newspaper from her purse, opened it, and proceeded to read.

  One afternoon, when I was visiting in the spring of 2011, my grandmother and I went out to get our hair done. Crossing the parking lot to the beauty parlor, I asked her what makes a person classy.

  “The way they act,” she said. “Whether they’re kind and considerate. Not fake.”

  “Not fake?” I said. “So, if you can be kind and considerate—”

  “But not two-faced,” she said. “Saying one thing and doing something else.”

  I reflected on this for a moment as we continued across the parking lot, how true this was of the Gerard family. I thought of my grandfather, always keeping his word in business—and my grandmother, getting up at four o’clock every morning to make sandwiches for the men working in the barrel yard. Yes, my grandparents considered good manners and promise keeping to be simple matters of respect and forthrightness, I thought. Certainly this had been passed down to their children and their grandchildren. I swelled with pride.

  “My hairdresser’s lost two hundred pounds,” said my grandmother, interrupting my train of thought. “And he’s still fat.”

  While my grandfather was dying, my grandmother would curse the cancer eating away at invisible places inside him. Her inability to stop it infuriated her. Contrasted against the rest of the family’s vociferousness, her anger was quiet, buried beneath the surface, and would come out in bursts: lashing out, then retreating immediately. Where the rest of the family argued and ordered one another around, she seethed. She drew herself inward. She talked less and less. Her mind seemed to wander. Days before my grandfather passed, while he lay on a hospice bed in their living room, she suggested we try to get him up and walk him around. It was inconceivable to her that he’d never again be the man who approached her at the Valentine’s Day dance in 1945.

  When he was a young man, my grandfather harbored dreams of being a writer. A chest of drawers in the basement held his screenplays and short stories—love stories, mostly. My grandfather was a hopeless romantic. Even into their final years together, sometimes he’d turn to me and say, about my grandmother standing near us, “Ain’t she a foxy lady?” She would respond with, “Oh, shush.”

  He was an avid reader of novels. He loved mysteries, but hated violence. He was always singing songs by Frank Sinatra and Rosemary Clooney, and Michael Jackson and the Rolling Stones—anything that got his body moving. When he danced, his hands became pistol-shaped and he pointed them away from his body, winking at his dance partner. His specialty was speechifying—he was always ready to drop a nugget of wisdom, based in principles starting with God and descending to the bothersome chipmunks eating his flowers—but he wasn’t arrogant. He was easily embarrassed.

  “Most important,” he’d always say, “guard your health. Without your health, you have nothing.”

  One of my earliest memories is with my grandfather at the beach. It was a rare visit to Florida, before he stopped flying altogether—he always got sick on airplanes. I was three, and was wearing my zebra-print bathing suit. My parents had warned me about the sand spurs on the dunes, but I wasn’t listening, or didn’t listen. I marched straight into them, and before I knew it, my feet were on fire. Sand spurs were stuck to the bottoms, and the more I tried to avoid them, the more they stuck. I started to wail. My grandfather ran over and lifted me out of the spurs, and carried me down to the shore to wash my feet in the water.

  When the last of their three children had left home, my grandparents moved out of their house on Rochester Road in Shaker Heights and into a sprawling ranch house in Pepper Pike, another affluent Cleveland suburb. I spent weeks there when I wasn’t in school, exploring the wonders of their dressers and record cabinets, the mysteries of my grandmother’s home office, and the sprawling landscape of the property around their home. The land was partially wooded and populated with deer and chipmunks, skunks and fireflies: Ohio creatures that I never saw in Florida. I’d wander through the trees, hunting for animal bones and unusual seed pods and peering into the neighbor’s yards. I spent whole afternoons rolling down the small hill between my grandparen
ts’ paving-stone patio and the bottom of their backyard. I never left without visiting the room in the basement containing select garments from my grandparents’ old wardrobes—my grandfather’s army jacket, my grandmother’s knee-length rabbit fur coat—or reading again my grandfather’s screenplays and short stories, and my aunt’s letters from summer camp.

  The house was also where I learned about my father as a child. I found his bar mitzvah photos in the guest bedroom nightstand; I ate the foods he ate growing up. Over a dinner of beet borscht in my grandparents’ kitchen, I would listen to their stories about him taking ballroom dancing lessons, tripping on acid, teasing my aunt’s boyfriends. Later, on the way to his favorite ice cream parlor, we’d drive by his elementary school and the field where he played little league baseball. I’d fall asleep that night beneath the same blankets that kept him warm when he was a child. My childhood was mapped onto his.

  My father moved to Florida after college. His brother landed in Salt Lake City and his sister in California. Thanksgiving was our yearly reunion, and the family’s pilgrimage back to Cleveland. The holiday followed a procedure: Two days in advance of the dinner, my grandmother would tell my father to bring the chairs up from the basement. Then would follow a day of relative calm, broken up by my grandparents shouting reminders at each other across the house. I would begin sneaking bites of the mandel bread my grandmother left wrapped up in the kitchen.

  Dinner would finally come and midway through someone would tell a joke in poor taste, and we’d all exchange looks. My father’s sister would breeze in with her family toward the end of the meal, looking frazzled, having caught a late flight. When they finished eating, we’d move to the yellow-lit den for drinks. I’d fall asleep with my head on my dad’s lap.

  My grandfather fought his cancer for years. As it advanced, his children spent more and more time in Cleveland. Near the end, my father drove there monthly to help him eat, bathe, and follow his treatment schedule. He spent weeks at a time away from my mother and from his work. His phone conversations were consumed by names of doctors and experimental procedures, medications and dietary restrictions. Though grateful for his children’s help, my grandfather was a stubborn man. He grew depressed. His weight plummeted. He received a colostomy bag, and dressing himself became nearly impossible—not only because of the physical difficulty of it, but also because the humiliation of having to hide the bag was almost too much for him to bear. Once an avid moviegoer, he could no longer sit comfortably through a whole film. Unsteady on his feet, he couldn’t walk to the mailbox at the end of the driveway.