Fowl Weather (28 page)

“That doesn't even give us enough time to look at the frames, much less the pictures,” I complained to the museum's parking lot attendant, who gave me the shrug that my comment deserved.

Once I managed to blunder back onto the freeway, I hollered at Linda, “Why did we ever come to this stupid city at all?” though it had been my idea. “Why didn't we just take a trip into the country?” I said, though this had been her suggestion from the first.

Bogged down by endless freeway construction and urged on by gleeful orange Department of Transportation signs advising us, “Expect long delays, choose alternate city to visit,” we decided to skip the rest of Toledo's attractions and opt for the reliable Cleveland Metroparks Zoo instead. Coveting a stay in a rural America, we took blue highways east and ended up at the Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge on Lake Erie. A great egret waved us past a logjam of birders in minivans who were hoping for a glimpse of a visiting scissor-tailed flycatcher, seldom seen in the Great Lakes. We headed for the woods to walk off our art museum frustration, triumphantly emerging with several pricey morel mushrooms, which had gone unnoticed by birders scanning for warblers.

When Linda accosted a ranger to find out that the ducklike diving birds we'd been seeing were in fact old coots like me, he added that at the Magee Marsh Wildlife Area, a quarter mile down the road, a migrating Kirtland's warbler had been spotted on the beach. I knew this to be one of the rarest birds around, a warbler whose only nesting site in the country was a few tracts of jack pines in northern Michigan, and even then only among young trees that grow in the wake of managed forest fires. But there didn't seem to be any point in us poking around the shoreline for a bird we probably couldn't find and wouldn't know if we did, so we continued east in search of a motel.

Unable to locate the sort of old-fashioned mom-and-pop motel
smack in the middle of nowhere that Linda insisted still existed, we settled on a room at the Shorebird Motel in the part marina town, part ConAgra factory city of Huron. Being cooped up in a strange bedroom occasionally triggered a panic attack in Linda. In an attempt to bleed off a trickle of her boundless energy, we took one of our weirder after-dark strolls. Having headed for the beach in hopes of a walk across the sand, we chanced instead upon an eerie Lake Erie fishing pier made of trailer-size blocks of concrete. With only the distant city lights as our guide, we felt our way along the narrow, quarter-mile-long structure. Waves lapping over the cement blocks kept the surface slippery, while gusts of wind encouraged us to press our arms to our sides to stave off spontaneous windsurfing shortcuts back toward shore.

Just as the feeble yellow light of a navigational marker at the end of the pier caught my eye, a huge sailboat rose up out of nowhere to flash its ghostly white sails at us. Except for a rustle of canvas and a slight ripple of water, we didn't hear a sound as the boat skirted dangerously close to the pier before the murk swallowed it up again. I hadn't seen a soul on board, animate or otherwise.

“The Flying Dutchman,” I sputtered. “Spirits of the dead.” I stubbed my toe against a concrete crevice for the thirtieth time or so as we reversed direction and started retracing our steps. “It's a warning that this is incredibly dangerous.” The uneven blocks weren't the worst obstacle, though. Two college students, apparently taking a break from pet-sitting responsibilities, had decided that the middle of a pier in the black of night was the perfect spot for stretching out and embracing one another. I nearly tripped over the lovers and embraced Davy Jones as a result.

The next day, at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, I lectured Linda on every animal we saw, explaining how each one reminded me of her. However, my mind was elsewhere. I was preoccupied by
a stuffed monkey I'd seen for sale in a gift shop window near the zoo entrance. The toy held the promise of companionship for Ed, the sock monkey my grandmother had sewn for me as a boy and who'd come with us on the trip to keep Stinky company. Crushing disappointment followed, for when I finally had the chance to examine the monkey's pouting molded-vinyl face up close, I realized that the Chinese manufacturer lacked my grandmother's empathy for primates. So I reluctantly left it in the window.

“Don't say anything to
him
about it,” I whispered to Linda, inclining my head toward Ed in the back seat as we headed back to Huron for dinner at Denny's and another perilous pier walk. After Ed's failure as Stanley Sue's kitchen-countertop sentinel and his apparent rejection by the diffident Stinky, I didn't want him to suffer another letdown.

