Museum of the Weird (11 page)

“Do you think there are more?” she asked. She wore a thin neck brace almost covered by her turtleneck. “There are more than last week.”

“Mrs. Merkel has three more,” I said, squeezing lemon over ice, licking my fingers.

“The parents are asking me about it, I don’t know what to tell them. They don’t think it’s safe to bring their children outside.”

“Did you tell them it was safe?”

“I don’t know if it’s safe. I don’t think it is.” She held her hand to her throat and leaned back in her chair to look up at the sky. “On the radio they say the vultures won’t go until they’ve exhausted a population.”

“I just wish somebody would do something about it,” she said. “I’d swear that they’re after us.”

The next morning, I touched Toby’s hand. He looked up from the paper. “Mrs. Merkel’s vultures are back,” I said.

He chewed at the inside of his mouth.

“I can’t spend all my time there,” I said. “I have a job.”

“I can’t go. I’m working on an idea.” He closed the paper and pushed a yellow pad towards me. On it was a drawing of a refrigerator door, with knobs and buttons in a row across the top.

“What is it?”

“Condiment dispenser. I’m working on the cleaning mechanism, and then I’m going to call a phone number and they’re going to start making it.”

“Would it really work?” I leaned over to the notepad again and he covered it with his hand.

“You’re always talking about how you can’t find the right jar of mustard,” he said. “This way, they’d all be in a row. There’s a panel across the top, you don’t even have to open the refrigerator door.”

“Do I need to do the rake trick myself?”

“You’d never have to look for mustard again,” he said.

* * *

I showed up thinking Mrs. Merkel wouldn’t be home, but when I went to take the sheets off the bed, I found her crouched in the corner of her bedroom.

“I know what they’re here for,” she said. “They’re waiting for me.” She had a cardboard box taped over the window.

“They’ve been circling for days,” she said. “They’re waiting for me to die.”

“Don’t say that.”

“That’s what they do, isn’t it? They wait for things to die, and nobody’s doing anything to help me.” She stared at her cardboard window. “I’m hungry.”

The adhesive remover would be in the garage. “I’ll make some soup if you come out of here,” I said.

Twenty minutes later, she emerged from the bedroom looking apologetic. “I’ve been alone for fifteen years,” she said.

“Your soup is at the table.”

She sat down at the table. “I know what they’re here for,” she said to the soup.

* * *

When I got home I found Toby on the couch, eating peanuts and drinking champagne from the bottle.

“She’s losing it,” I said.

“I think we could really do something with this town if we set our minds to it.” He passed the bag of peanuts. “I was just thinking, everyone’s scared to death of these vultures.” He took a drink of champagne and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “We need to make some kind of repellant.”

I sat at the other end of the couch and he moved his feet to give me more room. “How would we do it?” I asked.

“We play off people’s security,” he said. “Take a guy afraid they’ll find him while he’s playing golf. Sell him a golf umbrella with metallic panels.”

“Blind the birds?”

“Or a lady who’s scared they’ll eat her garden. Sell her a bag of quicklime, but you’ve got ‘Vulture Repellant’ written real big across the front.” He took a long drink of the champagne. “The overhead is practically zero.”

Brenda ushered the children inside as soon as they stepped out of their parents’ cars. She held them close to her, casting furtive glances at the sky. The children usually played out front on nice afternoons, but the meteorologist’s article in the newspaper said the vultures came in with the warm front and to be cautious when allowing children and small animals out.

“Did they carry off Mrs. Merkel’s laundry?” Brenda asked. We were eating a snack with the kids.

“She hasn’t hung her clothes out in a month. She wears her housecoat and the underwear she put in storage years ago.”

“Who puts underwear in storage?”

An animal cracker fell in my glass of milk.

The children had all the typical meaningless adorable things to say. Louis asked if the devil sent the vultures, probably because he had seen the flock circling over the abandoned Methodist church. Brenda’s child said the vultures came from the desert and smoked cigarettes.

For the craft project, I came up with the idea of making vulture pictures out of feathers and macaroni. After they finished we could paste on some paragraph printed from a book about where vultures come from, and the kids could take the pictures home to their parents. Brenda put Robert in time-out when he made a picture of a vulture eating his baby brother.

“I don’t think I want children,” I told Brenda, who was busy separating feathers globbed together with dirty paste.

“They’re not bad when you have one at a time,” she said.

“You shouldn’t wait until you’re thirty, though,” Brenda said. “Your kid’ll end up retarded.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Radio,” she said, sneaking another cracker from the bin. “It’s medical science. How are your boyfriend’s ideas coming?”

“He’s making a vulture repellant.”

She finished her cracker and started filling juice cups on a tray. “That’s a pretty good idea,” she said. “That’s good, that he’s trying to do something.”

“He wants to poison them.”

“He could market that.” She drank a cup of juice and filled it again for the tray. “You’ve got to believe in him, or he’s going to lose faith in himself.”

“But he wants to kill them.”

“I’m not saying you need a man right now, but that man of yours, he’s fine. He’s no bastard, like Brittney’s father. He’s an inventor, he’s one of those genius types that we don’t understand right away.” She pursed her lips and picked up the juice tray. “Just let him crack his eggs, honey.”

* * *

The blue panel with yellow flecks I saw in Mrs. Merkel’s backyard was, on closer inspection, an image of the Virgin Mary printed cheaply on a hook-stitched rug. It hung from the clothesline. Inside, Mrs. Merkel had meatloaf in the oven.

“Your beau brought it over,” she said. “He put the clothesline back up and said a prayer and, wouldn’t you know, those buzzards haven’t touched the ground since.”

