Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Calls for Boyce

Sammy gave me a call yesterday afternoon that Boyce would probably be on his way to the Sleep Center, and he probably wasn’t going to be very happy.  I knew Boyce would be on his way to my work, but I had no idea why he wouldn’t be happy.  Sammy told me that when Boyce got to his “commercial lock repair” call that morning and found out it was the Arby’s that Sammy works at, he was none too pleased.  Sammy was waiting for him at the back door holding the dead bolt in his hand that he had dismantled an hour earlier and then threw at the side of the dumpster several times.  “Oh, sir, glad you’re here.  I think there’s something wrong with the lock,” and then Sammy let all the pieces fall out of his hand.  Ever the consummate professional, Boyce replaced the dead bolt on Arby’s back door, though all the while informing Sammy that one extra call wasn’t going to let him keep his job, and might get Sammy fired from his.

That same morning I had gone behind the Sleep Center and unscrewed the deadbolt.  I didn’t know what to do with it so I heaved it back into the forest where the nesting boxes are for the Eastern Screech Owls.  I called Boyce’s company and tried to play it casual, asking for, “Your best man.  Perhaps that excellent locksmith, Boil Limpderder.”  The secretary asked if I meant Boyce Lancaster.  I wasn’t sure how I should play it, so I said, “Hm, could be.  And yet I’m fairly certain his name is Boil Limpderder.”  The secretary said there was no one by that name at the company, nor any one on this planet by that name.  So I said, “That was my dead brother’s name!”, and hung up the phone.  I had to wait a few minutes before I called back.  Luckily someone else answered the phone and I asked for a Boyce Lancaster to come out to fix the Sleep Center’s lock.

When Boyce got to the Sleep Center he told me how stupid my plan was, for no other reason then if Rex Tugwell sees him, he could put two and two together.  Besides, he informed me that he didn’t have the size of dead bolt that would fit in the door.  That meant the two of us had to go into the forest and look for the dead bolt I heaved out there.  We never found it, and we had to run out to Home Depot really quick in order to buy a right-sized lock. 

While Boyce installed the dead bolt into the back door of the Sleep Center, he asked me if I’d like to go gambling with him at one of the Indian reservation casinos.  I understood what Boyce was hinting at and told him that Sammy and I both would contribute seed money.  I asked him if he was going to keep gambling one of his last paychecks a secret from Charlotte, but he said it was her idea.

Just as Boyce was finishing the lock Rex Tugwell came around the side.  He stared at what was happening, and then got a big, mischievous smile.  When he approached us, though, he shook Boyce’s hand and they talked for a couple minutes about drills and motorcycles.  When Rex left us he looked at me and said, “I’m going to shoot some extra doves for this one,” and I told him that’s fine.  This is Boyce we’re talking about.

When we all got together in the evening for dinner, we began to discuss what our dream jobs were.  We’ve had the discussion before, and Sammy’s answer changes every time.  Yesterday his dream job was to be one of those divers who goes into rivers and lakes looking for dead bodies or murder weapons.  He said there’s probably no pressure to actually find anything, “Because, my god, look at the size of that lake!”  Plus it’s dark under there and that could some lead to some really trippy experiences.  And if you do find the body or the weapon, all of your colleagues would be incredibly impressed.  You’d have some drinks while you watched the local news about how the cops caught the bad guy, and then you’d all raise your glass and give knowing looks about who really solved the case.

Boyce said he would be a hay farmer.  Boyce always chooses hay farmer.

I said I was perfectly content with my job, but I wish I could be a security guard somewhere.  Except the place I was securing would have to be dangerous enough to need three guards—a spot for Sammy and Boyce, of course—but not so dangerous that I’d actually have to do anything.  I’d just stand outside the door and sometimes people would stop by in their cars and say, “Do you know where Hartwell Street is?”  And I’d tell them and they’d say thank you, then I’d go home and pick the kids up in my arms, and Rachel would tell me dinner was almost ready.  Chicken breast, again?  My god, how about some variety? (In my fantasies I generally sew small seeds of discontent so that later during dinner, having sensed my reticence, Rachel will ask me what's wrong.  I then sigh and explain how it's nothing she did.  I tell her, "It's funny.  I never thought I'd take you for granted, but I think sometimes I do."  Then I look at her and it all comes back to me, how I was before her and how I was without her and how I am with her now on this endless tape loop of realized dreams, and I say the chicken is delicious, and I love her, and she pats my hand and gives our son a little piece of green bean on his high chair tray.)

