Fowl Weather (2 page)

“What is it?”

I raised a finger to my lips. “Monkeys, it sounds like.”

She flashed me an exasperated look.

“Or baboons,” I told her. “I haven't quite gotten it yet. Listen. They'll do it again.”

We stood quietly as air hissed through the furnace duct at the base of the sink. The bathtub drain gurgled right on cue.

“That?” she asked. I shook my head vehemently, frowning and wiggling my hand toward the window. “Something outdoors? An animal?” she quizzed me, as if we were playing charades. “It's probably just a couple of raccoons.”

“Raccoons?” I followed her into the living room. “In February? They're hibernating.”

“So are all the Michigan monkeys.”

I threw a heavy jacket over my powder-blue pajama shirt, then stuffed my bare feet and green plaid pajama pants cuffs into a pair of boots. Rummaging through the back of the pet supplies closet, I fished out a flashlight that, quite unexpectedly, lit when my thumb clicked the switch. “I'd better take a peek at the ducks,” I announced. “If those are raccoons, I want to make sure everybody's safe.” As I pulled a stocking cap over my ears, I told her, “I know what raccoons sound like, and those things aren't raccoons.”

I didn't worry excessively about our backyard birds. Barring a grizzly bear attack, they were secure in their pens—and I hadn't tangled with a grizzly since the Ice Age of 1967. Thinking back, I decided it had probably been a snarling Sister Rachel who had chased me underneath a desk in my Catholic Central High School English class. In those days, I'd paid scant attention to animals. But after I'd married Linda, ten years ago, we'd slowly started accumulating critters, and I had grown fond of even the most illtempered ones.

Much of the accumulating was inadvertent. Our first duck cropped up when my brother-in-law Jack rescued her from the parking lot of an auto-parts warehouse whose employees were peppering her with stones. We had bought another duck to keep her company and within a scant few years had also taken in orphaned geese, turkeys, and hens. Similar chaos had unfolded inside the house. We had naively begun with a belligerent pet
bunny, added a canary, a dove, and a tyrannical parrot, and soon found ourselves providing a home for the winged and unwanted—including the abandoned baby songbirds that Linda raised and released each summer.

At first, the joys and jolts of caring for thirty-odd oddball animals had worn me down to a nubbin. Gradually, however, the relentless grind of countless cleanup chores, endless home veterinary tasks, and limitless feedings had become as easy as falling off a log and sustaining contusions from head to toe. My unusual life had ceased to strike me as extraordinary any longer. I longed for the unexpected, and that was always a mistake.

I
DIDN'T SERIOUSLY
expect to discover a troupe of primates cavorting on the back deck. That just didn't make sense. But I did hold out hope that a supernatural animal might be paying us an interdimensional visit. I'd been reading John A. Keel's
Strange Creatures from Time and Space
and Loren Coleman's
Mysterious America,
about anomalous critters that show up where they don't belong. Phantom kangaroos bounded across Chicago suburbs, panthers roamed Michigan's Oakland County, and birds the size of ponies buzzed Ohio Valley farms. The breathless possibility that the miraculous could leak into even a life as dull as mine was all there in matter-of-fact black and white. So if a saddle-soap salesman in Saskatoon could surprise a Sasquatch, I surmised, why couldn't I astonish an ape in our apple tree?

I walked out the front door of a house on the edge of slumber and entered a world in turmoil. One moment I'd been sinking into the nightly lull after tucking in a dozen indoor animals; the next moment I was immersed in swirling snow. The storm had moved in without so much as a polite rap on the door to inform us it was coming. Five hours ago, when I had changed the water in the duck
wading pools, I hadn't seen so much as a feather in the air. But six inches of snow had piled up in the dark, like compounded interest on a credit card.

Leaving the glow of the house behind, I trudged toward the silhouette of our barn. Raising the flashlight beam from the ground encased me in a blinding capsule of confetti. Next to a fenced-in area where Linda grew sunflowers in the summer, I hurried a little. That part of the yard always felt creepy after dark, as if space aliens regularly picked me up, wiped my memory clean, then plopped me down among the seed hulls. I coughed to announce my presence to any entities within earshot.

