Fowl Weather (32 page)

Although Stanley Sue's appetite was better, her breathing remained labored. Linda phoned Dr. Hedley, who suggested that we try a different antibiotic. For a couple of days, I fooled myself into thinking it had helped, but that weekend she plummeted downhill. Dr. Hedley had left Michigan to sit with his sick father out west. Late Sunday afternoon, Dr. Fuller returned Linda's call from a bedand-breakfast in northern Michigan. He instructed us to completely cover Stanley Sue's cage and move her to a room that we could heat to eighty-five degrees. He would see her the next morning.

Joan drove Stanley Sue and me to the vet. Linda couldn't drive me, because of her back problems. I could have driven myself, but I welcomed the moral support and well-heated SUV. As Dr. Fuller examined the whimpering bird, I sat on a chair in the room and erupted in a torrent of tears.

“He's been under a lot of stress lately,” Joan said to Dr. Fuller. “This isn't just about Stanley Sue.” She was thinking of my father's death and my mother's Alzheimer's disease.

I was too ashamed to glance up at Dr. Fuller, who had treated our turkeys, rabbits, ducks, geese, and indoor birds over the years but had never seen me in lunatic mode before. I couldn't explain the psychological sickness that I was suffering over my parrot, because I didn't understand it myself. A hand had reached inside me and flicked on a switch labeled “Despair,” and I couldn't find it in the dark to turn it off. I decided it was red, like the button on my mother's furnace.

Without holding out any hope, Dr. Fuller offered to keep Stanley Sue overnight. “We'll give her a few nebulization treatments,” he told me, which meant placing her in an empty aquarium and pumping it full of oxygenated air mixed with an aerosol antibiotic. “That's the most effective way of getting the medicine deep into her lungs.”

“Do what you can,” I sobbed as I floated past him on a flood of tears. “I'll understand if she doesn't make it.”

Out in the parking lot in the passenger's seat of Joan's SUV, I slumped forward like an accident victim, with Joan clutching my arm. A wintry mix of rain and sleet ticked against the glass. Her wipers cut two arcs across the windshield. “She's going to be all right, “she assured me, taking my hand. “She's going to be all right.”

I
STARTED SEARCHING
for signs that she would be okay.

I tried divining meaning behind license plates, newspaper articles, snippets of overheard conversation, items appraised on
Antiques Roadshow,
song lyrics, bank statements,
TV Guide
summaries, cereal boxes, spam e-mail, crossword puzzles, fortune cookies, billboards, dreams,
New Yorker
magazine cartoons, weather reports, gastric upset, and whatever else crossed my path. I blamed this grasping at supernatural straws on my Blessed Sacrament Elementary School years steeped in saints, miracles, heavenly portents, and, of course, incessant guilt—though the truth may have simply been that I was mentally ill. Nevertheless, I kept searching. But nothing transcendental emerged. The ghost cat and K-A-U-F-M-A-N had already spoken their piece.

A
T LEAST STANLEY SUE
had returned home. Dr. Fuller had phoned to tell me, with a smile in his voice, that I could pick her up. But he obviously hadn't approved of my breakdown in his office.

“These birds are extremely perceptive,” he warned me as I hovered near the examination table, “so it is important that you maintain a positive attitude around her. If you're upset, she'll read that. Her recovery depends on getting plenty of encouragement.”

It also depended on medication, the proper temperature, and nutrition. For the foreseeable future, Stanley Sue had to live in an aquarium in our back room to keep her warm and out of drafts—and to prevent her from straining herself by climbing the bars of a cage. To supplement the small amount of food that she ate on her own, I had to tube-feed her a special high-protein, high-vitamin mixture twice a day.

Tube-feeding represented a particular horror that made dosing her with antibiotic seem as easy as flinging table scraps to a hen. Holding the towel-wrapped parrot firmly against my chest, I learned to work an angled metal nozzle down her throat and into her crop, being careful not to take the wrong passage by mistake and cut off her air. Once I had situated the end of the tube in her crop, it would make a telltale bulge an inch below her beak. Then I needed to keep her absolutely still as I depressed the plunger of a fat syringe and trickled in the liquid food. The procedure never went smoothly, thanks to my fear of hurting her. I often had to give up following a botched attempt and try again a few minutes later, once bird and Bob had calmed down. Although I exhibited cowardice over most aspects of my life, I probably couldn't be faulted for squeamishness when it came to the tube-feeding. It was a delicate, nerve-racking, cringe-inducing procedure that reduced each day to a ticking off of hours before I had to do it all over again.

