Robert Olen Butler
(from the collection of stories Tabloid Dreams (Henry Holt & Co., 1996); first appeared in The New Yorker, May 22, 1995)
I never can quite say as much as I know.
I look at other parrots and I wonder if it's the same for them, if
somebody is trapped in each of them paying some kind of price for
living their life in a certain way. For instance, "Hello," I say, and
I'm sitting on a perch in a pet store in Houston and what I'm really
thinking is Holy shit. It's you. And what's happened is I'm looking at
my wife.
"Hello," she says, and she comes over to me and I can't believe how
beautiful she is. Those great brown eyes, almost as dark as the center
of mine. And her nose--I don't remember her for her nose but its beauty
is clear to me now. Her nose is a little too long, but it's redeemed by
the faint hook to it.
She scratches the back of my neck.
Her touch makes my tail flare. I feel the stretch and rustle of me back
there. I bend my head to her and she whispers, "Pretty bird."
For a moment I think she knows it's me. But she doesn't, of course. I
say "Hello" again and I will eventually pick up "pretty bird." I can
tell that as soon as she says it, but for now I can only give her
another hello. Her fingertips move through my feathers and she seems to
know about birds. She knows that to pet a bird you don't smooth his
feathers down, you ruffle them.
But of course she did that in my human life, as well. It's all the same
for her. Not that I was complaining, even to myself, at that moment in
the pet shop when she found me like I presume she was supposed to. She
said it again, "Pretty bird," and this brain that works like it does
now could feel that tiny little voice of mine ready to shape itself
around these sounds. But before I could get them out of my beak there
was this guy at my wife's shoulder and all my feathers went slick flat
like to make me small enough not to be seen and I backed away. The
pupils of my eyes pinned and dilated and pinned again.
He circled around her. A guy that looked like a meat packer, big in the
chest and thick with hair, the kind of guy that I always sensed her
eyes moving to when I was alive. I had a bare chest and I'd look for
little black hairs on the sheets when I'd come home on a day with the
whiff of somebody else in the air. She was still in the same goddam
rut.
A "hello" wouldn't do and I'd recently learned "good night" but it was
the wrong suggestion altogether, so I said nothing and the guy circled
her and he was looking at me with a smug little smile and I fluffed up
all my feathers, made myself about twice as big, so big he'd see he
couldn't mess with me. I waited for him to draw close enough for me to
take off the tip of his finger.
But she intervened. Those nut-brown eyes were before me and she said, "I want him."
And that's how I ended up in my own house once again. She bought me a
large black wrought-iron cage, very large, convinced by some young guy
who clerked in the bird department and who took her aside and made his
voice go much too soft when he was doing the selling job. The meat
packer didn't like it. I didn't either. I'd missed a lot of chances to
take a bite out of this clerk in my stay at the shop and I regretted
that suddenly.
But I got my giant cage and I guess I'm happy enough about that. I can
pace as much as I want. I can hang upside down. It's full of bird toys.
That dangling thing over there with knots and strips of rawhide and a
bell at the bottom needs a good thrashing a couple of times a day and
I'm the bird to do it. I look at the very dangle of it and the thing is
rough, the rawhide and the knotted rope, and I get this restlessness
back in my tail, a burning thrashing feeling, and it's like all the
times when I was sure there was a man naked with my wife. Then I go to
this thing that feels so familiar and I bite and bite and it's very
good.
I could have used the thing the last day I went out of this house as a
man. I'd found the address of the new guy at my wife's office. He'd
been there a month in the shipping department and three times she'd
mentioned him. She didn't even have to work with him and three times I
heard about him, just dropped into the conversation. "Oh," she'd say
when a car commercial came on the television, "that car there is like
the one the new man in shipping owns. Just like it." Hey, I'm not
stupid. She said another thing about him and then another and right
after the third one I locked myself in the bathroom because I couldn't
rage about this anymore. I felt like a damn fool whenever I actually
said anything about this kind of feeling and she looked at me like she
could start hating me real easy and so I was working on saying nothing,
even if it meant locking myself up. My goal was to hold my tongue about
half the time. That would be a good start.