Whenever this question of dream job came up with Rachel she always said she was perfectly content being a receptionist.  She said she wouldn’t want a job that would make her spend even two seconds in worry or thought.  “You know what a job is for?” she would say, “To make me enough money so I can do things that matter.”  Sometimes, if she said that around one of her girfriends who was in business or something, she would hear, “Don’t you want to do something you love?”  Rachel would say that’s something guidance counselors invented to make kids not kill themselves when they realized how many years of their lives would be spent working for people who weren't their family or friends.

Charlotte didn’t say what her dream job was, and it’s probably for the best since it might have made Boyce feel bad.  I know what it is, though.  She wants to write songs.  She doesn’t want to perform them, she just wants to write them.  One day when she’s long dead Boyce Jr. is going to tear open some floor board and find an entire evolution in music in old old shoebox.

After dinner we discussed going out to the casino this weekend.  Boyce is a terrible gambler, and I told him I'd do all the leg work for him.  The house always has the odds, but that doesn't mean the house always gets to win.  Boyce told me he'd pick me up in the morning for a ride-along.  I asked where we were going, and he said he wanted to ask me the same thing.

Sunday, May 23, 2010

A Last Week

This coming week is Boyce’s last few days on the job, and he’s agreed to let me go with him for at least one of his calls.  Since I only work part time at the Sleep Center, and that often happens at night, I have plenty of time to do ride-alongs with Boyce.  Boyce said he might only have one or two calls the entire week, but I told him that he was bound to get some good business as a farewell.

I used to go with Boyce on ride-alongs a lot more than I have lately.  People began getting uncomfortable when a second locksmith, dressed without a uniform, would stand around and scope out the inside of the house.  Once I asked Rachel to go with me to deflect any weirdness my presence might cause with Boyce’s customers.  She asked me why anyone would want to do a ride-along with a locksmith, besides just to spend time with Boyce (Rachel used to say that even if I was a horrible person, she’d still like hanging out with me because of Sammy and Boyce.  Compare this to my mother who constantly dared Boyce and Sammy when they were teenagers to lie on the railroad tracks and let a train pass over them).  I explained to her that often times a ride-along with a locksmith was like getting to be the first witness to an epic disaster that you are under no obligation to clean up.  Think driving in a motorboat down the canals of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.  A lot of Boyce’s customers had locks broken due to domestic disturbances, and that meant the homes were mind-boggling.  Say what you will about my mother, but you never had a cockroach fall on you from a hole in the ceiling when you were in the house.  Sure, she might have called your father a piddling disaster with a backbone made from rabbit ghosts, and she may have scared all the guests the one time you had a birthday party by telling all the other eighth graders how she thought they were going to die, but she never let vermin take over the house.  Besides, if you go with Boyce on a ride-along and you go to a nice house, they might make you lemonade.  That is, unless they spend their time on the phone with their husband saying things like, “No, honey, I don’t think he’s a locksmith.  He’s just staring at our stuff.  No.  I wouldn’t call him scary, but there’s something not right about him.”

Rachel did go on one ride-along with Boyce.  She didn’t say much about it, but Boyce told me that when they first got to the house the woman was crying and talking to family on the phone about “finally leaving him.”  Boyce said, “By the time we left that woman had given Rachel lunch and they were smiling about cities they thought were beautiful, even if they hadn’t been there before.  She gave me lunch too, but I think only because she really wanted to give Rachel something.”  Certainly not the experience of my ride-alongs which generally ended with Boyce asking me to wait in the van.

I called Marcel yesterday to see if he could talk to some of the higher-ups at the Sleep Center to see if Boyce could get some hours doing janitorial work with me.  He told me he would do what he could.  I even called Rex Tugwell, too, because this is Boyce we’re talking about.  Rex was fairly civil on the phone and told me the only way he could give Boyce hours is if he took some from me.  I said that was fine.  Rex explained that he couldn’t really do that because Boyce would have to be hired by human resources, but he was really nice when he said it.  For the amount of times I have had people explain how much pleasure they would get in causing me both physical and emotional harm, I have never heard someone complain about Rachel, Boyce, and Sammy.

I’m certainly willing to give Boyce what limited hours I have.  I have very little need for money because a) I do not have a family, b) my house belonged to my mother, and is paid for, c) I have already purchased all bird-related paraphernalia I might need, and d) although it's never yet come to it, I could probably just make a living at casinos.  Plus, I don't need health insurance yet because I am relatively healthy, although Rachel would said she doubted that sometimes, and then she’d touch my arm.  Once I was so energized when she touched my arm that I picked up a chair in a room full of her friends.  I just held onto it because I didn’t know what to do with it.  I did the only thing I knew how to do in a crowd full of women and their husbands, which was to tell them something about birds: “The penguin has the strongest wing relative to its size.”  Then I put the chair down.  Then a couple of Rachel’s girlfriends laughed, which they always did once they were convinced Rachel was never going to be romantically interested in me.  The husbands would sometimes say something a bit mean, because they didn't ever know what to think of me.  Rachel would tell me, "So what?  They play golf and grow goatees and wait for their bellies to come in."  Then I'd tell her about how beautiful the European bee-eater is, and maybe some day I could see it.  That's the closest she would let me come to telling her that she was my soul mate.



