Fowl Weather Read online

  FOWL WEATHER

  Also by Bob Tarte

  Enslaved by Ducks

  FOWL WEATHER

  by BOB TARTE

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2007 by Bob Tarte. All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Design by Anne Winslow.

  While the people, places, and events described in the following pages are real, location and human names have been changed for the sake of privacy.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tarte, Bob.

  Fowl weather / by Bob Tarte.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-56512-502-5 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1-56512-502-9 (hardcover)

  1. Pets—Michigan—Lowell—Anecdotes. 2. Animals—Michigan—

  Lowell—Anecdotes. 3. Human-animal relationships—Michigan—

  Lowell—Anecdotes 4. Tarte, Bob. I. Title.

  SF416.T38 2007

  636.088’70977455—dc22 2006027491

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  First Edition

  To My Mom

  Contents

  Cast of Characters

  Chapter 1: Alien Abduction

  Chapter 2: Vanished

  Chapter 3: Ask an Expert

  Chapter 4: A Duck Out of Water

  Chapter 5: Wild Things

  Chapter 6: Fowl Weather

  Chapter 7: Bobo’s Back in Town

  Chapter 8: Golden Orb Weaver

  Chapter 9: Somebody Left Something Somewhere

  Chapter 10: Underwater

  Chapter 11: Travels with Stinky

  Chapter 12: Elbow Room

  Chapter 13: Aquarium

  Chapter 14: Muskegon Wastewater

  Chapter 15: Bella

  Chapter 16: The Creature in the Woods

  Acknowledgments and Culpability

  Cast of Characters

  Listed more or less in order of appearance and by type.

  NONHUMAN

  Indoor Birds

  Ollie: the Mussolini of Brotogeris pocket parrots

  Stanley Sue: endearing African grey Timneh parrot

  Howard: ring-necked dove who’s anything but peaceful

  Dusty: knot-tying Congo African grey parrot

  Louie: proud “male” cockatiel who surprised us with an egg

  Bella: gentle but ear-biting African grey Timneh parrot

  Indoor Mammals

  Agnes: take-charge outdoor cat

  Bertie: ultimately tailless Netherland Dwarf bunny

  Walter: lumbering Checkered Giant rabbit

  Rudy: cuddly escape-artist dwarf bunny

  Moobie: insists her cat water bowl be held for her

  Penny: upstairs hidey cat

  Frieda: tonnage masquerading as a New Zealand rabbit

  Outdoor Birds

  Liza and Hailey: African goose sisters

  Victor: Muscovy duck who prefers chomping watermelon to Bob

  Louie/Lulu: spoiled white Pekin duck

  Hamilton: menacing alpha-male Muscovy duck

  Ramone: the world’s shyest Muscovy duck

  Richie: ladies’ man white Pekin duck

  Buffy: Buff Orpington hen, possibly a philosopher

  Matthew: considers topknot hairdos an affront to geese

  Angel and Patty: presumed goose brother and sister

  HUMAN

  Bob Tarte: long-suffering author

  Linda Tarte: long-suffering author’s put-upon wife

  Bob’s mom: Bob’s mom

  Joan Smith: Bob’s sister who’s enslaved by ferrets

  Bette Ann Worley (Bett): Bob’s organizational-genius sister

  Eileen Kucek: grade school classmate turned grade A nuisance

  Judy Teany: well-meaning neighbor to Bob’s mom

  Mrs. Martoni: or is it “Martini”?

  Henry Murphy: master gardener who tramples plants

  Marge Chedrick: tireless wildlife rehabber

  Kate: owner of spoiled house duck Louie/Lulu

  Dr. Hedley: zoo vet genius

  Bo: co-owner of the Weigh and Pay restaurant

  Roswitha: Bob and Linda’s neighbor on the river

  Dr. Fuller: avian vet extraordinaire

  INHUMARN

  Noises in the night: only Bob seems to hear them

  Ed: a sock monkey

  Hose demon: sinister force that snags and kinks garden hoses

  Telephone: brings one dollop of unpleasantness after another

  Bill Holm: two-dimensional buddy to Bob

  Mom’s purse: frequently hides in the bread drawer

  Bobo the Roller Clown: precipitator of coincidences

  FOWL WEATHER

  CHAPTER 1

  Alien Abduction

  Linda sprang up from her chair to reheat her food in the microwave yet again. “Ollie, if you don’t let me eat, I’m going to brain you.” She was talking to a little green parrot slightly larger than a parakeet. “I’m not shaking the pill bottle. We don’t fight with the pill bottle at dinner. We eat our peas.”

