Fowl Weather (19 page)

My grass whipping finally paid off big. I normally wouldn't have noticed a single, silent brown bird hiding in the leaves. But the hush at the river's edge—the lush green that muffled the whoosh of traffic—allowed me to pay attention to tiny things. Tree bark, I marveled.
Tree bark.
The brown bird looped out over the river, then flew back again. As I moved to get a better look, it replayed its boomerang flight. Finally I caught the silhouette of its crest, the wedding band on its tail, and a high-pitched squeak that a locust wouldn't have envied. Embarrassed not to have recognized a cedar waxwing, I glanced at the next tree down the line, where another waxwing performed a mirror-image routine. It was the same on the opposite bank. Up and down the river, four or five birds at a time went airborne as these berry eaters dined on flies on the fly. Not to be outdone, a belted kingfisher hit the water with a crack and, after settling on a snag, erupted in a long, rolling, mirthless, chattering laugh, lamenting his failure to catch a fish. He should have tried the bugs.

When Linda joined me the following evening, the bell tones of a song sparrow serenaded us, along with the splash of turtles that hopped off their log when they spotted us. I wanted the cedar waxwings to surprise her, but we had barely planted our heels next to an oak when a pair of crow-size birds zipped by with folded necks, splayed orange legs, and grumpy
kuk-kuk
calls. “Green herons,” I gasped.

“No!” said Linda.

We'd once glimpsed a solitary green heron at a marsh on Lake Erie. A pair in full view in our own liquid backyard was as mind-numbing as being back on antidepressant number two. Honks replaced the receding squawks as a dozen Canada geese wheeled close, pulled up landing gear at the sound of Linda's cries, then touched down in the water behind a grassy island one hundred
yards upriver. Their clatter scattered a flock of killdeers, which squealed their name as they took flight.

“Who knew all this went on down here,” I said.

“You'd never know our house was just back there.”

Except for the whine of a farmer's tractor and a truck that blew its horn like the salute of a gargantuan swan, we might as well have been stranded in the wilds of Manitoba. For as far as we could see, the riverbank shielded our eyes from any man-made structures, though a quality doughnut shop wouldn't have been entirely unappealing. The beauty drew us back evening after evening. We kept close tabs on the larger birds that clustered around the tiny island, watching for Linda's flock of Canada geese, a trio of juvenile sandhill cranes with shaggy brown backs, a skittish great blue heron, and—if we had been very, very good and had eaten all our vegetables—a magnificent bald eagle bathing in the shallows.

“What's that on the rocks?” Linda asked. I swept the opposite bank with my binoculars. “There's two of them!” she exclaimed. “Right there. Just a little bit down from us.”

I had grown so used to goggling at big birds at a distance that I hadn't noticed a couple of diminutive peepers right under my substantial nose. “Sandpipers,” I muttered. Bobbing and teetering as they walked and probed the mud for food, they resembled a toy maker's whimsical creations. I was about to express my amazement that we'd find sandpipers on our river when an unearthly call grabbed my jaw and dropped it to the ground. Linda shared the same dumb expression of astonishment as we listened to a resonant piping that rose from a low, throaty croak to the suggestion of a woodwind at full tilt. If you crossed a clarinet with an exotic percussive instrument, you might create a similar call, but only if a master musician played the theme as a matter of life and
death. The call repeated again and again, dazzling us with every replay.

“Could that be a heron?” Linda wondered.

A great blue heron perched upriver on a stump halfway to the island. Leaving our neat little clearing behind, I found myself racing through the brambles and poisonous plants trying to locate the soloist. As I drew opposite the heron, the volume of the sound diminished.

“It's not the heron,” I wheezed when I'd trudged back to Linda. “It must be some other bird on the other side of the trees across the river.”

As soon as we got back to the house, I retreated upstairs, flipped past the Madagascar CD with its call of the indri lemur, and selected a disc of bird songs. A few minutes after I had gone downstairs to tell Linda that the cosmic bugler was a sandhill crane, the phone rang. Ignoring the warning of the caller ID, I lifted the receiver anyway.

