Authors: Christopher Hebert
The man rolled the extinguished butt between his fingers. “Whatever you want them to be.”
Michael Boni gave him twenty dollars for the pair, cage included.
As the truck’s engine rumbled and caught, hacking in place, Michael Boni drifted over to the open window. “What do they eat?”
“Bird food?” the man said, reaching for the crank, closing the gap. Then he was gone.
Michael Boni named the one with the orange crown Priscilla, a name fit for a princess. The black-headed one was Caesar.
Forgetting the blades, he went straight to a used bookstore near his apartment, and in the third book he tried, a hardcover branded with library stamps, he found a picture of a twin to Priscilla but with a bit more yellow at the throat. It was the first he’d ever heard of a caique.
Two days after Michael Boni took the birds home, Caesar began plucking feathers from his chest. Michael Boni brought him seeds and fruit, but Caesar wouldn’t eat. The book didn’t explain why. Michael Boni might have thought it was normal, but Priscilla’s appetite was good. She ate her share and Caesar’s, too.
The next morning Michael Boni found Caesar on his side on the bottom of the cage, breathing heavily. The bird didn’t object when Michael Boni picked him up. He seemed to like being cradled, nestling his head in the warmth of Michael Boni’s armpit. They passed the day that way.
Twenty-four hours later Caesar was dead. There was no hiding what had happened from Priscilla. When Michael Boni carried Caesar outside, leaving Priscilla alone in the cage, she responded by flinging herself against the bars.
Michael Boni buried Caesar in the yard. Afterward he came back inside. Priscilla was flapping and strutting around angrily. He opened
the door to the cage, wanting to hold her, to comfort her. The nip she took from his hand later healed into a crescent-moon-shaped scar.
A week passed before she would let him touch her again.
The baby chicks in the pen at his feet had none of Priscilla’s personality. Maybe that would come later. So Michael Boni picked five that looked energetic and healthy. The kid also gave him a sack of rations and another of scratch.
“What else do you need?”
There was a long silence as Michael Boni squinted at the balls of fluff in the box. Only now did it occur to him to wonder what Priscilla was going to make of this.
The kid kept staring at him, waiting for an answer.
By then, spring was over, and the hot soup of Michigan summer had begun, Michael Boni’s second in his grandmother’s house. Unlike his old apartment, which at least had a window unit, his grandmother’s place had no air-conditioning at all, no escape from the swelter.
Carrying the box of chicks inside from the truck, Michael Boni thought about the red bulb at the feed store. Was it really possible the birds would need even more heat than this? The book he’d bought to learn about caiques was strictly exotic. Nothing at all in it about chickens. So Michael Boni brought the box into the bedroom, pressing it against the radiator.
Down the hall, Priscilla was pacing. He could hear the clatter of angry claws on the bottom of the cage. How did she know? He’d come in through the front door to avoid passing her room. Could she smell the chicks? Could she hear the muffled cheeps?
“I’ll be there in a minute,” Michael Boni said, hoping the sound of his voice might calm her.
There was no way to get to his workshop without passing Priscilla’s door. He darted past as fast as he could, but the moment she saw him, Priscilla let out a squeak.
“A minute,” he said. “Just a minute.”
He returned from the shop with a garbage bag full of sawdust. Priscilla followed him with her beak, wailing like a siren.
“Just a second,” he said.
He sifted the sawdust into the box a handful at a time. The five chicks fled into the farthest corner, huddling, whistling their own alarmed tune. He nestled a ramekin of water and another of rations into the sawdust.
As soon as he turned on the heat, the pipes began to thunk, seeming to ask if he was sure. It was a good question. During his first winter he’d discovered the radiator could be as cold as a sewer pipe one moment and then bolting like a steam engine the next.
Back in the bedroom, he pulled off his socks and shoes, and then he waited, curled up on the floor.
It surprised him how helpless he felt.
Wobbling around on their ridiculous legs, the chicks couldn’t seem to find the food. Michael Boni kept thinking about the tiny, cold weight of Caesar, the ever fainter rise and fall of his scabby, featherless breast. He tapped at the seed with his finger.