Morning got off to a bad start as Linda realized that between the zoo and Denny's she had managed to lose her favorite stocking cap, Sagey, who now joined the ranks of missing hats Greenie and Grapey and misplaced sweater Piney. But her mood brightened when we visited Crane Creek State Park, near the Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge. The state park's Magee Marsh boardwalk proved to be a smorgasbord of songbirds fluttering in the thickets on both sides of the path. Without moving a muscle we had within arm's length a bewildering array of warblers tired and tame from their migration: blackburnian, chestnut-sided, yellow, black-and-white, black-throated blue, common yellowthroat, yellow-rumped, magnolia, and others; plus, we blundered into a green heron hiding in the bulrushes.

Emboldened by our effortless success, Linda asked a birder weighted down with binoculars, cameras, and a spotting scope whether anyone had sighted the Kirtland's warbler that day. He
gave us what I considered needlessly precise directions to the bird's last known appearance on the beach.

I envisioned a hushed and tedious wait across from a stand of trees, a flash of feathers in the foliage if we were lucky, another long wait, then the trudge back to the car spent reassuring one another, “We certainly saw
something.
” But this was not to be. Instead, at the promised spot on Lake Erie's southern shore, we met a flock of slack-jawed birders who formed a thirty-foot-diameter circle. At the center leisurely pecked and hopped a small grey-and-yellow bird wearing an air of casualness and self-effacement at odds with its exalted status. At one point this elusive Kirtland's warbler—fresh from wintering in the Bahamas and perhaps one of only twelve hundred males in the world—actually skittered between the legs of a dumbstruck observer.

“How many of these are here at the park?” I asked a father birder who was sharing the spectacle with his fledgling son.

“Just him,” he told me.

Despite the thrill of a close look at an endangered warbler that was seldom seen during migration, the experience muddied my mind with questions. In a park of several hundred acres, how did anyone manage to locate such a tiny, solitary bird, how did they keep from losing him overnight, and why didn't he simply fly to a spot where he could enjoy his privacy? But what troubled me the most was the irritating coincidence of sharing a beach with a bird associated with controlled forest burns and a wife associated with uncontrolled rice heating. Stinky was obviously more powerful than I ever would have guessed.

E
ILEEN HAD GOTTEN
stinky in our absence. We found a veterinarian's bill on our countertop and a note from Teresa saying
that she had taken goose Patty to nearby vet Dr. Leroy for treatment after one of the other geese had bitten her beneath her eye. We galloped to the backyard pen to examine the minor bruise; then I phoned our sitter to thank her for taking prompt action. “Did you have trouble getting the goose into your car?”

“No,” she laughed, “I had more trouble with your friend Eileen.”

I felt a pinch of dread in my stomach. “She's not my friend, but what happened?”

“She dropped by just as I got Patty back from the vet, and she lit into me with ‘How could you let something like this happen to my goose?' and all sorts of nasty things. That girl really got worked up.”

“I'm so sorry,” I said. “It's bad enough you had to deal with an injured goose, but to suffer through Eileen on top of that.”

“I didn't pay any attention to her. I let her get it out of her system, and then I asked her what she would have done differently.”

“What did she say?”

“What could she say? She just stomped off. But she called me several times after that to holler at me about Patty. Once she even asked me, ‘Did that goose die yet?' “

“I'll cook
her
goose,” I trumpeted, but I didn't get the chance. Eileen's call within the hour threw me off balance. When she began by railing at us for allowing harm to come to Patty, I told her that the goose had received a clean bill of health from Dr. Leroy.

“Well, I wanted to talk to you about your pet sitter,” she said.

“What's that?” I replied, ready to lower the boom.

“I was very impressed with her,” she told me. “She's a keeper, and I hope you use her again.”

Moobie enjoyed watching me peel off my pajamas as I got dressed to visit my mom. It wasn't that she had a predilection for human nudity; it fascinated her that a person could suddenly turn into unfurling flags of cloth. Lying at the end of the bed, she wore an expression of amusement as she tick-tocked her head back and forth between fixating on my discarded garments and focusing on pasty white Bob. She involved herself in the disrobing process by sitting bolt upright and paddling her clawless feet against my hip. Then, as I flung the pajama bottoms toward the laundry basket, she took a chunky swipe at the empty air and began purring luxuriously.