“Just checking in,” said Eileen brightly, as if we were old friends rather than old classmates. “I just wondered what was new.”

“What's new,” I harrumphed. I didn't know what to say at first. Then, in an unexpected burst of goodwill, I suggested, “You really should come over some evening and walk down to the river with us.”

Linda and I had started taking a palm-size two-way radio on our solo trips down to the river. That way, if I saw an interesting bird while Linda was scrubbing cages in the dining room, I could radio her, “There's a pair of spotted sandpipers by the big tree, but no eagle,” and Linda would answer, “What? I can't hear you. Your voice sounds funny.”

I had hoped to get my daily peek at a tiny flock of migrating yellow-rumped warblers that moved along the riverbank in the late afternoon. This attractive brown fall bird with yellow patches had previously carried the dignified title of myrtle warbler. But pranksters in the American Birding Association had renamed it for a potentially embarrassing body part to keep the white-breasted nuthatch, red-bellied woodpecker, and bristle-thighed curlew company. I could usually spot the warblers in the trees only by homing in on their sharp
pik
call, but some idiot was polluting the aural environment by running a string trimmer. It didn't take me long to realize that we were that idiot.

I tried to radio Linda from the river to ask her what was going on, but she didn't reply. Either she was right on top of the puttering two-stroke engine or she had dropped her walkie-talkie into a wading pool. Heading back toward the house, I stepped over the backyard fence and wiggled a finger at our student helper Mr. Bean, who flicked off the Ryobi and vigorously waved.

“Oh, Mr. Tarte,” he shouted just before I had managed to scurry out of conversation range. I reconciled myself to waiting for him at the basement door. “I wonder if I might ask your advice,” he began. “There's a girl at college that I want to take out on a picnic and ask her to go steady. Do you consider Fallasburg Park to be a romantic spot?”

“Just keep away from the dumpsters,” I suggested. “If the aroma doesn't chase her off, the yellow jackets will.” When he nodded as if seriously considering my remark, I asked him, “Is this someone you've known a long time?”

“This will be the first time I've dated her.”

“And you're asking her to go steady?” I thought that going steady had fallen out of fashion when
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet
had left the air, but social mores proceeded at their own pace at the local Bible college. I couldn't resist the obvious. “Why would you ask someone to go steady on a first date?”

“I can't get her to talk to me,” he said, shaking the string trimmer to convey his agitation with a slosh of its gas tank. “She spends most of her spare time with the other Indonesian students. But if we were going steady, I could see her on a regular basis.”

“I guess that makes a certain kind of sense.” I glanced at the cloudless sky in the wild hope that the sun might go supernova and interrupt our exchange. Instead, to my horror, I heard myself prolong the moment. “What happened to that Korean girl?”

“She's too busy with her Korean girlfriends. But I'm sure I have a chance with this one. Do you think it would be too forward if I bought her a ring?”

Substituting for a cosmic calamity, Linda burst around the corner, allowing me to slip into the workroom while she distracted him with a barrage of questions about his string trimming. The last noise I heard before easing the door shut with a soft but fulfilling click was Linda: “You didn't cut down the weeds around that big yellow spider, did you?”

I gave her a few minutes to sort out whatever the big-yellow-spider matter might involve. Then, fearing that Mr. Bean had entangled her in his gooey web of dating-etiquette questions, I followed Judy Teany's lead in rescuing my dad from old man Brink so many years ago. Clicking the two-way radio, I informed her, “Telephone, Linda.” Apparently, I hadn't lied. As soon as she clomped up the stairs, the phone rang as promised.

“It's your mother,” she told me, passing me the receiver and glowering because I had called her into the house just for that. Then she raced back outdoors to resume her conversation with the hired helper who had earned his secret nickname via his resemblance to sad-sack comedian Rowan Atkinson.

I didn't know what to make of the phone call with my mom, who seemed levelheaded, if forgetful, as we chatted about her intention to winterize the Buick and the color of Mrs. Teany's latest wig. Then she announced that in November she would be working at the polls, which she hadn't done for almost a decade. She had last applied two years earlier but hadn't been called in, presumably because her old boss had noticed her problems concentrating.

