Bob Tarte

by Enslaved by Ducks

  My comeuppance was devastating once Linda brought home Dusty, a Congo African grey parrot she had spotted in the classifieds.

  “Sweetheart,” I remember her informing me one evening as I sat on the sofa basking in the glow of a Wheel of Fortune “Las Vegas Vacation” episode as it faded into a junk-food commercial. “There’s an ad in the paper for a parrot that’s supposed to be a really good talker. He’s an African grey.”

  “We don’t need another parrot. We couldn’t possibly stand another parrot.”

  “I know,” she told me. “But I’m still going to call the people and find out what kind of cute things he says.”

  Though I hid in the bedroom with the door sealed shut and the BBC world news cranked up on the headboard radio, Linda’s explosions of glee still reached me as the bird’s owner regaled her with endless anecdotes. I shivered under the sheet in the early July heat as a damp chill foreboding my inevitable fate wracked my body. “He sounds like a wonderful bird,” Linda exclaimed as she burst into the room. “His name is Dusty. Can we go see him?”

  “We’re not getting another parrot,” I insisted through the pillow.

  “There’s no harm in looking at him. You like looking at birds.”

  “I don’t want another parrot. I really don’t want another parrot. We’ve got our hands full caring for the birds we’ve got.”

  “The owner’s a real nice lady, and she said we could come over on Saturday. We don’t have to buy him if you don’t want to.”

  “Buy him?” I groaned to Ed, the sock monkey, who snuggled against my chest trying in vain to comfort me.

  We’d been down this road many times before. Linda was driving a steamroller and nothing more substantial than a plywood cutout of a husband stood in her way. I might have succeeded in kidding myself that I had gained vast knowledge of animals over the years, but clearly I didn’t have a clue how to say no to my wife, particularly when the question involved a new pet that part of me secretly wanted, too—and that part was the knot inside my pine head.

  We weren’t allowed to see Dusty right away when we visited Becky in Kalamazoo. The three of us sat in the living room. The parrot sat in the den. “He won’t talk sometimes if you’re in the room,” Becky explained in hushed tones while her nineteen-month-old son whacked the walls and furniture with a plastic baseball bat. “Especially with strangers.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said to Linda, raising my eyebrows. On the hour-long drive from Lowell, I had raised every objection that came to mind against taking on another parrot. “He’d better be absolutely perfect, or he’s staying right where he is,” I said.

  “Oh, don’t worry, he talks all day once he gets used to you,” Becky said. Then she was silent for a moment as her son’s bat ticked off the seconds. “I sure hate having to sell him.” Her words caught in her throat. “I’m afraid Brandon’s going to stick his hand into the cage and lose a finger one of these days. And Dusty’s used to walking around on the floor after breakfast, and I can’t watch them both every single minute. Not that he would mean to hurt Brandon.” She moved her knee to avoid a blow from the vinyl slugger, whose wielder had shifted from bopping the coffee table to raising wisps of dust from a couch cushion. The little boy’s enthusiasm made me wonder if the bird wasn’t the family member who was actually in peril. “I brought up Dusty from a little chick years before I ever thought of getting married. I’ve listed him three times in the paper and shown him to several people, but I haven’t been able to let him go.”

  “You haven’t?” I asked, brightening with hope. “Maybe you should keep him.”

  “I just haven’t found the right home for him, I guess. But you seem like a really nice person,” she concluded, turning to Linda. “And you definitely have the right experience with parrots.”

  I had counted on the bird refusing to talk as the ultimate deal killer, and time seemed to be favoring me until a barrage of noise and speech erupted from an unseen source. “Wanna peanut?” said an excellent imitation of Becky’s voice, followed by a squeal, apparently from the very same child who now sat tight-lipped on his mother’s lap, wondering why she had confiscated his cudgel.

  “That’s Dusty,” Becky told us. That was our cue to see him.

  “Quack, quack, quack, quack, quack,” said Dusty. That was Linda’s cue to buy him no matter how he looked—and he looked impressive. In fact, I had trouble reconciling the female persona he had voiced with the bruiser of a bird we confronted in the den. Almost half again as large as Stanley Sue, Dusty carried the lighter plumage, solid black beak, and bright red tail feathers of a Congo African grey, along with a wild expression in his eye. His gorilla-proof stainless steel cage backed up Dusty’s implicit show of strength as he snapped his beak with an audible click that set my teeth on edge.

