Bird Brained Page 6

  “Like the specs,” I said, hoping to defuse the situation with some flattery. Her sunglasses were encrusted with a sea of tiny rhinestones, their frames flaring out larger than the fins on a late-fifties Caddy. Her penciled-in eyebrows hovered above, looking like two bats in flight.

  “These are the glasses I wear when I haven’t been able to sleep,” Sophie rumbled, her voice half Mixmaster, half Lauren Bacall. She locked onto the twenty inches of white feathers that stared back at her. “Don’t I have a rule about no birds somewhere in my rental clause?” she queried, handing me a cup of brew.

  I took a sip. The thick espresso and steamed milk was loaded with enough sugar to rattle my teeth. Mmm… just right.

  “Not that I know of.” I girded myself for the inevitable jolt of high octane that rushed through my body.

  “Remind me to stick it in next time,” she flatly replied.

  “Have a nice weekend?” I asked.

  “Trying to get me off the subject?” she parried without a blink.

  Sophie and her Cuban lover, Lucinda, took off on weekend jaunts whenever there was a hot-to-trot rally taking place along the East Coast. The only requirement was that the battle be pro-gay, pro-woman, pro-choice, antiviolence, or anti-Castro.

  “What was the rally and where was it held this time?” I grabbed a banana and an orange, figuring they’d pass as breakfast for the bird until I stocked up on its proper feed.

  Sophie handed me part of her Miami Herald, and we headed into the garden with our coffee.

  “Columbia, South Carolina. Gay and lesbian rally.” She balanced her cup on the bench and struck a match, holding the flame to the tip of her cigar.

  “You’re not supposed to smoke that, you know,” I reminded her.

  Sophie was trying to quit cigarettes for the umpteenth time. Her new theory was that cigars helped dull her craving for them, along with the Nicoderm patch that she wore.

  “Smoking means inhaling. Do you see me inhaling?” She adjusted her turban, which had begun to lean at the same angle as the Tower of Pisa.

  “Puffin’, puffin’!” interjected my feathered companion.

  Sophie removed her glasses and studied the cockatoo. “That’s exactly right, what I’m doing is puffing. You’ve got yourself a smart bird. All right, you can keep him.”

  My fingers dug through the orange rind and a geyser of juice hit a small green lizard that lay on the ground, enjoying the sun. It raised its head and glared at me through the bright yellow circles orbiting its eyes, before skittering off on fragile toes into the underbrush.

  “Who’s that for, anyway? You or the bird?” Sophie asked.

  “The bird,” I answered, squirting myself in the eye.

  “Figures he’d eat better than you.” She took the orange out of my hand, and the cockatoo immediately hopped onto her arm. “Just give him the whole thing.”

  The bird sank his beak into the rind and tipped his head back, extracting the juice with his tongue. Then, holding the orange in his claw, he tore the fruit apart.

  I figured now was as good a time as any to hit Sophie with the news. “By the way, you know the cage that you keep your houseplants in?”

  She grimaced at me, her Mixmaster voice set on grind. “Don’t tell me. The cage comes as part of your lease?”

  I grinned and took a sip of coffee, turning to the paper she’d given me. The news was filled with the usual deluge of dirt: fiscal mismanagement, a commissioner being sent off to jail for digging into the city’s till, and election fraud in which absentee ballots were signed by long-dead voters. All in all, nothing unusual.

  I scanned the rest of the paper while the bird continued to whoop it up with the orange. Microsoft was battling it out again in court, some militia group in the West was high-fiving it in a government standoff, and another invisible electric-fence company—also referred to as pet containment—had been blown up, this time in central Florida. Invisible electric-fence companies were recent targets in a series of bombings that had started in Georgia and were working their way down through the South. So far, no employees had been hurt.

  Just then, Lucinda walked out and joined us. A short, compact woman with closely cropped jet black hair, she was garbed in a wildly colorful robe that was a Sophie Gertz creation and a pure Peter Max rip-off.

  “Whatcha got there?” Lucinda asked. The bird had finished with the orange, and was preening my tresses.

