Callie leaves you for many reasons, and one is the parrot. She hates the smell. She finds his depression depressing. Marvin is lethargic by day, and he squawks through the night. His plumage is patchy; the bald spots are bloody. Feathers litter the floor around his perch.
You have options, she says. Zoos. Animal shelters. Your grandmother would understand.
But you love Marvin. You try to tell the stories you’ve told before. Callie cuts you off and says she doesn’t need to hear it: the Sunday mornings of your childhood, your grandmother’s bright kitchen, the mango chunks.
You reach for the other story, about grandma on her deathbed.
I feel like the story changes every time you tell it, Callie says. First it was a favor, now it was a promise?
So you ask Callie where she will go. She says she’s moving back in with her step dad. He had you over for dinner once, and the three of you ate venison stew while he pointed at his mounted kills— the quail, the deer, the moose. You ask her again why she is leaving. She says you must know why.
Maybe you do. She is younger than you. You’re balding, she’s beautiful. But it’s not like she’s earning any money modeling. Since she quit her job at Hooter’s, you cover the whole rent. She got a couple gigs posing nude at the art museum, but nothing steady. Meanwhile, you’re taking community college classes, studying literature, and will soon have a degree. You thought she’d be proud, but she mocks the hours it takes you to get through required reading. She laughs at the highlighter you use for key passages. And for whatever reason, this makes you love her even more.
You say you can help pack her things. She says, What things? She walks out empty-handed. You investigate, and find that her drawers are empty, and her toothbrush is gone. You wonder how long it’s been like this. You notice she left her towel.
She’s right about Marvin being depressed. His feathers have lost their luster. He picks at his food. The vet gave you some powdered vitamins, but said the best cure for Marvin was attention.
Callie was supposed to be the attention-giver. You bartend late into the night. She watches TV with Marvin; she does living-room pilates while he spectates. Who’s a pretty bird? Callie says. Marvin! Marvin says. The system worked for a while. Now what option do you have? It’s a Sunday, and you need to go to work.
You coax Marvin into his cage and cloak him with Callie’s towel. He’s quiet on the ride over, and he’s quiet when you nestle his cage into a dark corner of the storage room. For a moment, you have a vision of yourself tending bar with Marvin perched on your shoulder. You see a local news team lugging in their cameras to do a story about you and Marvin, how you’re a local attraction. As if sensing your visions, Marvin screams behind the dark curtain of the towel. You rattle the cage and he stops. You feel bad. You leave him covered.
You play a low-budget horror film on the television in the corner of the bar. The soundtrack is synth-y and soothing. The blues and reds from the screen dance across the rows of bottles. Cigarette smoke drifts in through the open windows. When the victims shriek, you pour shots for the customers, and then you pour shots for yourself. By midnight, you’re all drunk, and it seems like a good idea to bring out Marvin.
You place the cage on the bar and the guys circle. You ask Marvin, How’s the weather up there? To which he is supposed to reply, Sunshine! He used to. But he doesn’t. You open the door of the cage and he locks his beak around the bars and refuses to leave. His eyes are wide, glinting. You shake the cage hard; he hangs on. You hammer it against the bar and he tumbles out.
Marvin stretches his neck out, the feathers ragged and raised, his wings beat, but they’re clipped, so he only skates across the bar. The guys box him in with beer bottles, and he turns and turns and turns, his bright feathers reflected back at him in dark glass.
Take a sip, the guys say. They tilt glasses towards Marvin. His claws skitter through rings of condensation on the bar top. Dirty bird needs a bath, the guys say, and they splash him with beer. His feathers get wet, and Marvin seems to shrink. He wails, low and hurt, looking at you. You consider doing another shot, but then one of the guys pours an entire beer over Marvin’s head.
The bartop explodes in flurry of beat wings and spraying liquid. You see Marvin’s curved beak clamp around the guy’s index finger. You hear the beer bottles falling, the horror film playing, the bit man now screaming.
The flailing arm whips Marvin through the air, through neon splashes of light, and he’s dislodged for a moment, flying through the air, and you imagine what he might look like soaring out an open window, through the cigarette smoke and moonlight, but it’s not a window that he finds, but the bar wall, and Marvin is silent as he lies crumpled on the floor.
When you slam your fist against the man’s face, you are surprised by the black wetness of the blood that is already everywhere. You leave him encircled by the other guys, clutching the tip of his finger to a shredded, meaty knuckle. Marvin is unmoving in your arms as you rush him out into the night. He’s soft in your lap as your swerve out of the lot and onto the road.
You drive fast, and think about how everything good is ending. You remember things with Callie that will never happen again, like how she used to find auditions in the city, and seek your feedback on outfits. She liked when you sat in the living room, Marvin on your shoulder, telling her that each new look was better than the last. That she was stunning in the black top and pencil skirt, but not quite as stunning as she was in the white dress and high heels, and then the red dress, and the gold gown that was yellow but you loved her so you’d call it gold.
You poked holes in the condoms twice, but nothing ever came of it. The vet said Marvin could live another thirty or forty years, and of course you imagined your children caring for him. Callie would be so happy then, and even if you bartended still, your little boy and your little girl would have a father with a degree in English, and a small bookshelf full of classics, and they would know that you tried.
The gravel driveway leading to Callie’s stepdad’s cabin whispers beneath your wheels and Marvin is rigid. You slam through the front door into the darkness and Callie lifts her head from the pillow on the couch, and her stepdad bellows from behind his bedroom door. But when Marvin is on the kitchen table beneath the soft, white light, you’re all quiet and wide-eyed, her, him, and the quail and the deer and the moose on the walls.
Days go by, and Callie says it’s still fine for you to stay in the tent on the grass behind the cabin. You have not left it, save for the trip to the shed to squirrel away a bottle of her stepdad’s moonshine. You’ve been drinking yourself into something like flu symptoms, then sleeping and waking to stifling sunlight trapped in the sauna of the tent. You sweat heavily and sleep some more, and the stench of you almost overwhelms the must that lingers in the sleeping bag. You let it happen so that Callie cannot possibly consider slipping in with you when she delivers plates of food. You need to be alone.
Maybe it’s three days later when you finally shamble towards the house, mind nothing but hangover and Marvin, Marvin, Marvin. Callie’s stepdad stands from his porch rocker and shakes your hand like you’ve done something right. You remember him having teeth last time you talked. Now he does not.
It’s dinner time, and you help Callie set the table. She hugs you from behind when you rinse dust from the glasses. The stew is hot, just like the cabin air, and you eat quickly, feeling life return to your gut and your toes and your fingers. You only cry a little when you see Marvin on the wall, because he looks wanted, loved and among friends. “Hello,” the quail seems to say to Marvin, “Have you met Daddy Deer and Mama Moose?”
Ben Gitkind is a high school English teacher based in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Photo courtesy Stocksnap