  “He seems a bit aggressive,” I murmured, as I moved in back of Linda.

  “He’s a sweetie,” Becky insisted. “But he’s not too good with my husband. That’s because Kenneth is allergic to birds and doesn’t pay enough attention to him,” she added.

  “Can people touch him?” Linda asked.

  “He lets me cuddle him. When he’s walking on the floor, anyone can pick him up.”

  We didn’t even try to pick up Dusty’s cage, which was clearly too large to fit inside the backseat or trunk of my Ford Contour. “Too bad,” I sighed to Linda, in a last ditch effort to avoid buying the bird. “I guess this just wasn’t meant to be.” But two days later, she and her friend LuAnne unloaded the mammoth cage from LuAnne’s SUV and installed Dusty at the far end of the dining room between the hanging fern and the door to the backyard—the spot where Weaver’s flight cage would have stood.

  Almost immediately, Dusty began assailing us with voyeuristic sonic montages of his old life with Becky and Kenneth. It was as if a tape recorder that switched on and off at random had been secretly planted in their house. He mimicked the chirpy ringing of their cordless telephone, the declamatory buzz of a dot-matrix printer, clinking glassware, a small dog yipping, followed by what sounded like a volley of swats with a newspaper, and the beep-boop of an electronic toy. He captured the full harmonic complexity of toddler Brandon’s laughter. He even staged miniature dramas, such as Becky brightly and cheerfully calling, “Kenneth!” and her husband replying, “What?” in a sour, put-upon tone that reminded me of myself. He turned us into reluctant window peepers, and I began guarding my own speech for fear of what Dusty might absorb and spit back later.

  The first week or so that Dusty spent with us, he displayed warmth toward Linda and bland indifference toward me. After dinner, Linda would open Dusty’s cage, and he’d step onto the hinge of the drop-down door and let her scratch his head with an index finger. Some nights I’d beat her to the draw, hoping he’d let me do the honors, but he would hang around his seed dish until I gave up and left. Once when he descended to the floor to explore the kitchen at ground level, I managed to scoop him up with my hand and nervously return him to his cage as I cried, “Oh, what a good boy he is.” Another time when he strutted into the living room, I flopped down on the rug beside him and wiggled a shoelace for him to bite. I even carried off the trick I liked to practice with Stanley Sue, touching my nose to his beak as a familial way of saying hello.

  Our relationship hit the skids the day that Dusty decided Linda was the family member with whom he would bond. As he sat on his cage top waiting for Linda to return from feeding apples to the turkeys in the barn, I approached to try the old nose-and-beak touch routine. He replied by pecking me soundly on the cheek. Determined to give no quarter to the massively intimidating bird, I hesitantly raised my wrist and commanded him, “Step up.” He sank his beak into my forearm. He held on so firmly that when I snatched away my arm, he stayed stapled to my flesh and rode along, crashing harmlessly into a pinecone-and-evergreen floral arrangement on the dining room table that had somehow survived the many months since Christmas.

  Rushing into the side yard, I confronted Linda and cu
rsed her new parrot as a criminal, a monstrous animal who had no business living in our house with decent people. “No animal has ever treated me like this,” I howled in indignation. “I’ve never been anything but decent to that bird.”

  I had recently weaned myself from Zoloft, and the entire world seemed as sharp and steely as Dusty’s beak. The medication had lost its effectiveness over the years, and since I didn’t want to suffer through the high-voltage emotional jolt of another dosage increase, I had decided to cut the chemical strings instead. Despite my dislike for Dr. Rick, his admonishment about the lack of information on the long-term effects of Prozac, Zoloft, and related drugs had begun to gnaw at me. To mitigate the Zoloft vacuum, I swallowed a couple of capsules of St. John’s wort each morning to slightly pad the edges of my nervous-depressive personality. But it wasn’t particular effective against parrot jaws.

