Bird Brained (8 page)

I put my arm out and the bird ran down it, hopping onto the bench, his head boinging up and down like a plastic figurine in the rear window of a car.

“There are people who believe that birds become better pets that way. They’re more docile when their wings are clipped,” I explained.

“Sure. Why not? If someone were to break my arms and legs, I’d be more dependent on them, too,” Sophie dryly replied. “Of course, that doesn’t mean I’d have to like it.”

Her response caught me off guard. “Why, Sophie—I didn’t think that would bother you. After all, you used to have a bird.”

“That’s exactly why I never got another,” she responded. “Doesn’t matter if it’s animal, vegetable, or mineral. I’ve learned that everything needs to be free.”

We sat quietly for a moment, watching the bird attack my coffee cup. Finally Sophie broke the silence.

“So, what are you going to call this thing, anyway?”

The bird waddled over, fell onto his back, and kicked his feet against my hand. Great. Instead of kids, I was saddled with an unruly bird. I pushed the cockatoo away, propelling him along the upholstered bench like a disc in a game of shuffleboard. Instead of being irate, the bird erupted into the uproarious laughter of a lunatic on the loose. He immediately bolted back over, demanding that I repeat the action again and again and again. I looked up and caught Sophie’s eye, knowing there was only one thing he could be called.

“Bonkers,” I said. “He’s definitely Bonkers.”

I helped Sophie remove the menagerie of houseplants from inside her birdcage. After that, Lucinda hauled it to my place while I pretended to assist. The contraption was nearly as large as my apartment in New York had been.

By the time I was ready to head out, Sophie walked in, a bowl of fruit in her hand. She foisted an apple on me.

“If I’m gonna feed your bird, I might as well try to keep you healthy, too. Just be sure and eat it!” she commanded.

I took a big bite of the apple to please her, and received a pinch on the cheek as reward.

“Don’t worry about your bird,” Sophie advised. “He’ll spend the day outside with me while I do some touch-up painting on the house. I’m feeling magenta and lime today.”

I’d given up on the idea of privacy soon after moving in, when I discovered Sophie painting outside my bedroom window, bright and early, at five o’clock one morning. At first, I’d been startled. But Sophie had cheerfully waved and invited me outside to inspect her latest flash of inspiration. That’s when I realized why the rent was so low—my landlady had a hard time holding on to tenants.

I’d come to appreciate Sophie’s company during my routine bouts of insomnia. It was during those wee hours that she’d finagle me into a game of canasta, deftly cleaning me out of liquid funds. On the other hand, the woman made a mean late-night margarita, nicely accompanied by a dish of Lucinda’s black beans and rice.

I’d asked Sophie once why she was so compelled to continually paint the house such outrageous colors.

“I’m like a performing artist. I gotta constantly create,” she’d said. “This is my living canvas. This way my art never ends.”

I walked past her ever-evolving creation and under Neptune’s arch to squeeze behind the wheel of my car. Destination, points south. I crossed over the MacArthur Causeway, leaving behind my Miami Beach state of mind. I was going to pay Willy Weed a visit.

I brazenly propelled my way into the bumper-to-bumper traffic on Route 1, knowing that the guy in the Beemer was a lot more worried about dents than I was. Homestead’s claim to fame was that it had been ground zero back in 1992 for that tree-smashing, trailer-bashing storm of the decade, Hurricane Andrew. Years later, not a whole lot had changed. I exited onto a small two-lane road that skirted Homestead and led straight for the boonies.

Row upon row of stripped live oaks flashed by, their trunks bedraggled but proud, like old women who wake one morning to discover the night has stolen away with their youth and beauty. A boarded-up Baptist church stood melancholy and forlorn in a grove of Dade County pine, its battered sign promising to reopen soon. I pulled behind a blue pickup that shuffled maddeningly along at the speed limit, my mind wandering as a bald eagle soared lazily in the sky. I could have thrown a stone in any direction and hit a bird-breeder’s facility right about now. Forty-seven hundred of them are registered in this state, each and every one of whom had plopped down twenty-five bucks to the Florida Game and Freshwater Fish Commission to obtain a license to legally ply their trade. That’s all it took.

