Bob Tarte

by Enslaved by Ducks

  “Apply this to the injured area twice a day,” she informed me. Detecting my hesitation, she said, “You can handle your bird, can’t you?”

  “Certainly,” I nodded, envisioning Linda taking on the job.

  We managed to bushwhack and towel-wrap Stanley that evening in the manner taught to me by Dr. Benedict. He chewed at the folded material as we swabbed his twin groins with a Q-Tip, but he didn’t make a serious effort to pay us back with a bite. His gentleness impressed me even as his condition worsened. Within forty-eight hours, his droppings had become watery, and soon we were changing the newspapers on the bottom of his cage three times a day. A phone call to Dr. Stallings elicited the bland response, “That’s a typical side effect of the medicine. If it continues,” she said, “it may mean your bird has suffered liver damage, and we would have to investigate possible treatment protocols for that condition.”

  Numbness radiated through my body. “And this is all because of the drug you gave me?” I asked.

  “It happens occasionally.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that?” I demanded. “Why wouldn’t you warn me about the side effects of a drug before prescribing it?”

  “It’s your responsibility as a pet owner to ask about side effects before administering any medicine,” she insisted. “If we were to get bogged down with the question of side effects, we couldn’t even prescribe aspirin.”

  Sickened and depressed, I basted my worries with the glum certainty that I had somehow harmed my bird through negligence, failing Lynn, failing Stanley’s previous two owners, and reneging on a promise whispered through a cage cover to spoil our bird, not ruin him. I managed to squeak a request to Linda to make an appointment for Stanley with the dependable Dr. Hedley.

  Dr. Hedley divided his time between his private clinic and consultations with zoos in several cities. Though neither massive nor obviously muscular, he projected a sense of strength that made it easy to envision him wrestling an ostrich to the ground to administer an antibiotic injection or placing his head in a lion’s mouth to check its molars. If anyone could help Stanley, I figured it would be a man who dealt regularly with rhesus monkeys and Maribou storks, and Dr. Hedley didn’t disappoint me. He told me he’d been busy at his northern Wisconsin cottage excavating hollows in dead trees at fifty-foot elevations to serve as housing for pileated woodpeckers.

  “Doesn’t the height bother you?” I asked.

  “If it doesn’t bother the woodpeckers, now why should it bother me?” he laughed. “Actually, your bird looks pretty good. We’ve got a couple of leathery scabs developing where the injuries were, and they make a natural bandage better than anything I could prescribe.”

  When I showed him the medication Dr. Stallings had prescribed, he assured me Stanley’s watery droppings were nothing more serious than a short-term side effect. “But I would never use a cortisone-based medicine for a bird,” he admonished. “The problem is that birds won’t leave an injured area alone. They lick it, and any topical ointment gets into their systems through their tongues. Our best bet is to let Stanley continue to heal without any intervention.”

  Eager to prevent another parrot owner from going through a similar experience, I naively called Dr. Benedict that same day and told him what Dr. Hedley had advised me regarding Dr. Stallings’s prescription. Dr. Benedict had been our vet of choice in dealing with the difficult Ollie, and we enjoyed such a good rapport, Linda had more than once considered inviting him over for dinner. After hearing me out, he was silent for a moment.

  “So you’ve been badmouthing our practice,” he said.

  “I haven’t been badmouthing anyone,” I replied, as my delight at sharing a clinical insight evaporated. “I didn’t mention any names,” I insisted, failing to mention that Dr. Stallings’s name was clearly visible on the perfectly centered squeeze-bottle label. “I simply told Dr. Hedley what another vet had instructed us to do and the effect it had on Stanley, who seems to be doing a little better,” I added brightly. But Dr. Benedict would not be lured into discussing Stanley’s health.

  He made me explain in detail how we had administered the ointment to our bird, then quizzed me on minute aspects of the procedure like a prosecuting attorney probing for the weakness in a robbery suspect’s alibi.

  “Dr. Stallings’s instructions call for the application of a thin layer of the ointment. How did you determine whether you were applying a thin layer or not?” he asked with great satisfaction.

  After several minutes of cross-examination, I managed to hang up the phone.