  I decided to give Dusty a wide berth and leave the touchy-feely aspects of his care to Linda. Unfortunately, my newfound cautiousness only emboldened him. Wandering around downstairs while Dusty was at large invited aggressive lunges at my shoe that quickly turned into an ankle attack if I didn’t immediately shake him off my foot. Eager to regain the psychological ground that I had lost, I took to donning a pair of daunting winter boots and affecting an attitude of vexed forbearance.

  “What’s the story here?” I’d ask him in a sleepy tone of voice, as he exercised his beak on the impenetrable leather of my boots. “I don’t think that’s going to get you anywhere.” It took him exactly three futile assaults before he learned to climb the laces and strike at my vulnerable calf.

  “Get this bird off me!” I’d holler to Linda while hopping up and down on one leg. “Get him off!” To her credit, she never exactly laughed out loud, though an hour or so later, while reading an Emily Brontë novel, she might lapse into a snicker and refuse to discuss the reason.

  I wasn’t the only person who had problems with parrots and feet. In her book, The Parrot Who Owns Me, ornithologist Joanna Burger reported that her fiercely loyal Amazon parrot, Tiko, loved giving painful bites to her husband’s toes. And a woman on a parrot newsgroup told me, “Don’t take it personally. African greys have a thing about shoes.” I didn’t even need to be wearing them. One day I came home from work and noticed that a pair I had left under the coffee table sported a fresh coat of black polish.

  “Thanks for shining these,” I told Linda. “What’s the occasion?”

  “Dusty chewed on them this morning,” she confessed. “I don’t think you can notice the damage now.”

  Linda’s shoes he left alone.

  My sole defense against embarrassing foot attacks was to carry a heavy towel whenever Dusty was free and interpolate it between his beak and my fleshy parts. His response was to climb the towel toward my hand. That left me with the choice of dropping the towel and beating a hasty retreat or trying to reach the open cage door with the dangling bird and pop him inside before I sacrificed a digit.

  WHILE I SAT UPSTAIRS at my computer, I considered myself safe when Dusty was on the prowl. However, my sense of security was punctured one afternoon when a piercing pain to my ankle interrupted an e-mail session. Using his beak to help him climb, Dusty had quietly scaled twelve carpeted stairs and crept up to greet my foot in his inimitable way. A few days later he tried reprising the stunt, but this time I spun my head around and caught him at the entrance to my office. “I’m sorry,” he announced in my voice, then proceeded to clamber up my quickly vacated chair with unthinkable mayhem in mind. From then on, whenever he was loose and I was working upstairs, I barred the steps with the plywood board that kept the rabbits out of the living room during more tranquil hours. He could, of course, flap his wings and sail over the board at will, but like Stanley Sue, his odd reluctance to fly trumped most other concerns.

  I decided I had better fix the situation before I needed a bodyguard. My only recourse was changing my behavior. Maybe at some level he was afraid of me and acted aggressively out of defensiveness, I reasoned. Or perhaps he had transferred his dislike for his former owner’s husband to me and didn’t understand that I wanted to be his friend. In an attempt to win his trust, I began demonstrating my value to him. Whenever I woke up in the morning before Linda, I humped to the kitchen to shower kind words on Dusty along with the more tangible treats of fresh parrot seed and water. At first I only dared unlatch and slide out his bowls if he was perched on the opposite end of his cage, safely beyond biting distance. But once he began associating my actions with a benefit, he permitted these incursions with a mild look in his eye. During meals, I could even get away with poking table scraps through the bars into his dish, mere inches away from his beak.

  Dusty loved wooden chew toys. I almost never bought them, because fifteen dollars seemed pricey for an item he would be reduced to splinters and sawdust within a few hours. Calculating to endear myself to him, I bought scrap pieces of pine from Home Depot. I brushed the cobwebs off my power tools and cut, drilled, and strung the shapes on leather thongs. I was hesitant to thrust my arms into his cage to hook the limp kebabs to a top bar. But my hands darted and shook with impunity as he stood marveling at the gift.

  At the various stages of toy demolishment, I’d saunter into the dining room and praise his progress with exuberant cries of, “Dusty!” His delight in my reaction was obvious. “Dusty!” he’d repeat in my voice throughout the day. I made him a new toy at least once a week. Soon I could walk past his cage without earning a bloodthirsty lunge at the bars in my direction.