But this guy from shipping. I found out his name and his address and it
was one of her typical Saturday afternoons of vague shopping. So I went
to his house, and his car that was just like the commercial was
outside. Nobody was around in the neighborhood and there was this big
tree in the back of the house going up to a second floor window that
was making funny little sounds. I went up. The shade was drawn but not
quite all the way. I was holding on to a limb with arms and legs
wrapped around it like it was her in those times when I could forget
the others for a little while. But the crack in the shade was just out
of view and I crawled on along till there was no limb left and I fell
on my head. Thinking about that now, my wings flap and I feel myself
lift up and it all seems so avoidable. Though I know I'm different now.
I'm a bird.
Except I'm not. That's what's confusing. It's like those times when she
would tell me she loved me and I actually believed her and maybe it was
true and we clung to each other in bed and at times like that I was
different. I was the man in her life. I was whole with her. Except even
at that moment, holding her sweetly, there was this other creature
inside me who knew a lot more about it and couldn't quite put all the
evidence together to speak.
My cage sits in the den. My pool table is gone and the cage is sitting
in that space and if I come all the way down to one end of my perch I
can see through the door and down the back hallway to the master
bedroom. When she keeps the bedroom door open I can see the space at
the foot of the bed but not the bed itself. That I can sense to the
left, just out of sight. I watch the men go in and I hear the sounds
but I can't quite see. And they drive me crazy.
I flap my wings and I squawk and I fluff up and I slick down and I
throw seed and I attack that dangly toy as if it was the guy's balls,
but it does no good. It never did any good in the other life either,
the thrashing around I did by myself. In that other life I'd have given
anything to be standing in this den with her doing this thing with some
other guy just down the hall and all I had to do was walk down there
and turn the corner and she couldn't deny it any more.
But now all I can do is try to let it go. I sidestep down to the
opposite end of the cage and I look out the big sliding glass doors to
the back yard. It's a pretty yard. There are great placid maple trees
with good places to roost. There's a blue sky that plucks at the
feathers on my chest. There are clouds. Other birds. Fly away. I could
just fly away.
I tried once and I learned a lesson. She forgot and left the door to my
cage open and I climbed beak and foot, beak and foot, along the bars
and curled around to stretch sideways out the door and the vast scene
of peace was there at the other end of the room. I flew.
And a pain flared through my head and I fell straight down and the room
whirled around and the only good thing was she held me. She put her
hands under my wings and lifted me and clutched me to her breast and I
wish there hadn't been bees in my head at the time so I could have
enjoyed that, but she put me back in the cage and wept awhile. That
touched me, her tears. And I looked back to the wall of sky and trees.
There was something invisible there between me and that dream of peace.
I remembered, eventually, about glass, and I knew I'd been lucky, I
knew that for the little fragile-boned skull I was doing all this
thinking in, it meant death.
She wept that day but by the night she had another man. A guy with a
thick Georgia truck-stop accent and pale white skin and an Adam's apple
big as my seed ball. This guy has been around for a few weeks and he
makes a whooping sound down the hallway, just out of my sight. At times
like that I want to fly against the bars of the cage, but I don't. I
have to remember how the world has changed.
She's single now, of course. Her husband, the man that I was, is dead
to her. She does not understand all that is behind my "hello." I know
many words, for a parrot. I am a yellow-nape Amazon, a handsome bird, I
think, green with a splash of yellow at the back of my neck. I talk
pretty well, but none of my words are adequate. I can't make her
understand.
And what would I say if I could? I was jealous in life. I admit it. I
would admit it to her. But it was because of my connection to her. I
would explain that. When we held each other, I had no past at all, no
present but her body, no future but to lie there and not let her go. I
was an egg hatched beneath her crouching body, I entered as a chick
into her wet sky of a body, and all that I wished was to sit on her
shoulder and fluff my feathers and lay my head against her cheek, my
neck exposed to her hand. And so the glances that I could see in her
troubled me deeply, the movement of her eyes in public to other men,
the laughs sent across a room, the tracking of her mind behind her
blank eyes, pursuing images of others, her distraction even in our bed,
the ghosts that were there of men who'd touched her, perhaps even that
very day. I was not part of all those other men who were part of her. I
didn't want to connect to all that. It was only her that I would fluff
for but these others were there also and I couldn't put them aside. I
sensed them inside her and so they were inside me. If I had the words,
these are the things I would say.
But half an hour ago there was a moment that thrilled me. A word, a
word we all knew in the pet shop, was just the right word after all.
