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.
