Buddy Page 14

  As my mind was working a hundred miles an hour, my gaze fell upon Pam, who had picked up the stray broom and begun absently sweeping the floor before placing it back in the closet. A thick strand of blond hair was matted across her tan forehead, making her look at once exhausted and beautiful. And as I looked at her, the thought occurred that she couldn’t help any of this, all the luggage, all the animals, the demands of her kids, the cloud of chaos that sometimes followed her around. She might not necessarily be proud of the cacophony, but she was certainly not going to feel regret about all the wonderful moving parts comprising it. She is an unapologetically caring woman, and with that, there is accumulation. She undoubtedly knew that none of this was easy, not on her and definitely not on the people like me whom she wants in her life. But the kids, the bird, the bunnies, the bedlam, it was what her life was made of, and without it, she wouldn’t be herself. What about my life? Would I really rather have constant order and total silence, everything where I wanted it when I wanted it there? Is that really how you live a meaningful life?

  I recalled Pam once looking around my Boston condo, where precious little was ever out of place, and saying “Everything is always exactly where you left it. Doesn’t that ever start to feel old?” I didn’t have an answer because I didn’t know any other way.

  As I listened to Buddy screeching, I even thought of something else: he, like me, was out of sorts, him in a new environment, me in a new world order. I was probably shouting too, just not aloud. We had more in common than I thought, though I had the ability, even the predisposition, to keep it all inside. So I took a very deep breath, as if I were filling my lungs with perspective, and did something uncommonly—or maybe it’s uncharacteristically—magnanimous. I went out on the deck, Kindle in hand, and reclined on a lounge chair to keep the screaming bird company.

  “You and me both, Buddy,” I said. “We’ll get used to it.”

  He didn’t seem particularly heartened by my pearls of wisdom or my presence. Rather, he came sidestepping over like a boxer in an old movie, stutter steps followed by furious maneuvers with his beak, ominously close and then closer still, until I jumped up with the chair between us, exclaiming “What the hell are you doing?” The damn bird wanted me dead—or at least bloodied. We probably had that in common too. Tonight’s dinner dilemma? Solved: roast chicken. That was when Pam walked outside, once again to the rescue. “You guys not getting along?” she asked, innocently.

  I was about to accuse her bird of attempted murder, but she picked him up in one easy swoop and stroked the side of his face as he quietly cooed his approval.

  Caroline raced up the few steps and asked in that tone of exasperation that kids use better than anyone else, “Can we just go to the beach now?” Pam met my gaze with her clear green eyes and replied, “In a few minutes, Bear. I just think everyone needs a moment to settle down.”

  That evening, after a jarringly early dinner (it seems more like lunch when it’s still light out), I announced that I was taking the dogs to the beach for their nightly walk and offered my standard-issue invitation to the girls to come along. I expected the typical and immediate rejection—“No, thank you, iCarly’s on,” or some variation of it. Instead, Abigail looked at Caroline, Caroline looked at the dogs, and a moment later, there were two kids and two golden retrievers vying for space in the back of my well-worn little SUV, giggling and panting. Pam waved from the top step of the deck and said, “Make sure you come back with everyone you left with.”

  I had gone on hundreds of evening walks on Goose Rocks Beach, often with Pam but even more often in the sole company of my dog or dogs. On almost every single one of those walks, I’d see men of about my age playing Wiffle ball or beach bocce or touch football, with groups of young boys and girls. Sometimes it would just be a father and his son out for a swim at dusk or playing a simple game of catch like my father used to do with me. Every time, every night, every scene, I’d feel a flicker of regret, nothing overpowering but very real, as if I had missed something that I could never get back, and much as I might have loved Harry or, later, Baker, it would never be the same.

  That evening was different. The girls sprinted for the edge of the water and immediately started to play a game they described as “Jump the waves.” So did I.

  “Brian, you’ve got to jump higher!” Abigail exhorted me. So I did.

