Fowl Weather (17 page)

“You must have told Dave O'Connor,” she answered as Dusty unleashed another shriek.

“Dave O'Connor? From eighth grade? I haven't spoken to Dave O'Connor since 1966.”

“Well, you must have said something to one of his friends, and then he mentioned it to me. I can't remember. Things like that just get around.”

“Well, considering that we've lost several of our treasured animals, this is hardly the time to be bringing up Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle,” I told her, with as much indignation as I could pack into a sentence that ended with “Piggle-Wiggle.” Then, with a hot flush of satisfaction, I slammed down the phone.

Hearing from Eileen reminded me why I'd been dodging even well-intentioned folks. An old college friend had left a message on our answering machine when she'd come to Grand Rapids to visit her dad, but I'd been too depressed to return her call. Any attempt at catching up would inevitably degenerate into my tale of woe. If I couldn't be certain that the person on the other end of the line would smother me with condolences, I didn't even want to attempt a conversation.

I wasn't the only sedentary mammal in the house wallowing in depression. In the past, after we'd return Bertie to his cage each evening, huge Walter would shake off his typical torpor for a blobby gallop into the living room. Buzzing excitedly, he would
mark any object within reach with the scent gland on his chin. He'd chin the plant stand, chin the ugly recliner chair, chin the even uglier coffee table, and inevitably chin my lovely foot. Then he'd discreetly retire to the corner for a vigorous pee on the plastic mat that surrounded his litter box. Since Bertie's death, though, Walter confined himself and his prodigious bladder to the dining room, sitting pensively under the table and only occasionally venturing in with us after dinner.

The afternoon that I carried him to his exercise pen in the basement, he didn't notice brand-new brown rabbit Rudy right away. Ignoring his feed dish, he flopped down on the cement and exhibited no interest in moving. Rabbits supposedly possess a keen sense of smell, though I couldn't count the number of bunnies who'd sniffed right past the carrot I was holding for a fruitless search of the rug. Rudy's scent and the click of his toenails on the floor also failed to make an impression with Walter at first. Suddenly, an ear twitched. His eyes snapped into focus, and he scrambled to his feet. Humming and grunting, he butted the wire barrier with his head, then darted back and forth like a caged leopard eager to sink its teeth into the tot with a lollipop. But these were hums and grunts of love emanating from a rabbit that didn't discriminate based on gender. He would gleefully hump anything that moved or just as readily scuffle with it, and little Rudy had instantly restored our Checker Giant to soaringly happy levels of testosterone.

Magda had exuded blandness when Linda had called her earlier that same day with the news that the little grey bunny had died during the night. “You have no idea how upsetting it is to wake up to this, especially after what happened to our ducks and then to Bertie.”

“You can come over and pick out another rabbit.”

“We are both just sick about it, and we don't understand how such a thing could have happened. You told us he was old enough to leave his mother.”

“We never let our rabbits go before they're weaned,” Magda drowsily assured her. “He should have been okay, but he is covered by a thirty-day guarantee. You're entitled to an exchange.”

“Bob's been a complete wreck since we lost Bertie, so you can imagine how he felt having to bury another little guy. He just came in from the backyard, and he doesn't look very good.”

“I don't make you bring in the body. We trust you.” And that was for the best, since digging up the rabbit would have put another crimp in our morning. We were running short on towels, so I'd made an executive decision that an animal that hadn't survived twenty-four hours on the premises didn't deserve the full Cannon salute. I had wrapped him in a light blue washcloth instead—which fitted him perfectly—before interring him next to Bertie in the busiest pet cemetery in western Michigan.

“Well, what do you think he died of?” Linda asked.

“It's never happened before, so I couldn't tell you.”

I stood beside Linda the whole time she was on the phone, hoping to absorb some vicarious condolences. “What did she say?” I asked Linda after she'd hung up.

“She wasn't what you would call extremely apologetic.”

“She isn't extremely anything,” I said.

