T. Boyle - Greasy Lake and Other Stories

She’s concentrating on a tricky picot stitch. For the first time, in the silence, she becomes aware of the steady undercurrent of sound. It’s not just vocal, it’s more than that — a rustling, a whisper whispered to a roar. She imagines a dragon, breathing fire, just outside the house.

“Mai, are you listening to me? Those birds can cause disease.” He’s got the book in his hand again— The Pictorial Encyclopedia of Birds —thumbing through it like a professor. “Here, here it is: histoplasmosis, it says. Wind-borne. It grows in bird crap.”

She looks inexpressibly wise, smug even. “Oh, that? That’s nothing, no more serious than a cold,” she says, coughing into her fist. “Don’t you remember Permilla Greer had it two years back?”

“Can spread through the reticulo-something-or-other system,” he reads, and then looks up: “with a high percentage of mortality. ”

Three days later a man in a blue Ford pickup with tires the size of tank treads pulls into the driveway. The bed of the truck is a confusion of wires and amplifiers and huge open-faced loudspeakers. Intrigued, Mai knots the belt of her housecoat and steps out onto the porch.

“Well, yes, sure,” Egon is saying, “you can back it over that pile of fence posts there and right up under the trees, if you want.”

A young man in mirror sunglasses is standing beside the open door of the pickup. He nods twice at Egon, then hoists himself into the truck bed and begins flinging equipment around. “Okay,” he says, “okay,” as if addressing a large and impatient audience, “the way it works is like this: I’ve got these tapes of starling distress calls, and when they come back tonight to roost I crank up the volume and let ’em have it.”

“Distress calls?”

The man is wearing a T-shirt under his jacket. When he pauses to put his hands on his hips, Mai can make out the initials emblazoned across his chest — KDOG — red letters radiating jagged orange lightning bolts. “Yeah, you know, like we mike a cage full of starlings and then put a cat or a hawk or something in there with them. But that’s not when we start the tape. We wait till the cat rips one up, then we set the reels rolling.”

Egon looks dubious. Mai can see him pinching his lower lip the way he does when somebody tells him the Russians are behind high fertilizer prices or that a pack of coyotes chewed the udders off twenty dairy cows in New Jersey.

“Don’t worry,” the man says, a thick coil of electrical cord in his hand, “this’ll shake ’em up.”

For the next two weeks, at dusk, the chatter of the roosting birds is entirely obliterated by a hideous tinny death shriek, crackling with static and blared at apocalyptic volume. When the Bird Man, as Mai has come to think of him, first switches on the amplifier each night, thirty or forty starlings shoot up out of the nearest tree and circle the yard twice before settling back down again. These, she supposes, are the highstrung, flighty types. As for the rest — the great weltering black mass hunkered down in the trees like all the generations of God’s creation stretching back from here to the beginning of time — they go about their business as if wrapped in the silence of the Ages. That is, they preen their wings, cackle, squawl, screech, warp the branches, and crap all over everything, as unruffled and oblivious as they were before the Bird Man ever set foot in the yard.

On this particular evening the racket seems louder than ever, the very windowpanes humming with it. Mai has not been feeling well — she’s got a cough that makes her want to give up smoking, and her forehead seems hot to the touch — and she was lying down when the Bird Man started his serenade. Now she gets up and shuffles over to the window. Below, parked in the shadow of the nearest oak, the Bird Man sits in his truck, wearing a set of headphones and the sunglasses he never removes. The hammering shriek of the bird call sets Mai’s teeth on edge, assaults her ears, and stabs at her temples, and she realizes in that instant that it is distressing her far more than it distresses the birds. She suddenly wants to bolt down the stairs, out the door, and into the pickup, she wants to pull the plug, rake the sunglasses from the Bird Man’s face, and tell him to get the hell out of her yard and never come back again. Instead, she decides to have a word with Egon.

Downstairs the noise is even louder, intolerable, as if it had been designed to test the limits of human endurance. She rounds the corner into the den, furious, and is surprised to see Ed Bartro, from the McCracken Board of Supervisors, perched on the edge of the armchair. “Hello, Mai,” he shouts over the clamor, “I’m just telling your husband here we got to do something about these birds.”

Egon sits across from him, looking hunted. He’s got two cigarettes going at once, and he’s balancing a double gimlet on his knee. Mai can tell from the blunted look of his eyes that it isn’t his first.

“It worked in Paducah,” Ed is saying, “and over at Fort Camp-bell too. Tergitol. It’s a detergent, like what you use on your dishes, Mai,” he says, turning to her, “and when they spray it on the birds it washes the oil out of their feathers. Then you get them wet — if it rains, so much the better; if not, we’ll have the fire department come out and soak down the grove — and they freeze to death in the night. It’s not cheap, not by a long shot,” he says, “but the county’s just going to have to foot the bill.”

“You sure it’ll work?” Egon shouts, rattling the ice in his glass for emphasis.

“Nothing’s for certain, Egon,” Ed says, “but I’m ninety-nine and nine-tenths sure of it.”

The following night, about seven o’clock, a pair of helicopters clatter over the house and begin circling the grove. Mai is hand-mashing potatoes and frying pork chops. The noise startles her, and she turns down the flame, wipes her hands on her apron, and steps out onto the porch to have a look. Angry suddenly, thinking, Why must everything be so loud? she cups her hands over her ears and watches the searchlights gleam through the dark claws of the treetops. Gradually, she becomes aware of a new odor on the damp night air, a whiff of soap and alcohol undermining the sour ammoniac stench of the birds. It’s like a dream, she thinks, like a war. The helicopters scream, the spray descends in a deadly fog, the pork chops burn.

An hour later the firemen arrive. Three companies. From Lone Oak, West Paducah and Woodlawn. The sequence is almost surreal: lights and shouts, black boots squashing the shoots in the garden, heavy-grid tires tearing up the lawn, the rattle of the pumps, coffee for thirty. By the time they leave, Mai is in bed, feeling as if she’s been beaten with a shoe. She coughs up a ball of phlegm, spits it into a tissue and contemplates it, wondering if she should call the doctor in the morning.

When Egon comes in it is past midnight, and she’s been dozing with the light on. “Mai,” he says, “Mai, are you asleep?” Groggy, she props herself up on her elbows and squints at him. He is drunk, trundling heavily about the room as he strips off his clothes. “Well, I think this is going to do it, Mai,” he says, the words thick on his tongue. “They knocked off six million in one shot with this stuff over at Russellville, so Ed tells me, and they only used half as much.”

She can’t make out the rest of what he says — he’s muttering, slamming at a balky bureau drawer, running water in the bathroom. When she wakes again the house is dark, and she can feel him beside her, heavy and inert. Outside, in the trees, the doomed birds whisper among themselves, and the sound is like thunder in her ears.

In the morning, as the sun fires the naked fingers of the highest branches, the flock lifts up out of the trees with a crash of wings and a riot of shrieks and cackles. Mai feels too weak to get out of bed, feels as if her bones have gone soft on her, but Egon is up and out the door at first light. She is reawakened half an hour later by the slam of the front door and the pounding of footsteps below. There is the sound of Egon’s voice, cursing softly, and then the click-click-click of the telephone dial. “Hello, Ed?” The house is still, his voice as clear as if he were standing beside her. A cough catches in her throat and she reaches for the bottle of cough syrup she’d fished out of the medicine cabinet after the firemen had left.