We watched Mary from the kitchen window. She held her palm serenely against the possibility of vultures. The blue tassels at the edges of the rug flicked around in the wind. Toby had arranged pillar candles and small statues. The pillar candles had blue and green wax and depicted the Stations of the Cross, and a big white one was set in the center for the resurrection.

“It was so kind,” Mrs. Merkel said. “He wants me to call him if they come back down. I’m making meatloaf.”

She was wearing an faded yellow dress with a wide, white belt. Her hair was out of curlers and she had it pulled back. She was stirring a pitcher of Tang. “I feel like a million bucks,” she said.

“It’s not very Methodist, is it?”

She tapped the spoon on the pitcher. “It’s more Methodist than shooting them, which is what Mr. Dobbs was doing.”

* * *

Toby was smiling in his sleep. He had my satin eye pillow strapped to his face. I crawled into bed and lay my arm over him, kissing the back of his neck. When the sun came in through the windows and it got too warm, I pointed the fan towards the bed.

On the kitchen table was Toby’s stack of receipts, for groceries mostly. On the top was one from the Christian Supply. It was deducted from his total debt, refigured and circled, “$1,103.38,” in red pen.

Brenda ordered a crab cake at lunch. “How’s the inventor?” she asked.

“He’s still working on it.”

“Any day now,” she said. “You stick with a man like that, he’ll hit on something soon enough.”

“I’m starting to wonder how long I have to stick, is all.” Brenda’s crab cake arrived and she stabbed at it with her fork. “Brit had to go to the vet,” she said. “I mean, the doctor. The cat had to go to the vet.”

“What’s wrong with Brittney?”

“She stuck a ball of paper in her ear. I don’t know why she did that. They had to use long tweezers, actually. Cost me twenty dollars.”

My chicken salad came in a lump on lettuce leaves. “Why did you have a baby so young, anyway?”

Brenda speared the crab cake and lifted up the corner of it, turning the piece over with her fork.

“Were you scared of the retardation thing?” I asked. “Yes,” she said. She took a bite.

“What’s wrong with the cat?” I asked.

“Put it to sleep,” she said.

* * *

The meteorologist interrupted his weekend forecast. “It’s a dark world out there,” he said, tapping the sensor in his hand and changing the seven-day on the green screen to a picture of a vulture. “We’ve had a lot of calls and letters.” The picture faded and changed to one of a group of vultures closing in on a family. “Keep walking when you leave your house, don’t stop for anything. Carry your children and keep your pets on a short leash. Protect your backyard by putting up a chicken wire net.”

Brenda stayed five hours past close, hanging a plastic net over the daycare’s backyard. She tried to crimp the wires with her hands and ended up in the clinic for tetanus shots. After that, she refused to leave her bed until the vultures left. I had to lead classes. We fingerpainted vultures and made vulture sculptures with popsicle sticks. We drew plans in crayon detailing how to safely trap and release vultures. Robert drew his baby brother as bait. After show-and-tell, I told a story about vultures.

* * *

Once upon a time, there was a kind princess who lived in a castle protected with spiked walls and lava moats and knights. She had a beautiful garden and a stable full of prize horses but she could never leave the castle because of the killer birds circling day and night. They avoided the spiked walls and flew over the lava moat to stay warm. The knights couldn’t reach them with their swords and the situation grew desperate until one of the knights had the brilliant idea to kill one of the smaller horses and fill it with quicklime. The vultures swooped down, gorged themselves and fell dead, and the knights had the whole mess cleaned up before the princess came out for her evening walk.

* * *

Toby bought fifty golf umbrellas from a wholesaler for his vulture project. He handed me the recalculated debt when I walked in the door.

“I wanted panels of aluminum and fabric glue,” he said, “but it was impossible to cut the panels correctly. I ended up buying jumbo rolls of aluminum foil and stapling them to the nylon. That’s itemized on the second receipt.”

“The second receipt.”

“Under the first one. These will sell,” he said. A single prototype lay finished between us. “My old manager at the range said he was very interested, and all I showed him was the model.” He pointed at the mess of foil and fabric. The staples had snagged on the support poles and ripped the fabric, and he had lined the exposed rips with tape and rows of staples and more foil.

I didn’t even want to touch it. “Perhaps the model would benefit from another layer of nylon?”

“I’m doing this for us,” he said, carefully examining his work.

“I don’t need any help. Thank you, though. I would prefer to do this one for us.” He opened the umbrella, and closed it again to keep the top layers of foil intact.

“You could have bought a reflective nylon. Something that wouldn’t split so easily.”

“You’re profiting from this,” he said. “I was different before, but I’m helping us now. I’m using my intelligence, and I’m really starting something for us. Don’t shut me down already, when you haven’t even seen what I can do.”

“Listen,” I said. “I want to forgive your debt.”

Toby picked up his box of forty-nine compact golf umbrellas, his jumbo roll of aluminum foil, both staplers and three cans of spray adhesive, and walked out.

After he left, I turned on the television. The news had a camera following the meteorologist, who made a camouflage tent and camped among the nests in protest of the hunters. The Methodists were holding nightly prayer meetings and when the TV cameras arrived, they played an electric guitar. At the corner store, the shelves of bread and milk were cleaned out. The hunters were taking practice aim at the magpies in the parking lot. The meteorologist took over the camera and was speaking urgently about buckshot and environmental activism. I didn’t answer the phone when it rang and Mrs. Merkel cried from the machine that the vultures had gathered on her clothesline and weighed it down towards the candles. Her Virgin Mary rug had been burning for hours.