I knew that Homestead and its environs were especially loaded with bird breeders not only because of the number of thefts that had taken place in the area, but also because of a handy-dandy little book that listed every breeder’s name and facility, along with their address and telephone number. The book was made available by the Game and Freshwater Fish Commission to anyone willing to fork over five dollars. Unless you were high-tech and modern, that is. Then seventeen smackeroos got you a floppy from which you could download all the necessary information. It made for a convenient shopping list, one that the Cuban bird gang surely had the brains to have gotten hold of.

As I turned off the asphalt onto a narrow dirt road that led through a forest of scrub palmetto and pine, an explosion of black starlings erupted overhead, annoyed at my unannounced presence. A gang of black-headed vultures remained languidly indifferent, content to hitch a ride on a thermal while scanning the ground for their next meal. The dirt path curved to the right and opened up to reveal a large clearing with three broken-down house trailers and two dozen decrepit cages, each containing one or two listless critters inside.

I pulled up next to Willy’s Dodge Ram, its roof mounted with four big headlights that Weed used for jacklighting deer. A vanity tag bore the logo
HELL’S BELLS
, while slapped on the vehicle was a worn-out bumper sticker that pretty much summed up Willy’s take on life,
WILL THE LAST AMERICAN TO LEAVE PLEASE BRING THE FLAG?
It was a popular sentiment with most of the area’s crackers, or “lizard eaters,” as some of the locals are called, who worried that an influx of Cubans was insidiously working its way toward them from out of Miami.

I opened my car door to a surge of heat so humid it was almost liquid. Ninety-five degrees of sticky hot air rolled over my body like the swell of a wave to turn my skin into an irresistibly moist calling card for every tiny deer fly around. They banded together in miniature squadrons, attacking my body with the expertise of a panzer unit programmed to kill. My efforts at swatting them away only provided the insects with a much welcome breeze as they munched at my flesh in uninterrupted bliss.

A hand-painted sign was nailed onto one of the trees. It announced that I was about to enter
THE ENDANGERED CREATURES OF GOD FOUNDATION
, for which all donations were gladly accepted. That was a scam Willy had come up with a few months ago, when he’d decided to try and pass off his place as a sanctuary. In reality, Weed’s hovel was a dump living in hope of conniving its way into a tax write-off.

I kicked through the cans and debris that littered the ground to a cage holding a dejected cougar. The animal paced back and forth across the floor of its small pen with neurotic precision, its deadened eyes scarcely acknowledging my presence, its six-foot-long tawny body a scraggly mass of bones and fur. Next door, a 450-pound Siberian tiger could barely stretch out in its pigeonhole of a cage. Other enclosures held bobcats and leopards and servals; all thin and neglected, and all for sale. In Florida it was deemed a right to own whatever animal one desired, be it a lion, an elephant, or a zebra—any or all of which could be purchased right here in the exotic wildlife capital of the world.

A vulture landed nearby to pick at a rotting chicken carcass that one of the mangy cougars had refused to eat. I turned away from the pathetic menagerie and checked out the squalid mobile homes that lay spread out before me. The music of Guns N’ Roses was cranked up and pumping through the thin, metal walls of the first trailer, making it a sure bet to contain Willy. I climbed the cinder-block steps and wrenched open the aluminum door.

The stench nearly rocked me off my feet: a reeking brew of heat, body odor, rotten food, and mildew. Empty beer bottles littered the floor next to a cardboard box that contained remnants of fossilized pizza. A pile of laundry, midway through the process of fermenting, sat in a corner with a discolored jockstrap perched on top. Heaps of garbage overflowed from overturned paper bags, smoldering in an experimental indoor compost heap. Just one quick glance made the cages outside look pretty good.

Willy Weed stood dead center in among the debris, his greasy strands of hair half in and half out of a half-assed ponytail, a joint hanging from his lips. The tattoo on his bare chest swam in a pool of sweat as he went through the motions of completing a bicep curl, a twenty-five-pound weight barely gripped in his hand. His jeans hung well below a pair of bony hips, making it obvious he didn’t bother with the usual formality of underwear.

Willy mumbled something that I couldn’t understand, his eyes glazed over in a stoned-out state of nirvana. I didn’t bother trying to yell above the deafening wail of music. I just beelined to the nearest electrical socket, where I euthanized Guns N’ Roses.

“Now, what was it that you said?” I asked, enjoying the sweet sound of silence.