Cheep, cheep, cheep
, he said. The chicks tripped over his finger as if they were blind. Maybe they were. It was impossible to tell what was going on behind those tiny black specks.
One at a time, he picked up the chicks and dipped their beaks into the food and water, and several of them stayed behind for a meal.
Within an hour, the house had turned tropical. Sweat was speeding down his spine and pooling beneath him. He got up to check the thermostat. Ninety-five. He stripped down to his briefs. In the other room, the siren still wailed. And now Priscilla was slamming her rattle against the bars of the cage, sounding like an ambulance crashing over a curb stacked with garbage cans.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’m coming.”
The moment he appeared in her doorway, the siren faded to a whistle.
“Here I am,” he said. “Here I am.”
Her head wove back and forth in sharp, halting jerks.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”
She took a step back from the door of the cage. He took that as a sign she was ready to be calm.
The moment he opened the door, her beak came down like a spike.
“Fuck!” Michael Boni leaped back, pressing his hand to his mouth, a spot of sour blood on his lips.
Priscilla hopped from the cage to the bureau to the desk. He realized she was making for the hall.
“Oh, no you don’t,” he said, getting to the door just in time.
Priscilla watched with tilted head as he shook the pain from his hand. Smugly, it seemed to him. She barely reached his anklebone. He could have crushed her with one foot, but she stood her ground.
And then, with a single swift jab, she sank her beak into his toe.
The chicks didn’t sleep. Not all at the same time, anyway. They seemed to take turns keeping guard, at least two of them constantly peeping. That first night Michael Boni never managed to close his eyes.
For the next several days it was the same. Sweat ran down him like rain from an umbrella. The bandages on his hand and foot swelled into sponges. Meanwhile he could hear Priscilla down the hall. He hadn’t tried to put her back in the cage. It wasn’t worth the bloodshed. Now she was shredding his grandmother’s drapes. Her claws scraped grooves in the floor.
Twice a day he slid green beans and lettuce, delivered by Constance, under the door.
Every couple of days, while the chicks were distracted with fresh rations, Michael Boni turned the thermostat down a degree. By the beginning of the second week, he got it down below ninety for the
first time. He was able to wear an undershirt again. But the evening the house hit eighty-eight, he found the birds huddling in the corner of the box like balls of socks. When he squatted down to talk to them, they wouldn’t even look in his direction.
“All right,” he said. “I get it.”
Back up the thermostat went to ninety-two.
By then, Michael Boni hardly heard the chicks anymore. The peeping was his white noise.
Since moving in, Michael Boni hadn’t touched his grandmother’s yard, her borders and hedges. The time for that would’ve been when she was still alive. The good grandson, coming over every weekend to mow and trim. Now the bushes were in a late stage of swallowing the house, another reminder of how much he’d failed her.
From the bedroom, Michael Boni’s view of Constance’s garden was mostly obstructed by an overgrown juniper. But he could catch the occasional glimpse of the old lady through some of the dead branches.
These days Constance was so busy planting and weeding and harvesting, she didn’t seem to have noticed he’d disappeared. She still left a bucket of vegetables on his porch every couple of days, but she never knocked, never came inside. And he hadn’t left the house since coming home with the chicks. They were still so small and fragile, he was afraid to leave them.
One evening just before dusk, someone new appeared in the garden. Michael Boni was sitting by the window, and a guy he’d never seen before stepped out of the weedy lot, Clementine at his side. A white guy, pale, with wild red hair. His stay was brief. Constance sent him off with a bucket.
Two nights later the guy was back. And again the night after that, always just as dusk was falling. Constance put him to work.
Just like that, Michael Boni saw he’d been replaced.
But didn’t he get some say, a vote? After all the work he’d put in, wasn’t the garden almost as much his as hers?
What worried Michael Boni was the hours the guy liked to come. The evenings soon became nights. Michael Boni would wake up in the black of morning to check on the birds, and there the guy would be, peeling lettuce leaves and picking beans by moonlight. By dawn, he’d be gone.
Soon Michael Boni was staying up all night to watch him. More than once, when the guy disappeared into one of the juniper’s blind spots, Michael Boni even crept out to the workshop to get a better view. The last thing Michael Boni needed was strangers poking around his business.