Less unnerving but still fussy was keeping the back room at eighty-five degrees in the middle of December, since it required continual adjustment of a space heater that hadn't been built for precision. The first two nights that Stanley Sue had spent back home, I slept on the couch in the living room. Every two hours I
woke up and, with the aid of a flashlight, checked the thermometer inside the aquarium, then nudged the heater thermostat up or down. It took me a few days to figure out how to keep the room temperature from bouncing around. Once I finally moved back into the bedroom, I still got up once or twice a night to peek at her. If I wielded the flashlight too intrusively, she would nod her head in disapproval and tap her beak against the glass.

She took the abuse remarkably well. I had no idea what an intelligent creature thought of being confined to a glass box. I hated subjecting her to the discomfort and indignity. I removed her bell from her cage and taped it to the lip of the aquarium so that it hung down inside. She couldn't exactly ring it, but she could rattle it in greeting or displeasure, and this seemed to please her. Considering that she was so shy that even introducing a new perch to her cage sent her into nervous throes, she coped courageously with the fish-bowl existence.

Some days, she seemed to show progress. Her breathing difficulties lessened, her eyes grew brighter, her appetite increased. Other days her poor lung function necessitated a hurried trip to Dr. Fuller's office and another nebulization treatment. Because the antibiotics hadn't cured her, he drew blood to check for a fungal disease or virus, but the tests came back negative. “We really need to take an X-ray to find out what's going on inside of her,” he said, “but in her present state, that much handling might be risky.”

The ups and downs drove me crazy. I tried to compensate for the absence of a medical diagnosis by seeking omens in the usual detritus of my life, from clues on
Jeopardy!
to graphics on candy bar wrappers. Nothing pointed toward a cure. My anxiety level shot up when Linda arrived home from grocery shopping one afternoon to announce that she had run into a friend of Henry Murphy's, who'd informed her that our master gardener had dropped dead from a heart attack.

“He sure was a character,” Linda told me. “A couple of days before he passed on, he was over at the cemetery standing on a tombstone, trying to get his kite to fly.”

Cemetery? Flying?
I thought.
This doesn't sound good.

S
TANLEY
S
UE'S SICKNESS
didn't exactly put me in a holiday frame of mind as symbols of Christmas sprung up throughout the house. Santa Clauses invaded our bookshelves. The coffee table sprouted scented candles, ceramic snowmen, and a radioactive red candy dish. Strings festooned with greeting cards traversed the dining room, presenting a navigation hazard to the birds, while the Christmas tree in the living room gave the rabbits a fortified hiding place. Rousting them meant risking a poke in the eye with a branch or, worse, dislodging an ornament and earning a reprimand from Linda.

Most years, I'd joke, “It's my turn to have a ‘Bob Christmas.' “

“What would that consist of?” Linda would ask, playing along.

I'd answer, “Not one thing,” with a wistful sigh.

But holiday cheer was serious business to my wife, and any holiday applied. I rarely escaped the Fourth of July without slapping mosquitoes off my neck while fireworks popped overhead, and even the amorphous Labor Day necessitated a stroll through some park simply to distinguish the occasion from plain vanilla calendar dates. If worry prevented me from being dragged into Christmas festivities with my usual glumness, the least I could do was try to avoid completely ruining the season for her. And she wouldn't let me cancel the celebration anyway. Due to the precariousness of Stanley Sue's condition, we hired Jamie to sit with Stanley Sue and the tricky thermostat while we spent the afternoon of December 24 making merry with Linda's son Ben; his wife, Ann; their kids; and Linda's mom. I watched my watch and barely paid attention to anything else.

Christmas Day at Joan and Jack's proved even bumpier, despite a meat-optional breakfast buffet and the cheery disorder supplied by five cats, two ferrets, a wolf-dog, and a sparrow. Holidays had lacked their center since the death of my father, who had apparently played neutron to the uncharged lesser particles of our family. This year my mother had slipped out of orbit, too. She had forgotten the whole concept of opening presents.