This guy with his cowboy belt buckle and rattlesnake boots and his
pasty face and his twanging words of love trailed after my wife through
the den, past my cage, and I said, "Cracker." He even flipped his head
back a little at this in surprise. He'd been called that before to his
face, I realized. I said it again, "Cracker." But to him I was a bird
and he let it pass. "Cracker," I said. "Hello, cracker." That was even
better. They were out of sight through the hall doorway and I hustled
along the perch and I caught a glimpse of them before they made the
turn to the bed and I said, "Hello, cracker," and he shot me one last
glance.
It made me hopeful. I eased away from that end of the cage, moved
toward the scene of peace beyond the far wall. The sky is chalky blue
today, blue like the brow of the blue-front Amazon who was on the perch
next to me for about a week at the store. She was very sweet, but I
watched her carefully for a day or two when she first came in. And it
wasn't long before she nuzzled up to a cockatoo named Gordo and I knew
she'd break my heart. But her color now in the sky is sweet, really. I
left all those feelings behind me when my wife showed up. I am a
faithful man, for all my suspicions. Too faithful, maybe. I am ready to
give too much and maybe that's the problem.
The whooping began down the hall and I focussed on a tree out there. A
crow flapped down, his mouth open, his throat throbbing, though I could
not hear his sound. I was feeling very odd. At least I'd made my point
to the guy in the other room. "Pretty bird," I said, referring to
myself. She called me "pretty bird" and I believed her and I told
myself again, "Pretty bird."
But then something new happened, something very difficult for me. She
appeared in the den naked. I have not seen her naked since I fell from
the tree and had no wings to fly. She always had a certain tidiness in
things. She was naked in the bedroom, clothed in the den. But now she
appears from the hallway and I look at her and she is still slim and
she is beautiful, I think--at least I clearly remember that as her
husband I found her beautiful in this state. Now, though, she seems too
naked. Plucked. I find that a sad thing. I am sorry for her and she
goes by me and she disappears into the kitchen. I want to pluck some of
my own feathers, the feathers from my chest, and give them to her. I
love her more in that moment, seeing her terrible nakedness, than I
ever have before.
And since I've had success in the last few minutes with words, when she
comes back I am moved to speak. "Hello," I say, meaning, You are still
connected to me, I still want only you. "Hello," I say again. Please
listen to this tiny heart that beats fast at all times for you.
And she does indeed stop and she comes to me and bends to me. "Pretty
bird," I say and I am saying, You are beautiful, my wife, and your
beauty cries out for protection. "Pretty." I want to cover you with my
own nakedness. "Bad bird," I say. If there are others in your life,
even in your mind, then there is nothing I can do. "Bad." Your
nakedness is touched from inside by the others. "Open," I say. How can
we be whole together if you are not empty in the place that I am to
fill?
She smiles at this and she opens the door to my cage. "Up," I say,
meaning, Is there no place for me in this world where I can be free of
this terrible sense of others?
She reaches in now and offers her hand and I climb onto it and I tremble and she says, "Poor baby."
"Poor baby," I say. You have yearned for wholeness too and somehow I
failed you. I was not enough. "Bad bird," I say. I'm sorry.
And then the cracker comes around the corner. He wears only his
rattlesnake boots. I take one look at his miserable, featherless body
and shake my head. We keep our sexual parts hidden, we parrots, and
this man is a pitiful sight. "Peanut," I say. I presume that my wife
simply has not noticed. But that's foolish, of course. This is, in
fact, what she wants. Not me. And she scrapes me off her hand onto the
open cage door and she turns her naked back to me and embraces this man
and they laugh and stagger in their embrace around the corner.
For a moment I still think I've been eloquent. What I've said only
needs repeating for it to have its transforming effect. "Hello," I say.
"Hello. Pretty bird. Pretty. Bad bird. Bad. Open. Up. Poor baby. Bad
bird." And I am beginning to hear myself as I really sound to her.
"Peanut." I can never say what is in my heart to her. Never.
I stand on my cage door now and my wings stir. I look at the corner to
the hallway and down at the end the whooping has begun again. I can fly
there and think of things to do about all this.
But I do not. I turn instead and I look at the trees moving just beyond
the other end of the room. I look at the sky the color of the brow of a
blue-front Amazon. A shadow of birds spanks across the lawn. And I
spread my wings. I will fly now. Even though I know there is something
between me and that place where I can be free of all these feelings, I
will fly. I will throw myself there again and again. Pretty bird. Bad
bird. Good night.