Space and Time Issue 121 (9 page)

I squatted down next to the squirrel. 

“Okay,” I said, “I’m going to try to pull its leg from the trap. Does anyone know a vet around here?”

“There’s an animal hospital down on Fourth Ave,” said Mrs. McCarthy, the elderly woman with the dogs.

“Call a car service, somebody,” I said. “As soon as we have the squirrel, I’ll take it over to the hospital. And maybe somebody has a shoebox we can put it in?”

Vivian pressed a heavy pair of gloves into my hands. I put them on, and reached slowly toward the trap, but even wearing the gloves I was nervous—it was nearly impossible to avoid the teeth of the squirming animal. “Dammit!” I hissed. 

Then I realized that, except for the squirrel’s cries, it had become very quiet.

I looked up. Mrs. Delaney was standing there, holding a small cloth bag. Without a word to any of the neighbors she sat down cross-legged in the grass next to me and, murmuring some quiet words I couldn’t quite hear, slowly moved the bag close to the frantic animal. She didn’t seem worried about a nip from those sharp and possibly diseased little teeth; she just carefully pushed the bag over the animal’s head and body and held it gently but firmly. 

Whether it was whatever she was saying or the darkness of the bag or the loss of blood, I don’t know, but the squirrel stopped struggling. I was able to carefully take the metal bar of the trap in one hand and the wood base in the other, slowly separate them, and pull the trap from the animal’s leg.

I threw the bloodied thing toward the house and sat back. I suddenly felt very tired. “Did somebody call the car service?” I asked.

“Don’t bother yourself,” said Mrs. Delaney. “She’s dead.”

I looked up. Sometime in the last minute or two, the neighbors had quietly walked back to their homes. The only people left were myself, Mrs. Delaney and Vivian. I took off the gloves and handed them to Vivian, who dropped them on Halloran’s lawn. “He can get rid of them,” she said roughly. “God knows what kind of vermin that poor thing had.” 

Mrs. Delaney had picked up the bag so that the squirrel slipped completely inside it. She looked into the bag and sighed. “Too much fright and too much blood lost,” she said, as if talking to the squirrel. “Poor thing. Not to die old and tired or fighting a predator, but caught in a nasty human trap.” She looked up. “Vivian, I’m sure I can trust you to let Mr. Halloran know that I would appreciate it if he would remove those traps immediately.”

“Oh, he’ll hear from me,” said Vivian grimly.

“Don’t yell too much at the man, dear; he is miserable enough. Jerry, walk me to my garden. I need a nice strong young man like you to help me dig a grave.”

We walked slowly towards Mrs. Delaney’s house at the back of the Court. When we reached the tree, she stopped. I waited for her, and then looked up; a mockingbird sat on one of the branches, singing to some unseen audience. It looked down at us and scolded, then resumed its concert. I laughed in spite of myself.

“You like mockingbirds?” Mrs. Delaney asked.

“I guess so,” I said. “They’ve got nerve. They’re not big birds, but if you go anywhere near their nest, they’ll attack, no matter how big you are. And they’re great mimics.”

We stood in the quiet Court, listening to the bird go through its repertoire, until Mrs. Delaney smiled. “Now, if that wasn’t a car alarm,” she said, “I’ll eat my hat. What a very smart bird it is.”

We continued to walk back toward her garden. “There’s a spade against the wall, behind that bush,” she told me. “You can dig a small hole there, in front of the window. Just deep enough so that cats don’t find her.”

The soil was soft, and it took only about 15 minutes to dig a hole, deposit the tiny corpse into it, and cover it up again. Just as I was finishing, Mrs. Delaney came out of the house with a glass. “Iced tea,” she said. “Tetley, with a bit of fresh mint in it.”

“Thanks,” I said. I drank gratefully, and handed the glass back. Mrs. Delaney regarded the small grave thoughtfully. “Something will have to be done about that Halloran,” she said, more to herself than to me, it seemed. “Dedication to your garden is a worthy thing, but he is causing trouble and pain, and that must stop.”

She looked up into the tree at the mockingbird, which was carefully grooming its wings. For a moment, it seemed to look back at her. A corner of her mouth raised just slightly. “The thought occurs to me,” she said. “You seem to enjoy birds as much as I do. Wouldn’t you like to put up one of those bird feeders? There’s a pet store over on Third Avenue, run by a friend of mine. Tell him I sent you. He’ll set you up.”

