Making Nice (4 page)

“Fine. But if you interfere, you’re banned forever.”

I don’t even know why I said it. Banning each other forever was supposed to mean something but didn’t, at least not to her. When I was about ten and she was thirteen, she’d tell me jokes after dinner to make me laugh so hard I’d throw up. It was a trick she discovered by accident one night, as my giggling turned into an airless, wheezing laugh, followed by a cough, followed by chewed-up chicken nuggets on the floor. But once she realized the trick could be repeated, she did it so often I started losing weight. It’d been going on for a few weeks, and she’d already been told to quit, already been made to promise to quit, and already been grounded, but each stopped her only long enough for our parents to let their guard down. I was in the top bunk with the lights off already when I heard
“Pssst. Pssssssssssst. Psst!”
I knew what was about to happen and started giggling, my brother in the bottom bunk below me whisper-pleading for her to stop. “It’s not a joke,” she whispered. “I just need to ask you an important question.”

“What,” I said.

“Why’d the monkey fall out of the tree?”

“Get outta here!” AJ yelled, and that was enough, and my body did its wheeze and cough thing before a plate’s worth of Hamburger Helper went waterfalling down over the railing while our brother huddled in the back corner of his bed crying for help. My mother came running in with a bottle of Windex and rags and screamed at my sister that she was banned forever from telling me jokes after dinner. She delivered the punchline three nights later on her way past the door.

“Because it was dead,” she said. Spaghetti.

And that day on the lawn, with Gary, was like that. We were adults now, but still the laughing came easy. Dad went for sandwiches and sodas at the deli and the three of us sat in the sun watching Gary hop around the grass like a toad between us. We were splayed out, switching from our hands to our elbows and back again, ripping up lawn and tossing it while we told old stories and laughed, I mean really laughed, for the first time in months. My face hurt. I was in the middle of telling them what I discovered about hooligan penguins gay gangbanging each other when AJ drove in for a long weekend, and then we were all sitting there having a good time together near tulip buds bursting purple. I pointed out their yellow stamens and said “flower dicks” while Gary bounced around like an idiot-machine. AJ couldn’t believe he was still alive.

“What kind of bird is he, you think?” he asked.

“A dragon,” I said. “Or some kind of raptor.”

“Sparrow,” my dad said.

“Osprey maybe,” I said. “Murderer of fish.”

“Yeah, he looks like a sparrow,” my brother said.

“He does look like a sparrow,” my sister said.

“And you guys look like dumb-shits that don’t know what they’re talking about,” I said, “because sparrows are the Toyota Camrys of birds: every car looks like them and they look like every car and sometimes even minivans.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” my brother said.

“Yeah it does. Ford Taurus. Honda Accord. Mercedes Benz … I can’t tell the difference.”

“He has Mom’s pills hidden in his room,” my sister said.

“They’re my inheritance,” I said. “She bequeathed them to me when you guys weren’t there, but the point I’m trying to make here is that things often look like other things that they’re not. It’s too early to tell what Gary is, and it doesn’t even matter because he’s imprinted on me. I am his guardian, confidant, and mentor—”

“You’re a gay,” my father said.

“—and the example I’m setting for him is that of alpha-male penguin-swan-hawk. If I do my job correctly, he’ll be capable of amazing sexual and regular-style violence on land, sea, air, ice, and telephone pole power lines. I’m talking transgressive
and
cute. Identify and swoop. Seek and destroy. Right, Gary?”

And at that exact moment little Gary hopped up onto my knee and moved his head around weirdly, kinda like an Egyptian, and sing-songed something like, “Purty, purty, purty … whoit, whoit, whoit, whoit … what-cheer, what-cheer … wheet, wheet, wheet, wheet!”

All of us oohed and aahed.