  His squawking distracted me just long enough for my parrot Stanley Sue to twist the spoon from my hand, spilling mashed potatoes; the spoon clattered to the linoleum and sent her flying across the room in fright. The passage of Stanley Sue attracted the ire of Howard the dove, who considered the dining room airspace exclusively his own. From his perch on top of the refrigerator, he took off in pursuit of Stanley Sue, just as she chose the worst possible spot to make her landing, clinging like a thistle to the side of large Congo African grey parrot Dusty’s cage.

  “Dusty, no!”

  I had no chance of reaching Stanley Sue before Dusty could bite her feet through the bars, so I snatched a place mat and hurled it toward the greys. Although the missile hit the parakeet cage instead, it succeeded in launching Stanley Sue a second time. Dusty banged to the floor of his cage, Ollie sailed haplessly toward the window, and a panicky Howard shot into the living room, where black cat Agnes lay observing the melee from the back of the couch.

  “Get Howard!” Linda hollered, but he wasn’t in danger. Lighting on the coat rack out of reach of the bored cat, he flicked his wings and hooted his indignity at the inconvenience of it all. By the time I had extracted Howard’s toes from Linda’s scarf, Stanley Sue had waddled across the floor and climbed to the top of her cage, where she clucked in anticipation of the next spoonful of food as if nothing unusual had happened.

  “Agnes!” Dusty called in a perfect yet somehow unflattering imitation of my voice. “Come here, Agnes.” But he didn’t fool the cat.

  As I stepped back into the dining room cupping Howard in my hands, my big toe failed to clear the two-foot-high plywood board that theoretically bunny-proofed the rest of the house, knocking it to the floor with a familiar thwack. Linda bent down to maneuver it back into position, but not before tiny, donkey-colored Bertie charged the breach and disappeared into the living room. I plopped Howard into his cage, then joined Linda in the rabbit hunt.

  “Oh, no, you didn’t go there?” she groaned. “My back can’t take this.” But he had. Energized by his escape, Bertie had managed to scrabble over the TV tray that I had angled between a stereo speaker and the wall to prevent him from hiding behind the entertainment center—exactly where he had wedged himself.

  Taking advantage of our absence, Agnes bounded over the board and into the dining room for a closer look at th
e birds. Scolding chirps advertised her presence. “I’m watching you,” I informed her.

  Kneeling in front of the almighty television, I flung open a cabinet door of the entertainment center, surprising Bertie just long enough for me to snatch him up with one hand and extend him toward Linda, who reached the dining room just as the board tipped over again in protest. Catching Linda’s admonishing glare, Agnes fled down the stairs to the basement. I slammed the door shut behind her.

  “Can we eat in peace now?” Linda asked the room as she replaced the board for what she hoped would be the last time that evening.

  “I doubt it,” I muttered darkly.

  THE WEIRD SOUNDS outside the window didn’t penetrate the haze of my bad mood at first. Stanley Sue’s bell was still clattering around inside my head. Three times she had rattled her bell since dinner, demanding a peanut. Three times, when I had lifted her cage cover, she had refused to take it. Finally, after I had cajoled her with baby talk, she had deigned to pluck the nut from my fingers, only to hurl it to the floor of her cage.

  Immersed in gloom, I shut off the bathroom faucet, pouting because I hadn’t wanted to watch a rerun of The Beverly Hillbillies featuring Jethro’s sister, Jethrine. I had wanted to watch Monster House, a decorating show where people lose control of their homes without the involvement of a parrot. Grousing to myself about the shocked faces I’d missed seeing, I flung a wet washcloth toward the bathtub, then froze and cocked my head at the window and a noise like bubbling water.