When you see the European Bee-Eater though, you realize how close she let me get.
 

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Some Days are Better than Others

A couple nights ago I asked Sammy and Boyce if they wanted to save a Northern Mockingbird.  There is generally a silence on the other end of the line when I ask these things, as though they’re both saying, “Another bird thing…okay.”  Boyce’s silence, however, went a little longer than usual and was accompanied with a sigh, though he agreed to pick up Sammy and I around 9 pm.  It’s not true that mockingbirds sing only at night, but dusk is around the time people really begin to notice their song, just as everything else is getting quiet.  Of course, we were all in Boyce’s van by the time I realized I had no idea where Janice lived.  I called Marcel, which as you can imagine was very exciting, but he didn’t know where she lived.  You know that Marcel is a really cool guy when you’re never entirely convinced he knows who anyone is who isn’t standing right next to him.  “Janice…” he said, like maybe I was bringing up a Janice from my fourth grade physical fitness award ceremony.  Even when he answered the phone and said, “Hey brother, what’s up,” I felt like I needed to say, “It’s Cyrus.  Cyrus Wetherbee.  From the Sleep Center.  I’ve been in your apartment.”  Sometimes I try to pretend like I don’t remember people’s names just so I can seem like I’m cool enough to forget those kinds of things, hiding under a nonchalant, “Oh, yeah, right—I’m just not good with names.”  It never works, though, and I am generally exposed as a cool-fraud.  Both Sammy and Boyce can tell you about #3, the third time I was hit in junior high or high school.  It revolves around an exposure of cool-fraud when I tried to pretend like I didn’t remember the name of Francine Bruhm, the popular-by-pity, wheelchair-bound diabetic girl.  When she asked me one day how I was, I awkwardly said, “Do we know each other?”,  as though we were in a bank line rather than sitting next to each other in English.  She said that we’ve known each other for quite a while, and I replied, “Oh yeah, the one with the wheelchair.”  She leaned forward in her wheelchair as best she could and slapped me across the face.  I don’t know why, but Sammy loves to hear that story every Fourth of July.

After Marcel said he didn’t know Janice’s address I called Rex Tugwell.  Rex begins most conversations with me by laughing, and I always half-expect him to lunge at me like some kind of rabid wolf.  Even on the phone.  When I said why I called, he asked me, “You gonna put salt in her garden?”  This confused me intensely and made me feel like a sexual deviant, so I told him I was going to steal a mockingbird by her bedroom, which confused Rex intensely and may have made him feel like a sexual deviant.  Apparently, Rex’s son, Rexford Tugwell VI, told his father that Janice’s son, Lucas, is a very unlikeable freshman in high school.  Janice’s home is constantly terrorized by hoodlums, whether it be egging, toilet papering, or pouring gasoline on their asphalt driveway and setting it on fire.  I told Rex all I wanted to do was snatch the bird, and he said, “You go get her, Typhus.”  Maybe part of the reason Rex is so mean to me is because he thinks everything I say is code for horrifying acts of perversion.

We drove to Janice’s house which wasn’t terribly far away from where Boyce lives.  It’s on the east side of town where it opens into farm country.  Boyce’s house is a small farmhouse on a few acres, and so was Janice’s: plenty of space for ne’er-do-wells to practice their art.  We parked Boyce’s van down the road a bit, and walked along the property line to the side of Janice’s house.  I wasn’t sure which bedroom window was hers, and since there were big maple trees on both sides, I chose the northern side first.  We sat against the house, which was already dark despite the fact that it wasn’t yet ten o’clock, and I told them my plan of catching the bird.  I explained that I would climb the tree first and see if there were signs of a nest.  Unless there were feathers or eggs I wouldn’t be sure whether a nest belonged to a Northern Mockingbird, but it was worth a try.  I had brought a butterfly net to catch the mockingbird.  Mockingbirds are notoriously unimpressed with people, and you can actually get very close to them without inducing fear.  In fact, the only fear will be yours as the mockingbird may attack you for intruding on its territory.  Therefore, while I distracted the mockingbird, Sammy or Boyce could catch it with the net.