  Then they ran along the shoreline chasing the dogs, which quickly transformed into a game in which the dogs ran along the shoreline chasing them. And then we all played a game of “Red light, green light” at my suggestion, spreading out along a wide stretch of hard beige sand on the increasingly empty beach.

  When I announced a red light, they would screech to a stop, prompting me to put my face right up to theirs in inspection. If they laughed, they were sent back to the starting line, and Caroline always did. We took turns. We shouted commands. We pleaded for mercy. For that hour, as the light faded from the vast sky, I felt myself living the life I had watched from a distance all those years ago, and it was nice—better than nice, actually. Well, I was living it until Abigail suddenly announced, in no uncertain terms, “I’m bored.”

  “Me too,” Caroline said. A moment before, they had been giggling up a storm.

  So the five of us made for the car and headed home, the girls complaining now that the sandy, wet dogs were leaning against them. At the house, they ran inside as if they hadn’t seen their mother in years, so quickly that they left the car doors open and the dogs looking at me confused.

  “How was it?” Pam asked them.

  “It was okay,” Abigail said.

  “I’m hungry,” Caroline added.

  Pam looked at me for some hint of what had happened. I offered a modest shrug and said, “Well, I thought it was great.”

  That night, after the girls were asleep, Pam told me, pointblank, “I’m putting Buddy to bed in the basement.”

  Oh, God.

  A word about my Maine basement: immaculate. Some other words: sanctuary, simple, soothing. There are a couple of others as well, such as pristine and uncluttered. You could eat a gourmet dinner off my basement floor. A Massachusetts General neurologist would feel comfortable doing brain surgery down there. It has all the usual basement accessories, such as a washer and dryer, hot-water heater, furnace, and all that, all the accessories completely accessible—and precious little else, which is exactly the way I like it. In my real life, my city life, I didn’t have a basement. I didn’t have a lawn either, which is why my Maine basement and lawn made me feel so, well, adult. City life is complicated, messy, cold, and sometimes hard. I wanted my country life to be its restorative opposite. That explains why I like to cut my own grass, apply my own fertilizer, and keep my cellar lovingly unburdened of all the junk most people acquire and hide, never to be used again. I wanted the lawn thick and the basement sparse. I specifically remember Pam telling me she was putting the bird in the basement, and I explicitly remember her seeing the look of horror and annoyance on my face. She said that everything down there was washable and she would clean it herself.

  I just didn’t appreciate the immediate, real-world implications of the maneuver.

  At dawn’s first light, I came to realize that Buddy had somehow positioned himself directly under my first-floor bedroom—to be more specific, the clever little guy got directly under my bed. When he awoke, he was undoubtedly filled with questions, such as What the hell am I doing here, and where is everyone else? So he let out a thunderbolt of a cock-a-doodle-doo that slammed through the bedroom floor like a jackhammer, blazed through the mattress, and sent me just about hurtling skyward toward the ceiling fan in an Exorcist-like stunt. I could actually feel myself hit the bed again, which only seemed to cause him to screech anew. Was his beak in my goddamn pillow, pecking at the insides of my brain?

  Slapped awake, I found myself inexplicably breathless, as if I had just gone on a long bike ride in extreme heat. The room was mostly dark, though through the windows I could
see the very first drops of light in the morning sky. I looked over at Pam, but there was just the vacant expanse of white comforter. She was gone or, more likely, had never been there. The last I had seen of her was when she said she was going upstairs to see the kids off to sleep. She’d likely fallen asleep beside them or between them, exhausted at the close of another long day.

  The bird’s screeches made me wonder about the quality of my flooring. There didn’t seem to be anything between me and the monster’s voice box. I needed him to stop, desperately so, but I sure as hell wasn’t going down there, not after the porch scene the afternoon before, when he’d seemed as though he wanted to take me down, and not when he was this agitated. I lay in bed amid the avian screams, hoping, praying that Pam would again take charge. I mean, she had to hear him upstairs. Hell, my friends in Boston could probably hear him.