  “We’ve got ourselves another tenant. What do you think? Should we raise the rent?” Sophie quipped.

  A light, silvery laugh trickled from Lucinda as she stepped out of her robe, displaying an original Gertz bikini along with the body I had wanted since I was twenty years old.

  Lucinda was a born-again bodybuilder who’d begun lifting weights on the day she turned fifty. She made it a practice to religiously oil her skin every morning, while still wet from the shower. The result was that rays of sun dappled her form like a beautiful work of art, highlighting each well-developed muscle.

  She raised a cup of coffee to her lips, unconsciously flexing a bicep that Arnold would have been proud of. Not an ounce of flab reared its head on a stomach so tight it would have reduced Jane Fonda to tears. The latissimus dorsi muscles in her back rippled like miniature dolphins at play under skin as sleek as a cat’s. As for her buns, they were solid as Mount Rushmore, but better sculpted. Hers was the kind of butt men wanted to reach out and touch, just to see if it was truly real. Woe had befallen the few males crazy enough to try. All this came wrapped up in one amazingly feminine package.

  Lucinda eased her feet into a pair of Rollerblades, preparing for her morning spin. God, I envied the woman.

  “Sugar, you can have this body, too,” she’d once told me in authentic Jack LaLanne fashion. “But I can’t lie. You’re gonna have to work hard to get it.”

  I’d decided to forego the bikini, instead. I put the paper aside and filled Sophie and Lucinda in on how I’d wound up with the bird.

  “So, what do you think?” I asked Lucinda. “Does the murder sound like it could have something to do with Santeria?” She was open about the fact that many of her Cuban relatives were followers of the faith.

  “Listen, darling. I know there are stories floating around about graves being robbed for body parts to be used in black-magic rituals. But I’ve never heard of any followers resorting to murder for their religious beliefs. Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t kill you for some other reason.” She grinned.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I replied.

  Lucinda’s attention migrated to the cockatoo on my shoulder. “Aren’t you worried, letting that bird sit out here in the open? It might decide to just spread its wings and fly away.” The cockatoo rubbed his head under my chin as I scratched along the side of his neck. “He can’t. His wing feathers have been clipped. That makes him too unbalanced to fly.”

  Lucinda wrinkled up her nose at the thought. “Sounds just as barbaric as Santeria to me.”

  I put my arm out and the bird ran down it, hopping onto the bench, his head boinging up and down like a plastic figurine in the rear window of a car.

  “There are people who believe that birds become better pets that way. They’re more docile when their wings are clipped,” I explained.

  “Sure. Why not? If someone were to break my arms and legs, I’d be more dependent on them, too,” Sophie dryly replied. “Of course, that doesn’t mean I’d have to like it.”

  Her response caught me off guard. “Why, Sophie—I didn’t think that would bother you. After all, you used to have a bird.”

  “That’s exactly why I never got another,” she responded. “Doesn’t matter if it’s animal, vegetable, or mineral. I’ve learned that everything needs to be free.”

  We sat quietly for a moment, watching the bird attack my coffee cup. Finally Sophie broke the silence.

  “So, what are you going to call this thing, anyway?”

  The bird waddled over, fell onto his back, and kicked
his feet against my hand. Great. Instead of kids, I was saddled with an unruly bird. I pushed the cockatoo away, propelling him along the upholstered bench like a disc in a game of shuffleboard. Instead of being irate, the bird erupted into the uproarious laughter of a lunatic on the loose. He immediately bolted back over, demanding that I repeat the action again and again and again. I looked up and caught Sophie’s eye, knowing there was only one thing he could be called.

  “Bonkers,” I said. “He’s definitely Bonkers.”

  Four

  I helped Sophie remove the menagerie of houseplants from inside her birdcage. After that, Lucinda hauled it to my place while I pretended to assist. The contraption was nearly as large as my apartment in New York had been.

  By the time I was ready to head out, Sophie walked in, a bowl of fruit in her hand. She foisted an apple on me.

  “If I’m gonna feed your bird, I might as well try to keep you healthy, too. Just be sure and eat it!” she commanded.