I climbed the maple and looked around for a nest but couldn’t find one.  Northern Mockingbirds generally don’t make a nest more than ten feet off the ground, but I kept climbing just to see what I could find.  Lo and behold, I discovered a nest the right size, though with no feathers or eggs.  I called Sammy and Boyce to climb up and both joined me about twenty feet in the air.  They didn’t even ask how long we had to sit in the maple tree.  We each found a comfortable nook to lean into and talked.  We were almost even with the bedroom window, and while Boyce began to speak I looked in at the decorations on the wall.  Maybe if Boyce hadn’t talked about what he did I would have noticed that Janice wouldn’t have so many hearts and rock posters on her bedroom wall.

While sitting in the tree Boyce told us that he was getting laid off.  His hours as a locksmith had been reduced so low that the company couldn’t justify keeping him on staff any longer.  Add to that the family’s only transportation was through the van, which actually belonged to the locksmith company, and Boyce was feeling like he forgot to bring a rope with him.  Sammy patted Boyce on the arm and I told him that if it made him feel any better, we could go hide in the bushes and watch the mockingbird get shot with a pellet gun.  Boyce said he was glad he was in the tree with us, because ever since he told Charlotte it’s been tough to be around her.  “She doesn’t have much reaction to it because she thinks I’ll work it out, but that makes it even harder to work it out,” he said.

We both told Boyce that we’d help him out where we could, but sometimes a man just wants to say the world sucks, so that’s what we were letting him do.  At about that time we heard a voice down at the bottom of the maple tree.  Sammy whispered, “Can mockingbirds do that?”  Although the mockingbird can imitate the human voice, along with cell phones, alarm clocks, and barn animals, it cannot imitate the pubescent voice of a punk who shouts, “Dani!  Dani!  Open the window!  I’m here!”

We did our best to look through the branches, but all we could see was a teenage boy dressed in black standing underneath the bedroom window.  That’s when the bedroom window opened, and a blonde with black streaks in her hair leaned out.  Apparently, this was Dani, Janice’s daughter, and that wasn’t the right bedroom for catching a Northern Mockingbird.  We heard her whisper, “I’m coming!”  Dani climbed out the window and we realized she was going to use the tree we were in to get down.  The three of us scrambled to get down that tree, but there wasn't room, and since it was dark we had to reach out our feet to find good branches to step on.  I reached for the bird nest and grabbed it—just in case—and took it down with me.  I was climbing down first, followed by Boyce, then Sammy.  I hit the ground with a thud, but about that time we could hear the screams of Dani in the tree.  She nearly ran into Sammy on that branch as he waited for space after Boyce.  It probably didn’t help that Sammy held up his hands as though to say “Don’t scream!”, but that only exposed his missing fingers.  Dani kept screaming, and Sammy thought better of reasoning with her, so he just dangled from a branch and let himself fall.  The boyfriend was staring at all this happening in shock: first I came down holding a bird nest and butterfly net, then Boyce, then suddenly from nowhere Sammy fell all the way straight to the ground.  To give Sammy time to recover from his long fall I threw the bird’s nest in the boyfriend's face.  Boyce immediately burst into laughter when I did that, and when Sammy screamed, “Okay, run!” I thought Boyce was going to hyperventilate from joy.  We ran across their front yard as fast as we could and jumped into the van.  Boyce floored it out of there and it wasn’t long before we were just driving around country roads wondering how many months until Dani was pregnant with a daughter she would name Karma or Destiny. 

It was close to midnight and we asked Boyce if he wanted to go home or drive around some more so he could talk about his job.  He said he was going to lose this van in a couple days so we should keep driving, just to put some more miles on it before it’s gone.  I’m not sure who it was, but one of us proposed going back to Janice’s house to see if there was any aftermath.  We looked from the road but couldn’t see anything different.  I asked Boyce if there was anything we could do to make him feel better, and he said, like he’d been thinking about it for a while, “I’d like to rip that mailbox out of the ground.”  Sammy and I didn’t question it so we helped Boyce get a chain from out of the back of the van and wrap it around Janice's mailbox and then to Boyce’s fender.  When he put the van into gear he looked at both of us and said, “I needed this,” and then floored it.  The van jerked really hard.  Apparently, Janice’s mailbox has been destroyed so many times they put some concrete into the ground.  We still managed to tear it out, dragging some of the concrete, but it did nearly tear Boyce’s fender off.  We got out of  the van to inspect the damage and Boyce smiled at the fender that was going to scrape on the ground all the way home.  I unhooked the mailbox from the chain and dragged it into a little trench by the road.  I think Rachel wouldn’t mind tearing out Janice’s mailbox if it made Boyce feel better, but she would want me to return it.  And since that thing had concrete at the base, the best I could do was roll it into the trench.

