Enslaved by Ducks (39 page)

But I couldn’t turn back time—especially if it involved diddling with a digital clock. As a realistic alternative, I decided to stop taking Dusty for granted as an adversary and start noticing his finer points. An example was quick in coming. I strode into the dining room late one afternoon while Howard was chasing the smaller birds from the plant hanger to the refrigerator top and noticed to my horror that our parakeet, Sophie, had squeezed between the bars of Dusty’s cage. She flitted about like a moth touring a chandelier, flicking against him with her wing tips until she finally settled on his bowl and helped herself to his exotic seeds. As we had learned from previous unpleasantness with Howard, Stanley Sue would have made mincemeat of any intruder in her cage. Dusty was generous about the visit, however. He gazed at the yellow parakeet with avuncular affection and never made the slightest move in her direction.

He seemed to demonstrate similar fondness for the starlings we raised that summer. “Aww,” he would coo in Linda’s voice, when she brought the baby birds to the dining room table for feeding. Once we had released the batch, a few of them hung around our yard to beg for food at regular intervals. “They’re here,” Dusty announced one morning. We hadn’t heard him use that phrase before, and we hadn’t mouthed it ourselves. A glance out the window revealed three birds on the backyard gate clamoring to be fed. “They’re here,” he told us again and again over the next few days. Then the starlings left us, and the phrase flew from Dusty’s repertoire, never to be repeated.

More than any other factor, Dusty’s keenly honed sense of humor was what finally won me over. He loved exploiting his talking and mimicry talents to lord it over the other animals and make fun of us. Whenever we released Howard from his cage, immediately after lighting upon the back of a dining room chair in front
of the parakeets’ cage, Howard would hurl his swaggering
hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo
call at them. The unvarying nature of this event wasn’t lost on Dusty, and neither were the intricacies of timing. One day when I opened Howard’s cage door, Dusty waited patiently for the dove to spring into the air, arc across the table, and flutter toward a landing on the appropriate chair. An instant before Howard’s feet touched the wood and while he was still gearing up for an impressive hoot, Dusty beat him to the draw with a louder version of the dove’s own call.
Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!
Deflated, Howard was forced to face the parakeets in silence. Later he hooted at them, but a parrot had already tarnished his perfect moment.

Within a half hour of finishing dinner, we always rounded up the birds that weren’t hand-tamed by clapping and shooing them into their cages. Dusty contributed after his own fashion. “Time to go back,” I would remind the three parakeets and our canary, Elliott, as Ollie watched from Linda’s shoulders. They typically snubbed my request. “Go on!” Dusty urged them in Linda’s voice, followed by an imitation of our bird-herding handclaps that came just as I was about to put my hands together.
Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo
, I felt like telling Dusty.

He showed the same sarcastic consideration for our cat. Before I could even clomp all the way down the basement stairs to call Agnes into the house for her after-dinner treat, Dusty would anticipate my routine by unleashing the mocking cry, “Agnes!” with perfect mastery of my dulcet tones. Later in the evening, after we had switched off the lights in the kitchen and dining room, we always kept the noise level low lest we disturb the sleeping birds. The penalty was facing a domino effect of complaints. If I crept into the kitchen and inadvertently crinkled a bag of tortilla chips while removing it from the cupboard, the caged and covered Howard would emphatically hoot his disapproval. Annoyed at being
awakened by Howard, Stanley Sue would raucously throttle her bell, prompting Dusty to exclaim in my voice, “Stanley, be quiet!” The only thing missing from this chain reaction was a salivating dog.

Linda and I were away from the house during Dusty’s most outrageous verbal performance. While we vacationed in Tennessee, our pet-sitter Rhonda was having trouble convincing Dusty to return from his constitutional across the living room rug. Following the instructions Linda had left her, Rhonda dropped a towel over the parrot to minimize the chance of falling foul of his beak, picked him up, and deposited him inside his cage. As she closed his door, Dusty shot her a piercing look and cursed her with the epithet, “Bitch.”

“That’s what he said,” Rhonda reported later. “He said it loud and clear.”