The barn door was securely shut. Nothing could have gotten inside, but I gave the interior a check with my flashlight, throwing shadows of roosting hens around the walls and annoying our Muscovy duck Victor, who was instantly at my side panting and hissing with menace. “You're okay, hon,” I told him. I swept past the amber eye of a chicken, slammed the door behind me, and headed for the pen behind the house. As far as I could tell, the snowfall was fluffy and unbroken by the tracks of a giant hairy hominid. The ducks muttered as I checked the latches of their pens. Our goose Liza croaked an inquisitive honk, urging her sister Hailey to second the question, but I moved on before they decided to erupt.

As I followed my footprints back to the front yard, I realized, to my amazement, that I had actually enjoyed my walk—somewhat, more or less, at least. I hated winter and any other season that made me lace myself up in thigh-high boots. But the disorienting aspects of the storm had won me over. The snow had camouflaged the landmarks of our property by adding rounded, flowing corners to the shrubs, mailbox, and porch steps. The sidewalk, gravel shoulder, and asphalt road had completely vanished. Ten feet from my own
front door, I was in terra incognita. I stared at the streaming snow-flakes, doing my best to hallucinate that they were static and I was shooting upward, but the house and Linda's car shot upward with me, and that ruined the illusion. I gave up and retreated indoors.

“Did you see it?” Linda asked as I stomped my boots on the doormat that read
THE TARTES.
Stripping off my coat in the living room, I felt chilly for the first time. It took me a moment to recall what she was asking me about.

“No,” I said. “Nothing. Not even a raccoon.”

B
ACK HOME FROM
work the next day, I walked into the kitchen to find Stanley Sue settled comfortably on the countertop. From the fresh set of chew marks decorating our wooden bread box, I could see what she'd been doing. For months she had made the tops of Bertie's and Walter's rabbit cages her base of operation for launching attacks on the already decimated windowsill and floor molding. And if the bunnies were foolish enough to rouse from their daylight-hours naps, she might snap ineffectually at them through the wire mesh while strutting above their heads.

For reasons known only to Stanley Sue, one afternoon she'd abandoned her obsession with rabbits and woodwork, marched across the linoleum, and applied herself to the kitchen instead. She attached herself by the beak, opening and slamming shut any cupboard doors within reach, then beveling the corners to suit her artistic sensibilities. Climbing a ladder of drawer pulls, she gnawed her way up to the countertop, adorning the Formica edge with a signature chip before sculpting the front of the silverware drawer. We tolerated all this destruction because it unfolded slowly over time. But Stanley finally went too far when she tested her athletic abilities by picking up Linda's cow-shaped ceramic spoon rest and giving it a discus toss.

We'd already limited her out-of-cage hours to circumvent problems with the other birds. We rarely let Howard loose at the same time as Stanley Sue, because the defenseless dove would foolishly pick a fight with our winged whittler. We couldn't trust Elliot the canary and our parakeets to keep clear of her as they buzzed between the rooms like colorful bumblebees. And the incessantly squawking Ollie proved too tempting a target for any of us. More than once, I had lunged at him myself. Remarkably, our two African grey parrots barely acknowledged each other's existence, though Stanley Sue had enjoyed ambushing her previous owner's macaw. That would have been a bad mistake with Dusty, who came out twice a day to play with Linda and menace me.

Once we'd made the decision to keep Stanley Sue out of the kitchen, barring her way seemed ridiculously easy at first. She was inexplicably afraid of intimacy with many common household objects, including cardboard wrapping-paper tubes. We placed one of these across the floor in the space between the refrigerator and the dishwasher where the dining room became the kitchen. It made a most effective gate. Whenever Linda inadvertently squashed a tube underfoot on her way to the microwave with a heat pack for her back, she would simply replace the tube with another from the top of the refrigerator. A cluster huddled there, awaiting duty for thumping to drive the bunnies back into their cages when their morning or evening liberation came to an end.

Although Stanley Sue could fly, it apparently never dawned on her that she could effortlessly sail above the cylindrical sentinel. The tube's terrible power extended from floor to ceiling in an impenetrable curtain. Her timidity lasted just over a week. One day my e-mailing session upstairs was interrupted by the clunk of a drinking glass downstairs. I found Stanley Sue at the sink in an animated mood. The cardboard tube lay at a confused angle across
the floor, the upended glass had darkened the rug with spots of water, and all was right with Stanley Sue's world again. She had finally mustered the courage to shove the tube aside.

