Home from the Vinyl Cafe (14 page)

It was now a quarter to six.

Dave returned to the pet store and came back with a bag of mealworms. He set them on the counter and wondered how he was going to get them to the feeder. The idea of dipping his hands into the seething bag revolted him. He tried a pair of Morley’s oven mitts, but they were too large and clumsy to work with. He imagined sucking them up with the turkey baster, and experimented with the barbecue tongs. He settled on the flour scoop.

The bird didn’t stop eating until nine-thirty that night. She’s going to be sick, thought Dave.

Then he looked at his nearly empty bag of mealworms and thought, I’m going to be eaten out of house and home by a bird.

He went back to the pet store first thing in the morning.

When he came home at supper, only half the worms he had put out that morning had been eaten. The rest were frozen to the feeder.

It took only a few days for the bird to train Dave.

By the end of the week, they had worked out a routine that seemed effective. A scoop of worms at breakfast, a scoop of worms at lunch, and a scoop of worms at dinner. It meant Dave had to come home at noon.

“I don’t mind,” he said.

And he didn’t. He would fix soup and cheese, or a sandwich, and would sit at the table and watch his bird through the sliding glass doors that led out to the backyard.

She was not a spectacular bird; she didn’t have the blood reds of a cardinal or the rich yellows of a fall warbler. On dull
days she almost looked dingy. But in some lights, she was beautiful. If the sun was low and the light warm, she would glow with a reddy hue. Almost gold.

Usually, she spent only a moment or two on the feeder, preferring, it seemed, to eat her worms in the obscurity of the hedge, but one sunny afternoon she sat on the feeder for nearly five minutes, looking around and singing softly.

Dave knew that if Gerta was right, the bird would die if he stopped feeding it. By February he had bought so many mealworms that the pet store was giving him a discount. He felt a sense of pride about what he was doing—he felt honored that the bird had chosen him.

It was not long after Valentine’s Day when Gerta mentioned the bird to her friend Nick, who, she said, was a bit of a birder. She brought Nick over that evening so he could see it for himself. Nick watched for half an hour and said, “I’m not sure. Do you mind if I call my friend Bob?”

Bob was there in under an hour. He was wearing camouflage pants and a heavy sweater with a high neck. He was carrying a pair of binoculars in a canvas shoulder sack. He took one look at Dave’s bird and asked if he could use the telephone. He didn’t even use his binoculars.

“I’m phoning from Toronto,” he said into the phone, his right foot bouncing up and down excitedly. “I’m in some guy’s kitchen.” He smiled at Dave, then looked at him quizzically. “About fifteen minutes from downtown. Right?”

Dave nodded.

“You aren’t going to believe this,” he said into the phone. “
Summer
tanager.”

When he hung up, he turned and smiled at Dave and Sam. “That’s the bird of the winter you’ve got there.” He pulled out
his
bird book—the
National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds
of North America
—and flipped it open and pointed at a picture. Dave peered at the page and nodded.

The man said, “There are a few of my friends who would love to see it. Would that be okay?”

Morley came home at seven.

“Guess what we have in the backyard,” said Sam.

“What?” said Morley, throwing groceries on the kitchen counter.

Sam looked at Dave.

“What?” said Morley.

“The bird in the backyard,” said Dave. “The one I’ve been feeding worms …”

“It’s
cosmic
,” said Sam.

“It’s a summer tanager,” said Dave.

That night as Morley was brushing her teeth, Dave said, “Some people might drop by in the morning.”

“Who?” said Morley.

“To look at the bird,” said Dave.

“What bird?” said Morley.

“The bird I feed the mealworms to,” said Dave. “It’s supposed to winter in Brazil.”

“It chose our backyard over Brazil?”

“So people want to see it,” said Dave, “because it’s a rarity. It’ll be okay. These are birders we’re talking about—nice people.”

“I don’t want people poking around our backyard in the morning,” said Morley. “Can’t they wait until the weekend?”

It was so early that the sun wasn’t up when Dave heard the noise. He listened for a moment and then he thought, Raccoons. And he went back to sleep.

When he woke the second time, Arthur was beside the bed, whinging—padding to the window and back again. Raccoons aren’t that noisy, thought Dave dimly. Then it dawned on him: Someone was stealing the bikes. He leaped out of bed and opened the curtains and squinted into the backyard. There was a smudge of gray on the horizon. When his eyes focused, he gasped and stepped back from the window and said, “Sweet Jesus on a bicycle.”

There were maybe fifty motionless men lined up in the shadows behind his house—strung out along the alley, leaning over his back fence, and scanning his backyard with large binoculars. Dave inched forward and peeked out again. Then he pulled the curtains shut and sat on the edge of his bed.

“Houston,” he said softly, “we have a problem.”

Morley mumbled and rolled over. Dave said, “Don’t wake up. I need a plan before you wake up.”

He wasn’t saying these things out loud. He was saying these things in his head. It was the closest he had come to prayer since last Christmas morning when he defrosted the turkey with the hair dryer.

He needed to wake up. “Coffee,” he said prayerfully.

It was only when Dave was downstairs, standing in the middle of the brightly lit kitchen, scratching, that the enormity of his problem struck him. As far as the fifty men in his backyard were concerned, he was standing on a spotlit stage. He stopped scratching. Then he turned off the kitchen light.

It was six-forty-five
A.M .

Fifteen minutes later, Sam’s clock radio snapped on. Here we go, thought Dave. Liftoff. He was sitting at the kitchen table, not sure what he should do. Before he could do anything, the phone rang. It was Carl Lowbeer.

“Dave,” he said. He was whispering. “There is something terrible going on outside.”

Not as terrible, however, as what was going on at the Turlingtons’. Two doors down, at the Turlingtons’ house, Mary, Bert, and the Turlington twins were lying on the floor of Mary and Bert’s bedroom with their hands over the heads.

At six-fifty-five
A.M.
, Rachel, one of the twins, had looked out her bedroom window to see if it was good snowball snow. When Rachel saw the men with the binoculars, she ran to her parents’ bed and said, “The house is surrounded by police. I think it’s the swap team.”

Bert, who is not what you’d call a morning person, nearly stroked out when he saw the men in the dark jackets with their binoculars trained at his kids’ window. His first thought was the carpet installers who had been accidentally shot dead through their motel-room door by overzealous police in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. It was a case of mistaken identity—as this obviously was, too. Bert dropped to the floor and crawled around his house, waking everyone up.

“We’re surrounded,” he said. “Get into our bedroom. Fast.”

And now the whole family was there except for Bert’s fifteen-year-old son, Adam, who had locked himself into the upstairs bathroom. Bert wormed his way into the hall and pounded on the door.

“What are you doing?” he howled.

Adam, who had never gotten up so fast in his life, was desperately trying to flush the first marijuana he had ever bought down the toilet. He had bought it three weeks before from a kid at school. Afraid to smoke it, he had hidden it in an old pair of sneakers in the back of his closet. Now the marijuana kept floating to the top of the toilet. And the police were here to arrest him.

Bert inched his way back to the bedroom and pulled himself up to the window to peer over the sill. There were cars
everywhere, parked on both sides of the street and pulled up onto the sidewalk. Bert’s heart was pounding. There were men who looked like they were carrying telescopes running down Dave’s driveway toward his backyard.

High-powered rifles, thought Bert.

The Lowbeers’ dog was barking.

A man came running out of Dave’s yard and pointed directly at Bert’s house. Bert gasped and dropped to the floor.

“Blessed Mother of Mercy,” he said. “We are going to die.”