“How did you find out you'll be working?” I asked.

“It was the funniest thing,” she said. “I was taking a walk to the end of the block, and down by Aberdeen School I saw a piece of
paper on the sidewalk with my name on it telling me to report to the polls. I don't know how it got there.”

“Where did you find that paper?”

“Just down the street. It might have been closer to church. I can't remember.”

The phone call alarmed me. Before calling Joan to discuss this latest development, I peered out the window and noted Linda and Mr. Bean still embroiled in conversation. From his slumped posture and his longing glance up at the sun, I gathered that my wife had gained the advantage.

“I
FEEL SO SORRY
for that spider,” Linda told Joan as we sat on her enclosed porch.

Joan made playful kazoo noises with her mouth as she picked up Beethoven from the cement floor and deposited him inside a cardboard box. “Where did your dolly go?” she asked him, even though, like many pure white ferrets, he was as deaf as a deceased composer. Before she could completely remove the stuffed doll, the outraged weasel grabbed it by the arm and yanked it back inside his box.

Her husband, Jack, came out with a piece of popcorn and handed it to me. “Busy Bird will land on your lap if you hold this very still. She loves popcorn.” Instead of paying the slightest particle of attention to me, the house sparrow scolded Jack with a level of invective that only a bird could muster. “She hates it when I wear my glasses.” He said this on the sly from the side of his mouth, so that the sparrow wouldn't overhear.

“What about the spider?” Joan asked.

While we tended to have animals dumped on us by other people, Joan and Jack stumbled across them as they tried to go about their lives. Driving to work one morning, Joan had noticed a
sausage-shaped, white furry form scampering under a van in front of her at a traffic light. The next thing she knew, she had become a ferret owner. Jack had scooped up an abandoned baby sparrow in the driveway after the parents had shoved the featherless pest out of the nest twice. He undertook the daunting task of raising the chick into a sassy adult that preferred lording it over the other pets to sparrowing outdoors. Elsewhere in the house skulked a rescued wolf-dog amalgamation, a couple of adult cats, and three growing kittens that had recently materialized half-starved in the yard—though you couldn't tell they had ever suffered to see the spoiled things now.

“I'm scared to death of those big yellow spiders,” Linda told Joan. “I can't even stand to look at a picture of them in a book.”

“Golden orb weavers,” I added.

“Every time I go out to the barn, I have to look the other way, because it terrifies me just to see that spider by the door. But one of the college students cut down all the weeds around her web, and now there aren't enough insects. I don't know how she'll feed herself.”

“She's a spider,” I pontificated. “She'll take care of it.”

“That is worrying, about Mom,” Joan said.

“Where did Dusty Marie go?” asked Jack.

Joan pointed to the snaking coils of plastic tubing that covered the floor of the porch and concealed the second ferret. “I don't believe she found that piece of paper about the job at the polls, either. It really concerns me, Bob.”

Swiveling at the sound of Busy Bird pecking her cage bars, I caught sight of the building across the street; large letters painted across the bricks proclaimed
FOSTER GRAVE VAULT CO.
I flinched to face such an unvarnished reminder of where my father currently resided. “I didn't tell you about Mom's visit last week,” I said to change the subject inside my head.

“What happened?”

“To start with, she couldn't remember how to get to our house and had to write down the directions.”

“She almost hit someone,” Linda added.

“Even then, she had trouble following the instructions and ended up coming a roundabout way. When she was leaving, though, she pulled out into the road directly in front of an oncoming car, swerved to miss it, and nearly clipped the postman's station wagon.”

“She nearly hit the postman,” Linda said.

Joan's attention drifted to Beethoven in his box. He lay on his back holding a tennis ball in his paws, like a sea otter about to crack an urchin's shell for lunch. A few inches from him, the plastic tube wiggled as Dusty Marie navigated the tunnel. “She probably shouldn't be driving, except around the neighborhood, maybe.”