Enslaved by Ducks (5 page)

“Not Binky,” Linda wailed, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Not Binky,” she repeated through her tears.

I put my arms around her. Well, that’s that, I thought. Life will be much simpler now. Then, it was as if a stranger had stepped into my body and taken over. I found myself sobbing like a steam engine. We wrapped him in a blue bath towel and buried him on the edge of our property beyond our backyard fence. We left the house, driving north to Greenville and eating lunch at the local Big Boy—hoping, I suppose, that things would seem better by comparison with our lackluster lunch.

That night, though, I couldn’t get to sleep. There was a full moon, and it seemed as if all the luminescence were concentrated in a spotlight that shone on Binky’s grave.

“I can’t stand the thought of him being all alone out there,” I said to Linda. The sense of him buried in the ground was intolerable. I was connected to him by an invisible wire, and I wished he were alive to chew through it.

I
N THE END
, I memorialized Binky by building him an elaborate grave complex that would have impressed the pharaohs, crowning his grave with an inordinately large pile of rocks. One damp spring afternoon, after standing at his resting place, I brought the flat central rock into the basement workroom and with the dregs of a can of latex house paint, I inscribed a headstone:
BINKY 1990–1992—FAREWELL TO OUR DEAR FRIEND
.

“This I’ve got to see,” my mother muttered when Linda told her about the monument. But I was far from finished. Using a grass whip, I cleared out all the weeds and brush between the boundary fence of our backyard and Binky’s grave beneath a stand of maples. I laid out a straight path to the site, bordering it first with two-by-fours abandoned in our barn by the previous homeowner, then anchoring the boards on both sides with cabbage-size rocks. I filled the mourning path with a three-inch-deep layer of wood chips. Then, I created a second rock-and-board-bounded, woodchip-filled path that meandered from the mourning path down the hill beyond the burn barrel, turned west to wander roughly parallel with the backyard fence, then jogged north and joined the fence, which I lowered at that point to step-over height with a pair of bolt cutters. For a distance of thirty feet or so, I tore out the weeds and brambles, turned over the soil with a hoe, and planted an incompatible mixture of ground-level creeping myrtle and billowing purple vetch. The latter spread that summer like dandelions, burying the myrtle in balls of woody vegetation.

The next summer, only the barest traces of my paths remained, just rocks and boards to stub the toe of anyone foolish enough to fight their way through the virulent weeds, wild blackberry bushes, stinging nettles, purple thistle, mullein, and out-of-control vetch. The paint had long since flaked off Binky’s marker. I had already touched up the inscription once, but finally let it go. I soon found I had little energy to pine for him. We had unwittingly taken in a new pet who was every ounce as belligerent as Binky.

During the first year of our struggles with Binky, Linda bought me a yellow-and-black canary as a Christmas present. The addition of Chester to our household was as effortless as our glum bunny’s was troublesome. He sang merrily at the slightest provocation. The rush of warm air through the kitchen register, the whine of the vacuum cleaner, or the tinny sound from the speaker of our portable TV triggered ecstatic passages of warbles and rolling trills from him. Unlike Binky, Chester had little craving for freedom. Whenever we opened the door to his cage, he would flutter worriedly around our dining room and occasionally settle onto a perch I had hung from the wall. But he didn’t care for any interaction with us.

“Maybe we can tame him,” I suggested with unfounded eagerness. When I had first moved into our house, I’d read Alfred G. Martin’s book
Hand-Taming Wild Birds at the Feeder
about tempting chickadees and tufted titmice to take food from a human hand. But standing motionless in front of the bird feeder, arm outstretched, cupped palm spilling black- oil sunflower seeds while birds scolded
me from a nearby pine tree lost its charm after a matter of minutes. Still, if wild birds could theoretically be coaxed into fellowship, I reasoned that a bird raised and kept by humans ought to be a pushover. I extended a wooden dowel identical to his wall-mounted perch toward Chester and urged him to land on it, but this activity quickly degenerated into my chasing Chester around the room with a stick. A better way to proceed, a pet-bird magazine informed me, was to begin by merely placing my hand into his cage until he became used to its presence. From there, I could gradually acclimate him to my finger. But when I introduced my thumb into his cage, Chester threw himself against the bars in fright, a poor foundation for building a bond of trust.

