Thunderstruck & Other Stories (10 page)

But when the farmer down the road appears at your house with a three-legged dog and explains that he knows you already have one—apparently a single three-legged dog is all you need to become famous for three-legged dogs—what can you do? And if your two three-legged dogs fall in love, and your new three-legged dog ends up pregnant by
your old three-legged dog—well, you’d have to have a harder heart than Tony had to send all those four-legged puppies away.

He hid the Escort in the barn because he hadn’t told Izzy about it: they’d decided not to exchange presents this year. The house was cold inside, a shambles. They’d bought it two years before from a Dutchman who had run it briefly as a home for delinquent French boys. Then the boys ran away, or were taken away by the government, leaving behind eight bedrooms smelling of piss and three outbuildings that had been set mildly on fire. Tony and Izzy bought the property for nothing, practically, though even that “nothing” was a gift from Tony’s father. “Buy this house outright,” he’d said. “I’m tired of worrying about you.” The bankruptcy laws in France were awful: for years they would not be allowed to own property, to even have a bank account. The French would teach them a lesson. So they’d had to put the house in Malcolm’s name; the girls were underage at the time. They’d hoped he’d rise to the occasion.

At the far end of the main room, the kitchen lay in pieces. A bag of garbage sat on the sofa like a person. Tony moved it, then filled a carafe of wine from the box on the kitchen island and set it on the mantelpiece to warm. He built a fire in the stove underneath. Izzy would be with the budgies. He decided to leave her alone.

“Hello, little mother,” he said to Macy, who lay in her basket nursing her pitch-black pups. She was a poodle the way Malcolm and the girls were French: generally she could
pass, but an authentic poodle might find her a little vulgar. Now she lifted her head and regarded Tony with the weary love of a woman for a dissolute husband. There was a knock at the door. She looked at it.

“I’ll get it,” Tony told her.

The puppies took no notice, and the four-legged dogs were elsewhere, but Aldo came skittering down the hall in full bark and filled the room with hysterics that woke up all but the most blasé of the kittens. His missing front leg and barrel-chested Airedale’s bark gave him a wounded-veteran air.

“Aldo!” Tony told him, trying to hook his leg around the dog’s prow as he opened the door. “Back.
Back
.”

Sid seemed to have swollen in the rain. “Oh, bark bark bark,” he said, wiping his feet theatrically. Under his arm was a bell-shaped birdcage, and inside the birdcage was a gray parrot with a red tail.

“Voilà,” he said. “Christmas present from your only begotten son.”

“A parrot,” said Tony.

“Well spotted,” said Sid. “A parrot indeed.”

The parrot clutched the bars of the cage in its beak. Its black eyes were set in rings of white feathers. It opened its beak delicately and showed a black tongue, then casually flapped its wings. In his rib cage Tony felt a similar cautious flapping. So his heart still worked.
“Je m’appelle Clothilde,”
the parrot said. Her accent was terrible.

“Hello, beauty,” Tony said to her. “Oh, hello, darling. This is from Malcolm? Isn’t she lovely? Aldo. Aldo, down. Shush. For God’s sake.”

“That’ll be fifty euro,” Sid said. “Here, take ’er. D’ye mind? Wet out here. May I?”

“For what?” said Tony.

“What for what?”

“Fifty euro for what?”

“For the bird.” Sid shouldered a path into the room and bobbed his head in an avian way, as though it were his only means of seeing in three dimensions. He yawned, doglike; his tongue was black, too, stained with red wine. Aldo sniffed the back of his knee, barked once, then noticed the fire and curled up by the stove.

“I thought it was a—”

“Fifty down, fifty on delivery. D’ye mind?” He’d already hooked his elbow at the bottom of his filthy fleece top and was flipping it up. “Just till I dry.”

Before France, Sid had been a visiting lecturer in drama at an American university and must have owned actual clothing, with zippers and buttons and
DRY CLEAN ONLY
tags, but Tony had never seen him in anything other than exercise togs for the very fat. Sid tossed the fleece top on the back of the sofa and began to thoughtfully palm his bare stomach. From the hip bones down—the part of Sid in perpetual darkness, the territory in the shadow of his belly—he seemed to be a slender man. But his stomach was extraordinary: round and high and tight and gravity-defying. He showed it to the cast-iron stove, ostensibly for purposes of evaporation, though it looked to Tony like more of a challenge:
Get a load of me
, stomach seemed to say to fire.