Boyce drove us home and we didn’t tell him again that we’d help him out where we could.  He already knew that, and he deserved forgetting his problems for a moment to bask in the glory of tearing out the mailbox of a stranger whose daughter sneaks around with the biggest, pimply tool you’ll ever meet.

Monday, May 17, 2010

Monsieur Moriarty, Bird Expert

It’s rare when someone solicits my advice for something.  It occurred this morning, however, at the Sleep Center when Janice stopped me while I mopped one of the rooms.  She asked me how to get rid of a mockingbird that lived outside of her bedroom window.

Even though I was thrilled with the question, I asked Janice why she didn’t ask God to get rid of the mockingbird for her.  Janice is very religious, which I don’t mind.  Rachel always talked about God, too.  When bad things happened around, Rachel, though, she’d say, “Glory to God” and then shrug her shoulders.  When bad things happen around Janice, she says, “It’s not my fault,” even though both her God and I saw that tupperware of spaghetti blow up in the microwave.

Janice told me God had more important things to do than worry about her mockingbird, but I told her I doubted that, since he cared more about a mockingbird than most kids on this planet if I was judging by nutrition, and some times, even life spans.  I always like saying things like that to Janice.  I used to say the same things to Rachel but she’d tell me I was full of crap: “See, Cyrus, you believe in God.  It’s just a really stupid God you’ve picked up from really stupid people.”  Then she would offer me something in the room and explain it was better I believed [said object] was God.  Once when she said that she picked up a stress ball on the coffee table.  Then she looked at it a second and said that the stress ball really was what most people thought God was.  Whatever, Rachel.  Sometimes it was a lucky thing she was so pretty.

Janice must have been having a lot of trouble with that mockingbird because she said, “Oh Cyrus, one day you’ll see.”  Then she asked me again about the mockingbird.  She told me she tried hanging a strong magnet she bought at an outdoors store.  I asked her why she would do that and she had some convoluted explanation about magnetic fields and a bird’s sense of direction.  That was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard.  I told her that she should try hanging a whole bunch of blueberries in the tree.  I told her this because the Northern Mockingbird loves blueberries.  Plus they are a very expensive fruit.

I couldn’t keep up the charade though, and told her the best thing she could do was to wait out the mockingbird.  It’s spring so he's probably nesting or still looking for a mate.  Her best chance was to hope he moved on.  She wasn’t going for that, so I told her she could buy a fake owl and put it in the tree, but there’s no way the mockingbird will be fooled by it.  The best thing she could do, even better than waiting for him to move on, is to fall in love with the mockingbird.  It’s actually a very intelligent, comedic bird prone to dive-bombing animals and chasing off larger birds it should, by all measure, be terrified by.

“Yeah well, we need our sleep.  I’ll just have my husband shoot it with a pellet gun,” Janice said.

“That’s a great solution, Janice.  I suppose that’s what you did when your kids were babies and they cried at night.”  She walked out of the room, though, mumbling under her breath that I was either a "madman monster" or "Monsieur Moriarty."  I feel like that bird had a better chance of survival if I had just never said a thing to Janice.  I should have stopped with the blueberries suggestion.

I think maybe I’ll see if Sammy and Boyce want to save a mockingbird.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

What?!?

Are you aware there’s been an oil spill in the Gulf Coast?  I asked Sammy and Boyce why they didn’t bring it up.  Boyce said he didn’t know.  Sammy calls him an event-medievalist, because the only way Boyce allows himself to be informed of current events is either by his next door neighbor, a man four acres away who is obsessed with his lawn, or if armed men come riding on a horse demanding he join the king’s army.  Anything that doesn’t make his neighbor run four acres or cause his forced entry into an infantry unit, Boyce says isn’t worth knowing.  This means Boyce actually knows more about birds than he does American Idol and the stock market.  Once when he was on a locksmith call the homeowner had the tv on in the background.  The tv announced that celebrity Anna Nicole Smith’s baby’s father had received permanent custody, and Boyce threw his tools down on the carpet and screamed, “Damn it, now!”  He didn’t want to waste a single moment of his life on that piece of information.  The homeowner, however, brought him a ginger ale and told him to sit down for a bit, saying that it was all in the child’s best interest.  The ginger ale was apparently homemade, but Boyce said it wasn’t worth the cost.  Sammy said he knew about the oil spill but didn’t know how to break it to me with all that was happening with Antonio.  No argument, there.  Overload.