By late June, the cotton balls had acquired distinct new parts, wings and necks. Michael Boni got them a larger box. A week later they needed something even bigger. He began taking them outside during the day. The birds liked to peck in the grass. They seemed happy there, chasing bugs and kicking dirt. When he wasn’t napping to make up for lost sleep, Michael Boni was watching over them, feeling like an old mother hen.
One afternoon a week or two later, Michael Boni and the chicks were in his grandmother’s bedroom, and he glanced out the window and saw Constance alone in the garden.
He knelt over to the box by the radiator. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
Constance was on her knees, sprinkling mulch. She didn’t bother raising her eyes. “I was beginning to wonder about you.”
Michael Boni stood beside a patch of something new and leafy, something he didn’t recognize. “I’ve been busy.”
Constance tilted her head toward his grandmother’s garage. “You got some fancy new saws that don’t make any noise?”
“A different kind of project.”
“Is that so?”
He didn’t know what stopped him from saying the rest. Wasn’t that why he’d come over, to tell her about the chicks? Hadn’t he gotten them in the first place just for her? But in a strange way, he and the birds had begun to feel like a family, Priscilla the bitter older sister. And it was Michael Boni’s role to protect them.
Then again, he hadn’t told her about Darius, either. He just hadn’t found the words yet, a way to put it so she’d understand. But in his mind, it was all about Constance and his grandmother, different pieces of the same thing.
“You’ve got a new helper,” he said.
Constance stabbed her little shovel into the dirt. “I’m not sure how much a help he is.”
“Who is he?”
Constance shrugged. “One of Clementine’s strays.”
“He seems to be here a lot.”
“Is that right?”
“It’s strange,” Michael Boni said. “Don’t you think? Gardening in the middle of the night?”
A fly was circling Constance’s face, and she blew at it from the corner of her mouth. “You tell me what’s strange.”
“What do you think he wants?”
“Green beans?”
Michael Boni could sense she knew more than she was letting on, but the way she was looking at him now, it seemed she was thinking the same about him, that he was also holding out.
“I’ve been thinking of expanding,” Constance said, breaking the silence.
“I don’t really have time right now to be making any more beds.”
“Who asked you to?”
“I just figured,” he said.
“Who said I was even talking about the garden?”
“Okay,” he said, regretting now that he’d spoken at all. “All right.”
Constance picked up her shovel again. “Are you just going watch?”
Michael Boni turned back toward the sidewalk. “Later.”
She gave the soil a whack. “I won’t hold my breath.”
Later that night and into the early morning, Michael Boni sat in the chair by the bed, waiting and watching through the dead juniper branches, but the redhead didn’t show. The chicks kept him company, while down the hall Pricilla slept among the shredded remains of his grandmother’s drapes.
The chicks’ peeps had lost their urgency. Now they sounded something like music.
They looked almost like real chickens now, feathers and all. Still small, but they’d outgrown their last box, the biggest Michael Boni could find. He’d already built them a coop of sorts. He’d stuck with what he knew. Their new home looked a lot like the set of kitchen cabinets he was supposed to have made the previous spring. The birds could have moved in a week ago, but he wasn’t quite ready yet to let them go.
Through the window, through the bush, Michael Boni watched the first streaks of burned orange and gold spill above the garden. He’d been awake all night.
By the time the doorbell rang, sometime later, the morning shadows had retreated from the yard. But he didn’t feel the least bit tired, rising to his feet to peer through the peephole.
Darius stood on the porch in his wrinkled uniform, dark bags under his eyes.
“You’re early,” Michael Boni said.
Darius checked his watch. “I’m right on time.”
The morning had come more quickly than Michael Boni had expected. His mind felt as though it were still in the chair, watching, waiting.
Darius was looking past Michael Boni, into the interior of the house. He wore a strange expression. “This is where you live?”
Michael Boni realized he’d never let anyone other than Constance come inside.
As Darius passed the threshold, his eyes latched onto the foyer table, a burled walnut half moon holding a porcelain Virgin Mary.