“Just tear the wrapping,” Joan urged her. But even after I ran a finger under the pieces of tape to pop them and unfurled the paper to the first fold, she hesitated. Then she placed the present on the floor beside her chair and examined the wrapping-paper shell instead.

“Whose house is this?” she asked Joan as we nibbled on Bett's molasses cookies.

“It's my house.”

She waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, go on!” She had come to think of Joan and me as college-age kids still living at home.

“How's your bird?” Bett's husband, Dave, asked.

“I'm guardedly optimistic,” I managed to answer.

Just as I was mentally patting myself on the back for putting on a vaguely cheery face, Joan gave Linda a sculpted necklace of an African grey parrot. With its bright red tail, it resembled Dusty but inevitably reminded me of my maroon-tailed Stanley Sue. I ducked into the bathroom and stared at the soap dish for a while.

“We need to get going,” I told Linda mere seconds after we had opened the last present.

“Thanks for coming to see me,” Mom said.

“You're in my house,” Joan reminded her.

When I got back home, Stanley Sue dipped her head, grabbed a beakful of the shredded paper that lined the bottom of the aquarium, and gave it a short toss. “Are you throwing confetti?” I asked
her. But her pleasure at seeing me was short-lived, as I proceeded to tube-feed her. Happy holiday.

I
DECIDED TO GET
Stanley Sue out of the fish tank. If she had to die, she would at least die inside her cage and not in a glass house designed for guppies. I shoved aside the stacks of newspapers that had so far escaped the recycling bin, then nestled two extra dining room chairs together to create a hole in the clutter for her cage. The relocation boosted her morale. She took two helpings of dinner veggies from my spoon, crawled up to her hanging rubber ring at bedtime, and reached out to jangle her bell in protest when I snapped off the light.

Barely had I settled into the shallow indentation of an optimistic groove when Linda received a phone call saying that her mother had been rushed to the hospital with, of all things, pneumonia. I didn't burn my brain cells metaphorically linking her respiratory sickness with the bird's, except to note the evil correspondence as I drove Linda to Battle Creek. Then I headed seventy-five miles back home to begin caring for thirty-some animals on my own.

I slept poorly, worrying about Linda, her mom, and Stanley Sue, and cursed the alarm clock when it hollered in my ear. Getting the duck and goose chores finished before leaving for work meant straggling out of bed under black-of-night conditions to clear snow, chip ice, fill wading pools, replenish drinking water, top off food, bump into things, and make sure that high-strung ganders Matthew and Angel didn't bolt out the doors. Back inside the house I uncovered the birds, fed our three cats—Whiskers and Baby had long since rejoined Nancy Ann—overcooked instant oatmeal on the stove, let the rabbits hop around the dining room as I bolted down my gruel, clipped rectangles of toast to the parakeet and dove cages, coddled a squawking Ollie, filled seed
cups and water bowls, and, taking a deep breath, tube-fed Stanley Sue before slip-sliding to my workplace.

Back from work shortly after noon, I trudged out to the waterfowl pens, tugging open the doors to allow the ducks and geese a chance to turn up their nostrils at a snow-covered yard. I refilled their pools and water dishes and did the same in the barn enclosures. Indoors I let Howard, the parakeets, and the canary out of their cages. The blustering dove chased the smaller birds, who easily outmaneuvered him. I checked the rabbits' food and water, then retreated to the back room for an attempt at a nap disguised as quality time with Stanley Sue while I waited to hear from Linda.

I opened her door and let her clamber to the top of her cage. She watched me as I snaked my legs beneath Linda's desk, threw a pillow onto the floor, and did my best to achieve some comfort in the little room. Troubled by the lack of news from Battle Creek, I fell short of my normal afternoon descent into merciful oblivion. After a few minutes of supine anxiety, I sat up and faced six weeks' worth of unpaid bills. As I assuaged our power company, telephone carrier, and trash service, Stanley Sue navigated her bars to pluck a grape from the tea cart. “That's an awfully good girl,” I said. She chewed it, adding the skin to the peanut shells littering a strip of chain-store advertisements at the foot of her cage. “Keep it up, and we might be able to skip the you-know-what-feeding tonight,” I promised. I had just belatedly paid the fall leaf-raking bill when my hand leaped to the ringing phone.