  Following Dr. Hedley’s orders, we ignored Stanley’s abrasions, and he healed, to enjoy once again a half-hour of television after dinner. But I soon learned to avoid nature programs, since the appearance of a hawk in flight prompted him to emit an ear-piercing alarm call. A year later, his mysterious condition recurred, though it was far milder the second time around. Dr. Hedley was in Illinois treating a wildebeest, forcing us to try yet another vet. The lanky and affable Dr. Fuller told us that Stanley’s problems were behavioral. When I asked for a translation, he told me, “He’s chewing on himself.” He reminded me that parrots occasionally engage in feather-plucking and other self-mutilating behavior when they become agitated over a prolonged period of time. “You told me this occurred the first time almost exactly a year ago. Is there anything that happens this time of year which might be causing your bird anxiety?”

  “Nothing that I can think of,” I answered. “This is the time of year we always go on vacation.”

  “That could well be the cause,” he said. “Especially if your bird has a tendency toward nervousness.” Just to be on the safe side that nothing microbial was amiss, Dr. Fuller took a blood test, then asked if I’d like a drop of Stanley’s blood reserved for determining his gender through a new DNA test. I agreed to the procedure without giving it much thought. But a week later I was shocked to receive a laboratory report in the mail that stated:

  Subject’s name: Stanley

  Type of bird: African grey Timneh parrot

  Gender: Female

  “I knew it,” Linda moaned. “You never should have gotten him tested.”

  “We had to know,” I insisted. “I really should have figured it out a long time ago, anyway. She’s way too much of a pest to be a male.”

  Nevertheless, I didn’t want to start over with a brand-new name. Stanley had been through enough trauma in her short life, and suddenly calling her Guinevere or Edwina could send her over the top. Recalling that bird behavioralist Sally Blanchard had rechristened her African grey Bongo as Bongo Marie once she had learned the parrot’s true gender, I promptly adopted Stanley Sue as the full legal name for our pet.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” Linda complained. “That’s my middle name.”

  “You took my name when we got married. You were Linda Bush. Now you’re Linda Tarte. So you can share one of your many names with Stanley. Fair is fair.”

  As it turned out, Stanley’s self-inflicted injury did not amount to much the second time around, though she was fussy about hopping onto my hand for about a month. Dr. Fuller opined that Stanley was learning to trust us. My thinking was that finally calling her a name that more or less suited her gender had deflated a latent sexual identity problem. Or something along those lines. But so much had happened over the last twelve months that Stanley’s gender switcheroo was a minor adjustment. Our animal population had suddenly exploded. Somehow, when my attention had apparently been vaguely directed elsewhere, we had taken on a rabbit, a ring-neck dove, and three parakeets, a combination that dramatically complicated our lives.

  CHAPTER 4

  Howard the Clumsy Romeo

  No more animals,” I told Linda.

  “We hardly have any.”

  “A cat, two parrots, and a canary. That’s more animals than I’ve ever seen together at one time. And they all live in our house.”

  “Well,” she shrugged, “I told you we should get some animals for outdoors. I can’t un
derstand why anyone fortunate to own a barn like ours wouldn’t want a couple of cows or a donkey.”

  Linda had always lived out in the country, and that was a big difference between us. Her past included subsistence living with a pig and several chickens in the Michigan north woods, while I had merely lived with Catholics in suburbia.

  Antirural sentiments ran deep in the Blessed Sacrament Parish neighborhood of my youth, where no one would admit to watching The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, or Petticoat Junction, though with shades drawn, such activities undoubtedly took place. During the five-hour trip from Grand Rapids to my mom’s hometown of Port Huron in the ancient pre-interstate era, whenever we got stuck behind a poky driver on the sense-dulling cornfield-lined roads along the way, my good-natured father would inevitably grumble about “another damn farmer.” Branding a person a farmer was one of the choicest insults you could level at any hapless soul. In high school, we drew a line between the suburban high-steppers and the downtrodden yokels from outside the city limits. Even during the rebellious 1960s, however much I disdained the middle-class pursuit of manicured lawns bounded by smooth, rolling sidewalks, I considered life in the country a fearful remnant of Dark Ages chaos.