“I forget,” he said, looking at the half-smashed walls. “How long have you been in this house?”

“This one? Two years,” said Tony, embarrassed. “We’ve been in France—”

Sid gave a low whistle. “You got your work cut out for you, son.”

“Work takes money.”

“How many bedrooms?”

“Too many. Eight.”

Sid swung back and forth with his hands on his stomach. He seemed to be dowsing for something. “How much the Dutchman ask for it?”

“Can’t remember. Not much.”

“It’s fucking raining,” Sid said.

“Has been,” said Tony. “This bird. Is she really a present from Malcolm?”

“Happy Crimbo,” Sid said.

“He gave you fifty euro?”

Sid nodded absentmindedly and eyed the wine. “A hundred euro is a terrific price for an African gray. They’ll run eight hundred in a store.”

“Sure,” said Tony. The bird squawked and paced her cage, and Tony again felt his heart mimic back. He had no intention of paying Sid. “I used to have a gray like this.”

“What happened?”

“She died.”

“As they will,” said Sid. “When?”

“When I was twelve. My father gave her to me. I loved that bird for a while.”

“What happened?”

“Oh,” said Tony. “My father taught her to talk. Religious
things. Said the bird found religion.
Repent your sins. Baby Jesus. What a friend we have in Jesus
.”

“Nothing less tolerable than a godly bird,” said Sid.

“She was ill after she got religious. Then she died. My father told me they usually lived for decades and decades, parrots. I don’t think I ever got over it.”

He’d told that story to Malcolm, and Malcolm had remembered. Clothilde. A lady African gray. The females were always crankier, he recalled, and she bit at the cage again. He set her on the ground.

“Now then. A drink?”

Sid turned and smiled. “What are you offering?”

“Pineau, beer. I could make you a gin, wine—”

“Pineau!” said Sid. “It’s
such
a nice drink. The angels weep. But it’s not pineau weather, is it? Is that wine there? Is that wine for
me
?”

“Let me get glasses,” said Tony. The cupboards were on the floor, waiting to be hung. The four-legged dogs came careening down the main stairs and into the room, herding an adolescent kitten.

“Sheepdogs?” Sid asked.

“Of some stripe, maybe.” Louis and Borgia certainly had the gap-mouthed, hunch-shouldered look of sheepdogs, but Tony suspected an actual sheep would scare the crap out of them. Mostly they bumped into things and tried to look as though they meant to do it. Borgia sometimes tried to herd the kitchen island; a kitten was an improvement. Now she saw the parrot and began to herd that.

“That bird’s not going anywhere,” said Tony, taking the carafe from the mantelpiece. “That bird is caged.”

Borgia stopped, her head at an obsequious tilt.

“Right,” said Tony to the bird. He lifted her cage and put her on the coffee table. Sid collapsed into the old leather armchair.

“Je t’aime, Olivier,”
said Clothilde, and Tony thought:
Nothing sounds more insincere than a parrot speaking French
.

The wine tasted like buttered popcorn. Sid lit a cigarette. “D’ye mind?” he said again, as though it were polite to ask even if he disregarded the answer.

“Izzy’s asthma,” said Tony, helplessly.

“Izzy’s not here.”

“She’s—”

“She’s not in the room,” clarified Sid. “Where is she?”

“Budgies,” said Tony.

“What?”

“She’s in the budgie room.”

That was the advantage and danger of an eight-bedroom house: eventually the oddest things would have their own rooms. When Malcolm sold the house—if Malcolm sold the house—the new owners would walk around sniffing, saying, as Tony and Izzy had before them, “What do you suppose they did in
this
room?”

“Ah, the budgies,” said Sid. “I’ve never met the budgies. Did you know that
budgerigar
means ‘good eating’ in the Aboriginal language?”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” said Tony.

“That would make you a psittiphage,” said Sid.

“A what?”

“A psittiphage: an eater of parrots. Psittiphobe: one who fears parrots. Psittophile: one who—”

“Yes,” said Tony. He filled Sid’s glass again.

“So you already have parrots, and now here’s another.”

“The budgies are Izzy’s minions. This one’s mine. I don’t even like those budgies. I love you, though,” he said to Clothilde. “Do you love me?”

She bobbed her head and said nothing.

“They talk?”