  I moved closer to the wall, careful to keep my skinny shadow from falling on the shade and frightening the visitor with the silhouette of a giant stick insect. As the warbling intensified, I decided that two animals were making the sounds. They were either conspiring against me in hushed tones right outside the house or, having just watched Monster House, whooping it up beyond the backyard fence down in the hollow.

  I’ve heard this before, I thought. But not in our yard. I associated the sounds with the tropics, which didn’t make a lot of sense, considering that I rarely got much nearer to the equator than northern Indiana.

  “Linda,” I whispered, poking my head around the door frame. “Come listen to this. Tell me what it is.”

  Lying flat on the living room floor in her usual spot, Linda closed an old issue of Good Old Days magazine, kicked off her afghan, and clambered to her feet. The unreliable disk between the fourth and fifth vertebrae in her lower back had gone out again as a result of the rabbit chase. I was reluctant to disturb her, but this struck me as a miraculous event.

  I popped back into the bathroom, squeezed my eyes closed, and concentrated. I’d heard the vocalizations before on an episode of The Crocodile Hunter perhaps—or on the CD of rain-forest sounds I listened to during my pathetic attempts at meditation. But by the time Linda had clomped to my side at the window, the animals had clammed up. This was typical. I couldn’t even count the number of times an incessant singer like a red-eyed vireo had shut its beak the instant she had stepped outdoors to hear it with me.

  “What is it?”

  I raised a finger to my lips. “Monkeys, it sounds like.”

  She flashed me an exasperated look.

  “Or baboons,” I told her. “I haven’t quite gotten it yet. Listen. They’ll do it again.”

  We stood quietly as air hissed through the furnace duct at the base of the sink. The bathtub drain gurgled right on cue.

  “That?” she asked. I shook my head vehemently, frowning and wiggling my hand toward the window. “Something outdoors? An animal?” she quizzed me, as if we were playing charades. “It’s probably just a couple of raccoons.”

  “Raccoons?” I followed her into the living room. “In February? They’re hibernating.”

  “So are all the Michigan monkeys.”

  I threw a heavy jacket over my powder-blue pajama shirt, then stuffed my bare feet and green plaid pajama pants cuffs into a pair of boots. Rummaging through the back of the pet supplies closet, I fished out a flashlight that, quite unexpectedly, lit when my thumb clicked the switch. “I’d better take a peek at the ducks,” I announced. “If those are raccoons, I want to make sure everybody’s safe.” As I pulled a stocking cap over my ears, I told her, “I know what raccoons sound like, and those things aren’t raccoons.”

  I didn’t worry excessively about our backyard birds. Barring a grizzly bear attack, they were secure in their pens—and I hadn’t tangled with a grizzly since the Ice Age of 1967. Thinking back, I decided it had probably been a snarling Sister Rachel who had chased me underneath a desk in my Catholic Central High School English class. In those days, I’d paid scant attention to animals. But after I’d married Linda, ten years ago, we’d slowly started accumulating critters, and I had grown fond of even the most illtempered ones.

  Much of the accumulating was inadvertent. Our first duck cropped up when my brother-in-law Jack rescued her from the parking lot of an auto-parts warehouse whose employees were peppering her with stones. We had bought another duck to keep her company and within a scant few years had also taken in orphaned geese, turkeys, and hens. Similar chaos had unfolded inside the house. We had naively begun with a belligerent pet bunny, added a canary, a dove, and a tyrannical parrot, and soon found ourselves providing a home for the winged and unwanted—including the abandoned baby songbirds that Linda raised and released each summer.

  At first, the joys and jolts of caring for thirty-odd oddball animals had worn me down to a nubbin. Gradually, however, the relentless grind of countless cleanup chores, endless home veterinary tasks, and limitless feedings had become as easy as falling off a log and sustaining contusions from head to toe. My unusual life had ceased to strike me as extraordinary any longer. I longed for the unexpected, and that was always a mistake.