  By the time I bought our 1907-vintage farmhouse in 1989, my attitude had shifted to the degree that I esteemed rural life as an escape from a series of apartments in crime-spattered downtown Grand Rapids. In a single year, thieves had broken into my battered Toyota so often that I installed old stove knobs on the in-dash cassette deck to demonstrate its worthlessness and left the doors unlocked at night to spare myself the cost of yet another broken window. Even so, some crack-crazed kid snatched the eighty-nine-cent notebook I used for jotting down business mileage, along with the stick-on digital clock my dad had gotten as a freebie with his subscription to Time.

  Linda, who had been living in an ailing trailer with no phones, lights, or plumbing in northern Michigan, immediately loved the house on the outskirts of Lowell. And it answered my need for a yard where I could walk around without people looking out their windows and seeing that I was walking around a yard.

  The first time I drove my parents out to see the house, their reaction to our little slab of rustic Shangri-La wasn’t particularly positive. When I proudly showed off the two acres of swampy thicket behind the back fence, my mother asked, “How are you going to get a lawnmower in there?” She gestured toward the rear door of the barn. “You’d better keep that closed,” she advised me, “Otherwise an animal is liable to get in.” I should have listened to her.

  To this day, the barn remains something of a puzzler. Earlier owners of our property must have found something to grow and harvest somewhere, unless the vast storage capacity of the double-decker barn was sheer whimsy. Steep, nonfarmable hills shoot up just across the road. What I suspect was formerly arable land out back has since become a swamp. I blame a century of industrial tinkering with the Grand River for the biannual flooding that forces our neighbor to resort to rowboat trips to reach his truck each spring and fall. Initially used as a lumber waterway, the Grand River was later exploited as a source of fill-dirt for the cities on its route, though it also conveyed the clam harvesters pursuing cheap mother-of-pearl shell substitutes for a button factory in Lowell. The clammers camped on the shores of our property in the years before World War I, announcing their presence with the hearty smell of bivalves boiling in great cauldrons and, no doubt, the shouted melodies of traditional clamming songs.

  More recently, the folks who sold us our house had spent decades grazing cows in the cowslip and kept porkers that were wont to stray upon the porch. After I moved in, and as my lifelong immunity to animals shifted to susceptibility, I came to suspect that an Amityville Horror–like entity was drawing beasts to our house, and I was merely the spirit’s latest vehicle for pet acquisitiveness.

  Certainly I seemed fated to house a procession of rabbits whether I sought them out or not. Bertha came to us unbidden. Linda rushed in one afternoon from a housecleaning job and told me, “You’ll never guess what I saw at Joyce Howell’s underneath her bird feeder.”

  “A bird.”

  “A little charcoal grey bunny with brown and silver highlights.”

  “I thought wild rabbits were solid brown.”

  Her eyes widened. “This was someone’s pet. Joyce said the poor thing has been eating sunflower seeds all winter. I opened the patio door and tried to feed him. He came pretty close before he ran away. He’s one of those tiny Netherland dwarf bunnies we looked at when we bought Binky. Joyce’s husband is going to catch him.”

  “And do what with him?” Linda’s glee had aroused my suspicions.

  “He’s been eating the lower branches of their shrubs, and they just want to catch it, that’s all.”

  But I knew there was more to come. A couple of days later, George Howell caught the rabbit in a basketball hoop–size trout net and zipped it over to us. Someone had conveyed the idea to George that we would welcome a new rabbit, and that someone called me downstairs from my upstairs hideout to meet our new resident.

  Wearing thick leather gloves capable of repelling eagle talons, George engulfed the tiny animal with his hands, extracted it from a cat carrier, and hurriedly plopped it in Binky’s old cage, which someone had carried from the basement to its familiar place in our dining room. “I hope he doesn’t bite you,” George enthusiastically warned us. “That guy’s been taking out branches thicker than my thumb. I think he’s part beaver.”

  “Wonderful,” I said, giving Linda the evil eye.

  “He looks just like a Beatrix Potter bunny,” Linda bubbled. “Can we let him out?”