In fact, she was extremely deadpan when, a few hours later, we stood in her garage as if rooted to the spot by an evil spell. Linda repeated how upset we were at the death of the grey bunny, then mentioned it a couple more times without budging from the shadow of Paul's station wagon, until Magda finally took the hint and conceded, “Yes, it's too bad.” Suddenly freed from our enchantment by those magic words, Linda, Magda, and I glided out
of the garage and into the backyard. I glanced back as a curtain swayed in the kitchen window. Apparently Paul's sales expertise didn't involve returns and exchanges.

While Linda busied herself describing the kind of bunny she wanted to the somnambulant Magda, I marched up and down the rows of cages, searching for an animal encased in a blinding ball of light signifying the peak of imperturbable good health. I paused next to a large duck pen to absorb the wondrous spectacle of Muscovies engaged in peaceful coexistence. Linda's shouts brought me out of my reverie. Working my way back toward the house and Paul's furtive peeks through the glass, I found Linda nuzzling a bouncy brown rabbit that was the spitting image of a wild cottontail. On the ride home, we named him Rudy.

“I'
M SUNK IN DEATH,
and I can't get up,” I told my friend Bill Holm. Just as I had lobbed this comment to him, the frazzled man behind the cash register of the Weigh and Pay restaurant took my dish and placed it on a scale. “Things aren't going well with my mother, either. It used to be that immersing myself in the animals gave me a break from worrying about her, but that doesn't work when the pets are dropping like flies.”

“Those are expensive potatoes,” Bill said as I paid for my meal. Sure enough, he ended up getting charged far less for the heaps of chicken he had shoveled onto his plate than I ended up laying out for my spuds, veggies, and cod. “You more than anyone should realize that bird bones are hollow, and hollow means free at the Weigh and Pay. And did you know cod is also known as the Gleason of the Sea?” I looked away. Conversations with Bill were inevitably peppered with references to Jackie Gleason, Harry Nilsson, Raymond Burr, Judge Judy, or other celebrities whom he considered admirable yet absurd. “See, I'm also getting a lettuce
salad. Lettuce is almost weightless. They may end up owing
me
money for this meal. You, on the other hand, may have to get a duck-pen equity loan.”

Judging from the scowling faces of the senior citizens who had been bused in from a nearby assisted-living facility, I suspected that either the skewed food prices had triggered instant nostalgia for institutional fare or they had overheard Bill.

“What do you think, guys?” the cashier asked as we rooted through containers next to the register for two sets of clean silverware. “Personally, I don't think it's going to fly.”

“Me neither, but you'd better not let the boss hear you,” said Bill.

The cashier snorted. “You mean my father? We've had this discussion many, many times. He tells me every Korean-owned corner grocery store in New York City sells take-out food by weight, and its all the rage out there. ‘Lowell ain't New York City, Dad,' I tell him.”

“It's more like Tbilisi,” Bill replied.

“Yeah, well, at least I got my way with the music.” He beamed, pointing to the ceiling speaker as we scurried to a booth. On second thought, I decided, the weighty prices hadn't caused the sour expressions at the two center tables. It was the heavy slab of Aerosmith and AC/DC on the local headbanger station.

After I brought Bill up-to-date on the animal psychic and pet death coincidences, he uttered the chilling phrase “Bobo's back in town,” then startled me with the news that he and his wife, Carol, had encountered the man named Love 22 during a recent trip to Key West.

“You met the actual Love 22?” I asked with my fork poised motionless in the air.

“Yes. He was doing some kind of bad street-performer routine,
and he handed me one of his twenty-two-dollar bills. I was stunned into speechlessness, and I felt weak and ashamed for not speaking with him. The next day, we ran into him again, on the beach. Bravely, I approached him and told him about the article we had written.”

Decades earlier, Bill and I had penned a tangled narrative for
Fortean Times,
a British journal of unexplained phenomenon, about a rash of strange coincidences we'd suffered involving clowns and the number twenty-two. The plague had started with our sighting of a car in Grand Rapids bearing the inscriptions
BOBO THE ROLLER CLOWN
and
TAKE A CLOWN TO LUNCH
just after we had filmed a home movie with Bill wearing a clown headpiece and sitting in a bathtub while contemplating the globe. The siege of convoluted circus synchronicities included newspaper articles about a clownlike figure named Love 22, who was prosecuted for handing out “counterfeit” twenty-two-dollar bills. After this assault, we routinely blamed a cosmic force, Bobo, for the frequent far-fetched coincidences in our lives.