“He’s never heard that word from us!” Linda exclaimed. “He must have heard it at his previous owners.”

“Don’t look at me,” I insisted.

“Well, I just froze when I heard that,” Rhonda told us. “Then I burst out laughing, he imitated my laugh, and we got along just fine from then on.”

As I became more appreciative of Dusty, Dusty became more tolerant of me. He stopped making a beeline for my feet when he crawled down from his cage in the evenings. While I sat in a battered dining room chair rubbing the head of Stanley Sue, who crouched beside me on the cushion, he would often strut right by without so much as a threatening glance in my direction. The pillow on the floor blocking my feet might have helped, though no armor had ever dissuaded him in the past. I still couldn’t follow Linda’s lead and feed him lukewarm licorice tea from a coffee mug without inviting a lunge for my hand. But once he was back inside
his cage, Dusty would accept a peanut from my fingers with such ethereal delicacy, I was rarely certain it was the same beak that had tattooed my flesh. En route through the dining room to take care of our backyard animals, I’d pause at the door, turn, and talk to Dusty, only to find myself favored with his soft eye peering back at me.

Outside in a burst of clear grey light, as clouds lingered between gathering and dispersing, I sloshed dirty water out of a plastic swimming pool. Ducks and geese nibbled noisily at the lawn. Across our lot and behind the barn, one-eyed turkey Hazel and her former tormentor, Lizzie, sat together on opposite sides of a fence. A mosquito threatened my neck, as flecks of mud and manure accumulated on my pant leg. A goldfinch sang a song that celebrated his freedom from the burden of keeping pets. I breathed hard walking up the hill to shut off the hose. I lumbered back down carrying two pitchers of scratch feed. I just wasn’t built for manual work. But still, I could be seized by the mindless certainty that I was doing exactly what I should be doing with my life, and for a little isolated instant in time, everything felt essentially right about the world. Even if another animal disaster lay just around the corner, clacking its beak.

M
Y POOR WIFE
, L
INDA
, was forced to hear about this book on a daily basis for the past three years, and I thank her for her unflappable enthusiasm. She could easily have written her own book with herself at the center of events, and it would have been truer than mine.

My agent, Jeff Kleinman, and my editor at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, Kathy Pories, both bear the blame of contributing ideas that helped shaped my narrative. My good friend Bill Holm joined me frequently at a sparsely inhabited Chinese restaurant and helped me work through story ideas. I would compliment him as an excellent sounding board, but that’s unfair to boards in general. He also read every chapter and made seemingly endless suggestions.

My sister, Joan Smith, and her husband, Jack, are among the many animal lovers who have helped Linda and me with our menagerie. Their ferrets, cats, dog, fish, and house sparrow are even more spoiled than our critters. Peg and Roger Markle gave us valuable bird-parenting advice, and their wildlife rehab work is awe inspiring. The veterinarians who have provided lifesaving care for our animals include Richard Bennett, John Carlotti, Alice Colby, Edward Farnum, Owen Fuller, Michael Hedley, and Raymond Leali. Extraordinary pet-sitters Jamie Beean, Betty MacKay, Mary Vaught, and Rhonda Delnick allowed us to escape from it all once in a while. Ron Biermacher gave me excellent, if not amusing, parrot-keeping advice.

A special thanks goes to Wayne Schuurman, president of Audio Advisor, Inc., who generously provided a flexible work schedule that allowed me time to write this book. A chain of gratitude is due my friend Rhonda Lubberts, who introduced me to Mary Jane Pories, who introduced me to Kathy Pories, who introduced me to Jeff Kleinman, who sold my book to Algonquin through Kathy Pories, who lives in the house that Jack built.

CC Smith, editor of
The Beat
magazine, encouraged my writing over the years as did my
Beat
co-conspirator, Dave Hucker, and his wife, Kim. They all commented on various chapters, as did Carol Holm, John Storm Roberts, Lorraine Travis, John Brosky, and Mike Bombyk.

Thanks also to my supportive sister, Bette Worley, her husband, David, my mom, Linda’s mom, and my late dad. And to everyone who buys a copy of this book, thanks for keeping the memory of our animals alive.