Fowl Weather by Bob Tarte

Author:Bob Tarte
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2007-11-09T05:00:00+00:00

LINDA WASN’T THE only one troubled by an irrational fear. When we sat down to eat dinner that evening, Dusty crawled down the bars to warily pace the floor of his cage and refused to climb back up to eat the vegetables that he loved. He didn’t seem sick. Moments earlier, just before I had walked into the room, he had been imitating a train whistle and repeating his favorite phrase, “What does the duck say? ‘Quack, quack, quack,’ “in an embarrassingly perfect imitation of my voice.

Our furnace man, Greg, had recently been working in the basement while Dusty talked about the duck and inquired over and over again, “Who’s the big grey bird?” After Greg had finished tuning up our oil burner and I was writing him a check in the living room, he asked, “Was that you I heard talking upstairs?” I had always considered Greg to be a genius, but I realized at that moment that he probably didn’t hold a similar opinion of me.

Linda and I tried to figure what could be spooking a macho bird like Dusty. He kept staring at something from the bottom of his cage, but when I tried following his line of vision, I came up blank. His focus shifted whenever I got up from my chair to investigate, and he eyed me eyeing him.

“Dusty, eat your green beans. Do you want Jell-O?” Linda asked.

“Is there anything new in here that might be scaring him? Whatever he doesn’t like isn’t staying in one place.” I walked to the window and scanned the treetops for a hawk or crow.

“Maybe he sees a ghost. Is Agnes in here?”

“She’s sleeping on the couch.”

We finished our dinner, fruitlessly cajoling him to eat as we went along. Not until I was standing at the sink, scraping my leftovers into a dish of table scraps for the ducks and hens, did Linda’s mood brighten. “He’s climbing up to his food dish. Good boy.”

I peered around the bulkhead that separated kitchen from dining room only to witness his retreat back to the cage floor. An odd thought hit me. Popping into the bedroom, I peeled off my bland black-and-grey sweater and replaced it with an even blander yellow-checked shirt. Upon my return to the dining room, Dusty treated me to his typically unfathomable “squid at the bottom of the sea” glare. But then he made his way up to his perch and tore into his bowl of vegetables.

I asked Linda to follow me into the bedroom and showed her the offending sweater. “You know how Dusty won’t chew on some of those leather belts you bring home from the thrift store? The ones that have a kind of snakeskin pattern?”

“He’s terrified of them.”

“Look at the stripes on the sweater.”

“They look like snakeskin!” She shook her head. “Maybe he thought a big snake had hold of you.”

“I doubt it. He’d be celebrating if that happened.”

“But isn’t it odd that he would have a genetically imprinted fear of snakes, even

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