Amelia Gray - Museum of the Weird

“Don’t slam the door,” Mrs. Merkel said. “Don’t kill them.”

He laid his palm on the door. “These vultures are symbols,” he said.

“Wave that rake around and make some screech noises,” she said. “I don’t want you killing anything.”

One vulture was rooting around in the compost pile, and the other snapped at the clothesline and fell back.

“They’re big,” Toby said. He slid the door open.

Outside he danced around the vultures with his back to the wall. They shrieked and he swung the rake low to the ground, catching a long divot of grass and flinging it back to the door. Mrs. Merkel turned up the volume on the television and Toby took another swing, passing closer. The birds fell back in unison and took off running, rising. He leaned the rake against the wall and opened the glass door so violently that it smacked into the other side.

“For goodness sake,” Mrs. Merkel said.

* * *

Brenda invited me out to lunches on weekends because she wanted to be my friend. We drank ice water and watched the sky.

“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.”