Bill winced. “When did we write that article—1982? It took Bobo almost twenty years to come up with the punch line.”

“At least it wasn't twenty-two years.” I shivered. “What did Mr. 22 say about the article?”

“He wasn't the least bit interested in it,” said Bill. “He's so immersed in his own twenty-twos that independent verification means nothing to him at all. Besides, he looked a little worried, like maybe he thought I was a stalker or just more insane than him.”

“I wonder if the animal psychic would be the least bit interested in our pet deaths. Maybe I can get her to pay my psychiatric bills.”

“Are you going back on Zoloft?”

A few years earlier, when Stanley Sue had briefly fallen ill, I'd examined my ongoing problems with depression and, at the urging of a neurotic psychiatrist, had decided to try a brain-altering pharmaceutical. When the Zoloft had stopped working for me a couple of years later, I'd quit rather than hopping up to a higher dosage

“I don't think so. But I need something. I can barely drag myself through the day.”

Bill started questioning me about how it felt to be profoundly depressed. Garden-variety malaise was a way of life with him, but not my twin specialties of debilitating gloom and paralyzing anxiety. Just as I had launched into a gloriously self-pitying description of my ruined psyche, the restaurant owner's son slid into the booth next to Bill.

“Food okay, guys?”

“Excellent chicken,” Bill remarked, edging away from him. “It's worth its weight in gold.”

“Yeah, well, I want to get away from this whole weighing idea. People are suspicious of it. They glare at me like I'm pulling something over on them. Look, look at that. That's just what I'm talking about. She's not supposed to be doing that.”

I turned to watch as a large woman examined her plate on the scale and shuffled back to the buffet. Using her spoon she started scraping nonmeat ballast back into the food bins. The owner's son buried his head in his hands just as his dad wandered out of the kitchen, wiping his palms on his apron. He stared in befuddlement as the woman continued emptying her dish with decreasing regard for returning the food items to their proper locations.

“Bo!” the father called when he noticed the vacancy behind the cash register. “Bo. You're needed up here, pronto.”

Bo swung his body away from our table and groaned as he
strode toward the front of the restaurant, leaving Bill and me staring stupidly at each other.

“Tell me his name isn't Bobo.”

“Whatever medication you go on, get extras for me,” Bill said.

I
RETURNED HOME
from the Weigh and Pay just in time to check on Rudy and Walter in their change-of-scenery exercise pens in the basement. Walter's loop of fencing was stapled to the baseboard to keep him from shoving it across the room, while Rudy's smaller circle was fastened to Walter's with twisted wire. When I greeted Walter, I found him snuffling at the floor, wondering what had happened to the smaller rabbit. I wondered what had happened to him, too, and delicately conveyed my concern to my wife.

“Linda, quick, get down here,” I bellowed. “Rudy's disappeared!”

The wooden steps shook—the entire house groaned—as Linda thundered down a stairway made from inch-thick hardwood. It would be one thing if she were elephantine. But despite her small size, she wielded such vast reserves of physical energy that any material object in her path stood in deadly peril. Possessions owned and operated solely by me cheerfully tolerated years of use with no ill effects. But Linda snapped the plastic handles of her vacuum cleaners in two, yanked the shower door off its tracks, collapsed her side of the bed, reduced her dresser drawers to tilted, immovable trays, and generally wreaked widespread destruction with the smallest twitch of her little toe. Metal sprinklers flew apart. Portable radios shed their antennas. Door keys bent at forty-five-degree angles. Oceans evaporated. The moon fell from its orbit. I wondered from time to time why I hadn't been pulverized.

After the stairs had ceased to undulate and I could hear again,
Linda pointed to a spot beneath the potter's wheel. “He's right here.”

“How did he get out of his pen?”

“I don't know. But you're a good boy, aren't you?” she told Rudy as he allowed her to scoop him up and plunk him back in his enclosure. When I checked on him a few minutes later, however, he had managed to liberate himself again.