Remembering how Binky’s independence had grown rather than diminished over his months with us, we decided that we’d give up trying to change Chester’s personality and enjoy him for his effusive voice. The obvious solution was a second bird that would willingly perch upon our shoulders and enjoy our company.

Now, if out of ignorance I decided to stretch my right leg across a set of railroad tracks and a passing freight train clipped it off just above the knee, I’d think twice before putting my left leg on the rails. But after impulse-buying Binky, I still hadn’t grasped the consequences of purchasing an animal merely because we liked its looks. No voice in our heads cautioned us to interview bird owners about which type of bird would make the least troublesome pet. Had we known anything of substance about caged birds, we would have proceeded with great caution before subjecting ourselves to a parrot. And had we known anything about parrots, we wouldn’t have blithely brought home a breed that had justifiably fallen out of favor even among the most hardboiled hookbill enthusiasts.

Once imported in great numbers, brotogeris “pocket parrots” were sold at department stores throughout the 1960s along with
goldfish, turtles, hermit crabs, budgies, and other low-maintenance critters. I remember seeing, in my high school years, these small parrots for sale under the relatively innocuous label “bee-bee parrots” (though later I’d learn that the B-B tag accurately describes the sting of a brotogeris bite). In the early 1990s, just before the 1992 Wild Bird Act banned the import of wild-caught birds for the pet trade, aviculturists across the country furiously stocked up on macaws, cockatoos, Amazon parrots, toucans, flamingoes, and anything else they could breed and unload on animal lovers. Few bothered with the pocket parrots, ostensibly because of their low selling price. I now think they probably let the brotogeris dwindle due to its temperament, which fluctuates between a lack of civility and demonic possession.

Our first choice for a bird was actually a cockatiel, based solely on the fact that we knew what a cockatiel looked like. One afternoon Linda rushed into the house waving a slip of paper. “Sweetie, look what I found! A lady at Food City had an ad on the bulletin board for two pet birds.”

I took the paper from her. “I wouldn’t trust anyone with handwriting like this. It looks demented.”

“That’s
my
handwriting. And it does not.” She snatched back her note. “This lady has a cockatiel for sale with cage for a hundred dollars and a Quaker parakeet with cage for a hundred and fifty.”

“A Quaker parakeet? We don’t want one of those.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But it probably only eats oatmeal.”

The cockatiel deal sounded good. And by the time we drove across the Grand River to find a secluded house in the woods guarded by the only ferocious Saint Bernard on the planet—“Stay in the car until I get a chain on him,” the husband recommended
as the beast raked my windshield with its massive forepaws—the Quaker parakeet had already been taken off the market.

“Our son doesn’t want us to sell his bird,” said the wife, and sure enough, a pudgy-faced boy glowered at us as if we were set on shooting his dog in the bargain. Near him hunkered the Quaker, a pudgy-faced, robin-size, green bird that glowered at us as if we were set on packing up the boy.

In an effort to make sure we would prefer their cockatiel to the verboten Quaker, the husband had already trimmed her flight feathers for us. But he had badly botched the job by cutting them far too short. Whenever the addled creature flapped her wings, she spattered the eggshell-colored wall nearest her cage with cockatiel blood.

“I don’t think she’s bleeding anymore,” the chagrined wife informed us as we backed out of their living room, our senses on alert for the return of the Volvo-size Saint Bernard. “We sprinkled flour on her feathers,” she added, citing that well-known coagulating trick favored by ambulance drivers and emergency room physicians around the world.

Though the experience unnerved us, we still came away favoring a cockatiel, and I bought a cage in anticipation. Unfortunately, when we brought the cage to the Jonah’s Ark, a local pet shop specializing in birds, it became clear that it was too small for a cock-atiel. A cockatiel would have been able to sit in the cage but wouldn’t have had the room to turn around without catching its tail between the bars. Plus, the cockatiels in the store struck us as disappointingly parakeet-like, as if someone had taken a common yellow budgie, added a crest and drawn-out tail, and applied a little orange rouge to the cheeks. But sensing that we were in purchasing mode, the clerk, Joyce, plucked a Quaker parakeet from a
Plexiglas display area and placed it on Linda’s finger. In contrast to the other Quaker we had seen, this one was lively and handsome, causing my hand to migrate toward my checkbook. But the bird was about the same size as a cockatiel and wouldn’t fit our cage. Joyce’s admonition unnerved us, too.