  “Wait till I get out of here,” said George, who was clearly anticipating bloodletting and rampant destruction once we uncaged the beast. Before George was back in his car, Linda was petting the rabbit she’d initially named Bertie after P. G. Wodehouse’s pampered and clueless protagonist. But we turned out to be the clueless ones, along with our new veterinarian, when Bertie pulled a gender switch similar to Stanley Sue’s. Examining our bunny, whom we learned was the escaped pet of an unconcerned neighbor of Joyce and George’s, Dr. Colby initially sustained our guess that our rabbit was a male and suggested a second appointment to have him neutered. An intact male rabbit can earn its disproportionate title of “buck” through aggressive behavior toward people, furnishings, and female “does,” including occasionally spraying anything that moves or stands still. Having been hosed by Binky a couple of times, I was anxious to get Bertie snipped. But the day we dropped him off for surgery, Linda casually asked Dr. Colby just before leaving the examination room, “Are you sure he’s a male?”

  The effrontery to veterinary science embarrassed me. “Dr. Colby already told us that he was,” I growled. Graciously our vet agreed to humor Linda by giving Bertie’s nether regions a second look. With some chagrin she pronounced Bertie to be the female we renamed Bertha.

  Not long after, Linda came home from work with another sad animal story. “You know that lady, Terri, with the teenagers who just bought the tropical fish? They’ve got a really sweet parakeet, and no one pays any attention to him now. He’s all alone in a dark room, and his mate died a little while ago. He used to lecture the girl bird all the time, but now he just sits there and doesn’t chirp or hop around the cage.”

  “That is a shame,” I told her, foolishly assuming that a show of sympathy would cost me nothing.

  “I’m trying to talk Terri into giving him to us,” Linda concluded, as if we had already flung open the door to parakeet ownership.

  Naturally, I was opposed to taking on another pet, but Linda convinced me that no less troublesome animal than the parakeet existed anywhere in nature, microscopic life included. I surrendered to the argument that an older bird wouldn’t even want to come out of his cage. Fortunately this turned out to be true with the blue-and-yellow Farley, whom Linda named after the Canadian nature writer Farley Mowat. On the sole occasion that Linda urged
our parakeet out, he flapped around the dining room in such a state of disorientation, we consequently left him contentedly behind bars.

  Caring for Farley was easy indeed. But I hadn’t figured on the companionship aspect.

  “He misses Lilly,” Linda told me. “Lilly was the mate who died. He needs a little friend.”

  “You’re fairly little,” I pointed out.

  “Oh, look how sad he is. It’s not right that he should spend the rest of his days all by himself.”

  “I don’t know. I sort of envy him.” But I had a feeling this discussion would recur until I finally gave in.

  THE GREEN-AND-YELLOW budgie Linda picked out was so tame, she sat on Linda’s shoulder on the car ride home from Betsy’s Beasts. I illogically named her Rossy after a pop group from Madagascar. Within a couple of days, Farley’s personality did a 180-degree flip-flop. The old guy went back to the happy chattering of his peak parakeet years, and like an elderly bachelor who marries a young thing, he died a month later of sheer bliss.

  “Rossy isn’t used to being by herself,” Linda reported a day after Farley’s demise.

  “She can look at Stanley Sue,” I countered uselessly. “Or she can latch on to Ollie. Ollie’s her size, and he’s just a cage away. They can forge a strong platonic bond.”

  “She needs a little friend.”

  Powerless, I gave in to a chipper blue-and-white male Linda named Reggie, because she liked the way the name went with Rossy. But those two didn’t go together at all, avoiding one another in the cage with the steely deliberateness of Stanley Sue ignoring a new perch. A third parakeet, the yellow Sophie, added balance to the batch with her retiring personality. Before I had a quasi-say in the matter, these most unobtrusive of all possible pets were flying around the dining room and kitchen, chewing on the upper-level woodwork, and sampling morsels from our plates. I worried that Ollie would make mincemeat of the effervescent budgies, but they were fast enough to tease him and steal food from his dish, too. Ollie and I could only watch and squawk. Rossy, who continued to spurn Reggie’s affections, followed my suggestion of developing a crush on Ollie. She enjoyed sharing his cage top at mealtime just out of reach of his beak.