I thought to object—for one thing, a feeder in my tiny lawn would look absurd—but her statement sounded less like a suggestion than a royal command. The funny thing was, though, the longer I thought about it, the better the idea sounded. 

Which is why, that Saturday, I found myself walking the seven blocks to the store she had mentioned. 

* * *

The feeder didn’t come with instructions, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out how to assemble it. And the next morning, when I opened my front door, three small brown birds who had apparently decided to breakfast at the new establishment took off in a panic. 

It was sort of cool. For a moment, I pictured myself spending the warm evenings in a small deck chair, a beer at my side, a guide to New York City birdlife in my lap, and a phone in my hands as I, excuse the expression, tweeted to my friends about the exotic species that were landing in my yard.

Then I thought about the daily outdoor Bay Court gossip sessions that I had, so far, successfully evaded. There would be no quiet birdwatching here. Still, I started to keep my living room blinds open so I could see the birds gathering outside. And each morning, before I even made coffee, I would go replenish the feeder. 

On those few occasions I did see Halloran (which wasn’t often), we’d nod politely to each other, but I didn’t say anything and neither did he. A sort of truce, I thought, had been established.

Until a couple of weeks after I’d put the birdfeeder up. I was just finishing a call with a client when somebody pounded on my door as though trying to knock it down. It startled the hell out of me, but I didn’t want to alarm my client (since, as far as he was concerned, I was working out of some business office in Manhattan), so I asked him to hold, put the phone on mute, and opened the door to find Halloran standing on his threshold, in an obviously foul mood. “I need to talk to you about your birds,” he rasped.

The man’s face was a dangerous shade of purple. He didn’t seem to be armed, and he didn’t make any attempt to actually come in, so I said, “One minute,” and closed the door. I unmuted the phone, told my client I’d call him the next day with my estimates, hung up, and opened the door again.

“Yes?” I asked, my phone in my pocket and my finger on the speed dial for 911.

“It’s your friggin’ birds,” Halloran said.

“My birds?” 

“Your birds. From your goddamned feeder.”

“Oh. Okay. What about the birds?” 

“They’re crapping on my sidewalk and on my lawn,” the man growled.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“Your birds! This morning, they started leaving their goddamn droppings all over my front walk! And my chair! And my grass! The stuff is impossible to clean up. What are you going to do about it?”

Halloran stepped aside and let me look.

It looked as though the Hallorans’ front property suffered from some weird disease. Their walk and their lawn were marked all over with ugly white blotches. A small folding chair that Halloran had put out was decorated with long white streaks. 

I couldn’t help myself. “Yeecchhh.” It was pretty damned disgusting.

“You going to stop it or am I going to have to call my lawyer?”

Okay, it was Alice in Wonderland time. I lost my temper and any type of neighborly restraint. “I’m sorry, but are you insane?”

“Your birds are messing up my property!”

Maybe it was the dead squirrel, maybe it was just exasperation, but I’d had it. “You stupid bastard, what are you talking about? You think I’m ordering the birds to shit on your stuff?”

“It’s your damn feeder!” 

I began to laugh—I couldn’t help it. “Who the hell do you think I am?” I finally sputtered. “The freakin’ birdman of Alcatraz? I don’t tell the birds where to do their thing.”

But the man just wouldn’t let go. “Then why aren’t they doin’ it in your yard?”

I looked, and damn, but he was right. The white stuff was all over his walk, his grass, his chair—but the only evidence of the birds on my side was a scattering of seed hulls.

“Huh!” was all I could say.

As though to underscore the puzzle, a small finch, its purple head making it look as if it had been dipped in grape Jell-O, fluttered from the feeder, where it had been busily gorging, and landed on Halloran’s lawn chair, where it serenely lifted its tail and left a small white spot in the center of the green plastic webbing. 

I couldn’t do anything but stare. At that point, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the bird had started a conversation like some come-to-life Disney cartoon.

“So?” Halloran asked, apparently not impressed by the idea of a supposedly wild creature purposefully using his chair as an outhouse. “Are you going to take that damn birdfeeder down?”

“I’m not sure I should,” I said, still watching the small birds fluttering around the seed. “Mrs. Delaney said...”