*   *   *

It was another week before Gary figured out how to fly into walls, and then his aim improved and he figured out how to fly into my face. “Watch the talons,” I’d say. He tried to land on Sparkles’s face a few times, too, but she’d get scared and run out of the room. It was amusing to me—an obese bulldog getting spooked by a bird no bigger than a tangerine. But after like the fourth or fifth time I wanted them to be friends, just in case, so I called Sparkles back in and held Gary up for her inspection. She sniffed him for a few seconds, looked at me, sniffed him some more, then licked him. On top of the pills, I was drinking every night because my heart felt like how hearts feel when you lose someone you love forever, but when Sparkles did that my heart hurt a whole different way that I can’t explain except to say it felt like a broken tooth—the gesture was too sweet, and it sent a jangly, electric pain shooting through me. “Shit,” I said, wiping my eyes. “Goddammit.” Then I made whimpering noises like my mother had near the end. I petted Sparkles and put Gary in his basket and bolted out of my room and down the stairs and out the front door and down the steps and across the lawn, where I dove into the shrubs bordering the property and just lay in them facedown for a while, until my father came outside and found me there and asked if I was OK. “I’m freakin’ worried,” he said. “What’re you doin’?”

“Nothing. I just—I had to be in this bush for a couple minutes. Now I feel better.”

“Well how long you gonna stay there? I heard Gary chirpin’. I could feed him if you want.”

“Oh,” I said. “No. That’s OK. Just help me outta here.”

Without another word—and I appreciated that—my father grabbed my ankles and yanked hard, twice, until I was out and lying facedown on the lawn. I push-upped my way to standing and thanked him, then slapped him on his big belly and ran into the house and up the stairs to feed my bird who, when he saw me come in, extended his neck like a turtle and opened his mouth as wide as he could and chirped like crazy. I was about to feed him when my father ducked in and said, “I wanna do it.”

I looked at him standing there in the doorway, double-denimed, his hat literally in his hand. His eyes were bloodshot and the same washed-out blue as a brand of dish soap I buy.

“OK,” I said. “Sure.”

He walked over and I handed him the straw and gave him instructions: “Scoop some mush on there and put it near his face.” He did, and Gary chomped at it, and then again and again, until he’d had his fill and shut up and went back to sleep, and then we leaned in and watched him breathe, making sure he wasn’t dead. After a while, more to himself than me, my father said, “Cool.”

*   *   *

I was eating breakfast when my sister marched in and slapped down a photograph of a bird that wasn’t just similar to Gary, it was near exact: the grayish-brown coloring with a slight reddish tint on the wings and tail feathers; the raised crest and coral-colored cone-shaped beak; the poofy underparts and perverted look in the eyes. Underneath the photo:
NORTHERN CARDINAL, FEMALE
.

I didn’t even finish my Hot Pocket.

On my way up the stairs I was considering a name change, but decided against it because I thought it might be bad luck to change names, like with a boat, and anyway Gary thought I was his mom so whatever. When I got to my room I found him hanging out under my bed near a balled-up sock that I’d thought was lost forever.

“Why are you always on the ground?” I said. “It’s a good way to get eaten, dipshit. Plus you’re gonna hurt yourself flying around the room banging into walls like a racquetball. Guess it’s time I built you that aviary. But first, research.”

I stuck my hand out and Gary jumped into it. I placed him on the top edge of my laptop screen, then read everything I could find, twice. Taxonomy:
Cardinalis cardinalis
; common name, Northern Cardinal; native to southern Canada, the east coasts of North America down through Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize, and vagrant in the Cayman Islands, which seems like a smart place to be a vagrant even though topless sunbathing is prohibited by law. Most often they live at the edges of woods, thickets, fields, and marshes and are ground feeders that enjoy eating dumbass insects as well as wild fruits, berries, oats, and seeds. They also drink maple sap from holes made by sapsuckers, an example of commensalism—look it up. Northern cardinals don’t migrate and don’t molt into an ugly plumage, so they’re still good-looking motherfuckers in the snow. Their predators include owls and hawks, snakes, raccoons and squirrels, red foxes, dickheaded brats with BB guns, and kinda-sorta cowbirds, the deadbeat parents of the avian world, who lay their eggs in the cuplike nests of cardinals and never come back. Northern cardinals mate for life and don’t rape anything. On the plus side, males are extremely aggressive in defending their territory, so much so that they often attack their own reflections in windows and break their little red necks. They’re so cool and great that they’re the official bird of seven U.S. states I won’t name. Also, young birds, both male and female, show coloring similar to the adult female until the fall, when males molt and grow their super-looking adult feathers.