“Don’t let him get hold of your fingernail. He’ll think it’s a nut and try to crack it.”

Duly warned, I buried my hands in my pockets as Linda and I walked up and down the aisles in search of an alternative to the cockatiel and the Quaker. In our flush to buy a bird, we didn’t stop to question why the inventory was depleted. The first time we had visited Jonah’s, the store was atwitter with all manner of birds. This time, however, most of the cages were empty except for a pair of menacing macaws that growled if we approached them, a sleepy-eyed cockatoo that barely noticed us, and a wild-caught, wild-eyed Senegal parrot that had mangled a clerk’s forearm our last time in the store. In an isolated cage near the cash register, the prettiest of the few birds scaled to fit our cage hung upside-down from the bars. He was a stubby-tailed, parakeet-size, animated fellow endowed with every possible hue of green and wearing a brilliant patch of orange just beneath his beak.

“What kind of bird is he?” Linda asked the clerk.

“You can take him out of the cage,” she replied brightly, bypassing the question. Then a cloud passed over her expression as if she had just remembered a troubling event from her childhood. “I’ll get him for you,” she offered, turning her back to block the cage-to-finger transaction from our view. Before passing the bird to Linda, she cautioned, “Now, he might use his beak to climb onto your hand, but don’t worry, he’s not trying to bite you. He’s just keeping his balance.”

True to Joyce’s words, when the small green bird bent forward,
he pinched the flesh of Linda’s finger in his beak as he pulled himself up with his foot. Linda laughed in surprise. Responding to Linda’s voice, the bird unleashed an amiable series of squeals and chirps. “You’re a friendly little guy,” said Linda, and the bird burbled back to her.

“Let me hold him!” I begged, extending a finger in friendship to the cheerful bird who cheerfully leaned over and bit me with great gusto.

“He’s just being possessive,” Joyce hastily explained, as I studied the neat pair of puncture marks below my knuckle. “He loves his people!” she assured us. “He loves his cage a lot, too,” she decided, snatching the bird from us and returning him to his perch before he could inflict another incision. Having worked up a hearty appetite biting a gullible pair of newcomers, the bird turned his attention to his seed dish.

“So, what kind of bird did you say he is?” I asked, as I massaged my finger.

“Violet, the store owner, isn’t here today,” Joyce apologized. When we begged her for a hint, she finally acceded, “I think he’s a peach face,” but no further explanation followed. The $150 price tag on its cage was more than we had intended on spending, but it seemed a shame to miss out on the chance to bring home a friendly bird who had only bitten me due to extraordinary circumstances that would never occur again. That must have been my thinking. Either that, or all the blood had rushed from my brain to my throbbing finger, because otherwise I never would have even considered such a Jekyll and Hyde of a bird. As it turned out, the dual nature of the misnamed “peach face” was precisely why it was one of the few birds in the store. Violet was out of town at an aviary show, and with her had gone all the well-behaved parrots, parakeets, and lovebirds.

W
E SHOULD HAVE KNOWN
better than to trust the stock at Jonah’s Ark. A month or so before cockatiel fever struck, we had flirted with the idea of the budgie parakeet as our dream bird, but only if we could locate one that had been hand-raised, socialized, and hypnotized to enjoy close interactions with people. Violet assured us she had exactly such a bird and apologized for the high price of eighty dollars versus around twenty dollars anywhere else.

“It takes a lot of work to bond a parakeet to humans,” she had explained, as she plucked a small blue budgie off its perch, “and this one is really special.” Almost at once, the bird squirmed from her grasp to lead the three of us on a floor-level chase around the store. If his wings hadn’t been clipped, we never could have caught him. “He’s just nervous,” she told us, when we had finally surrounded him near a refrigerator bearing a sign that read,
LIVE BAIT
, suggesting that the bird business at Jonah’s Ark wasn’t all that it could be. Both Linda and I made an attempt to get the bird to sit on our index fingers, but he thrashed with fear whenever we approached him.