“Robert? What’d he say?” Mrs. Halloran, her hair carefully teased into a tall structure that looked like one of the birds had built it as a nest, banged out of their door and strode over, her eyes already narrowed and ready for battle. “Is he going to take it down?”

“It was Mrs. Delaney who put up the damned birdfeeder,” said Halloran to his wife.

“No, it wasn’t,” I said. “I put it up. She just suggested it.”

“Damned, indeed,” said Mrs. Halloran, totally ignoring me. “Didn’t I tell you that she had something to do with it? I swear, if we were living in my mother’s time, I would have reported her to the priest years ago.”

Her husband scowled at her. “I don’t give two pennies for what your mother would have done. What I want to know is, what are we going to do about this?”

“Well,” Mrs. Halloran asked, “what does she want?”

They both turned and looked expectantly at me, like I’d know the answer to whatever it was they were asking.

I shrugged. “It was the day the squirrel got caught in your trap,” I said. “I helped her bury it, and she told me to buy the feeder.”

“You see?” Mrs. Halloran said to her husband. “I told you that you should be more polite to her. Now she’s helping out strangers instead of us, who have practically grown up in the neighborhood.”

He looked as though he wanted to say something, but before he had a chance she turned and glared at me.

I took a breath. “Look, Mrs. Halloran,” I said. “I’m new here. I don’t want to make trouble. I’ll tell you what. If you stop laying traps and setting fires, I’ll do some research, ask around, see if there’s something out there that will keep animals off your lawn without either killing them, or driving the rest of us crazy. But I can’t guarantee anything.”

“Nothing doing!” she said firmly. “We can’t wait for you to find some ‘acceptable’ way to keep our lawn clean. You wouldn’t care if every stray animal in the neighborhood to use our yard as its private toilet!”

A small flock of about 15 starlings fluttered down, found a bare spot on the lawn, lifted their tails and flew off again, chattering gaily.

She looked back at me. I shrugged.

“Fine,” she said through gritted teeth. “We’ll stop. What we want doesn’t matter. Just tell that witch to leave us in peace.” She stamped back into her house, her hair quivering slightly on top of her head.

Her husband watched her go and then turned back to me. To my surprise, he almost looked apologetic. “Look, I don’t really care if the feeder is up or not if you can just stop the birds from messing up our property.”

He almost made me feel a bit guilty. “I’ll go talk to Mrs. Delaney immediately,” I said. “And could you tell your wife I really didn’t mean any harm by putting up the feeder?”

“Sure,” said Halloran. “But she won’t believe me.”

A mockingbird which had been steadily eating at the feeder chose that moment to flutter up from the perch. As we watched, the bird rose, circled Halloran’s chair three times, and then flew up to the tree that loomed over the center of the courtyard. It came to rest on a wide, bare branch well away from the Halloran’s walk, sang for a few seconds—it sounded just like a car alarm—and daintily lifted its tail. A small white parcel hit the roots of the tree.

I stared at it, and then looked back at Halloran. After a moment, I said, “It looks like I won’t have to talk to Mrs. Delaney after all. Would you like some help cleaning up?”

“Nah,” said Halloran. “I’ll call my son. He owes me some money anyway; this will square us.”

He leaned forward a bit. “But perhaps you wouldn’t mind if I gave you some advice.”

“I’d appreciate that,” I said.

“Don’t take Mrs. Delaney’s favor for granted,” he said. “She’s been here longer than any of us, and she has some strange ways.” He paused and looked briefly, nervously, at the tree, whose leaves were starting to show the first signs of autumn. “And she’s very changeable.”

* * *

Barbara Krasnoff ‘s short fiction has appeared in a wide variety of anthologies, including
Memories and Visions, Such A Pretty Face, Clockwork Phoenix 2
and
4, Broken Time Blues, Subversion, Fat Girl in a Strange Land,
among others. Her work has also been published (online and off) in
Amazing Stories, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Weird Tales, Sybil’s Garage, Escape Velocity, Apex, Electric Velocipede, Space and Time, Crossed Genres,
and
Cosmos.
Barbara earns her living as Sr. Reviews Editor for
Computerworld.
She is a member of the NYC writers group Tabula Rasa, and lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her partner Jim Freund and an absurd number of toy penguins.