In the break room of the Sleep Center we watched a bit about the spill on tv, and I informed Rex Tugwell that those birds down there have never seen oil and may think it’s harmless or even nesting mortar, like spider webs and mud.  Rex said any bird dumb enough to take a beakful of crude deserves to have its stomach come out its backside.  That got a few people to laugh, but I asked Rex what he’d do with a pygostyle if I put it in front of him.  He said, "If that's a bird, I'd cook it on the grill and eat it."  The joke, however, is on Rex: the pygostyle is the ossified end part of a bird's spine.  People still laughed at what he said, though.  God, I hate him.

I’ve actually been to some of the Louisiana wetlands to do some bird watching.  I rented a car at the airport and asked the clerk the best place to see the "wild life."  He gave me directions to an over-populated, tourist-soaked beach.  I wandered around but all I could see were pathetic terns and gulls eating garbage and sitting in flocks on dock posts, undoubtedly wondering—like some momentarily contrite junkee weeping at the foot of his anemic daughter’s bed—why they are unable to resist popcorn and sand-covered Sun Chips.  On that beach I saw a couple kids heaving Alka-seltzer into the air for the terns and gulls to eat.  I watched them do it for a while and then informed them that what they were doing made no sense.  They were emphatic that Alka-seltzer makes birds explode.  I said, "First, a bird will never eat that.  Second, birds can release gas just like you.  And, you know Alka-seltzer is perfectly safe for people, right?  You're not throwing antifreeze up there."  It took five minutes but I eventually convinced them.  So instead of heaving Alka-seltzer tablets, they began throwing stones and shells they found.  I was so angry I spent nearly the rest of my trip gambling on a steamboat.  I won over four hundred dollars, and used that money to take a private wetland tour for exotic birds.  If I had a dollar for every time gambling saved a vacation gone haywire, I would have six or seven dollars.  But I would then gamble that, and get even more.

It’s a good thing my father isn’t around to see this spill.  He died only three weeks after the Exxon Valdez spill occurred in 1989.  He was very old and weak at that time, but I’m convinced that’s what finished him off.  All he did for three weeks was wander around the house calling out the Latin names of birds.  He’d say, “The Histrionicus histrionicus…the Phalacrocorax auritus.”  He was so sad he even called my mother.  I got on the other line because I had only known my mother and father to interact a few times.  He whispered into the phone, “Oh, Teresa.  They made the sea kill the sky.”  I was young and didn’t understand what he meant, and apparently neither did my mother, because she just burped loudly into the phone and hung up.

I told a lot of stories to Rachel about my mother and father, neither of whom she ever met.  I think it was that story though that finally made her say, “How were you even born, Cyrus?”  I told her, “That’s exactly what my mother used to say!”

My uncle finally came over for the last week of my father’s life.  My uncle was actually my mother’s eldest brother, but he and my father grew up together.  So he came over and drank with my father.  I think my father knew, whether it was because of the Valdez spill or not, that his time was up, because he let my uncle tell stories about traveling the country on a motorcycle, and my uncle would let my father tell stories about Ragnarok, the unstoppable apocalypse in Norse mythology.  Rachel never met my parents, but she did meet my uncle.  I warned her he would be very drunk, and he was, but after we spent the evening together she kissed him on the cheek and told my uncle he was a good man. 

Friday, May 7, 2010

Another Burial

I took the two owl pellets we found in the nesting box to the Lancaster house the next day.  I had told Boyce Jr. on the telephone that I’d let him dissect the pellets in order to pull out as many of Antonio’s bones as we could find.  Boyce Jr. was excited about the whole thing, and sometimes he’d point the tweezers and Xacto-knife in the air and tremble all over.  I hadn’t seen him this excited since Boyce bought him a sticker for his guitar case that read, “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS.”  Boyce Jr. didn’t know what that means anymore than I did, but he knew the word “kills,” so he was thrilled. 

An owl pellet is a clump of hair, bone, plant matter, and other assorted debris that the owl can’t digest.  He has to vomit it in order to avoid a bowel obstruction.  Boyce Jr. was therefore, under my tutelage, separating small parts of several animals in order to get what there existed of Antonio.  To the right on a white piece of paper we assembled an Antonio skeleton and feather pile, and every time we got an easily recognizable part like an upper beak or part of the skull, Boyce Jr. made a kind of nutso laugh from deep in his sinuses. 

It made me think of disassembling owl pellets with my father when I was a little child.  I wouldn’t get to laugh like Boyce Jr. did, and to be fair, I never really wanted to.  My father had his thick glasses on and was huddled over the pellet.  He’d pull the bones out of the pellets and ask me to assemble the animals, whether it was a mouse, chipmunk, or bird.  Then I’d go to school and my kindergarten teacher would ask me what I did over the weekend.  I always said, “I played football,” because that’s what my father told me I should say.  Once, in the second grade, I heard some kids talking about whether their fathers could slam dunk a basketball or not.  I mistakenly thought one of them made eye contact with me in order to invite me into the conversation, so I blurted out that my father and I regularly disassembled the regurgitated materials of owls.  One of the kids took my shirt off and choked me with it.  Other than that, I always said, “I played football.”