I plucked Gary off my laptop, stared him right in his left eyeball, then flipped him over but didn’t see anything. So I put him down on the desk and did a search for bird dicks and discovered that there are only a few species of birds with actual dicks, and even those are retractable. I can’t say about the ostriches, emus, cassowaries, or kiwis, but ducks and other waterfowl sometimes fuck in the water or go swimming right after, and having a dick helps ensure that the sperm isn’t washed away. Their cocks are corkscrew-shaped, and lady ducks have the plumbing to match. Their sex is referred to as coercive, which means rapey, which is exactly the kind of sex this elephant has with this rhino in a video Gary and I watched about a hundred times. That and the one where the donkey with a purple boner knocks over a South American guy shitting in a field. It’s pretty good.

*   *   *

I built the aviary out on the covered porch with mosquito netting my mother had rigged up around her bed for no reason, hex-head concrete anchors, and the biggest stones I could find. When that was all in place, my father and I took a trip to a birding store out in Sayville, where I bought two houses and three perches that I mounted to the stucco at different heights, about seven feet and four feet. Then I dragged the potted Ficus out there and plopped it right in the middle so Gary could learn to hang out in trees. It was a concern of mine, and I wouldn’t let him outside until he learned to get off the ground more and could feed himself. I didn’t sleep well the first few nights because I was worried he might be lonely or worse, and on the fourth night I dragged my sleeping bag and pillow out there and curled up on the cool concrete next to his basket. He woke me at dawn by crash-landing into my face.

And that’s how it stayed for a week or so. Things kind of plateaued. Gary wouldn’t feed himself, wouldn’t stay in the birdhouse or on the perches or in the tree. He just hopped around the concrete all day making his little metallic chips and chirps, waiting for one of us to feed him. I didn’t know what to do but give him time and space, let him build up some self-reliance. I was feeling cooped-up and spring-feverish anyway, having spent six months dealing with my mother’s diagnosis, five watching her die, two since she up and did. It felt—if not good—better to be outside, and the girls were wearing less and less the warmer it got. At one point I was buying coffee in 7-Eleven and sprung a halfie looking at the woman-next-to-me’s newly pink shoulder, the few freckles, the white of her bra strap. Her hair smelled like the concrete at a car wash. It took all of my restraint not to press my index finger against her shoulder burn and watch it go from white to pink.

I started going for long jogs, dinner with friends, drinks after. Between my sister and father someone was usually around, and both were more than happy to check in on Gary, make sure he was all right. He always was, even when Jackie and I took him out to the backyard to shoot video of him flying over to me and landing on my falcon glove. The plan was to dub in audio of a Crested Eagle shriek, maybe an Andean Condor. We did three takes, all failures. The first one he flew into my chest and fell to the ground, the second into my hairdo, and the third time he went over my head and up onto a pine tree branch about twenty feet off the ground. He wouldn’t come down, and I had to get a ladder and crab net and scoop him. And that’s when I enacted the Tether Rule: Gary wasn’t allowed outside without a kite string tied to his leg. My sister started calling him Tampon.

Later that week I ran into a drunken ex at The Wharf, and when the opportunity presented itself, I took her by the hand to the parking lot and my car, where we leaned against the hood and French and freestyle kissed for a few minutes before climbing in. We fooled around until someone’s headlights headlighted us up and she told me to stop what I was doing, which was fingering her C’mere style—like,
You’re in big trouble now, Vagina. Get over here this instant!
When I didn’t stop she said stop again, and I was like, “Really?” and she was like, “Yes really,” and I was like, “No,” and she was like, “Stop,” and I was like, “Please?” and she was like, “STOP!” and I was like, “
Fine
.” Then I stopped. She took her heel out of the cup holder and a penny was stuck to it.

After a quick discussion we decided to go to her place where I got her naked and fingered her Vending Machine style, like I’m trying to get change out of a vending machine
—
before attempting the Switcheroo, this move I do where I switch my fingers with my boner real fast and hope she doesn’t notice, but she noticed, and since I didn’t have a condom on, since I didn’t have a condom with me, she slapped me right on the dick and I watched it waggle like a windshield wiper. I went back to C’mere-ing her just long enough for her to start enjoying it, then Shoehorned her—a maneuver where instead of switching I go up and under and “shoehorn” it in—and it totally worked and we unprotecto-ed for ten to fifteen before I came in her light brown pubes and belly button and fell asleep for not very long because I woke up to a call from my father at six. Even in that blurry state, I knew before I answered. “I’ll come home” is all I said, and hung up.