“The budgies? One or two,” said Tony. Most of them couldn’t, they just babbled. Then suddenly one would say
Hello, there. Hello, there
. It always made Tony feel as though he’d been doing something vile in a room full of deaf and dumb and blind nuns, only to find there were a few regular nuns mixed in.

“Anthony,” Sid said grimly.

“What?”

Sid pointed at him. He waved his finger around, indicating something in general about Tony that was displeasing him. “Your hair,” he said at last. “Your beard. It’s a disgrace.”

“I need a trim.”

“One or the other. No man should ever keep his beard and hair the same length. Shave your head and let your beard go, or grow your hair and affect a Vandyke. One or the other. As it is, you just look
fuzzy
.”

“I
am
fuzzy,” said Tony. He rubbed his hair ostentatiously and stared at Sid’s bald head.

“All right,” said Sid. “I get your point.”

“I am fuzzy,” Tony said sadly.

“I know, mate.”

“Malcolm tell you?”

“Malcolm tell me what?”

But Tony couldn’t say it aloud.

Sid lumbered to his feet and snagged the carafe off the mantelpiece. He poured himself another glass.
“Jamais deux sans trois,”
he said,
Never two without three
, the drinker’s motto. He took a great gulp, then looked at Tony. “Bloody rude of me!” he said, filled Tony’s glass, too, and splashed the rest of the wine into his own. He held the empty carafe by the neck and pointed to the corner.

“What’s wrong with that dog?” Sid took a drink.

“That’s Macy,” said Tony.

“But what’s wrong with her?” Sid took another drink.

“That’s
Macy
.”

“But what happened to her?” Another drink.

After a second, Tony said, “Land mine.”

“That’s not what I mean. She’s all, she’s got, she’s
swollen
.” Sid indicated his own bare torso with the empty carafe and finished the wine. It was just like Sid to be prudish about a dog’s teats.

“She’s nursing. She had pups. You want one?”

“I live in a truck,” said Sid. He held out both the wine glass and the carafe.

Tony went to the box of wine on the kitchen island. “Don’t look,” he said, filling the carafe.

“
I
don’t care.”

“I was talking to Clothilde.”

“I don’t mean to harp on the fifty euro,” said Sid, “but it is fifty euro.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Tony. “Where’d Malcolm find her?”

“Mine.”

“Yours?”

He looked at the parrot with some suspicion and came back to fill Sid’s wine glass. Sid watched the rising level with the concentration of a telekinetic.

“You’re selling her why?”

“I see we’ll be ordering off the children’s menu,” said Sid, and then, with cruel patience, “I
live
. In. A.
Truck
.”

“Kids don’t want it?”

“
She
won’t,” said Sid. He shook his head. He’d been sitting like a human being. Now he wheeled around in the chair and draped his legs over one arm and leaned on the other. Some wine slopped and he sucked it off the back of his hand. The armchair seemed to falter with its burden. “Spent the morning tearing down the piggery,” he said.

“You have a piggery?”

“Had a piggery. Hated the piggery. The piggery is no more.”

“I thought you lived in a truck.”

“There’s this house,” said Sid. “Nearby Manville, this side of the river.”

“When did you buy that?”

“Haven’t yet. Will do. The
mairie
’s deciding whether it’s habitable. I’m getting a jump on the work. Night, mostly.”

“What if they decide it isn’t?”

“They will.”

“You’re renovating a house you don’t own in secret—”

Sid sighed dramatically. “I am,” he declared, “over France. Isn’t that what they say? I am so
over
France.”

“Leave,” said Tony. He moved to the sofa.

“My kids are here,” said Sid. “I might drink a pineau.”

He looked a bit cross-eyed, Tony thought, but maybe it was Tony who was drunk.

Apparently all American university lecturers slept with their students, but Sid, bored by the timorous bad behavior of the Yanks, who knew how to fuck up only a semester—a real man took pains to fuck up his
life
—had carried one off to Las Vegas and married her. That was how he’d lost his job. “Should have waited till final grades were in,” he’d once told Tony. “That, or not married her at all.” They’d moved to France with plans to open an English-language theater near Eymet. Tony had no notion when they’d given up on the idea. Now they had two little kids, a son and a daughter, and Sid made his living as a chippie’s assistant: he toted wood for a friend who was a master carpenter.

“Perhaps I’ll take that pineau,” Sid prodded.