Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

It’s a shame about us , Tony thought. It was a shame, for instance, that he and Izzy had exactly the same weaknesses and bad habits. They were both terrible with money, and they had a soft spot for animals. No, soft spot didn’t cover it. They were about animals the way some of their friends were about drink: They snuck abandoned animals into the house. They bought animals with money they didn’t have. They swore they needed no more animals in the morning and showed up with more animals in the evening. They had two three-legged dogs, two four-legged dogs, several puppies, six indoor cats, countless outdoor cats, untold kittens, goats, the old horse Nelson, at least fifty budgies. They would be ruined by animals.

But when the farmer down the road appears at your house with a three-legged dog and explains that he knows you already have one — apparently a single three-legged dog is all you need to become famous for three-legged dogs — what can you do? And if your two three-legged dogs fall in love, and your new three-legged dog ends up pregnant by your old three-legged dog — well, you’d have to have a harder heart than Tony had to send all those four-legged puppies away.

He hid the Escort in the barn because he hadn’t told Izzy about it: they’d decided not to exchange presents this year. The house was cold inside, a shambles. They’d bought it two years before from a Dutchman who had run it briefly as a home for delinquent French boys. Then the boys ran away, or were taken away by the government, leaving behind eight bedrooms smelling of piss and three outbuildings that had been set mildly on fire. Tony and Izzy bought the property for nothing, practically, though even that “nothing” was a gift from Tony’s father. “Buy this house outright,” he’d said. “I’m tired of worrying about you.” The bankruptcy laws in France were awful: for years they would not be allowed to own property, to even have a bank account. The French would teach them a lesson. So they’d had to put the house in Malcolm’s name; the girls were underage at the time. They’d hoped he’d rise to the occasion.

At the far end of the main room, the kitchen lay in pieces. A bag of garbage sat on the sofa like a person. Tony moved it, then filled a carafe of wine from the box on the kitchen island and set it on the mantelpiece to warm. He built a fire in the stove underneath. Izzy would be with the budgies. He decided to leave her alone.

“Hello, little mother,” he said to Macy, who lay in her basket nursing her pitch-black pups. She was a poodle the way Malcolm and the girls were French: generally she could pass, but an authentic poodle might find her a little vulgar. Now she lifted her head and regarded Tony with the weary love of a woman for a dissolute husband. There was a knock at the door. She looked at it.

“I’ll get it,” Tony told her.

The puppies took no notice, and the four-legged dogs were elsewhere, but Aldo came skittering down the hall in full bark and filled the room with hysterics that woke up all but the most blasé of the kittens. His missing front leg and barrel-chested Airedale’s bark gave him a wounded-veteran air.

“Aldo!” Tony told him, trying to hook his leg around the dog’s prow as he opened the door. “Back. Back .”

Sid seemed to have swollen in the rain. “Oh, bark bark bark,” he said, wiping his feet theatrically. Under his arm was a bell-shaped birdcage, and inside the birdcage was a gray parrot with a red tail.

“Voilà,” he said. “Christmas present from your only begotten son.”

“A parrot,” said Tony.

“Well spotted,” said Sid. “A parrot indeed.”

The parrot clutched the bars of the cage in its beak. Its black eyes were set in rings of white feathers. It opened its beak delicately and showed a black tongue, then casually flapped its wings. In his rib cage Tony felt a similar cautious flapping. So his heart still worked. “Je m’appelle Clothilde,” the parrot said. Her accent was terrible.

“Hello, beauty,” Tony said to her. “Oh, hello, darling. This is from Malcolm? Isn’t she lovely? Aldo. Aldo, down. Shush. For God’s sake.”

“That’ll be fifty euro,” Sid said. “Here, take ’er. D’ye mind? Wet out here. May I?”

“For what?” said Tony.

“What for what?”

“Fifty euro for what?”

“For the bird.” Sid shouldered a path into the room and bobbed his head in an avian way, as though it were his only means of seeing in three dimensions. He yawned, doglike; his tongue was black, too, stained with red wine. Aldo sniffed the back of his knee, barked once, then noticed the fire and curled up by the stove.

“I thought it was a—”

“Fifty down, fifty on delivery. D’ye mind?” He’d already hooked his elbow at the bottom of his filthy fleece top and was flipping it up. “Just till I dry.”

Before France, Sid had been a visiting lecturer in drama at an American university and must have owned actual clothing, with zippers and buttons and DRY CLEAN ONLY tags, but Tony had never seen him in anything other than exercise togs for the very fat. Sid tossed the fleece top on the back of the sofa and began to thoughtfully palm his bare stomach. From the hip bones down — the part of Sid in perpetual darkness, the territory in the shadow of his belly — he seemed to be a slender man. But his stomach was extraordinary: round and high and tight and gravity-defying. He showed it to the cast-iron stove, ostensibly for purposes of evaporation, though it looked to Tony like more of a challenge: Get a load of me , stomach seemed to say to fire.

“I forget,” he said, looking at the half-smashed walls. “How long have you been in this house?”

“This one? Two years,” said Tony, embarrassed. “We’ve been in France—”

Sid gave a low whistle. “You got your work cut out for you, son.”

“Work takes money.”

“How many bedrooms?”

“Too many. Eight.”

Sid swung back and forth with his hands on his stomach. He seemed to be dowsing for something. “How much the Dutchman ask for it?”

“Can’t remember. Not much.”

“It’s fucking raining,” Sid said.

“Has been,” said Tony. “This bird. Is she really a present from Malcolm?”

“Happy Crimbo,” Sid said.

“He gave you fifty euro?”

Sid nodded absentmindedly and eyed the wine. “A hundred euro is a terrific price for an African gray. They’ll run eight hundred in a store.”

“Sure,” said Tony. The bird squawked and paced her cage, and Tony again felt his heart mimic back. He had no intention of paying Sid. “I used to have a gray like this.”

“What happened?”

“She died.”

“As they will,” said Sid. “When?”

“When I was twelve. My father gave her to me. I loved that bird for a while.”

“What happened?”

“Oh,” said Tony. “My father taught her to talk. Religious things. Said the bird found religion. Repent your sins. Baby Jesus. What a friend we have in Jesus .”

“Nothing less tolerable than a godly bird,” said Sid.

“She was ill after she got religious. Then she died. My father told me they usually lived for decades and decades, parrots. I don’t think I ever got over it.”

He’d told that story to Malcolm, and Malcolm had remembered. Clothilde. A lady African gray. The females were always crankier, he recalled, and she bit at the cage again. He set her on the ground.

“Now then. A drink?”

Sid turned and smiled. “What are you offering?”

“Pineau, beer. I could make you a gin, wine—”

“Pineau!” said Sid. “It’s such a nice drink. The angels weep. But it’s not pineau weather, is it? Is that wine there? Is that wine for me ?”