Willy guffawed, nearly swallowing his joint. “I said, hey, Porter. Wanna join me in a toke?”

Down-home hospitality, crackerjack style.

“No, thanks, Willy. I think I’ll pass.”

Weed gazed at me through half-closed lids, his bicep twitching as the twenty-five-pound weight struggled to make liftoff. “That’s the trouble with you uptight Northern girls. You don’t know how to have yourselves a good time and relax.”

“You do enough of that for both of us,” I assured him.

A ray of sunlight managed to bypass the dirt on one of the dingy windows. The gleam caught my eye as it streamed in, glistening off what appeared to be military medals that had been mounted in a frame and hung on the wall. Weed didn’t strike me as a man who would risk his neck without big bucks egging him on.

“Who did you steal the medals from, Willy?” I asked, motioning toward the display.

Weed took a deep toke before removing the joint from his lips. “I did my time in the service,” he exhaled.

“Yeah? What military prison would that have been?” I prodded.

“That’s real cute, Porter. Poking fun at a disabled vet,” Willy feigned hurt.

I didn’t bother reminding him that I knew just how he’d received his limp, but let him ramble on.

“I happened to get those for serving my country—bravely, too, I might add, during the mother of all battles in Desert Storm. I’m a Top Gun,” Willy drawled.

He swayed to his left and hooked onto a Bud, ramming a finger deep inside the open bottle. As Willy chugged the Bud, beer sloshed down his chin and onto his chest, the liquid running straight inside his jeans.

“Damn! I hate when that happens,” he grumbled. “Good thing I didn’t get around to doing my laundry just yet.”

I looked away in distaste, and noticed an enormous mound of writhing flesh that had begun to rearrange itself in a darkened corner of the trailer.

Top Gun looked over, curious as to what was vying for my attention. “Why, that’s Big Mama.” He grinned. “Wanna make nice and say hi?”

Big Mama slowly lifted her head from where she lay coiled, and flicked out a tongue. An eighteen-foot Burmese python, the snake had the girth of a telephone pole and must have weighed close to two hundred pounds. Her muscles rippled beneath a shiny skin that would have delighted any fashion maven in search of a high-priced handbag and matching shoes. Gorgeous reddish brown splotches were delicately outlined in a luxurious cream, set against a subtle background of cocoa. Burmese pythons have no use for venom. All they need do is wind themselves around their prey and slowly constrict, steadily suffocating their quarry in an excruciating dance of death.

“What do you feed that thing?” I asked. It had to consume at least a chicken or two a day.

“I like to vary her diet with pain-in-the-ass wildlife agents,” Willy cracked with relish.

The stench and the heat were beginning to get to me. “I guess you haven’t bothered getting around to paying your electric bill.”

Willy put down the dumbbell and threw me a beer. “Big Mama likes it hot in here.”

I twisted off the cap and took a gulp, grateful for the liquid. “Maybe you ought to consider keeping her in a different trailer, then.”

“No way!” He grabbed a greasy deep-fried nugget of gator tail from an equally greasy plate, and held it toward me. I passed up the offering.

“Big Mama and I are like one,” he said, shoving the chunk into his mouth. “If she ain’t with me, she gets mighty cranky. And trust me, you don’t want eighteen feet of snake pissed off at ya. But she’s still the best woman I’ve ever had.”

I was beginning to wonder just how close Willy and Big Mama actually were, when my eyes were drawn to his snake-skin boots. I pondered whether that had been a former pet as well.

Willy followed my gaze and chuckled. “Got a yen for a pair?” he asked. “That’s what I’m getting Hector ready for.”

Weed disappeared into the back of his trailer, and returned a moment later carrying an aquarium in his hands. Inside was an eight-foot python with the smallest head I’d ever seen. Now I realized how Weed managed to kick a profit out of his snakes so quickly. He overfed the pythons he planned to skin, forcing their bodies to grow faster than their actual age would have allowed. The result, known as “pinhead syndrome,” was that their heads remained the proper size for their chronological age, while their bodies grew too fast and too big. I had reached my limit with Willy.

“I went to Alberto’s last night straight from the airport.”

Willy turned sullen. “Oh, yeah? You two must have had a real nice, friendly chat. Did you make sure to rat me out, Porter?”