  Finally I heard merciful footsteps on the staircase, the opening of the cellar door, and someone descending the steps. Then I heard Pam’s voice, muffled by the floor and choked by sleep. “Boo-Boo, you poor guy, all unsettled. It’s okay. You’re safe down here.”

  He gave her a long, explanatory caw, the two of them continuing this interspecies dialogue. Next thing I knew, Pam was falling into bed beside me, still wearing the same shorts and T-shirt she’d had on the day before, her hair a tangle of wisps and knots.

  “He’s just getting used to things,” she said, kissing the side of my head. I was about to respond, but she was already snoring softly. She hadn’t moved an inch when I got up an hour or so later to take two excited dogs to the beach for their morning romp in the sand and waves. Afterward, standing inside a delightful store called Cape Porpoise Kitchen, where I always got my morning coffee, the nice young woman approached and as I said, “The usual,” she pulled out a small bag for my muffin. My cell phone rang. “Excuse me one second,” I said, stepping away to take the call.

  It was Caroline’s squeaky voice on the other end of the line. “Brian, where are you?”

  “At the store, cutie. Where are you?”

  “Um, I’m at home. Hey, can you get me a cinnamon muffin and a toasted bagel, and Abby wants a blueberry muffin.”

  “Of course—”

  “And Mom wants an everything bagel.”

  “I’m on the way,” I said. “How’s Buddy?”

  “He’s loud.”

  And the phone went dead.

  I told the young woman what I needed, which was much more than I usually got: half a dozen muffins, a couple of bagels, another cup of coffee for Pam.

  She smiled. Maybe I was reading too much into this, but it looked like an admiring smile, a smile that said, Hey, maybe this slug isn’t just in it for himself. “Full house?” she asked.

  I nodded. “Kids, dogs, woman,” adding under my breath “rooster.”

  “Excuse me?” She looked legitimately surprised.

  “Toaster,” I said, quickly. “Would you mind throwing the bagels in the toaster?”

  Ends up, this was a rare time that Pam was wrong. Buddy never did settle down. For hours at a time, he stood at the doors peering in with a pleading, desperate look on his twitchy little face. He constantly fouled my deck. He bolted through the door whenever anyone slipped it open for any brief period of time. He charged my legs so often that I took to carrying a rolled-up newspaper in my back pocket, though that only convinced him of his relevance and pushed him to keep charging and pecking.

  For days at a time he did nothing but crow, to the point that even when he wasn’t crowing, I could hear it. The sound was stuck in my mind, maybe forever.

  Great vacation. I couldn’t even hear myself think, not that I’d want to, because the only thing I was really thinking was a string of vulgarities mixed in with fifty ways to kill your chicken. Where the hell is Maine’s famous wildlife when you need it most? I didn’t need a herd of anything, just one little fisher cat.

  “I’m really sorry,” Pam kept repeating over the screeching. “He’s just so scared.” When I barely responded, she added, “It’s my own fault. I shouldn’t have brought him up.” She knew full well that I couldn’t take the dejected Pam, so I would invariably give in and halfheartedly say, “It’s not all that bad.”

  “What?”

  Louder now, over the crowing: “I said it’s not so bad.”

  Buddy wasn’t eating the cracked corn that Pam put on the grass. He wasn’t eating the chicken fingers—yes, I know, it’s bizarre—that she diced up and piled in a bowl on the brick walk by the driveway. The poor bird was starving himself out of fear. It hit a point, when he slipped through the door and raced through the house squawking with exhilarated relief before being carried back outside by one of the kids, that I actually started feeling bad for him, which I hadn’t thought possible.

  And then something happened that was beyond the pale. The kids were getting ready for bed, and Abigail went into the cellar to grab her pajamas from the dryer. There was an urgent squeal. Pam raced downstairs. I heard crying. Then I heard Pam shouting in a way that she hardly ever does, “That’s it, Buddy. Now you’ve done it. You’ve gone after my kids. You’re out of here. See if you like living in the woods. Let’s see how aggressive you are out there!”

