Bird Lives

   

      Even now, decades later, there's some confusion as to whether Eva had told us to leave the cage door open or shut. Doug heard open; I'm pretty sure I heard shut. Doug thinks I left it open Friday afternoon when we left; I'm pretty sure I never touched it. In any event, when we showed up to resume wallpapering the kitchen that Saturday morning we didn't give the bird a second thought and went about our business moving furniture, putting plastic down, setting up the paper-table and tuning in to Phil Schapp's daily offering of Charlie Parker on the radio. Most of the morning was devoted to cleaning and sizing the walls, measuring out the room and cutting paper lengths to have on hand once the hanging began. It may not have been until lunchtime, in fact, that one of us walked past the cage with its door ajar and noticed the bird was gone. It didn't take long to realize the budgerigar had flown the coop and the open kitchen window, unfettered portal to avian adventure on the Upper West Side, gaped back at us with ominous reproach.

 

   Walter and Eva, as most of our clients did in those days, had picked up their kids at Montessori on Friday afternoon and hightailed it for The Hamptons. Eva had mentioned something about the budgie on their way out – “we always leave the cage closed”, maybe – which neither Doug nor I had paid the slightest attention to, busy as we were at the time filling holes, painting baseboards and mixing up a big vat of wheat-paste for the job ahead.

   Once the initial, stomach-churning panic had subsided we sat upon a pair of compound buckets to weigh our options. This was an early experience in house-painting cum pet-sitting for us and, whereas it wouldn't reach the traumatic level achieved by inadvertently poaching a tankful of guppies on our very next job, it had all the earmarks of a disaster of significant proportion. As this was the family pet, and there being two young kids involved, it seemed we had either to find the bird or replace him. Failing that, one of us would, at the very least, need to muster the courage to call our clients in order to inform them of the loss so that they'd have time to prepare the children before returning Sunday night. Asking the doorman to keep an eye out for the budgie in question amongst the Ginkgos that lined the street seemed improbable at best, but there was bound to be a pet store nearby; these parakeets all looked alike and seemed fairly ubiquitous. We could simply run around the corner to the Pets Are Us, we imagined, pick up a replacement for a couple of bucks, install him in the birdcage with the door firmly shut and no one would be the wiser. Better yet, our last client, clear across town in Park Slope, had an identical bird and we still had a key to his place. For the cost of a couple of tokens, I could make a run to Brooklyn, purloin that budgerigar and be back before Doug had finished the job. With viable options before us we went back to work, confident we'd have the paper hung and a bird in hand by the following afternoon.

   And that's when we found him, aswim in the paste bucket, coated from crusty crest to tiny talons in a thick, gelatinous goo. Barely alive, emitting a faint, occasional croak, the wee beasty had presumably spent the night in there and had been trying to get our attention all morning over the pyrotechnic noodlings of the Yardbird himself. Doug reacted first, reaching gingerly in with fingers spread, carefully extracting the amorphous lump from the long, clinging strands, lifting him towards his lips  –  for just a second here I thought he might try a bit of mouth-to-mouth –  and blowing a few warm, restorative breaths over the barely conscious cageling. The bird reacted with a slow, laborious blink of one pasty eye and a long, low chirp. Quickly fashioning something of a bird-bath from the sink strainer and testing the water temperature on his wrists, Doug began to scrub the budgie with a fingertip and a tenderness he might have reserved for his own child. Any thought of getting back to work in the face of this unfolding drama was out of the question and we spent the next hour or so taking turns at the sink, scrubbing the limp little bugger to within an inch of his life. Finally satisfied that we could do no more, that, apart from a thin sheen of adhesive residue we'd managed to get him back to the point where one could discern color and make out an articulated feather or two, Doug gently placed the now Punk parakeet, plumage permed all spiky and ahoo, back on the tin foil lining of the birdcage floor.  Aware that he might die at any moment from the trauma, the damp or cold, we reluctantly returned to work, the radio off and our ears tuned to whatever the death-rattle of a budgie might be.

   Given the grim prognosis it still seemed prudent to try to reach the Hamptons, as returning to a dead if somewhat sticky budgie may have proven more traumatic for a child than a bird gone missing altogether. With the persistence afforded by the few remaining hours of this long afternoon, Doug, invoking phrases such as “dire emergency” and “matter of life and death”, managed to extract the private, unlisted number from some irritable functionary at the phone company and got Eva on the line. Sponging the glue from the last of the wallpaper seems, I overheard him defending the call and use of the private number, patiently explaining the situation and outlining our concerns for the budgerigar and their children's tender psyches. 

   “Oh. That damned bird! “ Eva had apparently responded. “That damned bird once spent three weeks stuck in a dust-bunny behind the refrigerator. You can't kill that damned bird. The kids hate that bird!”