  I DIDN’T SERIOUSLY expect to discover a troupe of primates cavorting on the back deck. That just didn’t make sense. But I did hold out hope that a supernatural animal might be paying us an interdimensional visit. I’d been reading John A. Keel’s Strange Creatures from Time and Space and Loren Coleman’s Mysterious America, about anomalous critters that show up where they don’t belong. Phantom kangaroos bounded across Chicago suburbs, panthers roamed Michigan’s Oakland County, and birds the size of ponies buzzed Ohio Valley farms. The breathless possibility that the miraculous could leak into even a life as dull as mine was all there in matter-of-fact black and white. So if a saddle-soap salesman in Saskatoon could surprise a Sasquatch, I surmised, why couldn’t I astonish an ape in our apple tree?

  I walked out the front door of a house on the edge of slumber and entered a world in turmoil. One moment I’d been sinking into the nightly lull after tucking in a dozen indoor animals; the next moment I was immersed in swirling snow. The storm had moved in without so much as a polite rap on the door to inform us it was coming. Five hours ago, when I had changed the water in the duck wading pools, I hadn’t seen so much as a feather in the air. But six inches of snow had piled up in the dark, like compounded interest on a credit card.

  Leaving the glow of the house behind, I trudged toward the silhouette of our barn. Raising the flashlight beam from the ground encased me in a blinding capsule of confetti. Next to a fenced-in area where Linda grew sunflowers in the summer, I hurried a little. That part of the yard always felt creepy after dark, as if space aliens regularly picked me up, wiped my memory clean, then plopped me down among the seed hulls. I coughed to announce my presence to any entities within earshot.

  The barn door was securely shut. Nothing could have gotten inside, but I gave the interior a check with my flashlight, throwing shadows of roosting hens around the walls and annoying our Muscovy duck Victor, who was instantly at my side panting and hissing with menace. “You’re okay, hon,” I told him. I swept past the amber eye of a chicken, slammed the door behind me, and headed for the pen behind the house. As far as I could tell, the snowfall was fluffy and unbroken by the tracks of a giant hairy hominid. The ducks muttered as I checked the latches of their pens. Ou
r goose Liza croaked an inquisitive honk, urging her sister Hailey to second the question, but I moved on before they decided to erupt.

  As I followed my footprints back to the front yard, I realized, to my amazement, that I had actually enjoyed my walk—somewhat, more or less, at least. I hated winter and any other season that made me lace myself up in thigh-high boots. But the disorienting aspects of the storm had won me over. The snow had camouflaged the landmarks of our property by adding rounded, flowing corners to the shrubs, mailbox, and porch steps. The sidewalk, gravel shoulder, and asphalt road had completely vanished. Ten feet from my own front door, I was in terra incognita. I stared at the streaming snow-flakes, doing my best to hallucinate that they were static and I was shooting upward, but the house and Linda’s car shot upward with me, and that ruined the illusion. I gave up and retreated indoors.

  “Did you see it?” Linda asked as I stomped my boots on the doormat that read THE TARTES. Stripping off my coat in the living room, I felt chilly for the first time. It took me a moment to recall what she was asking me about.

  “No,” I said. “Nothing. Not even a raccoon.”

  BACK HOME FROM work the next day, I walked into the kitchen to find Stanley Sue settled comfortably on the countertop. From the fresh set of chew marks decorating our wooden bread box, I could see what she’d been doing. For months she had made the tops of Bertie’s and Walter’s rabbit cages her base of operation for launching attacks on the already decimated windowsill and floor molding. And if the bunnies were foolish enough to rouse from their daylight-hours naps, she might snap ineffectually at them through the wire mesh while strutting above their heads.

  For reasons known only to Stanley Sue, one afternoon she’d abandoned her obsession with rabbits and woodwork, marched across the linoleum, and applied herself to the kitchen instead. She attached herself by the beak, opening and slamming shut any cupboard doors within reach, then beveling the corners to suit her artistic sensibilities. Climbing a ladder of drawer pulls, she gnawed her way up to the countertop, adorning the Formica edge with a signature chip before sculpting the front of the silverware drawer. We tolerated all this destruction because it unfolded slowly over time. But Stanley finally went too far when she tested her athletic abilities by picking up Linda’s cow-shaped ceramic spoon rest and giving it a discus toss.