  I walked down the stairs slowly and quietly. I’m not sure why. Abigail was sobbing but, in truth, completely unharmed. It was the shock more than the beak that bothered her. Pam was crying softly as well. Everybody’s nerves were frayed. Buddy was standing in front of them on the cement floor, his head down, clucking forlornly. It was as if the whole tense, often miserable vacation had come to a head in the basement of my house that night: the fear, the anxiety, the constant screeching.

  In that moment, looking at Buddy staring at the floor, making guttural noises that I had never heard from him before, I felt legitimately sorry for the bird. He was out of place. He was frightened. He probably wasn’t sleeping. We knew he wasn’t eating. And in a moment of uncertainty, he had pecked at Abigail, hurting her feelings more than her physical being—but still.

  “Listen,” I said, and I couldn’t believe the words coming out of my mouth. Everybody turned to face me. Buddy even looked up, surprised. “He didn’t mean to do anything bad,” I said. “He’s just really anxious about everything right now. And because of that, so are we.”

  Me defending Buddy. It was the start of something odd.

  Later that night, as I sealed up the house before bed, I saw light seeping from the crack between the cellar door and the floor, so I returned to the scene of the crime to check on the feathery criminal.

  The only problem was, he wasn’t there—not in the basement, not in the cold storage room, not on the blankets that Pam had spread as his bed across the floor, not behind the furnace or the hot-water heater or anywhere else I looked.

  “Buddy,” I said in a loud whisper again and again and again. “Buddy, where are you?”

  I checked the door to make sure it was locked. I had bizarre images of Buddy, so despondent over pecking at Abigail and losing Pam’s trust, wandering into the dark night clucking that he wasn’t worthy anymore.

  “Buddy, c’mon, where the hell are you?”

  And that’s when I heard it, a soft cackle, not really anything that comes out of his beak, but something that starts and stays in his throat, kind of like the roostery version of a human humming. I whirled around toward the washing machine and dryer, the seeming source of the sound, but didn’t see anything.

  “Buddy? Buddy, are you there?”

  That same noise, faint but real. I walked over to the appliances, figuring he must have wedged himself in behind them, and that’s when I saw it: his little red comb sticking out from the tub of the washing machine. It was a top-loading washer; the lid was open; and Buddy had somehow either fallen or jumped inside.

  “Buddy, what the hell are you doing in there?” I asked.

  By now I was standing above him and he gave me a look that said, What difference does it make, moron? Get me out of here. I went to r
each my hands in, tentatively, but he clucked and poked in my direction with his beak. Even then, vulnerable, needing my help, he wouldn’t accept it.

  I thought about leaving him in there for the night, but something stopped me, something beyond the obvious fact that he’d be defecating in my washing machine. I didn’t want him breaking a wing or having a panic-induced heart attack or—and I can’t believe I was thinking it, but I was—just being completely uncomfortable for the night. So I went upstairs, to the second floor to get Pam, who, as usual, had fallen asleep with the kids.

  She opened her eyes slowly as I gently touched her shoulder. “It’s Buddy,” I said. She bolted upright, her eyes wide, panic spreading across her tired features.

  “He’s okay,” I said, “but he’s stuck.”

  She maneuvered between her kids and climbed out of bed in the dark room, followed me downstairs, and burst out laughing as she came across Buddy sitting in the tub of the washing machine, his head sticking out but his body concealed within. She reached down fearlessly, pulled him up, and pressed him against her chest as she exclaimed, “Oh, Boo-Boo, you fell in the washing machine. You poor guy.” She kissed his face as he cooed his appreciation.

  She poured him a small bowl of cracked corn from the feed container, placed him gently on his blankets, and sat down for a moment beside him. Not that either of them noticed, but I headed for the stairs.

  It had been a long week, which is not how my vacations usually felt. There were thousands of crows, constant anxiety, and death wishes from just about everyone involved. And that was just the first day. It got worse as the break went along. And at the center, there was this simple comedic bird who was only trying to fend for himself in what he suddenly saw as a menacing world. The good news, I hoped, was that Buddy had surely seen the last of Maine—and Maine had seen the last of Buddy.