A barricade of three tubes seemed promising. But its deterrent effect petered out after only an hour. Shooing Stanley Sue back to Bertie's cage top, I placed our stuffed sock monkey Ed on the kitchen counter. At first sight of his face, her pupils dilated in distress and her feathers flattened against her body. She elongated her neck and stared at Ed with deep suspicion from across the room. The doll, which my Grandmother Ordowski had made for me decades ago, was now reborn as a scarecrow. To reinforce Ed's menacing potential, I would occasionally lift him a few inches above the countertop and flop him back in forth in a madcap monkey dance. From Stanley Sue's cocked head and taut posture, it appeared that she was genuinely relieved to have resumed her post at Bertie's cage.

She had even invented a new project for herself. By poking her beak between the cage bars at just the right spot, she could grab the bunny's food dish and dump it upside down. It was a black afternoon when I headed to the kitchen for coffee and encountered Stanley Sue not merely sitting on the counter but further elevated on top of a gallon jug of spring water, as if to underscore her newfound primacy over the stuffed primate. Ed slumped ineffectually against the bread box.

“You're not doing your job,” I informed him.

“I chased her off there fifteen minutes ago,” Linda told me as she rolled in the vacuum cleaner to tidy up the dining room for the ninetieth time that day. “She just goes right back up there again. We'll either have to keep her in her cage or get something with flashing lights to keep her off my counter.”

“What do you mean, ‘something with flashing lights'?”

A
HORRIFIC HOWL
close to the house jolted me awake—a long, descending banshee call resembling a siren. Clear, unquavering, and downright scary, the sound had the same round-toned
whoop
quality that I had heard on the night of the furious snow. It wasn't the wail of a dog or a coyote. It was primate-like rather than canine. An ascending howl followed, briefer but just as window rattling. I reached out a reassuring arm to Linda that was actually intended to reassure me. But her place in the bed was empty. I remembered that before we had turned in, she had told me that her back was bothering her and she might move upstairs so as not to bother me. In her absence I hugged my pillow.

Although I had wanted another chance to hear the mystery animal, this was too much of a good thing and far too close besides. It might, after all, be how Bigfoot announced his presence before peeling the wall off a house. In full light of day or by the flickering light of
The Beverly Hillbillies,
the howl would have intrigued me rather than compacting me under the covers. But this wasn't a mere counterpoint to a host of familiar noises. It was the classic cry of a monster in the dark that creature-feature movies had warned me about since childhood. Only a bit player slated for first-reel extinction would get up and investigate.

I lay quietly as the clock ticked off my fears, hoping to hear telltale thumps from above, indicating that Linda had gotten out of bed and was on her way downstairs. She would be worried about the safety of the ducks rather than a mythical being. Checking on the animals was exactly what I needed to do, even if it involved nothing more physically compromising than glancing out at the backyard pen. If I was fortunate, I might merely witness an unearthly apparition that would doom me to spend the rest of my days on talk shows, trying to convince jaded studio audiences that hairy humanoids were real. I might not get off that easily,
though. I might witness a scene so unimaginable—such as a peanut-shaped spaceship piloted by an African grey parrot—as to crack my poor brain open like an egg.

Marshaling my courage, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and sat for a while. Then I sat for a while longer. Having pretty much mastered sitting, I forced myself to my feet. Turning nervousness into momentum, I marched through the dark into the living room, then into a dining room flooded with moonlight. Our birds and rabbits snoozed peacefully in their cages without a care. Through the window, the ducks and geese at the bottom of the hill appeared unfazed as well. The pen doors were safely closed. The wire walls and roof remained intact, and the wooden uprights hadn't been splintered like so many matchsticks by a raging behemoth.

The outdoors looked ominous in the glow of the nearly full moon. The woods were a confusion of inky shapes reaching up and thrown back down to the ground in sinister shadows capable of concealing a particularly skinny intruder—such as my evil twin. Each ditch and depression in the softly glowing snow hosted dark areas that a mouse-size being could have made into a hiding place. The spectral quality of the scene and my giddy state of mind created an inverted sense of seeing that pushed the familiar further away rather than bringing it closer, as if I were staring at an X-ray of our property. I found myself actually hoping for a bit of a scare. Even so, I wasn't able to psych myself into projecting a mystery animal onto the landscape. A deer in the right spot might have helped. I would even have welcomed a skunk.