It Chooses You (8 page)

Beverly: A deer. And this bone came from Vietnam. Some man there carves it. Isn’t that incredible?

Miranda: Amazing, yeah.

Beverly: It’s all hand-carved. Come on. These are fish. This was from a volcano.

It was like a very questionable natural-history museum; each thing might be a million years old or it might have been made in the late ’70s. But I was learning to assess people quickly, and Beverly wasn’t crazy, just very glad to see us and in a hurry to get the party started. There was so much to see and do.

Beverly: Oh, and this one is dinosaur poop. And you know what this is? That’s a dinosaur tooth — no, a mammoth tooth, but it’s pre-mammoth. This is a picture of my second marriage. My first husband died. We were married forty years — forty and a half — and he died of cancer. It was horrible.

Miranda: I’m sorry. How long have you been with your current husband?

Beverly: Eight years.

Miranda: That’s like two lives.

Beverly: Yeah, it is — two entirely different ones. This is our love.

By “love” she meant the leopards; we had just entered a fenced-off kitchen crawling with baby leopards.

Beverly: These are the girls, and I don’t allow them on the table and they know better. She’s a real lover, that one. This is Bonnie Blue, and she’s in heat, so that’s why she does a lot of yelling. Different, aren’t they?

I nodded, but at first they did not seem very different or very much like leopards. Weren’t leopards massive and deadly? These looked more like cute kittens. Then one of them suddenly jumped in the air to the height of my face. Two more began wrestling, slamming each other against the wall with violent cracks. They were small, but they no longer seemed cute; there was a strong man inside of each one. I tried to contemplate breeds and cross-breeds, but my knowledge was thin and I had to supplement it with what I knew about Spiderman and Frankenstein. And the Incredible Hulk.

Beverly: I started this twenty years ago — 1988. Twenty-one years, I guess. These cats are bred with a British Shorthair, because the leopard itself is only eight to ten pounds — a tiny little leopard. So they’re bred with a British Shorthair to give them some macho, some heavy.

Beverly took us outside to show us the bigger cats in their cages, who shared a wall with an aviary full of screaming birds.

Miranda: Does it drive the cats crazy that there are all these birds next door?

Beverly: Oh, they love it! It’s their entertainment center.

I was fine with admiring the coop from the outside, but Beverly told me to hurry in before one flew out. Dozens of birds swarmed around our heads. The squawking and chirping were deafening.

I thought about my dad’s bird phobia and how unenjoyable he would find this. Then I breathed in and out slowly and pretended I was a rebellious teenager trying to differentiate myself from my parents, and in this way I was able to stay in the aviary and continue the interview.

Miranda: What kind of bird is this?

Beverly: Isn’t that beautiful? And they’re rare. That’s a green-winged dove. There’s also a bird in here called a bobo. It’s black and white and it has a red beak — look for that. It sings like a canary in the morning, and it’s from Africa. And the finch is so doggoned cute.

Miranda: Yeah. Really loud, isn’t it?

Beverly: You get used to it after a while. Look at the colors. Our creator just has an unbelievable imagination.

The sound and smell and the wings beating around my face began to make me feel slightly hysterical, like I might cry. I also couldn’t stop smiling. I should go to Mexico, I thought. Not that Beverly was Mexican, just that I’d always meant to go there. She took a baby bird out of its nest and held it in her palm. It looked like an embryo.

Beverly: See the way the tongue goes side to side? They have little polka dots in the mouth, and that’s what attracts the mother to feed them. This has just been born.

Miranda: Maybe it should go back in the nest.

Beverly: Let me give you guys some eggs. You guys can take these with you.

Miranda: Really? Will they hatch?

Beverly: Only if you sit on them for thirty days! And now we have a surprise — come on.

She hurried us out of the aviary and over to a field, where we were quickly surrounded by massive sheep. I am not that familiar with sheep, so it took me a moment to notice that these ones had many, many horns, horns growing out of horns, all of them curly.

Beverly: These are the oldest breed known to man. They’re from Israel and they’re actually in the Bible. They’re in Genesis 28 to 30 — they’re Jacob’s. Very, very special. They have anywhere from two to six horns.

Miranda: Yeah, they really do have a lot of horns.

Three dogs came rushing up to the fence.

Beverly: Her name is Raspberry, and then the black one’s Squooshy, and the big one is Puppy-Puppy. If you hand-feed them they’re wonderful, but they’re wild if you don’t.

Miranda: Were these ones hand-fed?

Beverly laughed, so I laughed. I suggested we go inside, so I could interview her away from the sound of the birds. We went in the kitchen and she prepared the kittens’ lunch while we talked.

Miranda: Give me a sense of your history.

Beverly: I started off with one female.

Miranda: Okay. And you’re from?

Beverly: I’m from Huntington Beach.

Miranda: How long have you lived here?

Beverly: Let’s see — thirty-seven years? Since ’72.

Miranda: How do you make an income?

Beverly: The cats. The birds are not cutting it right now — they’re just not.

Miranda: Do you notice the economy? Does that affect it at all?

Beverly: Oh, yeah. They’re not buying like they used to.

Miranda: Do you have a computer?

Beverly: I do, but I don’t use it.

Miranda: So no online selling — none of that.

Beverly: Uh-uh. And that’s a down thing too, because everybody does it by computer now. I’m hurting my own self, but I don’t have the time or the energy. I just don’t. I’m not interested in computers.

Miranda: You’ve got a lot else to keep you busy. Do you feel like you have a community here or are you pretty isolated? What’s it like in this area?