  The situation had definitely improved, and so I boldly proceeded with phase two of my plan. My friend Ron worked for a hi-fi products company for which I wrote catalog and Web site copy. Early in his marriage, he had owned an African grey Timneh named Franklin, who threatened to carve him into tiny pieces whenever Ron tried to pick him up.

  “I finally decided that I was just going to let him bite me and put up with the pain no matter how bad it was,” Ron explained. “So I stuck out my hand, said, ‘Step up, Franklin,’ and sure enough, he bit me.”

  I nodded in sympathy.

  “It hurt like a bitch, but I kept doing it, and he kept biting me. My wife was disgusted and called me a masochist,” he laughed. “She said, ‘You’re one sick puppy!’ But finally, one time when I put out my hand, Franklin decided, ‘Oh, well, what the hell,’ and got up on my finger. And he never bit me again.”

  Unlike Ron, I had zero tolerance for pain. But there was a solid core of sense to his strategy. I would also essentially be following standard wisdom for dealing with a parrot that’s partial to one spouse. Take the bird into a neutral room on the hand of the person that the bird is bonded to. Then have that person hand off the bird to the other poor sap. Stoking my bravery was the realization that the bites I had received from Dusty so far had intimidated me more through surprise than actual injury.

  That Saturday, I returned from my weekly visit to the feed store for duck food and bird seed to find Dusty engaged in his favorite morning pastime of standing on the rim of a ceramic dish on my dresser and throwing loose change down the floor register. Our heating duct concealed more dimes and quarters than a row of slot machines. When Linda picked him up to return him to his cage, I met her at the bedroom door, extended my arm, and told her, “Let me take Dusty back.” She shook her head, but I insisted. Without a fuss, the parrot stepped onto my hand. Bird and man glared suspiciously at one another. I quickly handed him back to Linda. “He feels more comfortable with you,” I told her breezily. “You’d better take him.”

  Buoyed by my success, I tried the stunt again the following Saturday. This time when I reached for Dusty, Dusty also reached for me, clamping his beak on the fleshy bit between my thumb and forefinger with such intensity that my eyes rolled up into my head and flooded my brain with crimson light. I had no notion how long he hung on or how many times he bit me. The pain transported me to an extra-temporal dimension where a dozen episodes of The Honeymooners fit into the space of an
aspirin commercial and where embarrassing incidents from my college dating years unfolded in excruciating slow motion.

  Once Linda had convinced Dusty to let go of me, I sat silently on the edge of the couch staring with concern at the vivid pistachio-shell outlines he had embossed on my hand. I could hardly move my fingers and wondered if I’d ever be able to type, tie a knot, or drum my fingers ever again. He had meant to hurt me. He knew exactly what he was doing, intent on causing the maximum amount of pain while barely breaking the skin. Forget the branding irons, whips, and lack of indoor plumbing. The Inquisition could have done without its fiendish dungeons and managed quite nicely with an African grey parrot.

  Instead of erupting in anger at Dusty, I simmered in perplexity. After almost a decade of close relationships with animals, I had finally come full circle—kicked back to the starting point by a feathered reincarnation of Binky. Years before we had transformed our house into a full-fledged petting zoo, I had pitted my weak will against a belligerent bunny in fruitless hopes of altering his nature. I was doing the same with Dusty. The difference was, I genuinely liked the parrot. Or did I? I liked the idea of a talking bird. I liked it that Linda liked him. But in my heart, I probably didn’t actually like Dusty, and that difference proved to be crucial.

  Time and time again, I had noticed a huge change when I had moved from simply being nice to a pet to actually doting on it, and the animal always knew when that change had occurred. No matter how gently I would hold our Checker Giant rabbit, Walter, when carrying him from his cage to the basement pen, he would start kicking his powerful legs at a crucial point midway down the stairs, gouging parallel red lines across my stomach with his toe-nails as he sent me tumbling into the bag of potatoes on the landing. Not until he’d had a scary run-in with Pasteurella, a bacterial infection that frequently kills bunnies, did I actually crack open my heart to Walter. And that change changed everything. He suddenly relaxed when I held him in my arms. He sought me out to stroke his head. It had gone like that with our dove, Howard, too. And with Muscovy duck Hector. And rabbits Bertie and Rollo. Each could distinguish genuine affection from mere goodwill.