Deciding that Penny deserved her own little slice of Sunday morning pleasure, I trudged upstairs to receive a suspicious glare. Holding me in place at the side of the bed with her stare, she stood up, stretched her legs, and yawned, then flopped down facing the wall in a clear message that she wasn't receiving visitors. I ignored the snub and bent at the waist so that my damp hair just touched the bedspread. Rolling over, she rubbed her head against mine,
inhaled the essence of anti-dandruff shampoo, then straightened her body with dilated pupils and extended nails as if she had just eaten a couple of grams of catnip.

Leaving a second cat in the throes of purring, I continued my effort to dole out cheer by picking up the phone and punching in my mom's number to remind her that I would arrive shortly to take her to church. My father's voice on the answering machine startled me. Since his death, I'd been unable to get use to his unintentionally ironic statement “We can't come to the phone right now,” and hung up without leaving a message. Figuring that my mom was probably in the shower, I said my good-byes to Linda, Stanley Sue, and Dusty, and hopped into the car with the irrational hope that Father Paul's weekly sermon might be short and that no grade school students knelt in roped-off pews awaiting a lengthy awards ceremony.

I parked in front of Mom's house. I turned and waved cheerily at her neighbor Pat's Chevy across the street as she glided out of her driveway on her way to church, then saluted a movement of the Teanys' living room curtains. My mom met me at the front door while I was struggling to balance my keys in one hand and the log of a morning paper in the other. Still in her robe, she blurted out, “The car is gone,” as I slipped into the vestibule.

“Where did it go?” I asked skeptically.

“I left it somewhere.”

“When?”

“I was at the foot doctor near Fat Boy just a little while ago,” she told me, citing a neighborhood landmark. “I forgot about the car and walked home, and now I can't find it. I walked as far as Three Mile and back, but it's gone.”

“In your bathrobe?” I asked. “The car isn't in the driveway?”

“I left it somewhere.”

Dropping the Sunday paper onto the nearest sturdy chair, I strode into the kitchen and peered out the window at my mom's empty driveway. The absence of the car struck me as odd until I noticed that the garage door was closed.

A month earlier, while psyching herself up to thread her big Buick through the needle eye of a garage built around 1930 to accommodate a Ford Model A, Mom had accidentally hit the gas pedal instead of the brake. She'd struck the front corner with sufficient force to knock one side of the building off its foundation. Luckily, she hadn't hurt herself, and her next-door neighbor Ted, who was the maintenance manager for an apartment complex, had volunteered to repair the damage. He had just completed the work a couple of days ago, allowing her to park her car inside the garage for the first time in weeks. The sight of the empty driveway this morning had apparently unnerved her—though this didn't explain the confusion with the foot doctor, or why she was still in her pajamas when we were due at church.

I pushed the button that my father had installed in the back room and peered out through the window. The garage door opened like a theatrical curtain, dramatically revealing the red rear end of the Buick. “I'm such a dumbhead,” she said. “I was sure that I'd been out with the car today.”

“It's nothing to worry about,” I said, even though it worried me. “You probably dreamed about the foot doctor just before waking up. I dream about him all the time.”

She smiled at the reassurance. “It's nice to know I'm not going crazy.” Then she thought for a moment. “Were we going some place?”

“We were supposed to go to Mass, but we'll never make it,” I told her without regret. “Though why don't you get dressed, and I'll take you to the Fat Boy for breakfast.”

I
DIDN'T KNOW
what I had expected from Walter's cancer. I must have assumed that it would progress invisibly, like the air sac tumor that had killed our parakeet Rossy a couple of years ago. She had quietly died in her sleep one night. But over the course of the summer, Walter's leg had started to swell, and the tumor eventually erupted. The open wound horrified me, but Linda faithfully dressed and bandaged it each evening while I held him on the kitchen countertop and stared intently at the toaster.