While Boyce Jr. was trying to figure out some of the bone patterns from the pellet, Boyce asked me why I tied Antonio up.  I only had a matter of hours before I returned him and altered The Thunderbirds for the better.  “The options are either you didn’t want to see that group banning bird ownership, or you really wanted Antonio to die.  You didn’t have to give him back to that lady.  You could have tried harder to find him a home.” 

I told both Sammy and Boyce that I knew what was best for Antonio, and that he wanted to go.  There wasn’t any way better for him than those Eastern Screech Owls.  Charlotte waited for Sammy and Boyce to get distracted by smelling the pellet to say to me, “It’s getting worse.”  Maybe I would have got mad at her for saying that—I don’t know, I’ve never been mad at Charlotte—but she said right afterward, “I could use some Pizza Rolls,” and god, I could, too.  So I ignored what she had said and listened to Boyce Jr. cackle and shake a leg bone in the tweezers.

When Boyce Jr. was put to bed and I had eaten my fill of rolled pizza goodness, the three of us took Antonio’s remains out to Roger Malvin Country Club.  We buried him next to Hank’s tombstone and I pulled out of my bag some drinks and a book that Rachel had given me.  It’s called Bright Wings, and it’s a book of poems about birds with paintings by the bird-maestro himself, David Allen Sibley.  I gave the book to Sammy and told him to read one because he could do it better than me.  He tried to find a poem about a lovebird but there wasn’t one, so he did the next best thing and found one about an owl.  “Antonio was a sport.  He wouldn’t mind,” Sammy said.  Then he read “The Owl” by Edward Thomas:
Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved;
Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof
Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest
Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.

Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest,
Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I.
All of the night was quite barred out except
An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry

Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,
No merry note, nor cause of merriment,
But one telling me plain what I escaped
And others could not, that night, as in I went.

And salted was my food, and my repose,
Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice
Speaking for all who lay under the stars,
Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.
When Rachel got me that book I really only paid attention to the Sibley art, despite the fact that she wrote on the first page, "I know you're only going to look at the Sibley art, but poetry is people trying to sound like birds."  I've never heard a bird song sound remotely like a person saying big words in strange order, but it was a gift from Rachel so I didn't mind the inaccuracy. 

I couldn't concentrate to understand the poem but I did like the sound of Sammy reading it.  I raised my bottle and said, “That’s nicer than anything we read at my mother’s funeral,” and we drank.  My mother’s funeral was just my uncle and I in the middle of the night burying her ashes by the flagpole of a Ruby Tuesday’s as she requested.  She also requested me to read the following note when we finished: “Nothing but crabgrass going to grow on this patch.  Up your ass, Applebee’s.” My uncle and I were unsure if my mother was confused about which restaurant had wronged her, or if she simply wanted to defame another eatery after her death. Either way, the poem for Antonio was a lot nicer.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Antonio, Antonio!

Even though Sammy and Boyce took me out Wednesday night, when Friday came around I couldn’t stand being around Antonio anymore.  I was willing to lose the bet and have The Thunderbirds be pro-bird-ownership until the end of time, but I wasn’t willing to let Julia Albert have him back.  He clearly didn’t want to be with her—how could he?  When I went to work at the Sleep Center I put up a sign in the kitchen lounge: “Please enjoy my peach-faced lovebird.  I will pay you.  Ask Cyrus for details.”  For the next couple hours I got a few horrified looks by all the women working that day.  Marcie, one of the attendants, kind of spat at me when she said, “You know, there are other places to go for that.”  I told her I wasn’t going to just put an ad up on Craigslist.  “What if someone hurt it?” I asked.  Marcie shook her head like I was chewing puppy-flavored gum.  Marcel had to take me aside and tell me what the problem was.

I hadn’t really spoken much with Marcel since the Virgil Ray incident, so it was nice to have him around again.  He asked me what I was trying to say with the sign, and I told him about Antonio, the peach-faced lovebird.  Marcel said he wanted to help me but he wasn’t interested in having a bird.  I told him naturally, and smiled really big.  When Rex Tugwell came on shift that morning and was apprised of the whole event, he didn’t even make a joke about doing something with Antonio.  He only wanted to know if he could keep the sign I made, and I told him sure.

Sammy and Boyce tried to convince me to give it back to Julia Albert, but that’s because they clearly didn’t understand how unhappy Antonio was.  I explained several times that there was no way Antonio could go back to that horrible woman.  Charlotte was in the room and she asked how I could know.  I said, “I just do,” and she nodded her head like she got it.