  I took a big bite of the apple to please her, and received a pinch on the cheek as reward.

  “Don’t worry about your bird,” Sophie advised. “He’ll spend the day outside with me while I do some touch-up painting on the house. I’m feeling magenta and lime today.”

  I’d given up on the idea of privacy soon after moving in, when I discovered Sophie painting outside my bedroom window, bright and early, at five o’clock one morning. At first, I’d been startled. But Sophie had cheerfully waved and invited me outside to inspect her latest flash of inspiration. That’s when I realized why the rent was so low—my landlady had a hard time holding on to tenants.

  I’d come to appreciate Sophie’s company during my routine bouts of insomnia. It was during those wee hours that she’d finagle me into a game of canasta, deftly cleaning me out of liquid funds. On the other hand, the woman made a mean late-night margarita, nicely accompanied by a dish of Lucinda’s black beans and rice.

  I’d asked Sophie once why she was so compelled to continually paint the house such outrageous colors.

  “I’m like a performing artist. I gotta constantly create,” she’d said. “This is my living canvas. This way my art never ends.”

  I walked past her ever-evolving creation and under Neptune’s arch to squeeze behind the wheel of my car. Destination, points south. I crossed over the MacArthur Causeway, leaving behind my Miami Beach state of mind. I was going to pay Willy Weed a visit.

  I brazenly propelled my way into the bumper-to-bumper traffic on Route 1, knowing that the guy in the Beemer was a lot more worried about dents than I was. Homestead’s claim to fame was that it had been ground zero back in 1992 for that tree-smashing, trailer-bashing storm of the decade, Hurricane Andrew. Years later, not a whole lot had changed. I exited onto a small two-lane road that skirted Homestead and led straight for the boonies.

  Row upon row of stripped live oaks flashed by, their trunks bedraggled but proud, like old women who wake one morning to discover the night has stolen away with their youth and beauty. A boarded-up Baptist church stood melancholy and forlorn in a grove of Dade County pine, its battered sign promising to reopen soon. I pulled behind a blue pickup that shuffled maddeningly along at the speed limit, my mind wandering as a bald eagle soared lazily in the sky. I could have thrown a stone in any direction and hit a bird-breeder’s facility right about now. Forty-seven hundred of them are registered in this state, each and every one of whom had plopped down twenty-five bucks to the Florida Game and Freshwater Fish Commission to obtain a license to legally ply their trade. That’s all it took.

  I knew that Homestead and its environs were especially loaded with bird breeders not only because of the number of thefts that had taken place in the area, but also because of a handy-dandy little book that listed every breeder’s name and facility, along with their address and telephone number. The book was made available by the Game and Freshwater Fish Commission to anyone willing to fork over five dollars. Unless you were high-tech and modern, that is. Then seventeen smackeroos got you a floppy from which you could download all the necessary information. It made for a convenient shopping list, one that the Cuban bird gang surely had the brains to have gotten hold of.

  As I turned off the asphalt onto a narrow dirt road that led through a forest of scrub palmetto and pine, an explosion of black starlings erupted overhead, annoyed at my unannounced presence. A gang of black-headed vultures remained languidly indifferent, content to hitch a ride on a thermal while scanning the ground for their next meal. The dirt path curved to the right and opened up to reveal a large clearing with three broken-down house trailers and two dozen decrepit cages, each containing one or two listless critters inside.

  I pulled up next to Willy’s Dodge Ram, its roof mounted with four big headlights that Weed used for jacklighting deer. A vanity tag bore the logo HELL’S BELLS, while slapped on the vehicle was a worn-out bumper sticker that pretty much summed up Willy’s take on life, WILL THE LAST AMERICAN TO LEAVE PLEASE BRING THE FLAG? It was a popular sentiment with most of the area’s crackers, or “lizard eaters,” as some of the locals are called, who worried that an influx of Cubans was insidiously working its way toward them from out of Miami.

