Thunderstruck & Other Stories Page 8

  “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 g
row 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.

  So Tony got the pineau. It was sweet and thick and cold, and he and Sid drank it in big gulps, though it was meant to be an apéritif.

  “The angels weep,” said Sid.

  “I don’t know who gave us this bottle,” said Tony, looking at the label.

  “Bonjour,” said the bird.

  Sid fought to sit up. His stomach seemed to be the sun around which the rest of his body orbited. “Pay her off and she’ll love you forever. Isn’t that how it works in the slave-girl movies? Tony,” he said, “I hate to hound you, but—I’d ask Malcolm—”

  “I don’t have it.”

  “Izzy have it?”

  “Izzy has the same no-money I have.”

  “The budgie room,” said Sid dreamily. “That sounds nice. Let’s go see the budgie room and talk to Izzy.”

  “We’re not going to the budgie room.”

  “I like budgies,” said Sid, hurt.

  “I don’t.”

  But Sid was already struggling to his feet.

  “Je t’aime,” said the bird again, and Sid said, “Kid, you’re breaking my heart.”

  Tony followed Sid, and Aldo followed Tony, and Macy, yawning, followed Aldo. They walked down the hallway Indian file. From behind, Sid had the tight-arsed bullish strut of a smuggler. His bare back looked strong; he hitched up his sweatpants with one hand and almost kicked a passing kitten down the hallway. “You seem to be infested with kittens,” he observed. “Hello, you,” he said to it, leaning down and plucking it from under Aldo’s snuffling nose. It was one of the little kittens. Tony could hear its ingratiating purr. It was true: they were infested with kittens.

  “You want a kitten?” he asked.

  “I still live in a truck,” said Sid. In a kingly fashion, he handed Tony his empty wine glass, as though it were a decree he wanted enacted instantly. He held on to the kitten.

  “Izzy might be asleep,” said Tony.

  “Oh, she’ll see me.”

  Sid had epaulets of steel-gray hair on his shoulders. The kitten, high on the curve of his stomach, looked dwarfish and blissful. You kind of had to love the pair of them.

  “I’ll get you a drink,” said Tony. “Second door on your left.”

  In the kitchen Tony tossed the empty pineau bottle and refilled the carafe. Jamais deux sans trois. The spigot was hard to work, and the wine was running out, so he opened the cardboard box and extracted the metallic bladder and squeezed it like an udder into the carafe, from which he then filled Sid’s glass. If he’d been sober, he thought, he would never have let Sid bother Izzy; and he was very happy he wasn’t sober, because it was essential that someone bother Izzy. Aldo had followed him back and now sniffed one of the puppies skeptically. “He does so look like you,” Tony told him.

  When he opened the door to the budgie room one of the budgies flew out, a yellow lutino. That left forty-nine inside.

  Sid and Izzy were sitting on the awful flowered sofa holding hands; it was the room’s only piece of furniture meant for humans. The sprung-open cages of the budgies encircled them. Some budgies—the ones who feared the warden, no doubt—stayed in their cages, but most of them flew around like drunken fairies. The grouch-faced English budgie called Bomber Harris paced pacifically through Izzy’s spiky blond hair. The way Izzy and Sid sat—he still bare-chested, holding a sleeping kitten in one hand near his armpit, she with her birds—they looked like a low-budget allegorical painting, though what the allegory was, Tony couldn’t say. Izzy was a bird-inclined saint who attracted budgies with her kindness, or a crazy woman who stuffed her pockets with bread crumbs. If she’d been ten years younger and twenty pounds thinner, it would have been saint for sure.

  “Should that cat be in here,
with all these birds?” Tony asked.

  “It’s fine,” said Sid. “I have her hypnotized.”

  “Malcolm bought me a parrot,” Tony said to Izzy.

  “Malcolm did?”

  “Half a parrot,” said Sid, patting the back of her hand. Then he hissed at Tony, “When did this happen?”

  “Oh, hello,” said Bomber Harris in a ludicrously pleasant voice. “Oh, hello.”

  “Week ago,” said Tony. “An African gray. Like Maud.” He began to drink the glass of wine he’d brought for Sid.

  Izzy rolled her eyes at Maud’s name. “If you met that bird today, you’d never give her a second look.”

  “Attention,” said Sid. “This did not happen in a week.”

  “The budgies?” Izzy scooped Bomber Harris off her head and smiled at him. “They tell you that if you want to breed budgies you can’t have a pair, a pair won’t mate. You need at least two pair. So we got four pair to make sure. Eventually—”

  “Because they’re swingers,” asked Sid, “or because they’re naive? Should the other pair be older and come with sex manuals or be younger and come with quaaludes?”

  “Quaaludes?” said Izzy. “Do quaaludes even exist anymore?”

  “Since Malcolm,” said Tony.

  “Since Malcolm what?” said Sid.

  Since Malcolm had made his announcement—I’m selling the house—she’d slept in the budgie room on the old, moldy flowered sofa they’d found in the barn. At night she draped the cages, then blacked out her own head with a duvet. I’ve talked to a lawyer. It’s in my name. The budgie room had belonged to the worst of the badly behaved French boys, the one who seemed to have pissed in every corner of the room though the toilet was right there, the one who carved his name, PASQUAL, in the stone walls, and put his cigarettes out on the windowsill, and broke the lock on the window so he could creep out at night; by all evidence a feral boy—the budgies kept finding long dark hairs—but nevertheless a boy who most likely had never threatened to sell his parents’ house from under them. I’m sorry to do it. When had Malcolm become so tall? His hair was cut like the guitar players of Tony’s 1970s youth, shaggy, awful even then. It’s just when I look at my problems, I don’t see any other way. Izzy loved Malcolm, though she wasn’t his mother, and was taking his betrayal worse than Tony—which is to say, she believed it would actually happen. All right? Dad? Daddy? Everyone loved Malcolm. Sometimes Tony thought that was Malcolm’s problem, overexposure to the rays of love, a kind of melanoma of the soul.