That night I asked if Boyce would take me back to Hank’s grave, and he said he actually had an appointment in the morning but if I just stayed over at their place I could take the van.  So I did, and to the sound of a couple night herons in the marsh and the fairway sprinklers I took Antonio back to Hank.  We talked for a while and I explained that the night before, for the first time, I had a dream about Rachel.  On the way home I even stopped at Big Lets again, but nobody from Wednesday night was there.  There were a few very angry people at the bar and when I brought in the bird cage, one of them told me to get the hell out, which I promptly did.  I took Boyce's van back home with me and then dropped it off at his place on Saturday on my way to the park.

The agreement with Julia Albert was that I’d bring Antonio back to her at the Saturday morning Thunderbirds meeting.  When I got there I had the sheet over the cage.  I walked it over to Julia Albert who was looking really curious, because she must have been thinking that she lost the bet.  As I set the cage on the table Julia Albert began to say, “I don’t care what—” but then she stopped because she looked under the sheet and saw Antonio wasn’t there. 

She began shouting about the lovebird, but I had to correct her and say its name was Antonio.  She tried to explain that the bird was named Francis, after her late husband, but nice try.  It’s Antonio.  The other Thunderbirds began to gather as Julia Albert got hysterical, saying, “Where’s Harold?  Where’s Harold?”  I told her that if the bird was so precious she shouldn’t have given it to me.  She was clearly upset and fondled her earrings as though they were going to fall off.  “You and I don’t like each other, Cyrus, but I always thought you would take care of a bird.  I never thought you would hurt a bird, Cyrus!”  She wasn’t getting me with her witchcraft, though.  She kept an exotic bird caged up for over ten years, so she couldn’t play the sympathy card now.  I shrugged my shoulders and said, “Tough,” and walked away.  She was shouting about never setting foot at a Thunderbirds meeting again.  Whatever.  I was already banished, and I knew Sammy and Boyce would love that I got re-banished.

When I told Sammy and Boyce about what happened at the park their first question was where is Antonio.  They asked me if I gave it away to a friend, but besides them there’s really only Marcel, and I told them that Marcel never saw Antonio.  Boyce smiled kind of funny and asked me if Antonio was dead.  I said he was.  Antonio died very late Friday night.  I explained that he was old and lonely and it was to be expected.  It was unfortunate timing since I only needed to make it one more morning in order to complete the restoration of The Thunderbirds' earlier glory.  Sammy asked if you kill a lovebird like you do a chicken, and I told him that you could, but I didn’t kill Antonio.  He died.  They asked me if I set Antonio free and was just assuming he died, but I said no, he was an imprisoned bird until the very end.  Boyce came out and asked, “So where the hell is the bird, Cyrus?”, but Sammy wanted to keep guessing, and for twenty minutes the two guessed a variety of demises: electrocution, flash flood, liver disease, suffocation due to playing with a plastic bag, run over by a bus, run over by a motorcycle, run over by a moped, run over by a 4-square ball, methamphetamine overdose, fall from a great height, and naturally, suicide.  All were wrong, though.

It’s Boyce who asked the question that led them to the answer: “Did you bury Antonio?”  I said no, but I would like to.  That’s when they both knew what happened.  We immediately got into Boyce’s van and went to the Sleep Center.

On Friday night, when I returned with Antonio from Hank’s grave and was disappointed by my stop at Big Lets, I went to the Sleep Center.  I took Antonio out of the cage and gave him a little scratch on the head.  He was finished with all of this, and I knew it.  I tied some string around one of his legs and then got the ladder from behind the Sleep Center.  I put it up against the tree where I mounted the nesting box and climbed up.  I tied him to the top of the nesting box and scratched his head again. 

On the way to the Sleep Center with Sammy and Boyce, I explained to them that Eastern Screech Owls are only about 10 inches, but they eat birds, too.  They can’t swallow them whole so they kill them and then eat them in parts.  Nevertheless, it was possible neither of the two owls that live there have eaten Antonio yet.  They could think that Antonio was just a weird, crippled, diseased bird that was best ignored.  (We've all been there, haven't we?)

When we went behind the Sleep Center we put the ladder up against the tree.  I climbed up and all that remained was the string still tied to the top of the nesting box.  Sammy wondered if a raccoon could have gotten Antonio first, but I reached into the nesting box and saw that couldn’t be.  The owls weren’t there, but a couple owl pellets were.  And unless a result of the hantavirus in mice is to produce nice rosy pink and peach feathers, Antonio went through the gullet of an owl. 

And back again!