  I opened my car door to a surge of heat so humid it was almost liquid. Ninety-five degrees of sticky hot air rolled over my body like the swell of a wave to turn my skin into an irresistibly moist calling card for every tiny deer fly around. They banded together in miniature squadrons, attacking my body with the expertise of a panzer unit programmed to kill. My efforts at swatting them away only provided the insects with a much welcome breeze as they munched at my flesh in uninterrupted bliss.

  A hand-painted sign was nailed onto one of the trees. It announced that I was about to enter THE ENDANGERED CREATURES OF GOD FOUNDATION, for which all donations were gladly accepted. That was a scam Willy had come up with a few months ago, when he’d decided to try and pass off his place as a sanctuary. In reality, Weed’s hovel was a dump living in hope of conniving its way into a tax write-off.

  I kicked through the cans and debris that littered the ground to a cage holding a dejected cougar. The animal paced back and forth across the floor of its small pen with neurotic precision, its deadened eyes scarcely acknowledging my presence, its six-foot-long tawny body a scraggly mass of bones and fur. Next door, a 450-pound Siberian tiger could barely stretch out in its pigeonhole of a cage. Other enclosures held bobcats and leopards and servals; all thin and neglected, and all for sale. In Florida it was deemed a right to own whatever animal one desired, be it a lion, an elephant, or a zebra—any or all of which could be purchased right here in the exotic wildlife capital of the world.

  A vulture landed nearby to pick at a rotting chicken carcass that one of the mangy cougars had refused to eat. I turned away from the pathetic menagerie and checked out the squalid mobile homes that lay spread out before me. The music of Guns N’ Roses was cranked up and pumping through the thin, metal walls of the first trailer, making it a sure bet to contain Willy. I climbed the cinder-block steps and wrenched open the aluminum door.

  The stench nearly rocked me off my feet: a reeking brew of heat, body odor, rotten food, and mildew. Empty beer bottles littered the floor next to a cardboard box that contained remnants of fossilized pizza. A pile of laundry, midway through the process of fermenting, sat in a corner with a discolored jockstrap perched on top. Heaps of garbage overflowed from overturned paper bags, smoldering in an experimental indoor compost heap. Just one quick glance made the cages outside look pretty good.

  Willy Weed stood dead center in among the debris, his greasy strands of hair half in and half out of a half-assed ponytail, a joint hanging from his lips. The tattoo on his bare chest swam in a pool of sweat as he went through the motions of completing a bicep curl, a twenty-five-pound weight barely gripped in his hand. His jeans hung well below a pair of bony hips, making it obvious he didn’t bother with the usual formality of underwear.

  Willy mumbled something that I couldn’t un
derstand, his eyes glazed over in a stoned-out state of nirvana. I didn’t bother trying to yell above the deafening wail of music. I just beelined to the nearest electrical socket, where I euthanized Guns N’ Roses.

  “Now, what was it that you said?” I asked, enjoying the sweet sound of silence.

  Willy guffawed, nearly swallowing his joint. “I said, hey, Porter. Wanna join me in a toke?”

  Down-home hospitality, crackerjack style.

  “No, thanks, Willy. I think I’ll pass.”

  Weed gazed at me through half-closed lids, his bicep twitching as the twenty-five-pound weight struggled to make liftoff. “That’s the trouble with you uptight Northern girls. You don’t know how to have yourselves a good time and relax.”

  “You do enough of that for both of us,” I assured him.

  A ray of sunlight managed to bypass the dirt on one of the dingy windows. The gleam caught my eye as it streamed in, glistening off what appeared to be military medals that had been mounted in a frame and hung on the wall. Weed didn’t strike me as a man who would risk his neck without big bucks egging him on.

  “Who did you steal the medals from, Willy?” I asked, motioning toward the display.

  Weed took a deep toke before removing the joint from his lips. “I did my time in the service,” he exhaled.

  “Yeah? What military prison would that have been?” I prodded.

  “That’s real cute, Porter. Poking fun at a disabled vet,” Willy feigned hurt.

  I didn’t bother reminding him that I knew just how he’d received his limp, but let him ramble on.

  “I happened to get those for serving my country—bravely, too, I might add, during the mother of all battles in Desert Storm. I’m a Top Gun,” Willy drawled.